1 00:00:04,920 --> 00:00:09,098 Let's close our treatment of Virgil by taking this very rich text and looking at 2 00:00:09,098 --> 00:00:13,380 it through some of the theoretical lenses that we've been developing in the class. 3 00:00:13,537 --> 00:00:17,872 Remember we've got a whole set of ideas on myth that we've been developing in our 4 00:00:17,872 --> 00:00:20,535 toolbox. Pulling up tools and tinkering with the 5 00:00:20,535 --> 00:00:23,982 myths as we go through. And also in the case of Virgil it makes 6 00:00:23,982 --> 00:00:28,213 sense for us to talk about his work in terms of the early ideas of myths that we 7 00:00:28,213 --> 00:00:30,876 were talking about that existed among the ancients. 8 00:00:30,876 --> 00:00:35,107 Because Virgil himself was writing as a person who is fully engaged in the ideas 9 00:00:35,107 --> 00:00:38,449 of myth of his time. We don't know that that's true of Homer. 10 00:00:38,449 --> 00:00:42,653 Probably it wasn't. We don't know that's true of the tragedians. It probably 11 00:00:42,653 --> 00:00:47,236 wasn't, maybe around the edges, but for Virgil it's definitely the case that he is 12 00:00:47,236 --> 00:00:51,705 a scholar of the ideas of myth in his time and to see him build this myth with 13 00:00:51,705 --> 00:00:54,929 reference to theories of myth is an interesting exercise. 14 00:00:54,929 --> 00:00:59,342 So we'll start there and move on to tinkering with the story with some of our 15 00:00:59,342 --> 00:01:02,850 contemporary ideas. Looking at Virgil from the lens of some of 16 00:01:02,850 --> 00:01:07,206 the ancient ideas, we talked quite a bit in our treatment of Virgil about his 17 00:01:07,206 --> 00:01:10,826 rationalizing spirit. So he'll take what seems to be strange and 18 00:01:10,826 --> 00:01:13,736 mysterious happenings that happen in, In myth, 19 00:01:13,736 --> 00:01:17,585 The most mysterious ones, And he'll always give us multiple ways of 20 00:01:17,585 --> 00:01:22,192 trying to understand what's happening. So something will seem like a visitation 21 00:01:22,192 --> 00:01:25,050 from a God. But really it's happening inside of a 22 00:01:25,050 --> 00:01:27,907 dream. Which we know to be a representation of 23 00:01:27,907 --> 00:01:33,040 fantasy of a sin- single person who's having who's, who's, who is who's having 24 00:01:33,040 --> 00:01:38,113 some kind of vision in their sleep. You'll have this stirring up of love being 25 00:01:38,113 --> 00:01:42,254 sent down by a divine force. That's really focused on the Dido 26 00:01:42,254 --> 00:01:46,920 recognizing that joy that's very present between Aeneas and his young son. 27 00:01:47,102 --> 00:01:51,611 So, it's these aspects, I think, show Virgil in his rationalizing spirit, and 28 00:01:51,611 --> 00:01:57,095 we've marked those as we've run into the as we've run into them, in our treatment 29 00:01:57,095 --> 00:02:00,325 of the Aeneid. Similarly, also, we've marked moments 30 00:02:00,325 --> 00:02:03,066 where Virgil, seems to be relying on allegory. 31 00:02:03,249 --> 00:02:07,941 We talked about that connection between Juno, the translation of the, Greek 32 00:02:07,941 --> 00:02:12,998 goddess, Hera, and her connection with the air, and that Virgil really does, pretty 33 00:02:12,998 --> 00:02:17,812 strongly identify Juno with the air based on, a scholarly precedent in those, 34 00:02:17,812 --> 00:02:22,864 scholars that had preceded him looking at links between the goddess Hera, and the 35 00:02:22,864 --> 00:02:26,576 element of the air. Strong current in allegorical reading. 36 00:02:26,753 --> 00:02:31,231 Then also the association of Jupiter. The Greek Zeus, with the Aether, 37 00:02:31,231 --> 00:02:35,356 That strongly gets, connected in Virgil's treatment of the topic. 38 00:02:35,356 --> 00:02:38,244 And those two are, pretty much linked together. 39 00:02:38,244 --> 00:02:42,958 So now, the, gods are being mapped onto actual features of the cosmos, in a way an 40 00:02:42,958 --> 00:02:47,200 allegorist might do it. We talked about Iopas' song at the close 41 00:02:47,200 --> 00:02:49,970 of book one. And how, there, when Virgil gets his 42 00:02:49,970 --> 00:02:54,920 chance, takes his chance to represent what poetry is all about, in that same way that 43 00:02:54,920 --> 00:02:58,866 homer used a modicus to represent what poetry's about, we think. 44 00:02:59,053 --> 00:03:02,498 Virgil seems self consciously to be doing that as well. 45 00:03:02,686 --> 00:03:08,637 Knowing the scholarship that preceded him and, just like in, in his case of allegory 46 00:03:08,637 --> 00:03:12,645 he has Iopas sing a song about the whole structure of the cosmos. 47 00:03:12,645 --> 00:03:17,406 So he seems to be again, inviting us to read his tale, as a large allegory. 48 00:03:17,593 --> 00:03:22,269 Then, also, we could point to Virgil I think, in a way that would probably be 49 00:03:22,269 --> 00:03:26,952 fair as a kind of proto-functionalist. Remember what functionalists are up to? 50 00:03:27,135 --> 00:03:32,183 They claim that myths are there in order to legitimize certain kinds of social and 51 00:03:32,183 --> 00:03:35,650 cultural norms. Well, it seems pretty clear that Virgil is 52 00:03:35,650 --> 00:03:39,204 up to something self consciously like that in his own story. 53 00:03:39,204 --> 00:03:43,824 After all, he, he writes during a time when Rome has a desperate need for a new 54 00:03:43,824 --> 00:03:48,148 sense for what it is to be Roman. Some justification, some articulation, 55 00:03:48,148 --> 00:03:51,761 some new meaning put behind their traditional social customs. 56 00:03:51,761 --> 00:03:56,677 Well, Virgil seems to be on to this and I wouldn't call him a functionalist because 57 00:03:56,677 --> 00:04:00,113 functionalism wasn't invented. That would be an acronystic. 58 00:04:00,291 --> 00:04:03,252 But he strikes me as kind of a protofunctionalist. 59 00:04:03,430 --> 00:04:08,465 He is fully aware of the power of myth to instill and legitimize certain kinds of 60 00:04:08,465 --> 00:04:11,448 social norms. And he is self-consciously doing that with 61 00:04:11,448 --> 00:04:15,755 his mythic storytelling in order to instill and legitimize certain senses of 62 00:04:15,755 --> 00:04:20,334 what it is to be what it is to be Roman. Now, modern ideas on Virgil's myth are 63 00:04:20,334 --> 00:04:24,368 really interesting to pull out. I'm just gonna scratch the surface here. 64 00:04:24,368 --> 00:04:28,947 Literally, just barely scratch the surface of a very rich possibilities, set of 65 00:04:28,947 --> 00:04:32,273 possibilities. Surely introducing our tools and digging 66 00:04:32,273 --> 00:04:36,252 into our tool box, we're going to find all kinds of wonderful things on a, in 67 00:04:36,252 --> 00:04:38,978 Virgil's tale. First of all starting off with a 68 00:04:38,978 --> 00:04:43,507 functionalist reading from what contemporary functionalists might make out 69 00:04:43,507 --> 00:04:48,087 of Virgil's story. We've already hinted at this when we 70 00:04:48,087 --> 00:04:54,062 talked about one way to look at how Virgil casts the relationship between Dido and 71 00:04:54,062 --> 00:04:57,371 Aeneas. There we have a powerful sense of a new 72 00:04:57,371 --> 00:05:00,909 social and cultural value of pietas, or duty. 73 00:05:00,909 --> 00:05:07,421 And that becomes comes on a collision course with an old, and very traditional, 74 00:05:07,421 --> 00:05:13,471 and very Homeric anchoring cultural value of Sania, and there's no doubt Virgil was 75 00:05:13,471 --> 00:05:19,057 well aware of how powerful xenia was in Homer's world and I think there's no doubt 76 00:05:19,057 --> 00:05:24,576 that he structured his epic in such a way as to create a collision course between 77 00:05:24,576 --> 00:05:30,229 these two fundamental cultural values, and he in telling the story in the way he did 78 00:05:30,229 --> 00:05:35,310 made sure that pietas won that struggle. When they came to a collision course and 79 00:05:35,310 --> 00:05:39,724 he had, we were forced to choose between them, it's pietas that should be the 80 00:05:39,724 --> 00:05:41,757 winner. It comes out ahead of xenia. 81 00:05:41,757 --> 00:05:45,300 Yes, hospitality is all well and good, but duty is even better. 82 00:05:45,300 --> 00:05:50,062 Many times in life, these two things will not collide, but when they do, when you're 83 00:05:50,062 --> 00:05:52,560 forced to choose, you need to choose pietas. 84 00:05:52,560 --> 00:05:57,948 So it could well be that what we have here, in a from a functionalist reading, 85 00:05:57,948 --> 00:06:03,336 is a strong endorsement of this new central cultural value, so strong that 86 00:06:03,336 --> 00:06:08,643 it's made purposefully to have a collision course with and trump what might have 87 00:06:08,643 --> 00:06:12,838 counted as the old central cultural value in the Mederteranian. 88 00:06:12,838 --> 00:06:17,409 So taking off our, putting our funtionalist tools back in our toolbox for 89 00:06:17,409 --> 00:06:22,794 a second and picking up another tool let's just a make a quick comment about, about 90 00:06:22,982 --> 00:06:28,680 the kind of reading a pyschoanalyst might do of this myth, someone who wants to do 91 00:06:28,680 --> 00:06:31,560 psychoanalytic theory of the reading of myths. 92 00:06:31,560 --> 00:06:36,256 Remember, according to Freud, myths are there to dramatize the events of any 93 00:06:36,256 --> 00:06:41,568 individual's developement of their mental or intellectual, or psychological life. 94 00:06:41,765 --> 00:06:47,234 And dreams, this is how dreams operate. Dr-, we should look at myths as the dreams 95 00:06:47,234 --> 00:06:50,924 of an entire culture. So myths are a culture's attempt, a 96 00:06:50,924 --> 00:06:56,130 culture's attempt to reflect, to dramatize, the developments that they see 97 00:06:56,130 --> 00:06:59,951 in their own emergent collective psychological life. 98 00:06:59,951 --> 00:07:04,432 In the case of Rome, there are many directions we could go with this. 99 00:07:04,630 --> 00:07:09,769 But surely, it seems pretty clear that what we have is a, a culture at the time 100 00:07:09,769 --> 00:07:14,767 of Virgil's writing, that is dominant across the Mediterranean, and some sense 101 00:07:14,767 --> 00:07:19,010 of the joy and pleasure of being top dog in the universe married with a certain 102 00:07:19,010 --> 00:07:21,291 kind of guilt at what it took to get there, 103 00:07:21,291 --> 00:07:25,639 Including figures like Dido and all the people who get chewed up in the machinery 104 00:07:25,639 --> 00:07:29,723 of fate as it grinds forward toward the production of Rome and all the human 105 00:07:29,723 --> 00:07:32,481 suffering. That again, Virgil never turns a blind eye 106 00:07:32,481 --> 00:07:36,846 to, he doesn't paper over any of this. All these things seem to be sort of built 107 00:07:36,846 --> 00:07:42,353 into and offloaded from, can, if we're pretending to be contemporary Romans for a 108 00:07:42,353 --> 00:07:45,846 second, they're offloaded onto these mythological characters. 109 00:07:45,846 --> 00:07:50,678 So our sense that yeah, we're now top dogs in the in the, Mediterranean universe and 110 00:07:50,853 --> 00:07:55,743 we feel a little bad about being there, but look here we are, each of these pieces 111 00:07:55,743 --> 00:08:00,925 of our sense of what it is to be Roman gets offloaded onto these characters, and 112 00:08:00,925 --> 00:08:05,582 we get to watch Aeneas go through this whole process of acquiring and gathering 113 00:08:05,582 --> 00:08:09,716 power for Rome through his pietas and all the good things that he does. 114 00:08:09,891 --> 00:08:14,293 So dreams that we might have, fantasies that we as Romans might have of, of a 115 00:08:14,293 --> 00:08:18,174 great dominance over others. These get offloaded onto an acceptable 116 00:08:18,174 --> 00:08:22,664 substitute onto Aeneas, who we get to see, he's a mythic character He's the Greek 117 00:08:22,664 --> 00:08:26,766 founder of what it is to be Rome. We get to see him executing those things 118 00:08:26,766 --> 00:08:29,926 and then in the end, it helps to justify our own sense, 119 00:08:29,926 --> 00:08:33,530 Give meaning to our own sense of where we are in the universe. 120 00:08:33,696 --> 00:08:37,466 Again just scratching the surface. Finally, we'd want to take another 121 00:08:37,466 --> 00:08:40,460 possibility, put our Freudian tool back in our toolbox. 122 00:08:40,460 --> 00:08:45,100 And, using the structuralist tool, recall that what a structuralist does is look for 123 00:08:45,100 --> 00:08:48,061 binary oppositions that are at the core of a myth. 124 00:08:48,061 --> 00:08:52,562 These binary oppositions are between two things that are, you have important 125 00:08:52,562 --> 00:08:55,701 organizing elements of the experience of being human. 126 00:08:55,701 --> 00:08:59,966 And these two things are in conflict. And that conflict provides the, the 127 00:08:59,966 --> 00:09:02,750 voltage that is the energy that makes the myth. 128 00:09:02,750 --> 00:09:05,916 Unfold. Okay, so if we're doing a structuralist 129 00:09:05,916 --> 00:09:10,330 reading we go binary hunting. If a structuralist were to look at the in 130 00:09:10,330 --> 00:09:15,204 the end a structuralist could propose to return to a binary opposition that we've 131 00:09:15,204 --> 00:09:19,619 already been developing in this class. Recall that when we looked at Athenian 132 00:09:19,619 --> 00:09:24,206 tragedy, and especially the Oresteia. We talked about how there was a possible 133 00:09:24,206 --> 00:09:29,136 structuralist binary being at work there. The import different way, looking at 134 00:09:29,136 --> 00:09:32,118 different ways of how human societies are organized. 135 00:09:32,118 --> 00:09:36,074 On the one hand we have, I guess, organizing human societies via blood 136 00:09:36,074 --> 00:09:37,680 relations. On the other hand. 137 00:09:37,680 --> 00:09:42,777 I think of societies by voluntary associations, and in the case of this new 138 00:09:42,777 --> 00:09:48,010 democratic Athens, we talked about the Oresteia as underwriting this sense of 139 00:09:48,010 --> 00:09:53,082 voluntary associations as being a critical and important way to un, to talk about the 140 00:09:53,082 --> 00:09:57,485 structure of human society and here, they were winning out over blood relations. 141 00:09:57,485 --> 00:10:01,832 Voluntary associations versus blood relations, with a weaning out of voluntary 142 00:10:01,832 --> 00:10:05,846 associations in that earlier model. Now we get to Rome and things now, we 143 00:10:05,846 --> 00:10:09,691 could maybe use that same binary. Voluntary associations versus blood 144 00:10:09,691 --> 00:10:13,983 relations, but here, what's happening is blood relations are winning out again. 145 00:10:13,983 --> 00:10:18,219 So we're going back to the future. It's a renewal of a traditional way of 146 00:10:18,219 --> 00:10:22,010 looking at things that it seem that the oresteia was overturning, 147 00:10:22,010 --> 00:10:26,111 Which says the critical organizing piece of human society is these blood relations. 148 00:10:26,111 --> 00:10:28,730 Think how important blood relations are in our story. 149 00:10:28,730 --> 00:10:32,338 We've got Aeneas, we have his connection with his father, Anchises and his 150 00:10:32,338 --> 00:10:36,291 connection with his little young son that he's guiding by the hand, who represents 151 00:10:36,291 --> 00:10:38,812 the future. We have the eschewing of the connection 152 00:10:38,812 --> 00:10:42,666 with Dido, that voluntary association there is shown to be treacherous and one 153 00:10:42,666 --> 00:10:46,669 should avoid it and stay away from it. And then as we get into the book six in 154 00:10:46,669 --> 00:10:49,387 the Underworld, a strong endorsement of blood relations. 155 00:10:49,387 --> 00:10:53,341 Look at what Anchises does, tracks all these family trees and talks about how 156 00:10:53,341 --> 00:10:58,222 they're going to be the governing way that makes this future work in the larger Roman 157 00:10:58,222 --> 00:11:01,482 society. And the embrace now of voluntary of blood 158 00:11:01,482 --> 00:11:06,547 relations over voluntary associations as a way of anchoring in the society, would be 159 00:11:06,547 --> 00:11:09,807 one way, I think, that a structuralist could look at this. 160 00:11:09,807 --> 00:11:12,777 The two bi-, the binary opposition here is intention. 161 00:11:12,777 --> 00:11:17,551 It's not really resolved the finger is put on the scale, on one side and on the 162 00:11:17,551 --> 00:11:20,054 other. In classical Athens on the voluntary 163 00:11:20,054 --> 00:11:24,828 association side, in Rome back on the blood relations side but we see the value 164 00:11:24,828 --> 00:11:29,253 and importance of both of these ideas, and the two come into conflict in our 165 00:11:29,253 --> 00:11:35,506 intention is what a structure would do. One possible way a structure would read 166 00:11:35,506 --> 00:11:38,920 our amazing epic of Virgils's Aeneid.