I'll have to think about these, but your timing couldn't be more perfect as we
"race" to the "upper airs" and through that proverbial "ivory gate" at the end
of L. VI and the school year. So, I have a piggy back question--The "line-up"
in the Underworld of souls to be "recycled" into great Romans seems to smack of
reincarnation. Does this appear in any other Roman writings either literary or
religious?
Thanks for any feedback. Jane
<<< David Wilson-Okamura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 4/26 1:22a >>>
Dear Mantovani,
I wish I could take credit for the snappy title of this query, but I pretty
much ripped it off from an article by a very good friend (who is also a
very good cook), Radcliffe Edmonds III.
Several years ago, Martin Hughes kicked off a discussion of the Gates of
Sleep, to which we have returned only sporadically. My own reading of the
episode is benign and follows Servius: Aeneas exits through the gate of
"falsa insomnia" not because the Roman Empire is a nightmare, but because
the underworld journey is a fiction: in real life, nobody goes to hell and
lives to tell about it. On this reading, the ivory gate is the literary
equivalent of a wink.
There's lots more to be said about this, and there are smart people who
think differently about this. Several weeks ago, however, I was reading
through the poem as a whole and was especially struck by the following
description of Latinus when he goes into the forest in order to get advice
about his daughter:
At rex sollicitus monstris oracula Fauni,
fatidici genitoris, adit lucosque sub alta
consulit Albunea, nemorum quae maxima sacro
fonte sonat saeuamue exhalat opaca mephitim.
hinc Italae gentes omnisque Oenotria tellus
in dubiis responsa petunt; huc dona sacerdos
cum tulit et caesarum ouium sub nocte silenti
pellibus incubuit stratis somnosque petiuit,
multa modis simulacra uidet uolitantia miris
et uarias audit uoces fruiturque deorum
conloquio atque imis Acheronta adfatur Auernis.
hic et tum pater ipse petens responsa Latinus (Aen. 7.81-92)
Worried by the omens, the king goes to the
oracles of Faunus, his fate-telling father; in the shadow
of Albunea, he consults the groves, the great forest
that sounds of the sacred river and exhales a
raw stench in the darkness. Here the tribes of Italy
and all the realms of Oenotria seek out answers
in times of doubt; here the priest would bring gifts
and lie down on the skins of slaughtered sheep,
under the silent night, and seek dreams. Many
he shapes he sees, floating in strange ways; various
voices he hears; he enjoys the conversation of the gods;
he speaks to Acheron in the depths of Avernus. Here too
comes father Latinus, in search of answers...
This passage is striking for several reasons:
1. It's clear that Latinus "speaks" to Acheron without actually going to
Avernus; although he enjoys the conversation of the gods and sees strange
shapes, he is in fact in the forest, sleeping on an animal skin.
2. What produces these dreams? Fordyce, in his commentary on Aen. VII and
VIII, notes that the practice of incubation was well known in the ancient
world; I don't know whether or not incubation usually involved the
inhalation of volcanic vapors, but Virgil does mention that the sight
smells bad: "saeuamue exhalat opaca mephitim." Why is this important?
Because according to Plutarch, the oracle at Delphi regularly prophesied
under the influence of volcanic exhalations. (Until recently, there weren't
thought to be any volcanic rifts in the area and Plutarch's theory was
discounted; recently the site has been reexamined and it turns out that
there is a fault line; this doesn't prove Plutarch right, but it does make
his account more credible.)
3. The forest of Albunea (wherever that is; see Fordyce on Aen. 7.82f) is
not, of course, the only place that people congregate in order to "speak"
to Acheron. You can also visit the infernal river by way of a cave at
Cumae: a cave, says Virgil, that is notorious for driving the birds away
because it smells bad:
talis sese halitus atris
faucibus effundens supera ad conuexa ferebat
[unde locum Grai dixerunt nomine Aornum.] (Aen. 6.240-42)
such is the vapor that pours out of those dark jaws
and carries up to the round of the sky;; wherefore the Greeks
had called the place by the name of "birdless."
What seems to draw the attention of the commentators on this passage is the
etymology in l. 242: (a) is it false (yes) and (b) should we really
attribute the line to Virgil (no). What grabs me, though, is the fact that
Aeneas, like Latinus, converses with the dead under the influence of bad air.
I haven't been to Cumae myself, but the cave of the sibyl figures
prominently in a recent episode of The Sopranos, in which Tony visits the
cave with a prospective business partner. According to a placard in situ,
the sibyl delivered her prophecies under the influence of volcanic vapors.
Again, I don't know if the placard is really there, much less accurate; it
is, after all, only a TV show. The real question is this: why does Virgil
mention the smell on both occasions?
I'm not the first person to suggest that Aeneas goes to the underworld in a
dream; more than one person has pointed out that the entrance to Hades is
guarded by a black elm tree that has "somnia...uana" hanging in its
branches (Aen. 6.283-84). What I'm suggesting here is that what Virgil says
darkly in book 6 he says more openly at the beginning of book 7. To put it
more plainly, the fume-induced vision that Latinus has in Aen. 7.81f is the
same kind of experience that Aeneas has in book 6. The difference is that
what happens to Aeneas is described allegorically, in mythological terms,
and the vision of Latinus is described directly, in what I will call (for
lack of a better term) anthropological terms.
In both cases, the men go to Hades only in their glue-sniffing fantasies.
What think ye?
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David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, &c.
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