What is the purpose of these ruined cities (which are mentioned only briefly)? Are they a prophecy of what Rome will come to in the end? In which case there is not going to be much progress after all...There was a prophecy that Rome would one day perish; and Scipio the younger had thought on those lines, or so Polybius tells us.
All part of the Pythagoras problem in that book: when Ovid introduces his speech with the words
I don't think you have to read it that way: for me (and perhaps for Virgil also) ruins are romantic as well as melancholy, because they connect us with the past. Insofar as they are ruins, they are monitory. "Where is the horse and rider? / Where is the horn that was blowing?" And so on. But ruins are also remnants. And they invite continuation, in a way that the finished monument, intact and imposing, does not.
There is a similar puzzle at the end of Met. XV: will the Golden Age of Augustus really last forever, or will it give way to the Changefulness that Pythagoras has just finished saying (at the beginning of Met. XV) is the abiding principle of the universe?
docta quidem soluit, sed non et credita, uerbis
are we meant to reflect on human blindness in the face of wisdom, or to write the philosopher off as a silly old fool? As with Janus' denunciation of rampant greed in book 1 of the Fasti, do we really want to live the abstemious and impoverished life of virtue--do you, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère?
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c East Carolina University Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens 67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone Oxford scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter? OX2 6EJ
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