Let's close our treatment of Virgil by
taking this very rich text and looking at it through some of the theoretical lenses
that we've been developing in the class. Remember we've got a whole set of ideas on
myth that we've been developing in our toolbox.
Pulling up tools and tinkering with the myths as we go through.
And also in the case of Virgil it makes sense for us to talk about his work in
terms of the early ideas of myths that we were talking about that existed among the
ancients. Because Virgil himself was writing as a
person who is fully engaged in the ideas of myth of his time.
We don't know that that's true of Homer. Probably it wasn't. We don't know that's
true of the tragedians. It probably wasn't, maybe around the edges, but for
Virgil it's definitely the case that he is a scholar of the ideas of myth in his time
and to see him build this myth with reference to theories of myth is an
interesting exercise. So we'll start there and move on to
tinkering with the story with some of our contemporary ideas.
Looking at Virgil from the lens of some of the ancient ideas, we talked quite a bit
in our treatment of Virgil about his rationalizing spirit.
So he'll take what seems to be strange and mysterious happenings that happen in,
In myth, The most mysterious ones,
And he'll always give us multiple ways of trying to understand what's happening.
So something will seem like a visitation from a God.
But really it's happening inside of a dream.
Which we know to be a representation of fantasy of a sin- single person who's
having who's, who's, who is who's having some kind of vision in their sleep.
You'll have this stirring up of love being sent down by a divine force.
That's really focused on the Dido recognizing that joy that's very present
between Aeneas and his young son. So, it's these aspects, I think, show
Virgil in his rationalizing spirit, and we've marked those as we've run into the
as we've run into them, in our treatment of the Aeneid.
Similarly, also, we've marked moments where Virgil, seems to be relying on
allegory. We talked about that connection between
Juno, the translation of the, Greek goddess, Hera, and her connection with the
air, and that Virgil really does, pretty strongly identify Juno with the air based
on, a scholarly precedent in those, scholars that had preceded him looking at
links between the goddess Hera, and the element of the air.
Strong current in allegorical reading. Then also the association of Jupiter.
The Greek Zeus, with the Aether, That strongly gets, connected in Virgil's
treatment of the topic. And those two are, pretty much linked
together. So now, the, gods are being mapped onto
actual features of the cosmos, in a way an allegorist might do it.
We talked about Iopas' song at the close of book one.
And how, there, when Virgil gets his chance, takes his chance to represent what
poetry is all about, in that same way that homer used a modicus to represent what
poetry's about, we think. Virgil seems self consciously to be doing
that as well. Knowing the scholarship that preceded him
and, just like in, in his case of allegory he has Iopas sing a song about the whole
structure of the cosmos. So he seems to be again, inviting us to
read his tale, as a large allegory. Then, also, we could point to Virgil I
think, in a way that would probably be fair as a kind of proto-functionalist.
Remember what functionalists are up to? They claim that myths are there in order
to legitimize certain kinds of social and cultural norms.
Well, it seems pretty clear that Virgil is up to something self consciously like that
in his own story. After all, he, he writes during a time
when Rome has a desperate need for a new sense for what it is to be Roman.
Some justification, some articulation, some new meaning put behind their
traditional social customs. Well, Virgil seems to be on to this and I
wouldn't call him a functionalist because functionalism wasn't invented. That would
be an acronystic. But he strikes me as kind of a
protofunctionalist. He is fully aware of the power of myth to
instill and legitimize certain kinds of social norms.
And he is self-consciously doing that with his mythic storytelling in order to
instill and legitimize certain senses of what it is to be what it is to be Roman.
Now, modern ideas on Virgil's myth are really interesting to pull out.
I'm just gonna scratch the surface here. Literally, just barely scratch the surface
of a very rich possibilities, set of possibilities.
Surely introducing our tools and digging into our tool box, we're going to find all
kinds of wonderful things on a, in Virgil's tale.
First of all starting off with a functionalist reading from what
contemporary functionalists might make out of Virgil's story.
We've already hinted at this when we talked about one way to look at how Virgil
casts the relationship between Dido and Aeneas.
There we have a powerful sense of a new social and cultural value of pietas, or
duty. And that becomes comes on a collision
course with an old, and very traditional, and very Homeric anchoring cultural value
of Sania, and there's no doubt Virgil was well aware of how powerful xenia was in
Homer's world and I think there's no doubt that he structured his epic in such a way
as to create a collision course between these two fundamental cultural values, and
he in telling the story in the way he did made sure that pietas won that struggle.
When they came to a collision course and he had, we were forced to choose between
them, it's pietas that should be the winner.
It comes out ahead of xenia. Yes, hospitality is all well and good, but
duty is even better. Many times in life, these two things will
not collide, but when they do, when you're forced to choose, you need to choose
pietas. So it could well be that what we have
here, in a from a functionalist reading, is a strong endorsement of this new
central cultural value, so strong that it's made purposefully to have a collision
course with and trump what might have counted as the old central cultural value
in the Mederteranian. So taking off our, putting our
funtionalist tools back in our toolbox for a second and picking up another tool let's
just a make a quick comment about, about the kind of reading a pyschoanalyst might
do of this myth, someone who wants to do psychoanalytic theory of the reading of
myths. Remember, according to Freud, myths are
there to dramatize the events of any individual's developement of their mental
or intellectual, or psychological life. And dreams, this is how dreams operate.
Dr-, we should look at myths as the dreams of an entire culture.
So myths are a culture's attempt, a culture's attempt to reflect, to
dramatize, the developments that they see in their own emergent collective
psychological life. In the case of Rome, there are many
directions we could go with this. But surely, it seems pretty clear that
what we have is a, a culture at the time of Virgil's writing, that is dominant
across the Mediterranean, and some sense of the joy and pleasure of being top dog
in the universe married with a certain kind of guilt at what it took to get
there, Including figures like Dido and all the
people who get chewed up in the machinery of fate as it grinds forward toward the
production of Rome and all the human suffering.
That again, Virgil never turns a blind eye to, he doesn't paper over any of this.
All these things seem to be sort of built into and offloaded from, can, if we're
pretending to be contemporary Romans for a second, they're offloaded onto these
mythological characters. So our sense that yeah, we're now top dogs
in the in the, Mediterranean universe and we feel a little bad about being there,
but look here we are, each of these pieces of our sense of what it is to be Roman
gets offloaded onto these characters, and we get to watch Aeneas go through this
whole process of acquiring and gathering power for Rome through his pietas and all
the good things that he does. So dreams that we might have, fantasies
that we as Romans might have of, of a great dominance over others.
These get offloaded onto an acceptable substitute onto Aeneas, who we get to see,
he's a mythic character He's the Greek founder of what it is to be Rome.
We get to see him executing those things and then in the end, it helps to justify
our own sense, Give meaning to our own sense of where we
are in the universe. Again just scratching the surface.
Finally, we'd want to take another possibility, put our Freudian tool back in
our toolbox. And, using the structuralist tool, recall
that what a structuralist does is look for binary oppositions that are at the core of
a myth. These binary oppositions are between two
things that are, you have important organizing elements of the experience of
being human. And these two things are in conflict.
And that conflict provides the, the voltage that is the energy that makes the
myth. Unfold.
Okay, so if we're doing a structuralist reading we go binary hunting.
If a structuralist were to look at the in the end a structuralist could propose to
return to a binary opposition that we've already been developing in this class.
Recall that when we looked at Athenian tragedy, and especially the Oresteia.
We talked about how there was a possible structuralist binary being at work there.
The import different way, looking at different ways of how human societies are
organized. On the one hand we have, I guess,
organizing human societies via blood relations.
On the other hand. I think of societies by voluntary
associations, and in the case of this new democratic Athens, we talked about the
Oresteia as underwriting this sense of voluntary associations as being a critical
and important way to un, to talk about the structure of human society and here, they
were winning out over blood relations. Voluntary associations versus blood
relations, with a weaning out of voluntary associations in that earlier model.
Now we get to Rome and things now, we could maybe use that same binary.
Voluntary associations versus blood relations, but here, what's happening is
blood relations are winning out again. So we're going back to the future.
It's a renewal of a traditional way of looking at things that it seem that the
oresteia was overturning, Which says the critical organizing piece
of human society is these blood relations. Think how important blood relations are in
our story. We've got Aeneas, we have his connection
with his father, Anchises and his connection with his little young son that
he's guiding by the hand, who represents the future.
We have the eschewing of the connection with Dido, that voluntary association
there is shown to be treacherous and one should avoid it and stay away from it.
And then as we get into the book six in the Underworld, a strong endorsement of
blood relations. Look at what Anchises does, tracks all
these family trees and talks about how they're going to be the governing way that
makes this future work in the larger Roman society.
And the embrace now of voluntary of blood relations over voluntary associations as a
way of anchoring in the society, would be one way, I think, that a structuralist
could look at this. The two bi-, the binary opposition here is
intention. It's not really resolved the finger is put
on the scale, on one side and on the other.
In classical Athens on the voluntary association side, in Rome back on the
blood relations side but we see the value and importance of both of these ideas, and
the two come into conflict in our intention is what a structure would do.
One possible way a structure would read our amazing epic of Virgils's Aeneid.