We're now going to jump 500 years from
classical Athens into classical Rome. We're looking at a very
different culture now. And for some people, you will have learned
early on in your study of myth that yeah, that Romans borrow all the Greek myths and
change the names and adopt the stories for themselves. There's some truth to that, the Greeks
preexisted the Romans, for the most part, their literary traditions did. But it's probably a little more
accurate to say that both Greeks and Romans were working from a common
pool of Mediterranean materials that they each put their own spin on. And it's not quite right to look at the
Romans as being derivative of the Greeks, that doesn't quite work out right. They have their own ways
of doing things and we'll see as we track them out,
just what those are. They're interesting and fascinating differences with the materials
that we've already looked at. We're going to turn to a new
question when we enter into this first stage of our study of
Roman material with Virgil. That's going to be
a question that's deeply, carefully bound up with
the question of history. When we were studying the text that we've
looked at so far, we mostly could make only very meager references to the
historical context in which they grew up. That's true for Homer, even true of the cases where we have some
more information in classical Athens. The amount of historical material we
can reference is not all that robust. By the time we get to Virgil,
though, it's a very different story. Virgil is writing myth within history. He's doing something different
than what we've seen up until now. This is a historical time, by which I
mean we have lots of evidence around for the historical context in
which Virgil was writing. So to some extent up until now,
the materials that we've been reading, they've gotten a free pass on history. We can as I say, and we've try to bring specific historical
context where they're relevant to bear. For example when we read The Oresteia or
pieces of Homer. But up until now we've only been able
to make quite meager references to the historical context. That's going to be very different
when we turn to Virgil. We know a lot about the historical
background that he's working in and so it shows us a different kind of context. Myth is now being made
within historical time. It's I think a higher
degree of difficulty. Homer's free pass is no more. He can't just, Virgil can't just
extend himself out into mythic cloudiness and tell a story in some abstract way that's completely
divorced from his historical context. Instead of we're going to be able to
bring it to bear on understanding him. Now we've looked at myth as an important
component of understanding identity up till now and up till now we
focused on individual identity, especially that in the case of Odysseus
getting rebuilt through the Odyssey. And we also talked about in the materials
from last week, identity is getting dissolve before our very eyes
in a case of Oedipus and Pentheus. So identity up till how has been
mostly focused on individuals. When we get to Virgil, identity is now
going to be looked at through a new lens, we're going to look at the identity
of a nation as a whole. Now some of us will nod our heads and
say, well sure, myth does that. It spells out the identity
of a nation as a whole. But if we're used to that idea,
it's because Virgil was successful. What we've seen up till now, none of the
poets we've seen specifically have been self-consciously trying to craft
some identity of Greek-ness for us. That's something that we can
see in their stories but it's not at all the case that any of our
poets up till now have self consciously been trying to craft some larger
Greek identity for everybody. Instead they're talking about
great stories about individuals. When we get to Virgil,
very different story. We're looking now to national identity. What is it to be a Roman? That's going to be looked at through the
lens of specific identity in the case of Aeneus. But, Virgil's much more self
conscious about looking to myth as a way of articulating
the identity of a whole nation. Now, individual identity has
it's own ways of working. It's mostly a biological continuity. That's a good place to start. Where do I come from? Where are my connections to my past? We start with biology as
a way of connecting that. In terms of a nation, well,
what's the continuity going to be? It's not quite biological, although Virgil
is going to spin it that way for us. Instead, there's a sort of shared sense
of Roman-ness that gets passed on crucially through this form of narrative,
through myth. Myth I think is probably the very stuff of
what national identities are made up of. And it takes the place of biology for
individuals. It's the way you can look back to where the lineage is actually going to go
through some sort of mythic storytelling. Now, we enter into
the question of history, there are twin dangers like Scylla and
Charybdis when considering history. This is going to be in very broad strokes,
those of you historians out there are already much more
sophisticated than this but let's just get this out on the table. The twin dangers of considering history,
what I'm calling the Scylla and Charybdis, is that on the one hand
the history is just there, school, history is just there,
all we do is just discover it. Sometimes people try to change it maybe. But there's some reality, real thing,
just a fact back there that happened. That's a little bit too narrow of a view. The problem there is that the past
is actually a very big place. What counts as being just the facts
of what happened in history depends on what people want to focus on,
which things they're going to look at. For example, if I told you that, let me give you the whole history of what
happened yesterday, I might start off and talk about I woke up in the morning and
started brushing my teeth. I patted my dog, put on one black sock and
by mistake one blue sock, so I had to go back and change my socks. Now at this point you're already bored. Wait a minute, that's not history. Let's talk instead about grand
political events that happened, let's talk about family dynasties,
let's talk about big historical events, so right away you can say to yourself, okay. So, a person that's going to try to
tell the history has to talk about a story that's relevant for more than
just a single person who's narrating it. It's got to be relevant for
some particular we, some group out there. Now, who is the group you're
telling the story for? That's a critical part of
what history is all about, it guides the process of editing. So we've got this huge profusion that
might as well be functionally infinite, of stuff that's happened in the past in
order to tell a history we have to weed out functionally, almost of it and
tell just a very narrow piece of what it is that we are going to deem to
be most relevant to some group, some we. So, the history is just there and
it's only just a fact, waiting to be discovered. Doesn't quite to understand that there's a
very, that this idea of the past is huge, and rich, and requires us to edit. And how we edit depends on a lot
of normative kind of questions. Who's the we involved, what counts
as being relevant for that group? Secondly, the second twin
manger here is the idea that history is just totally made up. Sometimes people will say
history's made up by the winners. Well, okay, fine,
I mean that's a little bit cynical. But sure, it's the case that those who have certain
kinds of political power, they do have an ability to make their own version
of events the more authoritative one. But really we can't just all say that
we'll toss out willy-nilly the idea that what happened in the past
is totally up for grabs and anyone's account of the past is
just as good as anyone else's. I think that's a very pernicious road
to go down too, built around cynicism. History is not totally fabricated nor
is history just there. It's somewhere in between. To try to get at how we make
a historical narrative out of this profusion of events in the past, we have
to talk about editing and how we do it. I think, yeah, we have to, first of all,
ask a question about accuracy. So have we told accounts and
represented them in an accurate way? Furthermore, we're going to
have to get into this, now, judgment about whether
the storyline that's being told is a fair enough representation
of the past for some group, some collective we that we're talking
about in order to be representative of it. Does it actually function for the group as a whole as a fair
representation of the past? Accuracy, that's the first
order of question. We have to say are the events that
were being narrated actually happen in some historical past, fine,
then we have to say is focusing on these particular events a fair
representation of the past. There's an example here
that I could just toss out. Some people might claim that looking at the whole of the great conflict of the
middle of the last century, World War II. A person could look at the whole thing and
say to themselves yes, it's true that in World War II there
were atrocities on both sides. Okay, fine I suppose
someone would go ahead and could say that's factually accurate, there
were indeed atrocities on both sides. But does that actually work out to be
fair and adequate representation of what happened in that grand conflict in the
middle of the last century, World War II? Probably not. And most historians would come along and say, actually that's a gross
distortion of the facts. That may be factually accurate,
but it doesn't fairly and adequately represent
the largeness of this past. When we get to the question
of Virgil's history, getting out of our thought experiments for
the last century. When we get to the question of Virgil's
engagement with history, we're going to have to continuously be asking ourselves
surely some questions about accuracy, but the more interesting ones are going
to be questions about fairness. Is Virgil pulling out a thread
that represents Roman-ness in some kind of fair way. As I say, this is a new thing for us. We haven't had a chance really to hold our mythological storytellers feet to the fire
when it comes to historical accuracy. Virgil's a very different kind of case. So, we're going to get ready to hear
his stories about who this we is, who the Romans are, what their past is. And, we're going to have to make
judgements on whether we think, in the end, Virgil has used
this genre of myth fairly and accurately in order to construct
an identity of this national group. We're going to agree at some points,
we'll disagree at others, I think there'll be lively conversations
on the discussion forums about this. Let's get a closeup look next
at Virgil's engagement in this process of building a nation of Rome.