The Aeneid, Book Six: Latin Text,
with an Introduction, Notes, Latin and English Prose Versions,
and Vocabularies
Prepared by Sean Gabb
First edition published in May 2019
ISBN-13: 9781096888277
Read here for free
Address to the Reader
Contents
The Life of Vergil
The Aeneid: An Unrevised Draft
A Sudden Death
The Circumstances of The Aeneid
Rome: From Republic to Empire
The Poison of Unearned Wealth
The Collapse of Order
The Failure of Caesarism
The Augustan Settlement
The Return of Legitimacy
The Aeneid as Legitimising Propaganda
Augustus: Imperator Deorum Gratia
The Two Gates of Sleep
A Reservation
A Guide to Latin Scansion
The Nature of English Verse
The Nature of Quantitative Verse
Long and Short Syllables
Elision of Vowels
Feet as Basic Unit of Verse
The Caesura
The Sound of Latin Verse
Accent and Quantity Distinguished
A Conflict between Accent and Quantity?
A Forcible Resolution
No Need for Resolution
Accent and Quantity as Coordinate Rhythms
Vergil as Roman Poet
The Hellenising of Rome
Adapting Quantitative Metres to Latin
The Vergilian Synthesis
The Reception of The Aeneid
The Texts
Bibliography
Book VI of The Aeneid can be found in many other editions. The purpose of this edition is to make it as available as I can to the widest audience. I think of school students and undergraduate and graduate students throughout the English-speaking world. I think of young people in home education. I think of adults who are learning Latin by themselves, and who would like to read one of its greatest classics.
In this edition, therefore, I offer the following:
- The Latin text in a large and what I hope is an attractive format.
- A full set of notes to explain obscurities in the text.
- A list of all names and places mentioned in the text.
- A vocabulary that includes all the words found in the text.
- A separate vocabulary containing all the words that are used more than about eight times in the text.
- A rewriting of the text as Latin prose.
- A translation of the main text into English prose.
I also try to offer a reasonably full explanation of wider matters than those discussed in the notes. The Aeneid can be appreciated in itself as a most remarkable production. But appreciation of a work is always deepened by some knowledge of its context and of the difficulties overcome in its creation. More to the point, this edition of Book VI has been produced as a text for students. If you are one of these, you will be examined. How you will be examined I cannot say. If, though, you are sitting any examination similar to an A-Level in Latin, you will need to show awareness of the circumstances in which The Aeneid was written, and what influence these circumstances had on its writing. You will need to show an understanding of its technical underpinning as verse. You may also need to discuss its place in both Roman and then, after the end of Antiquity, in Latin literature.
All this being said, I pass to the main part of my Address.
Publius Vergilius Maro, known interchangeably in English as Vergil or Virgil, was born on the 15th October 70 BC in Andes, a village about 28 miles from Mantua. Now in Northern Italy, Mantua at this time was a city in Cisalpine Gaul. This territory was incorporated into Italy only in 42 BC, though its free inhabitants had been granted full Roman citizenship in 49 BC. There is much doubt regarding Vergil’s background. According to Macrobius, one of the ancient commentators, his father was in humble circumstances. This is unlikely, bearing in mind that Vergil received a long and elaborate education, and education was not free, and there is no evidence of the gratitude we might expect to see in his works had this been paid for by some wealthy patron. It is more likely that he was born into a minor landed family. This being so, he may have descended from Roman or Italian colonists. Little evidence for the Vergilius family, though, is attested in the surviving inscriptions.
He attended schools in Cremona, Milan, Rome and Naples. Here, he received the education standard among the higher classes in the Greek classics and in such Roman literature as had by this time been created. He particularly studied Rhetoric, Medicine and Astronomy. According to Servius, another of the commentators, he was notoriously shy, both among the other students and throughout his adult life. He is also said to have suffered consistently poor health, with pains in his head and stomach, and a tendency to spit blood. After briefly considering a career in the Law, he settled on poetry—some evidence here for shyness and ill-health, and much for a family of independent means.
Learn More
He may have written his earliest works while a student in Naples, when he seems to have come under Epicurean influence. He may, in Rome, have fallen under the influence of the New Poetry Movement, which we know mainly in connection with Catullus, and which I will discuss later. But his first known and major work is The Eclogues, which he began in 42 BC and published three or four years later. This is a poem in ten books, or a group of ten poems, that comments on general issues under cover of praising a rural life. It is said to have been composed as a petition for the return of some family property confiscated to pay off the soldiers in the civil war that Octavian and Antony had fought against the assassins of Julius Caesar. But this is only an inference from the contents of the poem.
His next major work, The Georgics, Vergil composed under the patronage of Maecenas, who was effectively Minister of Culture in the new régime established by Octavian. The poem is, in its outward form, a treatise on farming. As with The Eclogues, though, it deals cautiously and by implication with many other issues. It was considered a great success in Latin poetry, and Vergil and Maecenas are said to have taken turns in reading it to Octavian on his return from defeating Antony in the last civil war.
The Aeneid: An Unrevised Draft
His last and greatest work, The Aeneid, he composed under a direct commission from Octavian, by now renamed Augustus. This is a long and elaborate epic in twelve books that tells the story of how, fleeing from the sack of Troy, Aeneas reached Italy, where he founded a new nation from which the Romans were descended. The poem is deliberately modelled on Homer, and part of its intention was to do for Latin what the Homeric Poems had done for Greek—this being to make it into a first class language of literature. Another part of its intention was to legitimise the rule of Augustus and the new order of things that he had created in the Mediterranean World.
Vergil worked slowly, composing, it is said, only three lines a day. After twelve years of labour, the poem was left unrevised. Some books appear to have been in a more complete state than others. We are told that Vergil read Book VI at a dinner party attended by Augustus and his family. Bearing in mind his shyness, and bearing in mind the great acclaim for the reading, we can assume that this book was at least substantially complete. But this is no more than an assumption, and we know little about the composition of the rest. We can agree that Vergil did not write his three lines a day, before moving to the next, and never going back. There is too much consistency in what we have. It is more likely that the completion in draft of one section inspired running changes in the earlier sections. Completion in whole of its draft, though, is not completion of a work. There are fifty-seven unfinished lines in The Aeneid. If some critics insist that these are short for dramatic effect, I am not convinced. Also, the last six books are of variable quality in terms of narrative and the drawing of character. Even the first six contain oddities that may be explained by clever interpretation—or can, more easily, be taken as evidence of first thoughts undeveloped or privately marked for replacement.
The story of his death indicates that what we have is an interrupted work in progress. In 20 BC, having completed the draft of The Aeneid more or less as we have it, Vergil travelled through Greece for a long holiday. He intended, after this, to spend three years on revising the work. He met Augustus in Athens, where they spent time together. He then set out alone on the sea voyage home to Italy. His health finally broke down during a stay in Megara, and collapsed altogether on the last stretch of the voyage. He died on the 22nd September 19 BC, shortly after arriving at Brindisi. He was at the time forty-eight.
His last instructions were for the manuscript of The Aeneid to be destroyed. It may be that, shy to the end, he no longer believed he had produced the work of supreme genius that everyone else was expecting it to be. Or it may be that something in his last meeting with Augustus had brought a fundamental change of mind about the moral value of the work. Or it may simply be that, as the author, he was more sensible of its defects than anyone else has ever been. All we know is that, arriving in Brindisi shortly after the death, Augustus cancelled these instructions, and he ordered that the poem should be edited with minimal changes and published without delay. It was received at once, and ever after, as the greatest achievement in Roman poetry. It stands, with the Homeric Poems, with The Divine Comedy, and with Paradise Lost, as one of the greatest of all epic poems. Its influence on the Western mind has been great and profound.
The Circumstances of The Aeneid
Here, though, we move away from the scanty and unreliable details of biography to the wider circumstances of the text. Vergil wrote at a specific moment in Roman history; and he wrote, it is commonly agreed, for a specific purpose. One age had passed away—perhaps a series of ages had passed away—and a new was beginning. This new age needed to be explained and justified. If there is no book of The Aeneid from which apologia is absent, Book VI makes little sense without understanding the historical progress it explains and seeks to justify. We move, then, to an account of this progress.
As it developed between the extinction of the Monarchy and the beginning, in 264 BC, of the wars with Carthage, Rome possessed a form of government that was both stable and perceived as legitimate. The Senate, its most powerful institution, was an assembly dominated by a landed nobility with strong military traditions. Executive power was in the hands of magistrates mainly drawn from senatorial families, though more or less chosen by the people. Much legislative power was directly in the hands of popular assemblies. Politics were not always a matter of consensus. There had been a long and bitter dispute between the nobility and the people. But this dispute was conducted within the bounds of the Constitution, and the Romans prided themselves on both their political moderation and their regard for the public good. Political authority derived immediately from fitness as shown by election and then by success. It derived ultimately from how its exercise accorded with a set of traditions that reached back to the divine origins of Rome itself.
Observing the Republic before its decay had visibly begun, Polybius contrasts its ruling class with the faithless, light-fingered counterparts in the Greek world. Indeed, where keeping faith and the public good are concerned, it stands comparison with the Greeks in the best ages of their history.
The wars with Carthage began a slow undermining of the Constitution. These wars lasted for decades at a time. They were expensive both in lives and in property. The second of them was fought mainly on Italian soil. But victory caused more damage than the wars. The first war ended in 241 BC, with Rome in possession of Sicily, and then of Sardinia. The second ended in 201 BC, with Rome dominant in the Western Mediterranean. By the end of the third, in 146 BC, Rome was supreme from one end of that sea to the other, and directly or indirectly in charge of its various hinterlands. The Roman Constitution worked well for an agricultural city-state. It worked for the head of a loose federation in Central Italy. It was as unsuited to the capital of a large and growing empire as it was to the empire as a whole.
Commercial wealth must be earned, and brings its own restraints. The enrichment that followed these conquests was based on plunder and then on tribute. Successful generals came back from the wars loaded with gold. Following earlier and less harmful precedents, City magistrates would complete their terms of office and then be sent out to govern the new territories. They also came back rich. Elective magistracies that offered little in themselves beyond prestige and a sense of duties performed became the key to riches beyond imagination. Bribery of electors became the rule. Competing embassies from the East were at all times in Rome, adding to the general corruption with lavish bribery of the powerful.
A gulf opened between the classes greater than had ever been known. Small farming, already hit by Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, was now ruined by purchases and rentals of land that often amounted to theft, and its consolidation into immense plantations worked by slaves. Long military service overseas, plus the sale at cost price of food requisitioned from Sicily, disrupted the working of those smallholdings that were left untouched. The dispossessed poured into Rome, where they lived on a meagre public dole, or attached themselves as troublesome clients to the rich. The growing magnificence of the buildings in Rome was matched by the descent of its streets into a battleground of noble factions, all desperate for electoral success.
See here for details
For the more civilised provinces outside Italy, things may have gone better than the history books often claim. There were acts of collective brutality—the sack of Corinth in 146 BC, for example. Gaius Verres was not the only rapacious governor. The Romans were seldom generous in the matter of assessing tribute. Beyond this, however, Rome offered solid benefits to its new subjects. The later successors of Alexander were sometimes insane and frequently incompetent. They had never lived at peace with each other. If Rome demanded tribute, it also gave peace for long periods, plus a reasonably honest administration, so that wealth could be created at least as fast as it was drained. But success only contributed to the growing problems in Rome. As with oil money in the Middle East, every fresh injection of non-commercial wealth was another dose of poison.
After 133 BC, the noble brothers Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus tried to address these problems by constitutional means. Their project was to break up the larger plantations and recreate Italy as a land of yeoman farmers. The Empire would not be abandoned, nor its peoples raised to any equality of status. Instead its proceeds would be shared more evenly among the whole body of Roman citizens. If moderate by our own standards, the project of reform was resisted with such force by those who would lose from it that, for the first time, the Constitution broke down. The new oligarchs took up arms, and each brother was in turn killed or driven to suicide. Rome settled in to an uneasy peace lubricated by a more regular welfare to sedate the poor.
The next plan of reform came at the turn of the century with Gaius Marius, a successful general who had improved and enlarged the Army. This resulted in a formal civil war that was won by Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the military head of the wealthy. After 80 BC, he ruled as Dictator, killing and confiscating the property of his opponents. He also rolled back the surviving reforms of the Gracchi, strengthening the Senate at the expense of the popular assemblies. After his death in 78 BC, many of these changes were undone, and Rome went back to uneasy peace in which two semi-regular parties of populists and oligarchs competed for supremacy in the State.
It was now that Cicero rose to prominence. A weak and shifty politician, he sided with the oligarchs, while pleading for a “union of all good men” to settle their constitutional disputes by compromise. He had little influence on Pompey, who now took Sulla’s place as the military defender of the rich, and none on Julius Caesar, who sided with the poor. His importance to later generations has lain in his status as perhaps the greatest writer of Latin prose, and in the survival of nearly all he wrote, and of little else by his contemporaries, so that we are forced to look at Roman politics through his eyes. His abilities as a writer almost blind us to his quasi-legal suppression of a populist revolt, and his possible commissioning of Milo to kill their populist opponent Clodius.
After an attempt at compromise, irreconcilable differences between Pompey and Caesar led to another civil war in 49-48 BC. Caesar won this and returned to Rome as sole ruler of the City and its empire. By now, the Constitution was a heap of rubble. Its only workable replacement was some species of absolute monarchy that would govern the Empire as a single unit, securing the rich, but treating them as one interest group among many.
Though a very great man, Caesar lacked political imagination. He knew how to gain supreme power. He knew how to use it. He failed to see how power could be made into legitimate authority. No one could deny him the title of Dictator for Life. But he was now in advanced years as this was reckoned in all ages before our own. His relationship with Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, and the birth of their son, indicated a wish to found a ruling dynasty. If so, his personal collection of republican magistracies was no basis for a permanent scheme of rule. The only title he seems to have thought appropriate was that of King. If the Constitution was dead, the prejudice against undisguised monarchy was not. The oligarchs took their stand on constitutional propriety. Few populists appear to have been ready for so radical a break with tradition. Caesar also allowed the rumour to circulate that he saw Alexandria as a better capital than Rome of a Mediterranean empire with the balance of its wealth and population in the East. In March 44 BC, he was murdered in the Senate House.
After brief hopes of a restored Constitution, there was a new civil war. This time, Mark Antony, Caesar’s main deputy, and Octavian—or Gaius Octavius Thurinus—Caesar’s great-nephew and nominated heir, combined to defeat the assassins. Part of their agreement was a long death-list that included the elderly Cicero. He was hunted through Italy, and killed, and his head and hands were put on show in the Forum.
Since Octavian was only nineteen, and was without prior experience in political or military affairs, Antony assumed that he would be Caesar’s true heir. Octavian, though, was a man of hidden talents. Once the civil war was won, the Empire was effectively divided between East and West, Antony ruling from Alexandria with Cleopatra as his wife, and Octavian from Rome. A decade of cold war ended in yet another civil war. Octavian won this at Actium in 31 BC, after which he was more supreme than Caesar had ever been—more supreme because the passing of time and the killing of opponents had blurred still further memory of a functioning republic.
It was now that Octavian showed an undeniable creative genius. Imagine a breakdown of our own constitution in England, and a series of civil wars. You win these and rule for a while as a military dictator. You then announce a return to constitutional government. You restore the old electoral machinery, and appoint ministers responsible to Parliament. The only change you make is that you are to be Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor, Speaker of the House of Commons, Archbishop of Canterbury, Director-General of the BBC, a non-executive director of every big company—oh, and commander in chief of the armed forces. You are all of these things for life. That is pretty well what Octavian did in Rome.
After a final purge of his opponents, he called a meeting of the Senate in January 27 BC. Here, he handed all his unusual powers back to “the Senate and People of Rome.” In return, he was granted various civil and religious magistracies, or their equivalents, that raised him above the laws and gave him a formal veto over new laws. He also retained control of the armies, and the uncountable wealth of Egypt was confirmed as his personal estate. He then claimed to have restored the Ancient Constitution, with himself as nothing more than its temporary First Citizen, and with his new name of Augustus. There was no mention of kinship—no crown, or crowds of eunuch functionaries, or strip-searches of visitors; nor any suggestion of moving the capital to some other place, where the traditions of the Republic could be openly or insensibly retired.
Of course, the restoration was a fraud. The Empire was ruled by Augustus and a small cabinet of his wife and a few friends, its administration conducted through a growing bureaucracy of freed slaves. All this was underwritten by command of the armies. So long as he kept these on side, he was as absolute a ruler as any Greek tyrant. He could do anything he liked to anyone. If he chose not to continue behaving as he had, that was purely his choice based on good sense. There was no other restraint on his power. The Senate was a rubber stamp. The traditional magistracies were filled by his nominees. Because the one formal change made by Augustus was to raise the status of his rubber-stamp Senate, by transferring legislative power to it from the popular assemblies, the people at large had no authoritative voice. He died in advanced old age, in 14 AD. All his “temporary” powers were then granted to his chosen successor. Rome had passed, without any hope of reaction, from a Republic with provinces attached to an Empire ruled by an Emperor.
But there are frauds that no one cares to believe. Such was the settlement attempted by Caesar. And there are frauds that most people want to believe, and almost everyone agrees to believe. Such was the Augustan Settlement. Everyone got something. The surviving rich kept their property. The Roman poor got bread and circuses. The provincials got a return to peace and honest government. Conservatives could believe that everything was back as it had been, or was going there. Given their bread and circuses, the Roman poor gave up on populist radicalism. Nostalgia for the Republic was tolerated as a purely literary device. But most people appear to have looked at the chaos of the previous generations, and thanked whatever higher power they worshipped for the peace and modest economic expansion of the present.
Augustus went out of his way to make the new order of things acceptable. At nineteen, he was quite as ruthless as Antony and their minor partner Lepidus in drawing up that death-list. After winning at Actium, he arrived in Alexandria to finish with Antony and Cleopatra. Finding them dead by suicide, he finished the work by having Caesarion, Cleopatra’s son by Caesar, hunted down and put to death. Though the boy was only thirteen, there was room in the New Order of Things for one Caesar only. Once firmly in charge, Augustus spent the last forty years of his life playing Jolly Uncle to everyone in sight. Out of sight, in the Eastern Provinces, he was worshipped as a god.
So far as it is based on force and fraud, every government has need of what the Marxist Louis Althusser called a repressive state apparatus and an ideological state apparatus. It needs both a mailed fist to keep control, and a velvet glove to hide the mailed fist and to make its use a less immediate option. Augustus had his legions. He had his armed guard inside Rome. He was also, working with Maecenas, a master of legitimisation. He would not be another Gracchus or Marius, trying to pull down the Old Order. He would not be another Sulla, forcing the poor back into their slums at spear point. He would not be another Caesar, trying to build a New Order that had no Roman precedent. He would not be a strong man, holding irreconcilable forces in a temporary balance. He was instead Augustus—the New Romulus, the Second Founder, The Restorer. He probably believed it. The best lies are uttered by those who believe them.
Self-consciously, he clothed himself in the Roman past. He revived the Secular Games in 17 BC, celebrating them for the first time in more than a century. He built new temples. He venerated the Gods. He consulted the Sibylline Books on all the proper occasions. He paid careful respect to the traditional magistrates and to the Senate. He discouraged public immorality, even exiling his own daughter for adultery. He showed his wife working at a loom—when she was not running his empire for him, or poisoning his friends and relatives. He welcomed Livy’s immense History, which revived public interest in the past. He presided over a golden age of Roman literature—Livy, Horace, Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus, and, above all, Vergil.
The Aeneid as Legitimising Propaganda
The best legitimising ideology is one that not only shows the present as better than the past, but shows the present happy state as having grown inevitably out of the past. This is the overarching theme of The Aeneid. So far as he revived awareness in the Roman past, and showed the rewards of traditional virtue and the punishments of vice, Livy was useful to Augustus. But he takes an entirely conventional view of the past as better than the present, which is an age of moral decay—a time “when we can bear neither our vices nor their remedy.” Vergil takes the revolutionary step of locating the Golden Age in the present. For him, the Roman past is not a story of growth followed by decline, but a steady upward climb. It is an upward climb to the reign of Augustus.
A crude propagandist would have composed or commissioned an Augustiad, in which its hero was placed inescapably at the centre and continuously heaped with lavish praise. The Aeneid is set in the distant past. In his first book, Livy tells the story of Aeneas, but passes rapidly to what he sees as the more important and interesting Romulus, who had founded the City and given it his name. Vergil instead focusses wholly on Aeneas, placing Romulus in the crowd of other worthies.
Aeneas is a man who faces a total collapse of order. Troy has been taken and burned by the Greeks, its people killed or led off into slavery. On the direct order of Venus, his mother, he flees the disaster, holding his son by the hand and carrying his aged father on his back. Leading a small band of other survivors, he sets out by ship in search of a place where he can found a new city. He is not an obvious or an attractive hero. Compared with Achilles or Odysseus, or even the minor characters in Homer, he is a shadowy figure. But he is the embodiment of every Roman virtue. He is brave and loyal. He is carefully obedient to every command of the Gods. He obeys Venus in Book II, when his ordinary duty is to stay in Troy and fight to the end. He obeys Mercury in Book IV, when both interest and secular duty tell him to stay with Dido in Carthage. In Book VI, he follows the command of his father’s ghost, and visits the Underworld—a place of horrors from which few have returned. In Italy, he must unite with the Arcadians. He must fight with Mezentius and Turnus before he can unite with the Latins. At all times, he faces overpowering odds or an easier alternative. At all times, he presses forward with the duty placed on him by the Gods. His efforts culminate in victory and the origin of the Roman People.
Augustus is Aeneas. He too has faced the dissolution of an established order. He too, through Caesar, his adopted and deified father, is the son of a god. He too, through an unwavering belief in what is right, and by duty to and help from the Gods, has struggled forward to victory and established a new order of things.
Augustus: Imperator Deorum Gratia
The catalogue of heroes given in Book VI has its immediate purpose for Aeneas to show the long race he is to beget and their glories. For its earliest audience, the purpose was to emphasise the connections of past and present. Augustus is not only Aeneas in some poetic and metaphorical sense. It is not enough that they both show devotion to the Gods and to their country. They are also connected by lines of descent—lines of descent that reach further back and wider. Aeneas is the son of Venus. He is the ancestor of Romulus, who is a son of Mars. Romulus is the ancestor of Julius Caesar, who is also a god. Augustus, by the rite of adoption, is the son of Caesar. As such, he is the descendant of Aeneas and the Gods. By the fact of his reign, the past and present are tightly bound together.
In the first and most obvious sense, Augustus owed his power to victory in the last civil war. His moderation as supreme ruler then conferred working legitimacy. The effect of The Aeneid, and particularly of Book VI, made power and working legitimacy into long-term authority. Before the founding of the City—before even the arrival of Aeneas in Latium—that authority had been decreed by the Gods.
Though present by implication in many places, Augustus is mentioned by name three times in The Aeneid. In Book I, Jupiter prophesies that Aeneas will triumph over his enemies, and establish a line that will found Rome, which in turn will enjoy dominion unlimited by place or time. See lines 278-79:
his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono
imperium sine fine dedi….
At last, in lines 286-88:
nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar,
imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris
The name is Caesar, not Augustus. But the following lines make it clear which member of the family is intended. Caesar never established peace in the Empire and closed the doors of the Temple of Janus. He never ended the years of bitterness.
In Book VIII, the description of the Shield of Aeneas explains the Battle of Actium and the divinely-ordained victory of Rome over the East. This is not only a military victory. The gods of both sides take part. The Roman gods prevail. They wanted Augustus to win. They want him to reign as a new kind of monarch.
At last, we have Book VI. At the end of his catalogue of Roman heroes, Anchises comes to its highest point—lines 791-98:
hic vir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis,
Augustus Caesar, divi genus, aurea condet
saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva
Saturno quondam, super et Garamantas et Indos
proferet imperium; iacet extra sidera tellus, 795
extra anni solisque vias, ubi caelifer Atlas
axem umero torquet stellis ardentibus aptum.
Augustus is the son of a god. He is another Saturn, who will restore the Golden Age. He will carry the bounds of empire to the edges of the world. His reign was decreed at the beginning. All else in Roman history has been directed towards it. He has not overthrown tradition, but completed it. To oppose him is not foolish, bearing in mind his command of the armies. It is not wrong, bearing in mind his settlement of all disputes. It would be a treason against the whole march of Roman history—a kind of sacrilege.
Against this interpretation, we have a troubling alternative. I have described Aeneas as shadowy and unattractive. He is very often the latter. He is not always brave, nor brave, nor determined, nor chaste, nor loyal, His treatment of Dido is hard to justify. He effectively seduces here in Book IV. He moves in with her. Then then dumps her without bothering to explain himself in terms other than a divorce lawyer might use. His killing of Turnus in Book XII is also hard to justify. He has beaten down the proud—but there is no sparing of the beaten. Here is not pietas, but only furor. Is it possible that Vergil is showing Aeneas as corrupted by power? He could find many instances in his own memory of Augustus as other than Jolly Uncle.
Perhaps this interpretation fails to take account of the large differences between us and the Ancients of what was expcted of a hero. On the other hand, a certain regard for the suffering of others is hardly lacking from The Aeneid. Beyong a few occasional and conventional expressions of pity, it does seem lacking in Aeneas.
Or we have the Two Gates of Sleep—one of ivory, one of horn. Through the horn true dreams come into the world. Through the ivory come false dreams. Right at the end of Book VI, with all the stirring predictions of future greatness still echoing, Anchises and the Sibyl take Aeneas through the Gate of Ivory. Is this a lapse in the narrative? As said, The Aeneid was left unfinished, and there are oddities. Or is Vergil dismissing the Augustan Settlement as yet another false hope?
Learn More
His general view of the human state is bleak. We all end on the outer bank of the River Styx, begging to be ferried across. You can be a great hero, or in the prime of life. You can be a little girl or boy. Called away from life, you join the democracy of those holding out their hands for love of the farther bank. Those not given the proper funeral rites flitter about as ghosts of a hundred years. Those who do get across face an eternity of regret. A lucky few make it to the Elysian Fields. There, they are stripped of personal identity and made ready for another life that will end on that same outer bank. The exceptionally wicked are allowed to keep their personal identity, so they can be tortured for ever.
The Gods are not just or merciful. The world they rule is a place of violence and betrayal. Goodness has no automatic reward. Divine promises may be kept, or may be kept in ways that amount to deception. Palinurus was assured by Apollo he would not drown on the voyage to Sicily. Instead, he was suffered to be swept overboard and killed after he swam ashore. He complains. He begs to be taken from the Underworld. The Sibyl tells him in line 376:
desine fata deum flecti sperare precando
Why should we suppose that a few military victories and an apparent tranquillity in the present will amount to any sort of Golden Age? Vergil knew Augustus. He had seen the purges. He was clever enough to see through the sham of the Augustan Settlement. Only his own usefulness as a propagandist had saved him from being kicked penniless off whatever property he had inherited. Sooner or later, Augustus would die. Then the civil wars might begin again. Just as easily, there would be a new Emperor. No one could predict in detail the tyranny of Caligula and Nero. It would take much more than a century for the Empire to complete its transformation into the union of a bureaucratic state and a class of landed parasites, both sucking wealth from a hundred million disarmed serfs. But Vergil could read the past, and it took no genius to think the future, though with a varied mix of horrors, would be the same as the past. Out goes Aeneas through the ivory gate. Imperium sine fine there might be. There was and would be no Golden Age.
This is a possible interpretation. Given a relevant question, it is something that needs to be raised in an examination essay. But it stands against the whole weight of The Aeneid as we have it and the circumstances of its writing. The poem is notable not only for its glorying of Augustus mostly by implication, but also for the gentleness of its nationalism and its lack of party spirit. Livy can often find something to admire in the enemies of Rome—see his portrait of Hannibal near the beginning of Book XXXI. But he admires them only to show how great the Romans were in defeating them. This is a device that Vergil never uses.
Of course, the Romans are the Lords of Creation. The Gods have decreed for them Empire without End, and Augustus as their ruler. But other peoples are not denigrated. The Greeks have taken and burned Troy. It is right that they should later be conquered by Rome. But they are not villains. They and the Trojans are part of the same civilisation, worshipping the same gods. In Book VIII, Aeneas makes a tight alliance with the Arcadians, a Greek people living on the site where Rome was later to be built. He makes this alliance by explaining how he and Evander, their King, share a common descent. In Book VI, Anchises goes out of his way to concede primacy to the Greeks in all the arts and sciences.
Vergil is even sympathetic to the Carthaginians. They are the greatest enemy Rome has ever faced. But they are shown as welcoming the Trojans. Dido takes Aeneas to her bed, and her later madness is entirely due to her being under a divine spell. We feel sorry for her in Book IV. We think little of Aeneas for what he fails to say to her in Book VI. This may be less a coded attack on Augustus than human sympathy.
Where party spirit is concerned, Antony cannot be treated sympathetically. The last civil war is too close in time. But the Roman kings and those who overthrew them stand peacefully together in the Catalogue of Heroes. So too the Scipios and the Gracchus brothers. So too Pompey and Caesar. If Sulla is missing, that is probably because of his bloody purge.
The past in The Aeneid is seen as a continuous chain, every link in which is essential to the present happy state of affairs. Because Augustus has reconciled every people and every interest, all that happened then was really for the best. Alive, they took different sides in the dispute that ended the Republic. Seen from the present, Caesar and Pompey had been working towards the same end.
Because all is now reconciled, the Romans are able to bring their main contribution to humanity—this being, in line 853,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos
The Romans have been given Empire without End, and Augustus to Rule it. The Gods have given these things in order to bring on a universal rule of peace and justice. It is arguable that Vergil had been commissioned to produce a work of propaganda, and that he made his own views clear in subtextual asides and apparent oddities. Even so, the propaganda is of a quality that compels attention in its own right.
Learn More
The Aeneid is a poem. It is composed in a form that was originally alien to Latin, and which places strict limits on how Latin can be written. Vergil’s achievement was to move these limits into the background. Part of the reason we admire a tightrope dancer is that he can move at all without falling off. Much earlier Latin verse is to be admired for the same reason. Vergil allows us to forget the rope and focus on the movements of the dancer. To see this, we need to discuss the rules of Latin scansion and what may have been their desired effect.
Perhaps the shortest and the clearest way to explain how Latin verse works is to begin with English. It allows us to move from something that everyone already understands, or can understand, to something that is not understood. The poetic rules of each language are radically different. For English verse, though, the tradition has long been to use terms of description borrowed from Latin. Since we are fully at home with our own language, and can directly hear its poetic rules in action, these terms of analysis will be less abstract than they might be if applied straight to Latin.
Let us take these lines by A.E. Housman:
From Clee to heaven the beacon burns,
The shires have seen it plain,
From north and south the sign returns
And beacons burn again.Look left, look right, the hills are bright,
The dales are light between,
Because ‘tis fifty years to-night
That God has saved the Queen.Now, when the flame they watch not towers
About the soil they trod,
Lads, we’ll remember friends of ours
Who shared the work with God….
The lines are of eight and six syllables, alternating. Each line can be broken down into groups of syllables, or feet. The nature of its feet determines its sound, or metre. In these lines, the feet are generally iambic—that is, a foot contains two syllables, the second of which is stressed. By stress I mean that a syllable is spoken with greater force. See, for example:
The shíres | have séen | it pláin
Note how the accented vowels mark the stress of their syllables. In the whole of this discussion acute accents mark stress only, not any other quality a vowel or syllable may have.
Note how the accented syllables are not only stressed, but often contain longer vowels than those in the other syllables. In English, there is a tendency for stress and length to coincide. But this is only a tendency. There are many exceptions—however, for example, where the first vowel is long, but the second vowel, though short, carries the stress. See also line 7 above—they tród—where trod is stressed, but shorter than they. Length, or quantity, is something taken into account by a competent poet in English. But the main organising principle is stress. Accent in English is primarily one of stress.
Note how the feet given above are marked by dividing lines. If we are to mark feet in a line containing words of more than one syllable, the clearest method is to put the dividing lines above the line of verse. We may also choose to mark the accented syllables above the line. This gives us the following:
x | x | x | x
Lads, we’ll remember friends of ours
Note how a single consonant at the end of a syllable is taken as the start of the next syllable, and how two consonants are split, so that the first is taken as closing the preceding syllable and the second as opening the next. Though mostly irrelevant in English, because generally not perceived, this rule is of great importance in Latin.
So they can fit into their iambic scheme, some liberty is allowed for the contraction of syllables. Thus, heaven in line 1 is contracted to heav’n and towers in line 9 is contracted to tow’rs. This gives the following rhythmic pattern:
From Clée to héav’n the béacon búrns,
The shíres have séen it pláin,
From nórth and sóuth the sign réturns
And béacons búrn agáin.
There are secondary patternings. The first is that a completely regular patterning, especially in a longer poem, produces a monotonous effect. This is countered by occasionally reversing the pattern. See how line 7 begins with a trochaic foot—that is, the first syllable is stressed and the second unstressed:
Nów, when the fláme they wátch not tów’rs
The second is that lines are end-stopped—that is, the end of each line coincides with the end of a grammatical clause. The third is that lines are of differing length. This allows the second line in each group of two to continue whatever idea is contained in the first in a more compressed form. It also allows for more or less regular breaks, or audible pauses, within each line. In the eight-syllable lines, you will see that, because most English words are of not more than two syllables, there is a tendency for the line to break into separated groups of four syllables. Thus:
From Clee to heaven || the beacon burns
From north and south || the sign returns
Look left, look right, || the hills are bright
Now, when the flame || they watch not towers
Unvaried, this would again produce a monotonous effect. A competent poet, therefore, will insert occasional word bridges that tie these groups together:
Because ‘tis {fif || ty} years to-night
Lads, we’ll {remem || ber} friends of ours
There is then either no break, or the break will be shifted from after the fourth to after the third or fifth syllables. In the six-syllable lines, there is a tendency to a break after the fourth syllable. Given a competent handling, though, of the eight-syllable lines, this is not important; and the break can be moved back one or two syllables, or eliminated.
The last secondary patterning is the rhyme. Lines of equal length are tied together by rhyming ends. Rhyme is not a fixed requirement in English verse. Most of Milton and Shakespeare do not rhyme. It does, however, give a further recognisable shape to verse, and it often places a useful constraint on a writer to think about the words he is using.
The Nature of Quantitative Verse
This overview of English being given, we turn to Latin verse. As said, this operates on radically different principles. Feet are patterns not of stressed and unstressed, but of long and short syllables. Latin poetry is quantitative. Rhyme is of minor importance, and is usually seen within lines. There is much less tendency for lines to be end-stopped. Within a line, a break, or caesura, is much more likely to be seen inside a foot, rather than at its end. Unlike in English, there is a regular scheme of elision.
Unless otherwise stated, all words and lines given below in Latin are taken from Book VI of The Aeneid.
In Latin, all vowels are either long or short. Long vowels can be marked thus: ā, ē, ī, ō, ū. Short vowels can be marked thus: ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, ŭ. An example of ā in English is father, and of ă is cap. An example of ē is bear, and of ĕ is red. Because they are always long, diphthongs—æ, au, ei, eu, œ, ui—are not marked. Long signs alone—ˉ—are used in dictionaries to show the quantity of words. They are also used in basic texts, produced for learners, to show the correct pronunciation. Because all vowels not marked as long can be taken as short by default, short signs—˘—are only used for the analysis of verse, or where some particular clarity is required.
Note that these marks indicate length, never stress. If there is a relationship in Latin between length and stress, it is not automatically the case that long vowels are stressed.
Syllables also are long or short. A syllable is long by nature if it contains a vowel that itself is long. Take the second word of line 1—fātŭr. The first syllable is long by nature, because its vowel, a, is long. The second is short by nature because the u is short.
A syllable is long by position if it contains a short vowel, but this is followed by two consonants. Thus, fātŭr becomes fātūr in line 1 because the syllable u is followed by the l of lacrimans. This not to say that the final vowel u is lengthened. The vowel itself remains short. It is the syllable as a whole that is lengthened by position.
Two consonants do not need to be in the same word for a syllable to be lengthened. A syllable also becomes long by position if closed by a doubled consonant. This is not so in English, where the spelling of tapper shows that the first syllable is short, while the first syllable in taper is long. In Latin, doubled consonants are pronounced separately, and lengthen preceding syllables that are otherwise short. Thus, the u at the beginning of suppostaque in line 24 is short, but its syllable becomes long by position because of the doubled p.
There are apparent exceptions to this rule. Regardless of whether its vowel is long or short, a syllable followed by x or z is always long. Syllables followed by combinations, within the same word, of ch, ph, th, qu, and sometimes gu and su, are usually short. So are syllables followed—again within the same word—by combinations of b, c, d, g, p, t or p with l or r.
But these are not exceptions. x is a single letter for two sounds—k and s. z in Latin is also a single letter for the two sounds d and s, or s and d. l and r, are soft consonants, and are taken as binding so tightly to a preceding hard consonant that they can amount to single sounds.
I turn to the rules of elision. Though exceptions are allowed, a vowel at the end of one word that is followed by a word beginning with another vowel is not sounded. Thus classique inmittit in line 1 becomes classiqu’ inmittit. In line 7, abstrusa in venis becomes abstrus’ in venis.
h at the beginning of a next word does not shield a preceding final vowel. Thus, in line 31, Icare, haberes becomes Icar’, haberes. This is because h was often not sounded, and hardly ever taken as having position. It is the same with final m. Thus, in line 2, tandem Euboicis and Cumarum adlabitur become tand’ Euboicis and Cumar’ adlabitur.
See also line 93, where iterum hospita becomes iter’ hospita. It seems that final m in Latin was sounded at best faintly. In earlier Latin verse—Lucretius, for example—final s had no position.
Where est is concerned, the rule is reversed, and the word loses its own vowel. Thus, in line 14, ut fama est becomes ut fama ‘st. In line 50, adflata est becomes adflata ‘st. This is the case even when a preceding word ends with m, which now keeps position. Thus, in line 173, dignum est becomes dignum ‘st.
To put this together, see line 264:
Di, quibus imperium est animarum, umbraeque silentes
This becomes:
Di, quibus imperium ‘st animar’, umbraeque silentes
These rules do not apply at the ends and beginning of lines. In a line ending with a vowel, or m or h, there is no elision if the first word of the next line begins with a vowel. See lines 3-4:
obvertunt pelago proras; tum dente tenaci
ancora fundabat naves et litora curvae
Tenaci / ancora does not become tenac’ / ancora
I turn now to the matter of feet. Applied to English verse, these Latinate rules are often denounced as an imposition. The Housman poem given above might more accurately be described as a set of alternating lines of eight and six syllables, each with four or three stresses and various internal breaks. Certainly, most lines of English verse written before about 1920 tend to have a fixed numbers of syllables. If I do not think so, subdivision into feet may be superfluous. For Latin verse, the rules are essential to understanding its metre. There are metres—the various kinds of hendecasyllable, for example—where the number of syllables is fixed. But this is an effect of rules about the combining of feet. In other metres, syllabic length can vary from one line to the next. In all metres, the basic unit of Latin verse is the foot.
The metre of The Aeneid is dactylic hexameter. Each line contains six feet, each of which is by default a dactyl—or a long followed by two short syllables (– ˇ ˇ). Purely dactylic lines are unusual. They would be monotonous. They would constrain the choice of words. There is none in Aeneid VI. Therefore, any dactylic foot can be replaced by a spondee—or two longs (– –). This being said, the fifth foot is almost invariably a dactyl, and the last foot is almost never a dactyl—it can be either a spondee or a trochee (– ˇ). From this, it follows that a hexameter has a theoretical minimum of twelve syllables and a theoretical maximum of eighteen.
Let us show this with the first two lines of Aeneid VI:
Sic fatur lacrimans, classique inmittit habenas
et tandem Euboicis Cumarum adlabitur oris
We can mark, or scan, these as follows:
— –|— ˇ ˇ |— —| — —|— ˇ ˇ | — –
Sic fatur lacrimans, classiqu’, inmittit habenas– — | — ˇ ˇ|— — |— —|—ˇ ˇ |—ˇ
et tand’ Euboicis Cumar’ adlabitur oris
Note again that, in these examples and those that follow, syllables are marked as long or short, not their vowels. Remember that, when fātŭr becomes fātūr, the vowel itself does not change its nature. It is the syllable as a whole that is changed.
In many examinations, students are required to scan a number of lines. After a while of practice, you can do this in your head. You can even see the pattern as you read the lines. In an examination, though, or if you are a beginner, the best way of scanning a line is to start at the end. The last two syllables are nearly always a spondee or a trochee. If you cannot tell the length of the last syllable, you will get away with marking the foot as | – x. You mark your break and move back. The next three syllables will nearly always be a dactyl. Once you have marked that break, you have only four feet left. You turn to the first syllable if the line. This must always be long. It should not be hard to say if it opens a dactyl or a spondee. That leaves you with two more feet. You will know you have gone wrong if you find yourself with three longs in a foot, or a long and one or three shorts.
Now to the caesura, which is the audible break within a line. As said, it mostly comes within a foot, and very rarely between feet. Hexameters have a primary caesura, which usually coincides with a break in sense. This comes at one of several normal positions. It can come after the first syllable of the second foot; after the first syllable in the third foot (the “masculine” caesura); after the second syllable in the third foot if that foot is a dactyl (the “feminine” caesura); after the first syllable of the fourth foot (the hephthemimeral caesura).
Here is an example of a masculine caesura—line 1:
Sic fatur lacrimans, || classique inmittit habenas
Here is a feminine caesura—line 322:
Anchisa generate, || deum certissima proles
Here is a hephthemimeral caesura—line 3:
obvertunt pelago proras; || tum dente tenaci
There can be a secondary caesura elsewhere in the line, or a primary caesura at any point. Or, when a particular effect is required, there can be lines without any identifiable caesura—see line 316:
ast alios longe submotos arcet harena
These rules for the caesura sound highly abstract. But the break is always perceptible, and it always contributes to the overall sound of the line. More to the point, examinations in England hardly ever ask for the caesura to be marked when lines are to be scanned.
So far, I have discussed the rules of metre. Equally important, for anyone who wants to read Vergil as well as scan him, is how Latin poetry is supposed to sound. Every Classical Latin metre is borrowed from Greek, which was sometimes as different from Latin as Latin is from English. As spoken before about 100 AD, Greek appears to have had an accent that contained no perceptible stress. Words were instead patterned by variations of pitch. One reason why the Romans, and many other peoples, fell in love with Greek was that its ordinary speech sounded like song. But these variations of pitch had a limited use in the metres of their poetry, which were otherwise wholly quantitative.
Accent and Quantity Distinguished
As in English, though perhaps weaker, accent in Latin was primarily a matter of stress. For some of its early period, stress in Latin tended to fall on the first syllable of a word. By the classical period, this had shifted to the penultimate. A Latin word of more than two syllables is stressed on the next to last syllable—the penultimate—if this is long by nature or position. If it is not long, the stress moves back to the syllable before that—the antepenultimate—regardless of whether this is long or short. Thus, in ǎnĭmārŭm, the stress falls on the penultimate ār, because this is long—ǎnĭmā́rŭm. If the enclitic –que is added, the previously final short syllable is lengthened by position to become ǎnĭmārūmquĕ; and, now that it is a long penultimate, ūm carries the stress—ǎnĭmārū́mquĕ. Or, if ǎnĭmārŭm is elided to ǎnĭmār’ the stress moves back to ǎn, because Latin does not usually suffer a final stress, and because the new penultimate is short—ắnĭmār’.
Note again that, while it may once, or for special purposes, have had variations of pitch—as it does in English—accent in Latin was primarily one of stress. As with English, the words accent and stress are used interchangeably in this section.
Now, if we read Latin verse according to the spoken accent, there is a clash with its quantitative metre. There are hexameter lines in which accent and metre coincide. See, for example, Aeneid IV.486:
– — |— ˇ ˇ |— ˇ || ˇ |– ˇ ˇ |— ˇ ˇ |—ˇ
spárgens úmida mélla sopóriferúmque papáver
In this line, you will see that there is a stress on the first syllable of every foot. But this kind of line is a rare exception. The general case in Latin verse is that a stress can fall on any syllable in a foot, and only by apparent chance on the dominant long foot. See again lines 1-2:
– —|— ˇ ˇ | — —| — —| —ˇ ˇ | — –
Síc fatur lácrimans, clássiqu’, inmíttit habénas– — | — ˇ ˇ|— — |— — |— ˇ ˇ|—ˇ
et tánd’ Eubóicis Cúmar’ adlábitur óris
A Conflict between Accent and Quantity?
Learn More
This is a problem for anyone whose own language contains a powerful stress. In English, we are so used to patterns of stress that we barely perceive quantity. We can see it in Latin. Given a little practice in the rules explained above, we can mark the longs and shorts in any line, and group them into feet. We can even try to pronounce final vowels as long. But I have been reading Latin verse for a very long time. I am a reasonably decent poet in English. If I read Latin verse aloud as ordinary speech, or if I listen to other readings on the same scheme, quantity has at best a ghostly presence. I am overwhelming aware of the stresses. Following its own stated rules as quantitative verse, I am less aurally aware of The Aeneid as formal verse than I am of A Shropshire Lad. It sounds to me like rather sonorous free verse of the sort made popular by T.S. Eliot.
One possible solution is to regard Latin verse as a specialised dialect of the language and to read it aloud as such. In the past year, I have had two German students of A-Level Latin. Both of these have read Vergil by shifting the stresses to coincide with the first syllable of every foot. Therefore, a reading as ordinary speech of lines 3-4 gives:
obvértunt pélago próras; tum dénte tenáci
ancóra fundábat náves et lítora cúrvae
Shifting the stresses so they coincide with the first syllable in every foot gives:
óbvertúnt pelagó prorás; tum dénte tenáci
áncora fúndabát navés et lítora cúrvae
This appears to be the custom in Germany. I believe it is also the custom in America. I find it irritating. It reduces the most impressively grand lines in Vergil to something that borders on the incompetent—rather as we despise poets in English who make buttresses rhyme with confesses. I grant it brings out the quantitative rhythm, by overlaying a parallel set of stresses. It may be useful for seeing that students in a class are scanning the lines correctly. But I find it so unnatural that I am reluctant to believe that the Romans themselves could have recited their poetry in this manner. If there is evidence that they did, of course, every objection must fall to the ground. I must then make the same surrender as those scholars who were convinced that ancient statues were chastely white, until they were shown the remnants of the paint used to colour them. I do not think, however, that the evidence points in that direction. It does seem that the Romans recited their poetry as ordinary speech.
The first evidence is in the hexameter line itself. The last two feet are almost invariably a dactyl and a spondee or trochee—an adonic (–ˇ ˇ |—x). Almost equally invariably, the stresses in these feet coincide with the first syllable of each foot. See lines 1-4:
…míttit habénas
…lábitur óris
dénte tenáci
lítora cúrvae
The main exceptions in Aeneid VI are when Greek words come at the end of a line—see 623, 895:
…tosqu’ hýmenǽos
…ens élephánto
It seems in other lines that an effort is made to give a reader just enough coincidence of accent and quantity to make the hexameter aurally plain. The natural implication is that coincidence in other feet is not intended.
The second evidence comes from around the end of the classical period of Latin, when the heard distinction between long and short had faded, or was fading, and stress was becoming the dominant patterning of the spoken word. Commodian was a poet from the North African provinces who wrote in the middle of the third century. Africa seems to have been the first part of the Latin world where this distinction faded. The opening of his Instructiones reads:
Praefatio nostra viam erranti demonstrat
Respectumque bonum, cum venerit saeculi meta
Aeternum fieri, quod discredunt inscia corda:
Ego similiter erravi tempore multo.
I leave it to you to scan these lines. You will see that they do not scan as quantitative hexameters. It seems as if the poet has given up on recalling what is supposed to be long or short—distinctions that he and his readers do not hear—and intends instead to reproduce the sound of hexameters as read as ordinary speech. Ērrā́ntī dēmṓnstrǎt is not an adonic, but it sounds like one if the stress alone is taken into account. The first four feet also do not scan, and the stresses here fall without any attempt at the kind of rhythm you would expect from a scanning pronunciation. It is a fair presumption that this is a reproduction of how real quantitative verse was read at least in the third century, and perhaps much earlier.
The third evidence is from the papyri. In 1937, a Greek lexicon of Vergil, produced around 500 AD, was found at Nessana in Egypt. This gives a number of lines that have been marked with acute accents to show where emphases should fall. They fall invariably on the syllables stressed in ordinary speech. See, for example, Aeneid II.39:
scínditur incértum stúdia in contrária vúlgus
Why these marks were placed is open to doubt. Some believe they were to show foreign learners how Latin words should be pronounced in everyday speech. But they might have been placed to show how Vergil should be read. If so, we have further reason to believe that Latin verse was read as ordinary speech.
Accent and Quantity as Coordinate Rhythms
Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I do not in the least deny that quantity was heard by Vergil and his readers. Though their Latin had a stress accent, it also had a clear distinction of long and short syllables. This distinction seems to have been powerfully audible in Latin until at least the second century. I am sure it was more powerfully audible than it is to me. Again for the avoidance of doubt, I do not mean that the “ordinary speech” in which the Romans recited their verse was identical to ordinary conversation. I think it reasonable to believe that special effort was made to ensure that longs and shorts were clearly heard, and that special care was taken with enunciation—much as we see when English verse is recited. Even after the loss of quantity in Latin, poets and their readers were expected either to sound longs and shorts against the nature of their own spoken language, or to see them on the page.
We have a clear duty, if we are to appreciate the whole effect of Latin verse, to put aside the habits of our own language and to make as clear a distinction as we can between longs and shorts.
At the same time, it may be that Latin verse had a double rhythm. There was the quantitative rhythm. This could be heard by everyone, though understood only by those educated in the Greek classics. There was also an accentual rhythm. This was not wholly independent. Stress in Latin is a function of quantity, and particular quantitative metres will give rise to particular accentual rhythms. But each rhythm produced its own effect.
Indeed, though I may have implied that there is something contemptible about the lines by Commodian given above, that is not my intention. They have a fine accentual rhythm that supports their direct message. They can be seen as an interesting experiment, or as one example of an established form that was lost in the shipwreck of Roman literature in the two centuries after 500 AD. If there were two coordinate rhythms in Latin verse, why not detach them? Why not liberate verse from a set of rules that amounted to a straitjacket, now they were no longer heard, and focus on what could be heard?
There are examples from the Middle Ages of this “liberation.” In 814, Louis the Pious visited Orleans. The local Bishop welcomed him with an ode in quantitative Sapphics. This is an eleven-syllable metre, comprising five feet, which are usually a trochee, a spondee, a dactyl, a trochee and either a trochee or a spondee. After every three lines, there is a single adonic. The ode begins:
ēn ǎdēst Caēsār pĭŭs ēt bĕnīgnŭs,
ōrbĕ quī tōtō rŭtŭlāt cŏrūscŭs,
ātquĕ praē cūnctīs bŏnĭtātĕ pōllĕt
mūnĕrĕ Chrīstī.
A few years later, perhaps the same Bishop wrote another ode to Louis:
térra maríque víctor hónoránde
Caésar Augúste Hlúdowíce, Chrísti
dógmate clárus, décus aévi nóstri,
spés quoque régni.
These lines do not scan as Sapphics. They do, however, reproduce the same accentual rhythm as a quantitative Sapphic produces when there is a caesura after the long in the third foot. Why the same writer produced different kinds of Sapphic on each occasion is less important than that he did. The ninth century is a long time after the third, but not so very long after the end of Antiquity. We have some evidence, then, of two traditions. Quantitative verse was perhaps considered more elegant. But accentual was not an insult to its recipient.
Assuming the foregoing to be correct, Vergil’s metrical genius has normally been discussed in terms of how he fully adapted the rules of the Greek quantitative hexameter to Latin, so that he could write without the frequent clumsiness of earlier poets. It may be that part of his genius lay in producing a wholly satisfying and harmonious effect at the same time in both schemes of rhythmical arrangement. If this is the case, the shifting of stresses I mention above is not merely without authority, but even harms the intended effect.
In support of this hypothesis, I will return to the matter of Greek verse. The Greek accent was primarily one of varied pitch. If this had a limited influence on the formal quantitative metre of Greek verse, it was heard and appreciated. There would, then, have been the same double rhythm—though the different nature of accent and the different connection between quantity and accent in the two languages would have produced a different kind of rhythmical interplay.
We see this principle of double effect more clearly in the later history of Greek literature. By the sixth century, the Greek accent had shifted to one primarily of stress. As in Latin, the distinction between longs and shorts had faded. Read as ordinary speech, therefore, quantitative verse had no heard metrical shape. The immense authority of the ancient classics meant that they had to be read; and there was a small but continuing production of verses written according to the ancient rules. For general consumption, though, verse was written according to a new double scheme. A poet would write lines that scanned as quantitative iambic trimeter, but with an arrangement of words that produced an audible rhythm in the spoken language. It gave people a sense of continuity with the past, yet also gave a poetry that was not metrical chaos when read aloud, or when read to the uneducated. Because this double effect was too hard to achieve with the old dactylic metres, the hexameter gave way, in the Greek middle ages, to iambic trimeter as the verse form for epic poetry. The quantitative rules were insensibly retired, until a new metre based on accent had emerged. Such was the origin of the πολιτικός στίχος, a verse form used to this day.
If therefore, you would understand Vergil as a poet, you should learn the rules of Latin scansion, and then read the lines as ordinary speech—that is, according to the spoken accent. Effort should be made to sound the unaccented long syllables—but quantitative patterns and the spoken accent should be taken as coordinate elements in the overall effect.
Get a Copy
In most editions of Roman poetry, these rules of scansion are relegated to an appendix, or given in some other way as an afterthought. I suggest they are essential to understanding Vergil as a Roman poet. A discussion of them belongs in any main introduction. You should now realise what I mean above when I speak of dancing on a tightrope. If writing good English verse is not easy, writing fair English verse is not that hard. Our metres are natural to our language, and writing verse needs some practice, but little education. Writing Latin verse is impossible without first learning a number of complex rules—rules that evolved for a different language, and that place limits on the choice and arrangement of words. In making these rules work so well that they seem native to Latin, Vergil stands at the end of a long development. Most earlier attempts have been lost. Enough remains, though, for us to trace the main lines of development.
Every nation has its poetry, and the Romans are no exception. Unfortunately, we have almost nothing that they wrote in their own metres. We know of a Saturnian metre that was used in the early days of Latin. Barely a hundred lines have survived. Here is one of the longer connected examples, an epitaph of one of the Scipios, written around 150 BC:
Gnaevō patre prōgnātus, fortis uir sapiēnsque
cuius fōrma virtūtī parissuma fuit
cōnsul, cēnsor, aedīlis quī fuit apud vōs
Taurāsiam, Cisaunam, Samnium cēpit
subigit omnem Lūcānam, opsidēsque abdūcit.
I have marked the syllables long by nature, but cannot say what use these are to a reading. Is the metre quantitative or accentual? Is it a mix of both? I have said there was a time when Latin was stressed on the first syllable of a word. Are these lines to be stressed there? Or is this rather late example to be stressed according to the penultimate rule? Should the syllables nam and que in the last line be elided? Given another few hundred lines, we could answer these questions. Given what we have, there are theories but no agreement.
Moving from north to south, Italy before the dominion of Rome was divided between peoples who spoke four different languages, or groups of languages. There were the Celts, a barbarous and frequently troublesome race. There were the Etruscans, of whose ways and language we know much less than we wish we did. There were speakers of the various Italic languages, or which Latin was one. There were the Greeks, who had colonised Sicily and Southern Italy in waves of settlement that continued into the Classical period. The Romans, then, were aware of the Greeks from the beginnings of their own history. They knew the Greeks as traders and as rivals or allies. Because they were the special people of Antiquity, it was impossible to know about the Greeks without coming under their influence. We can be sure there was much indirect influence. The Etruscans had a deep and continuing influence on the Romans, and these had been deeply influenced by the Greeks. From the Etruscans the Romans took an adapted version of the Greek alphabet. They seem also to have taken some of their mythology and religion, and some political institutions. Certainly, on the eve of the first war with Carthage, in 264 BC, the Romans had finished the conquest of Southern Italy. All the Greek colonies in that region were now subject to Rome, and Rome was open to their cultural influence.
These wars with Carthage made Rome a great power in the Mediterranean world. The Ancients did not specialise in diplomatic history, but we can be sure they engaged in diplomacy as involved as our own. Because of their trading interests and their conflicts with each other, the Greek states of the East must have taken a keen interest in the unfolding events in the Western Mediterranean. We know that, towards the end of the first war, Carthage approached Ptolemy II of Egypt for an emergency loan of two thousand talents. Though he politely refused, we can take this as evidence for much diplomatic intrigue. Both Roman and Carthaginian envoys would have been at work in all the Eastern capitals. The Romans would have seen at first-hand what Greek civilisation had to offer in its main centres.
Its costs already mentioned, one of the benefits of unearned wealth is that it allows the emergence of a cultivated leisure class. This emerged in Rome during the third century BC. There was a new taste for the arts, and the vast mass of Greek civilisation flattened anything the Romans had for themselves. After fighting in it, Gnaeus Naevius wrote an epic on the first war with Carthage. He wrote this in Saturnian verses. Around the same time, Livius Andronicus translated The Odyssey into the same metre. But these works come at the end of a native tradition. They gave no new life to it. The emerging consensus in Rome was that Greek quantitative metres should be adapted to Latin—or Latin to Greek metres.
In deciding this, the Romans determined for themselves a unique relationship with Greece. Unlike the Macedonians and the higher classes in Egypt and Syria, they would not forget or hide their own language and make themselves into Greeks. Unlike the Jews and Carthaginians, they would not use Greek for certain limited purposes, but keep otherwise to their own ways. Instead, they would embrace the whole of Greek civilisation, but add to it a second language and a second literature. Their future epic poetry would be in Latin hexameters.
Adapting Quantitative Metres to Latin
However, while in its classical period a quantitative language, Latin does not easily fit into Greek metres. It has more syllables long by nature. Because more of its words end in consonants, it has more syllables long by position. Its words tend to be shorter. It has fewer open vowels within words. It prefers m to n, and uses fewer liquid consonants. Adding the differences of accent already mentioned, Latin sounds different. These difficulties can be solved by a careful arrangement of words. The resulting difficulty is that sense may be sacrificed to sound. In Latin prose, as it developed, there are conflicts to be resolved that do not arise in Greek. For verse, even a natural flexibility of word order must be stretched towards breaking point.
In principle, the main difficulties were solved almost at once. Around the beginning of the second century BC, Quintus Ennius wrote his Annales, an epic on the history of Rome. Most of it is now lost, but enough remains to see the approach he took. Many of his lines are remarkable for so early an effort. See:
Musae quae pedibus magnum pulsatis Olympum
The line scans. It has a strong masculine caesura. Except in the two last feet, there is no attempt at correspondence between accent and quantity. There is an alternating and not obtrusive alliteration of m and p. The accentual rhythm gives the line a suitably confident, peremptory sound. If all the lines had been of this nature, the Romans might have pulled off an achievement as remarkable as when, starting form nothing, they built a fleet and took mastery of the sea from Carthage. Sadly, the surviving lines are not all of this quality. See these:
Assaraco natus Capys optimus isque pium ex se
est locus, Hesperiam quam mortales perhibebant
occiduntur ubi potitur ratus Romulus praedam
avium, praepetibus sese pulchrisque locis dant
O Tite, tute, Tati, tibi tanta, tyranne, tulisti!
These lines scan, or can be made to scan. But they are at least experimental. The third is lumbering. The last is staccato, and has a comical effect probably not intended. The overall arrangement of the poem seems to lack invention. The Annales remained popular for many centuries—long enough for Hadrian to admire them as the greatest Latin epic. They do not compare with their Greek models.
So it continued for the next century. The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius is as great a poem as we have from Antiquity. It has passages of great power and beauty. It shows how Latin is, at an early age, capable of expressing difficult philosophical arguments. It outclasses anything comparable we still have in Greek. But the lines often have what may have become a deliberate roughness. See, from Book II:
nam vel uti pueri trepidant atque omnia caecis
in tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus
inter dum, nihilo quae sunt metuenda magis quam
quae pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura.
hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque.
Lucretius is a poet of supreme greatness. But it is as if, starting with imitations from the Greek, Roman poetry is moving in a different line of development. It might eventually have produced a more substantial body of great work. If so, this would have been as different from its original inspiration as was the rhymed and accentual Latin verse of the later Middle Ages.
We see a second start with Catullus and the other—now lost—poets of his generation. They take as their starting point the basic fact of the previous century, that quantitative verse can be written in Latin. Where they depart from the line of development I mention is their insistence of a return to the Greek originals, with a focus on the Alexandrian School. Their bias is away from grand themes, in favour of the personal and the subjective. The poetry has a gloss and smoothness not so far seen in Latin—a confident use of allusion; an emphasis on the sound of words, as well as their sense. If I ignore his hendecasyllables, the Catullan hexameter has a new confidence and perfection:
multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
The line opens an elegy on a dead brother. Its objects are grouped symmetrically, their consonants flowing into each other. Driven by the placing of accents, they move with a quietly sad rise and fall towards the subject participle. Here, a slight pause is required, both by sense and by the joining of two hard consonants. Everything is under control and in place. Change the position of a single word—per multas gentes, perhaps—and the line still scans, but its effect is ruined. Cicero disliked the New Poets. He mocked their poetry as trivial and self-indulgent. It was an event in Roman literature as significant as his prose—and far more of one than his own attempts at verse.
The poets of the Augustan Golden Age take both lines of development—the earnestness and force of the older poets, and the focus on beauty of the newer school—and they combine them into a body of work that, for the first time, allows Latin to stand beside Greek as one of the two classical languages of Antiquity. Vergil, in particular, breaks through every natural limitation of his language. He can be grand. He can be personal. He can speak in epigrams confined to a single line, or in sentences drawn out over a long block of lines. His invention never fails. His imagination is always lively. Above all, what had, just a few generations earlier, had been the blunt and unexpressive language of a race of farmers and soldiers is made to sing.
This is what makes Vergil important not simply in terms of when he lived, and what influences shaped his poetry. He is also a very great poet. He takes the entire legacy of Roman poetry, plus its Greek models, and adds something wonderful of his own. See, for example, lines 83-87:
o tandem magnis pelagi defuncte periclis
(sed terrae graviora manent), in regna Lavini
Dardanidae venient (mitte hanc de pectore curam),
sed non et venisse volent. bella, horrida bella,
et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno.
Learn More
As ever, the lines break down into patterns of long and short syllables. Each has its caesuara. Each has its different though related accentual pattern. Then we have the choice and arrangement of words. See how the nd in tandem help the word stand out, before it flows into magnis. This word in turn stands out slightly, because of the clash of s and p from different words. See how the penultimate in graviora has a drawling, ominous sound. See the sudden choppiness of mitte hanc de pectore curam. Look at the alliterative patterns, and how, in the fourth line, the tension is heightened by the sudden change of n and v alternating to b; or at the contrast of short and long words; or at the sudden and memorable epigram that pulls everything together. See, in short, how the hexameters flow with mournful grandeur, and how perfect is the match of form with content. I could do much more. The problem with genius is that it can be dissected, but never fully understood. If it could be reduced to a formula, there would be more of it—or it might be levelled into democratic flatness.
Even before it was published, Propertius believed The Aeneid would eclipse Homer. It became an instant classic in Rome and in all the provinces where Latin was the educated language. It was taken as the model of all language and poetry. It became a common authority on style and grammar. Schoolboys were made to learn it by heart. Ovid parodies it. Pliny quotes from it repeatedly without needing to say what it is. There are Vergilian tags among the graffiti in Pompeii.
The Christians admired it no less than the Pagans. Some thought Vergil had, in the fourth book of his Eclogues, predicted the birth of Christ. In any event, he had celebrated the reign of Augustus, in which Christ was born, and which had created the borderless world in which St Paul moved with so little hindrance. In the fourth century, Proba, an aristocratic convert, wrote her De Laudibus Christi, a rearrangement of Vergilian lines into a retelling of the Gospels.
His fame continued undiminished in the Middle Ages. He is quoted by Bede, by Paul the Deacon, and by Liutprand, among others. He remained a figure in popular culture, the subject of legends about his wisdom, and even his powers as a sorcerer. Even before the end of Antiquity, his works were used for divination. You consulted the Sortes Vergilianae by asking a question, then opening his works at random, and finding an answer in the first line clearly read.
His fame rose higher still in the Renaissance. He is Dante’s guide in The Divine Comedy, and the inspiration of poets and sculptors. He was the model for unlimited imitation in Latin verse. The first printed edition of his works was in 1469, with another 750 to the end of the sixteenth century. His influence pervades the birth of English and French literature. To write even superficially of this influence would contain a history of our own literature. Until the twentieth century, everyone in the higher classes was expected to have some acquaintance with his works in Latin. Today, he remains popular in translation. His alleged tomb outside Naples is a frequented place of pilgrimage.
A negative consequence of his fame is that he reduced Latin verse to a scheme that could be applied without the slightest inspiration. His genius could not be copied. His formulae could be, and were. Starting with Silius Italicus, there must be hundreds of thousands of extant hexameters, all scanning and harmonious, all variously unreadable. This derives from the choice made during the Augustan Golden Age, to refine Latin as a language of literature without reference to the language of the people. So far as it was made into a counterpart of Greek, Latin was detached from its spoken root. The decay of genius after the second century turned allowed composition to become a mechanical exercise. The insistence of fixed rules of composition then contributed further to the decay of genius. Latin verse has an interesting birth and a glorious noon, and an unending and sclerotic afternoon. The supreme perfection of Vergil has much to be blamed for this. Had Roman poetry followed Lucretius more than Vergil, its course would have been different. It might have been less sclerotic. The Lucretian hexameter is an open arc, the Vergilian a closed circle. The only escape it allows is from perfection.
But this is a problem for discussion elsewhere. For the moment, we have a study text of Aeneid Book VI. More than two thousand years after its author’s death, I am producing this with technology that Vergil himself would have thought supernatural. So far as it is read and used, I stand as one humble link in the chain of transmission that begins at a dinner party attended by Augustus, and continues into an unlimited future:
et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt
Like everything else we have from the Ancient World, The Aeneid was transmitted, until the invention of printing, in handwritten copies. Errors are inevitable to such a process over so long a period. However, because it is in a metre that allows few variations, and because it was transmitted in many copies, there are few problems with this text, and these exist mainly for those whose job it is to look for them.
I downloaded the text I am using from the Internet. I have added quotation marks. These are almost as useful as full stops, and may be more useful than commas. Because it has been the fashion since about 1850, I have put the text all in lowercase, except for names. I have kept v for consonantal u. This may not have been used by Vergil, but seems to have been general within a century of his death. It is also a permitted derogation for us from the demands of the reformed pronunciation. How you sound these is your business. I have added the archaic spellings of some words that have come to us in one branch of the manuscript tradition. I think these were intended by Vergil.
To avoid ambiguity, I have standardised the is endings in plural nominative and accusative nouns of the third declension to es. My guiding principle throughout has not been to make any contribution to the critical scholarship—a contribution I am not in the least qualified to make—but to produce a text convenient for students.
With convenience still in mind, I have added a rewriting of the text as Latin prose. Much of Vergil’s difficulty as an author comes from his taste for mentioning people or things by allusion, and by implying meanings rather than stating them. He is a poet, not a newspaper writer who expects to be read once and thrown aside. As I have argued already, he is also constrained in his choice and arrangement of words by a set of rules that are not native to his language. I cannot say how often I have helped students in class, not by explaining a difficult passage in English, but by reordering its words, and sometimes by substituting more common words.
The prose version I give is by Charles de La Rue, commonly known as Ruaeus, a French Jesuit of the seventeenth century. He produced it so that students with a moderate understanding of Latin could follow the main text. He reorders the text, changing words here and there, adding in italics words missed out by Vergil, replacing allusions with direct mentions, and generally turning a most elaborate work of art into clear prose. The advantage his version has over a translation into French—or English—is that it corresponds far better with the original. If you read a modern translation, you are reading what is effectively an original work. With Ruaeus, you are engaging with a simplified but still recognisable Vergil.
There are many photographed copies on the Internet of editions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that include this prose version. It used to be a favourite of editors, and of students. John Dryden relied much on it for his translation into English verse. I did hope to find one that I could scan. Sadly, the original text was always printed in a small font, and all the copies I could find were too degraded to be of use. I have therefore retyped it, changing a few spellings—chiefly of consonantal j to i—adding speech marks, and breaking it into sections that correspond to the divisions in the main text. I could have done more to standardise with the main text. But this would have involved too many changes to what is itself a classic.
After some thought, I have added a translation of the main text into English prose. There is no shame in using this, though I do suggest its use as a last resort—only if Vergil himself cannot be made to give up his meaning, or if Ruaeus fails to help in Latin. I did think of using the Dryden translation into heroic couplets. Considered as poetry, this is the best version I know. But I eventually settled on the prose translation made by Joseph Davidson in 1723. I have not been able to find who Davidson was, or if this was his real name. But his was, I believe, the first translation into English prose. As with Ruaeus, it used to be a favourite of editors and students, enoying or suffering many changes until the end of the nineteenth century. If it sometimes owes more to Ruaeus than to Vergil, it is a very good translation. I do not think anyone will have trouble with reading English from three hundred years ago. But, though similar, Davidson’s English is just sufficiently removed from our own to create a sense of distance that I find satisfying, and that I do not see in newer and perhaps more accurate translations.
I give thanks here to Mario Huet, who has retyped Davidson from an edition of 1725, complete with original spellings and punctuation, and with italicised words, as in Ruaeus, to mark what has been inserted. Again, I have added quotation marks and broken it into paragraphs that allow it to stand as a parallel text with Ruaeus.
I also give thanks to Lewis Collard and Colum Dread, who proofed the English text of this book. I am dreadful at proofing my own work, and such freedom from typing mistakes as the English text displays is due for them them than to any diligence of my own.
Bibliography
Colt Archaeological Institute, 1950. Excavations at Nessana: Literary Papyri. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Connington, J., 1876. P. Vergili Maronis Opera. London: Whittaker.
Davidson, J., 1723. The Works of Virgil Translated into English Prose As Near the Original as the Different Idioms of the Latin and English Languages will Allow. London: Longman et al..
Page, T. E., 1888. P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber VI: Edited with Notes and Vocabulary for the Use of Schools. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd.
Rose, H., 1936. A Handbook of Latin Literature from the Earliest Times to the Death of St Augustine. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.
Sigwick, A., 1899. P. Vergili Maronis Opera, with Introduction and English Notes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Staughton, W., 1813. The Works of Virgil with the Latin Interpretation of Ruaeus. Philadelphia: Philip H. Nicklin.
Wilkinson, L., 1963. Golden Latin Artisty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tags: a-level, accent, america, augustus, biography, books, caesar, carthage, Catullus, christ, cicero, cold war, education, empire, england, ennius, germany, grammar, greek, hendecasyllable, hexameter, history, invasion, latin, latin verse, law, livy, parallel, paul the deacon, pitch, poetry, propaganda, quantity, race, reading, revolution, rome, Ruling Class, speech, stress, translation, Vergil, verse, virgil, war