We'll pay some attention to how Virgil
himself thought about myth in the class. This is another one of those questions
that if we tried to ask it of Homer or of the Trojanians, we wouldn't get much in
the way of an answer. We'd be pretty much stuck on what they
thought myth was all about. When we turn to Virgil though, we have
actual good evidence for certain kinds of ways he understood myth to work.
We know for example, that Virgil has a linkage this large tradition of
interpretation of Homer. He's a scholar. Or a poet.
Yes he's very much an artist poet of the first order, but eh, he's at the same
time, a extremely learned person, that is not just familiar with the traditions that
he's writing and re-writing, he's also familiar with the traditions of commentary
on Homer, and that gives him a rich context in which, to remake the traditions
that are coming his way, and gives us a window on to what Virgil himself was up to
as a creator of myth. We can say for sure that Virgil has a
strong rationalizing impulse to him. We'll see that when we get to strange,
wondrous, mystical kinds of events, Virgil will typically provide us with a redundant
kind of causation for those strange or mystical events.
So for example, the falling in love scene, we'll see at the close of Book one where
Venus decides to weaken Dido by making her fall desperately in love with, with Aeneas
the point where the arts of love are actually used for terrible things.
Well, that happens in myth, doesn't it? While that hardly a soft and squishy
gentle kind of, force. It's something that can undo a person.
Well, it definitely happens to Dido. Venus then comes in and has Dido fall
desperately in love with Aeneus. But in order to do so, she uses her son
Amor who also will be known, later as, Cupid.
And, and, and specifically as Virgil tells the story what Venus does is reshape her
young son, Amor into the shape of the actual.
A young infant son of Vir of Aeneas Ascanius.
So now you've got this picture that Virgil's painting for you that talks about
on the one hand a goddess in a, A, powerful act of divine intervention
making a woman fall in love with a man. But on the other hand, he does it through
a surrogate that takes the shape of a young infant.
Now I don't know that this is absolutely true.
I won't call this a universal law. But let's go ahead and label something
that I've observed in my in my lifetime called the puppy effect.
If someone would like a person someone else to have an amorous attraction to
them, having a puppy on your lap is not a bad thing.
It means that, you can exhibit to the person yeah, the puppy automatically melts
a person's heart and makes the person think, oh wow, this is so cute and we want
to come over and pet it. Then also, if that person who has the
puppy on, on, on, on his or her lap, actually takes care of the little thing,
well chances are maybe the person might be a good person to have around in you know,
longer term relationship. So puppies are useful ways of getting
people's attention and expressing to them in some sense that, you yourself might be
kind of having your act together enough to care for something else so you might be a
worthy mate for that person. Well, the way Virgil tells the story
having Aeschaeneus be the, the object that makes Ido turn from just admiring the
abstract, this figure of Aeneas, to falling passionately, deeply in love with
him is kind of interesting. There's a psychologizing of the whole
event that I think Virgil is engaged in, having Dido in an example of this puppy
effect, seeing this young infant and thinking, well.
Wow. This person just might be okay, and having
that be the vehicle by which passionate love falls upon her is a sense of, I
think, Virgil giving us a redundant set of causations for an otherwise rather
grandiose kind of the divine intervention. We'll see later on in the story some
mention in book three of Aeneas's household gods.
They're someone that are going to show up in the story over and over again, in fact.
He has a dream about them telling him that it's important that he should leave Crete,
now that there's a plague, and he should go off and try to found his city somewhere
else. Aeneas is thinking about Crete as a
possible place to begin his new city, to get started on things, and then these
household gods come and tell him to go away.
Now, the, the appearance of the gods to a person, that's pretty exciting mythic
kinds of stuff, but look what Virgil's done with it.
He casts it in the form of a dream, so we now have Aeneas imagining something to
happen which gives us another kind of psychological way of understanding what
happens, and then also the pestilence that gets visited upon the group means they're
going to have to leave Crete anyway. So they're moving away from Crete and
abandoning that, that place is a potential site for a future Rome is determined by
the pestilence yes, in a physiological kind of way.
It's also determined by a dream, which could be looked at as a psychological
reality or maybe as a divine visitation. It's also cast, in Virgil, as a.
Pure and simple divine vi, divine visitation.
All of these are present there. There's a redundant set of causes that's
given for the action, some more mystical than others in a typical kind of Virgilian
move. The connections, also, of the gods and
what they mean, are, are slightly changed in Virgil's story.
When we hear about Jupiter he's going to be at quite a grand remove from most of
the events that happen in the story. This is a little bit different from Zeus,
who gets his hands dirty and goes ahead and threatens people and sends messengers
and all the kind of actual action that we see Zeus engaging in.
Jupiter's much more removed, and grand, and farther out.
There's an association that Virgil's building on here, of the highest god
Jupiter, with the highest levels of the cosmos.
The. The Romans would have known this by a
Greek term, iphare. The very highest reaches of the cosmos are
the places that Jupiter is associated with and that's where he stays.
He mostly doesn't come down. We're not going to see the kinds of rough
and tumble examples of Jupiter being involved in the action that Homer went
ahead and did. Another interesting example of this is
this figure, Hera. Sorry, Juno.
We're going to get to know Juno pretty well through the story, and Virgil has a
particular spin on her. Remember how he talks about her at the
very beginning, talking about how Aeneas is buffeted by blows from the air,
directed by Juno at him. Fair enough, fine, and as we're reading
it, he sort of weaves this all together, makes perfect sense, but we'll see that
when Juno becomes involved in events down below the earth, she typically is going to
get involved as a storm goddess. Blow winds at Aeneas blow awful storms at
him he'll be pressed around by actual physical storms that are now directed by
Juno. Okay fine, we know Gods getting involved
in this but the trick is, in the Greek materials, Hera is not a storm Goddess.
She doesn't show up, setting storm to people.
Poseidon surely does. Zeus can do it but it's not normally
Hera's way of doing things. Since when does the queen of the gods, a
storm goddess? Well, Virgil is working from a tradition
that draws on Greek scholarly work, and in fact on a long and deep allegorical
reading of the goddess Hera. As being associated with weather.
The Greek term for Hera, there I have written up on the board next to the
English term Hera there in Greek characters, has an eta, a rho and an
alpha. Eta is a long E and the H that shows up in
English is taken care of in Greek by that little squiggly mark up above the, sorry,
that little squiggly mark there up above the eta, hah.
Hera is her name, there in Greek. Well, the Greeks notice soon enough that
this was actually an anagram for the straightforward Greek word for air.
Air is the dense air of our atmosphere around us.
And they said it themselves, well Hera's letters, actually if you unscramble them,
are make her associated with our understanding of the air.
So from early on Greek allegorists read Hera as an allegorical symbol of the air.
Now they also thought, according to the science of the day, that the air was
responsible for the weather. And if it got heated up, or got moist, or
all those things that it we had crashes of thunder, we had winds, we had hot winds,
cold winds, we had all the meteorological phenomena, including storms and blowing,
were, were built into this lower atmosphere of air.
So, when. Virgil is carefully talking about Juno as
a storm god. What he's doing is working from a long and
deep allegorical tradition that have for many centuries associated Hera with the
air. Now, does Homer do this?
Well, mostly not. Homer's interpreters do and Virgil is
working from this tradition. From the traditional scholarship around
Homer's intrepreters. We'll see in Virgil's pantheon that not
only do we have a grand and separate and very far away Olympian divinities,
especially in the case of Jupiter we're also going to have these figures, the
household gods. These are going to be effigies actual
statues, that are the local gods of particular families.
A very Roman custom, not a Greek one at all.
These are going to be very important for Virgil's story and they're a kind of
concretization of abstract divine forces in the form of specific effigies that
people can direct their acts of worship toward.
Another kind of indication from Virgil that he's dealing in.
We guess abstractions what those abstractions are going to be made
concrete. We'll notice also that in furthering of
this rationalizing spirit, we're going to have actual real place names built into
our story. Virgil's story is entirely mappable.
It's mappable on specific locations in the Mediterranean.
When we look at Homer's Odyssey we didn't propose any mapping there, because in fact
all mappings of the Odyssey are the creations of the map makers.
Homer doesn't give us any settled atlas that lots of people that spend cottage
industries of time disagreeing over which mapping should go where and whether the
Scylla and Charybdis is in one place of the Mediterranean and the Pillars of
Hercules is somewhere else but mostly Odysseus's, Homer's treatment of this area
is as a land of mythic. Fantasy, its, strange and wonderful places
but you can't really find them in any specific way on maps.
Totally different with Virgil. Every place he's going to talk about is
specifically mappable on to real geography, that you and I as classical
Romans know we're going to get to know. We know these places we may have grown up,
we may have visited them. Virgil's now mapping this on to real
historical. Places.
Now we're going to see some other treatments that we'll spend time looking
at, Virgil. Where he will give rationalizing his
rationalizing impulse will take over. And at each of these points, we'll, we'll
link it back, to this new sense of myth in history that Virgil's working with.
He is working in a historical time with great learning around him.
And he's not going to ignore that in building his own myth.
And yet, Virgil is able, even within this very learned time, historically and
scientifically, with great records everywhere.
Virgil still is going to be able to construct myth.
It's much trickier to do it with. In History, I think you'll agree Virgil
succeeds, eh, with. Great, effect.