1 00:00:04,840 --> 00:00:10,035 We'll pay some attention to how Virgil himself thought about myth in the class. 2 00:00:10,232 --> 00:00:15,559 This is another one of those questions that if we tried to ask it of Homer or of 3 00:00:15,559 --> 00:00:19,571 the Trojanians, we wouldn't get much in the way of an answer. 4 00:00:19,768 --> 00:00:24,108 We'd be pretty much stuck on what they thought myth was all about. 5 00:00:24,306 --> 00:00:29,567 When we turn to Virgil though, we have actual good evidence for certain kinds of 6 00:00:29,567 --> 00:00:34,170 ways he understood myth to work. We know for example, that Virgil has a 7 00:00:34,170 --> 00:00:38,840 linkage this large tradition of interpretation of Homer. He's a scholar. 8 00:00:38,840 --> 00:00:42,588 Or a poet. Yes he's very much an artist poet of the 9 00:00:42,588 --> 00:00:47,585 first order, but eh, he's at the same time, a extremely learned person, that is 10 00:00:47,585 --> 00:00:52,912 not just familiar with the traditions that he's writing and re-writing, he's also 11 00:00:52,912 --> 00:00:58,514 familiar with the traditions of commentary on Homer, and that gives him a rich 12 00:00:58,514 --> 00:01:04,856 context in which, to remake the traditions that are coming his way, and gives us a 13 00:01:04,856 --> 00:01:09,614 window on to what Virgil himself was up to as a creator of myth. 14 00:01:09,827 --> 00:01:15,074 We can say for sure that Virgil has a strong rationalizing impulse to him. 15 00:01:15,074 --> 00:01:20,675 We'll see that when we get to strange, wondrous, mystical kinds of events, Virgil 16 00:01:20,675 --> 00:01:26,489 will typically provide us with a redundant kind of causation for those strange or 17 00:01:26,489 --> 00:01:30,531 mystical events. So for example, the falling in love scene, 18 00:01:30,531 --> 00:01:36,700 we'll see at the close of Book one where Venus decides to weaken Dido by making her 19 00:01:36,700 --> 00:01:42,906 fall desperately in love with, with Aeneas the point where the arts of love are 20 00:01:42,906 --> 00:01:48,063 actually used for terrible things. Well, that happens in myth, doesn't it? 21 00:01:48,277 --> 00:01:52,638 While that hardly a soft and squishy gentle kind of, force. 22 00:01:52,638 --> 00:01:57,856 It's something that can undo a person. Well, it definitely happens to Dido. 23 00:01:58,070 --> 00:02:03,289 Venus then comes in and has Dido fall desperately in love with Aeneus. 24 00:02:03,503 --> 00:02:08,936 But in order to do so, she uses her son Amor who also will be known, later as, 25 00:02:08,936 --> 00:02:12,510 Cupid. And, and, and specifically as Virgil tells 26 00:02:12,510 --> 00:02:19,489 the story what Venus does is reshape her young son, Amor into the shape of the 27 00:02:19,489 --> 00:02:22,914 actual. A young infant son of Vir of Aeneas 28 00:02:22,914 --> 00:02:26,259 Ascanius. So now you've got this picture that 29 00:02:26,259 --> 00:02:31,760 Virgil's painting for you that talks about on the one hand a goddess in a, 30 00:02:31,760 --> 00:02:36,721 A, powerful act of divine intervention making a woman fall in love with a man. 31 00:02:36,721 --> 00:02:41,621 But on the other hand, he does it through a surrogate that takes the shape of a 32 00:02:41,621 --> 00:02:44,971 young infant. Now I don't know that this is absolutely 33 00:02:44,971 --> 00:02:47,389 true. I won't call this a universal law. 34 00:02:47,576 --> 00:02:53,034 But let's go ahead and label something that I've observed in my in my lifetime 35 00:02:53,034 --> 00:02:57,313 called the puppy effect. If someone would like a person someone 36 00:02:57,313 --> 00:03:01,866 else to have an amorous attraction to them, having a puppy on your lap is not a 37 00:03:01,866 --> 00:03:04,404 bad thing. It means that, you can exhibit to the 38 00:03:04,404 --> 00:03:08,718 person yeah, the puppy automatically melts a person's heart and makes the person 39 00:03:08,718 --> 00:03:12,114 think, oh wow, this is so cute and we want to come over and pet it. 40 00:03:12,114 --> 00:03:15,888 Then also, if that person who has the puppy on, on, on, on his or her lap, 41 00:03:15,888 --> 00:03:20,363 actually takes care of the little thing, well chances are maybe the person might be 42 00:03:20,363 --> 00:03:24,083 a good person to have around in you know, longer term relationship. 43 00:03:24,245 --> 00:03:28,558 So puppies are useful ways of getting people's attention and expressing to them 44 00:03:28,558 --> 00:03:33,210 in some sense that, you yourself might be kind of having your act together enough to 45 00:03:33,210 --> 00:03:36,710 care for something else so you might be a worthy mate for that person. 46 00:03:36,710 --> 00:03:43,820 Well, the way Virgil tells the story having Aeschaeneus be the, the object that 47 00:03:43,820 --> 00:03:49,143 makes Ido turn from just admiring the abstract, this figure of Aeneas, to 48 00:03:49,143 --> 00:03:53,632 falling passionately, deeply in love with him is kind of interesting. 49 00:03:53,632 --> 00:03:58,782 There's a psychologizing of the whole event that I think Virgil is engaged in, 50 00:03:58,782 --> 00:04:03,799 having Dido in an example of this puppy effect, seeing this young infant and 51 00:04:03,799 --> 00:04:04,987 thinking, well. Wow. 52 00:04:04,987 --> 00:04:10,401 This person just might be okay, and having that be the vehicle by which passionate 53 00:04:10,401 --> 00:04:15,550 love falls upon her is a sense of, I think, Virgil giving us a redundant set of 54 00:04:15,550 --> 00:04:20,407 causations for an otherwise rather grandiose kind of the divine intervention. 55 00:04:20,407 --> 00:04:24,764 We'll see later on in the story some mention in book three of Aeneas's 56 00:04:24,764 --> 00:04:27,989 household gods. They're someone that are going to show up 57 00:04:27,989 --> 00:04:32,741 in the story over and over again, in fact. He has a dream about them telling him that 58 00:04:32,741 --> 00:04:37,380 it's important that he should leave Crete, now that there's a plague, and he should 59 00:04:37,380 --> 00:04:40,096 go off and try to found his city somewhere else. 60 00:04:40,096 --> 00:04:44,396 Aeneas is thinking about Crete as a possible place to begin his new city, to 61 00:04:44,396 --> 00:04:48,696 get started on things, and then these household gods come and tell him to go 62 00:04:48,696 --> 00:04:51,242 away. Now, the, the appearance of the gods to a 63 00:04:51,242 --> 00:04:55,551 person, that's pretty exciting mythic kinds of stuff, but look what Virgil's 64 00:04:55,551 --> 00:04:58,502 done with it. He casts it in the form of a dream, so we 65 00:04:58,502 --> 00:05:02,874 now have Aeneas imagining something to happen which gives us another kind of 66 00:05:02,874 --> 00:05:07,356 psychological way of understanding what happens, and then also the pestilence that 67 00:05:07,356 --> 00:05:11,455 gets visited upon the group means they're going to have to leave Crete anyway. 68 00:05:11,455 --> 00:05:15,823 So they're moving away from Crete and abandoning that, that place is a potential 69 00:05:15,823 --> 00:05:20,069 site for a future Rome is determined by the pestilence yes, in a physiological 70 00:05:20,069 --> 00:05:22,790 kind of way. It's also determined by a dream, which 71 00:05:22,790 --> 00:05:27,036 could be looked at as a psychological reality or maybe as a divine visitation. 72 00:05:27,036 --> 00:05:31,036 It's also cast, in Virgil, as a. Pure and simple divine vi, divine 73 00:05:31,036 --> 00:05:34,047 visitation. All of these are present there. 74 00:05:34,047 --> 00:05:39,855 There's a redundant set of causes that's given for the action, some more mystical 75 00:05:39,855 --> 00:05:43,297 than others in a typical kind of Virgilian move. 76 00:05:43,512 --> 00:05:49,047 The connections, also, of the gods and what they mean, are, are slightly changed 77 00:05:49,047 --> 00:05:52,577 in Virgil's story. When we hear about Jupiter he's going to 78 00:05:52,577 --> 00:05:57,304 be at quite a grand remove from most of the events that happen in the story. 79 00:05:57,483 --> 00:06:02,330 This is a little bit different from Zeus, who gets his hands dirty and goes ahead 80 00:06:02,330 --> 00:06:08,074 and threatens people and sends messengers and all the kind of actual action that we 81 00:06:08,074 --> 00:06:11,604 see Zeus engaging in. Jupiter's much more removed, and grand, 82 00:06:11,604 --> 00:06:14,954 and farther out. There's an association that Virgil's 83 00:06:14,954 --> 00:06:19,442 building on here, of the highest god Jupiter, with the highest levels of the 84 00:06:19,442 --> 00:06:20,280 cosmos. The. 85 00:06:20,280 --> 00:06:23,288 The Romans would have known this by a Greek term, iphare. 86 00:06:23,288 --> 00:06:27,908 The very highest reaches of the cosmos are the places that Jupiter is associated with 87 00:06:27,908 --> 00:06:30,809 and that's where he stays. He mostly doesn't come down. 88 00:06:30,809 --> 00:06:35,054 We're not going to see the kinds of rough and tumble examples of Jupiter being 89 00:06:35,054 --> 00:06:37,901 involved in the action that Homer went ahead and did. 90 00:06:37,901 --> 00:06:40,910 Another interesting example of this is this figure, Hera. 91 00:06:40,910 --> 00:06:43,922 Sorry, Juno. We're going to get to know Juno pretty 92 00:06:43,922 --> 00:06:47,717 well through the story, and Virgil has a particular spin on her. 93 00:06:47,717 --> 00:06:52,657 Remember how he talks about her at the very beginning, talking about how Aeneas 94 00:06:52,657 --> 00:06:56,151 is buffeted by blows from the air, directed by Juno at him. 95 00:06:56,332 --> 00:07:00,971 Fair enough, fine, and as we're reading it, he sort of weaves this all together, 96 00:07:00,971 --> 00:07:05,850 makes perfect sense, but we'll see that when Juno becomes involved in events down 97 00:07:05,850 --> 00:07:10,128 below the earth, she typically is going to get involved as a storm goddess. 98 00:07:10,128 --> 00:07:17,464 Blow winds at Aeneas blow awful storms at him he'll be pressed around by actual 99 00:07:17,464 --> 00:07:20,885 physical storms that are now directed by Juno. 100 00:07:20,885 --> 00:07:26,684 Okay fine, we know Gods getting involved in this but the trick is, in the Greek 101 00:07:26,684 --> 00:07:31,695 materials, Hera is not a storm Goddess. She doesn't show up, setting storm to 102 00:07:31,695 --> 00:07:33,349 people. Poseidon surely does. 103 00:07:33,349 --> 00:07:37,130 Zeus can do it but it's not normally Hera's way of doing things. 104 00:07:37,130 --> 00:07:40,320 Since when does the queen of the gods, a storm goddess? 105 00:07:40,320 --> 00:07:46,441 Well, Virgil is working from a tradition that draws on Greek scholarly work, and in 106 00:07:46,441 --> 00:07:51,220 fact on a long and deep allegorical reading of the goddess Hera. 107 00:07:51,220 --> 00:07:56,178 As being associated with weather. The Greek term for Hera, there I have 108 00:07:56,178 --> 00:08:01,066 written up on the board next to the English term Hera there in Greek 109 00:08:01,066 --> 00:08:03,970 characters, has an eta, a rho and an alpha. 110 00:08:03,970 --> 00:08:09,992 Eta is a long E and the H that shows up in English is taken care of in Greek by that 111 00:08:09,992 --> 00:08:15,729 little squiggly mark up above the, sorry, that little squiggly mark there up above 112 00:08:15,729 --> 00:08:18,820 the eta, hah. Hera is her name, there in Greek. 113 00:08:18,820 --> 00:08:23,940 Well, the Greeks notice soon enough that this was actually an anagram for the 114 00:08:23,940 --> 00:08:29,647 straightforward Greek word for air. Air is the dense air of our atmosphere 115 00:08:29,647 --> 00:08:33,841 around us. And they said it themselves, well Hera's 116 00:08:33,841 --> 00:08:39,219 letters, actually if you unscramble them, are make her associated with our 117 00:08:39,219 --> 00:08:43,510 understanding of the air. So from early on Greek allegorists read 118 00:08:43,510 --> 00:08:48,559 Hera as an allegorical symbol of the air. Now they also thought, according to the 119 00:08:48,559 --> 00:08:52,597 science of the day, that the air was responsible for the weather. 120 00:08:52,597 --> 00:08:58,024 And if it got heated up, or got moist, or all those things that it we had crashes of 121 00:08:58,024 --> 00:09:03,388 thunder, we had winds, we had hot winds, cold winds, we had all the meteorological 122 00:09:03,388 --> 00:09:08,167 phenomena, including storms and blowing, were, were built into this lower 123 00:09:08,505 --> 00:09:11,440 atmosphere of air. So, when. 124 00:09:11,440 --> 00:09:15,456 Virgil is carefully talking about Juno as a storm god. 125 00:09:15,456 --> 00:09:21,376 What he's doing is working from a long and deep allegorical tradition that have for 126 00:09:21,376 --> 00:09:24,477 many centuries associated Hera with the air. 127 00:09:24,477 --> 00:09:27,225 Now, does Homer do this? Well, mostly not. 128 00:09:27,437 --> 00:09:32,299 Homer's interpreters do and Virgil is working from this tradition. 129 00:09:32,299 --> 00:09:36,810 From the traditional scholarship around Homer's intrepreters. 130 00:09:36,810 --> 00:09:41,682 We'll see in Virgil's pantheon that not only do we have a grand and separate and 131 00:09:41,682 --> 00:09:46,134 very far away Olympian divinities, especially in the case of Jupiter we're 132 00:09:46,134 --> 00:09:49,263 also going to have these figures, the household gods. 133 00:09:49,263 --> 00:09:53,714 These are going to be effigies actual statues, that are the local gods of 134 00:09:53,714 --> 00:09:57,264 particular families. A very Roman custom, not a Greek one at 135 00:09:57,264 --> 00:09:59,971 all. These are going to be very important for 136 00:09:59,971 --> 00:10:04,663 Virgil's story and they're a kind of concretization of abstract divine forces 137 00:10:04,663 --> 00:10:09,356 in the form of specific effigies that people can direct their acts of worship 138 00:10:09,356 --> 00:10:12,952 toward. Another kind of indication from Virgil 139 00:10:12,952 --> 00:10:16,802 that he's dealing in. We guess abstractions what those 140 00:10:16,802 --> 00:10:19,489 abstractions are going to be made concrete. 141 00:10:19,489 --> 00:10:24,550 We'll notice also that in furthering of this rationalizing spirit, we're going to 142 00:10:24,550 --> 00:10:27,675 have actual real place names built into our story. 143 00:10:27,675 --> 00:10:32,799 Virgil's story is entirely mappable. It's mappable on specific locations in the 144 00:10:32,799 --> 00:10:36,673 Mediterranean. When we look at Homer's Odyssey we didn't 145 00:10:36,673 --> 00:10:41,547 propose any mapping there, because in fact all mappings of the Odyssey are the 146 00:10:41,547 --> 00:10:46,140 creations of the map makers. Homer doesn't give us any settled atlas 147 00:10:46,140 --> 00:10:51,748 that lots of people that spend cottage industries of time disagreeing over which 148 00:10:51,748 --> 00:10:57,287 mapping should go where and whether the Scylla and Charybdis is in one place of 149 00:10:57,287 --> 00:11:02,479 the Mediterranean and the Pillars of Hercules is somewhere else but mostly 150 00:11:02,479 --> 00:11:06,980 Odysseus's, Homer's treatment of this area is as a land of mythic. 151 00:11:06,980 --> 00:11:12,238 Fantasy, its, strange and wonderful places but you can't really find them in any 152 00:11:12,238 --> 00:11:15,285 specific way on maps. Totally different with Virgil. 153 00:11:15,285 --> 00:11:19,647 Every place he's going to talk about is specifically mappable on to real 154 00:11:19,647 --> 00:11:24,248 geography, that you and I as classical Romans know we're going to get to know. 155 00:11:24,248 --> 00:11:28,251 We know these places we may have grown up, we may have visited them. 156 00:11:28,251 --> 00:11:31,120 Virgil's now mapping this on to real historical. 157 00:11:31,486 --> 00:11:35,199 Places. Now we're going to see some other 158 00:11:35,199 --> 00:11:38,141 treatments that we'll spend time looking at, Virgil. 159 00:11:38,304 --> 00:11:42,881 Where he will give rationalizing his rationalizing impulse will take over. 160 00:11:43,045 --> 00:11:47,676 And at each of these points, we'll, we'll link it back, to this new sense of myth in 161 00:11:47,676 --> 00:11:52,090 history that Virgil's working with. He is working in a historical time with 162 00:11:52,090 --> 00:11:55,359 great learning around him. And he's not going to ignore that in 163 00:11:55,359 --> 00:11:58,737 building his own myth. And yet, Virgil is able, even within this 164 00:11:58,737 --> 00:12:02,497 very learned time, historically and scientifically, with great records 165 00:12:02,497 --> 00:12:04,894 everywhere. Virgil still is going to be able to 166 00:12:04,894 --> 00:12:07,510 construct myth. It's much trickier to do it with. 167 00:12:07,510 --> 00:12:11,950 In History, I think you'll agree Virgil succeeds, eh, with. 168 00:12:12,822 --> 00:12:15,480 Great, effect.