The Mythos of Empire - In Praise of David Ferry's Translation of Vergil's Aeneid

(The Aeneid - Vergil,* Translated by David Ferry, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017)

Those who know me know that I am a bit of a geek for ancient Rome, so it’s no surprise that I ran straight out and bought this new translation of the Aeneid as soon as it hit the bookstores. I am assuming, however, that you might not share my enthusiasm for the blood-soaked pagan empire, so let’s start with the question, why read the Aeneid at all? Admittedly, its story is nowhere near as beautifully constructed as Homer’s Odyssey, from which it borrows generously, and to which it is often compared. It’s full of prolonged battle scenes rendered in grisly anatomic detail – in other words, not exactly a beach read. And just what relevance does a lengthy work of epic poetry more than two thousand years old have to our lives today?

The question is a fair one, and more than rhetorical. The Aeneid is rarely assigned as required reading in college Humanities classes these days, and since Latin has nearly disappeared from the Liberal Arts curriculum of English speaking universities, its use as a scholarly text for language students is becoming a rarity as well. Does this mean it is time to chuck out Vergil’s magnum opus as another dusty text of a dead white man? I would argue an emphatic no.  

In these times, as we witness the rise of far-right, anti-immigrant and neofascist political movements around the world, it is important to understand and recognize the mythology of empire; the stories that tell the people of a nation what makes them superior and what justifies their right to rule over others. Governmental structures may be the machinery of rule, but the stories that stir the emotions of a people to identify with rulers and systems of rule are also essential to political power. This is what the Aeneid was for the at least the first five hundred years of the Roman Empire, the period when Europe, much of North Africa and the Middle East fell under Roman domain.

The prevailing view of Vergil scholars today is that Vergil was directly commissioned to write this text by Caesar Augustus, who recognized that the imperial ambitions of Rome required a mythological foundation – an origin story. The Greeks, by comparison, had a much richer literary tradition and it had served them well in building their own sense of collective identity. The Aeneid is generally understood to be a national epic, but it is a strange example of the genre. It departs from the typical development of such epics in that, rather than arising organically from the people, through oral tradition, folk legend, and religious mythology later rendered into text, it was instead written in service to the imperial class – much as religious art was commissioned by monarchs in Renaissance Europe. The Aeneid depicts Julius Caesar as a direct family descendant of the goddess, Venus, (which he, in fact, claimed to be) his rule divinely preordained. One of the most recognizable lines from the Aeneid is spoken by the spirit of Aeneas’s dead father in Book VI, who delivers the prophecy that it is the destiny of Rome…

“To pacify, to impose the rule of law,

To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.”

This is Robert Fitzgerald’s translation, a spare and concentrated text compared with the verbal breathing room offered by Ferry:

“To be the governor of the world, to bring to it peace,

Serenely maintained with order and with justice,

To spare the defeated and to bring an end

To war by vanquishing the proud.”

Ferry gives the impression of having worried more intensely over every word of Latin in the original, to make sure that it wouldn’t escape his pen. The result in this verse is that the idea of peace is emphasized far more than in Fitzgerald’s translation. Note the adverb “serenely,” and the phrase “to bring an end to war,” giving us a reason for why the proud must be battled down. And indeed, this idea was essential to the Roman imperial self-image, that they had, by defeating the various and often-skirmishing tribes of Gaul, delivered a kind of permanent peace – the Pax Romana. In this, we see the moral self-justification for imperial conquest.

The Roman Empire is in many ways the prototype for empire as it has been practiced in the West for the past five centuries. We can recognize Roman state organization in our government institutions – the rule of law, military structure, governing bodies. US government buildings were constructed at the turn of the century to resemble the classical Roman style.

Downtown Manhattan courthouse architecture with neoclassical Roman-inspired details.

Some core Roman ideas that carried over into Western colonialism include a self-serving belief in the divine right to rule over other peoples. During the conquering of the Americas this was known as Manifest Destiny, the belief that Europeans were inherently superior to the indigenous people who lived on these lands, and therefore were granted by God the divine right to clear the land of those people. A more patronizing version of this same ideology was used to justify the British Empire, most eloquently expressed in the phrase “white man’s burden,” originally penned in a poem by Rudyard Kipling in 1899. Even the Nazis during World War II, while appropriating and distorting Nordic mythology, made use of a distinctly Roman belief in the divine right of rule of a master race. Along with the Swastika they adopted the fasces – a bundle of rods wrapped around an axe, bound together to represent unity and military might.

Roman fasces incorporated into the front entrance gates of Prospect Park, Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn.

If it looks familiar, that’s because it’s also a commonly found detail in US government architecture. A very large example adorns the hall of the U.S. House of Representatives. And when Donald Trump promises to “make America great again,” he is also calling to a mythos, rooted deeply in the psyche of his supporters, of their country’s lost and glorious European past. If we want to understand how the mythos of empire works, how it justifies conquest and subjugation, the Aeneid is essential reading.

Okay, so the Aeneid is important – but do we really need another translation? Don’t we have enough yet? I would argue here that the unique challenges of translating the Aeneid into English leave broad room for translators to continually improve on the work of those who’ve gone before them. The subtle genius of Vergil’s writing is as often occluded as it is revealed by English translations from the original Latin – a notoriously wordy and meticulous language, resistant to nuance and layered shades of meaning. 

 David Ferry in particular seems to have a bond of spirit with Vergil, and it often shows most brilliantly when Vergil is describing nature. Just for a taste, in Book IV, when a grieving Aeneas gives in to divine command to break off his affair with Dido, the Carthaginian queen, he glumly returns to shore, fixing his eyes on his men as they load the ship before setting sail:

“It’s as when ants, knowing that winter’s coming,

Carry back into their house huge piles of corn,

To store it for their use, the long black file

Of workers moving steadily through the grass,

Bearing the plundered forage as they go,

Some straining under the weight of the big grains

Upon their tiny shoulders, and others sternly

Marshaling them as they go along the way.” (Page 120, Lines 568-575)

In these lines, you can imagine Vergil on a sunny autumn hillside in the Italian countryside, deep in contemplation of this tiny insect hierarchy. Ferry deftly uses the word “plundered” to draw a pointed simile with Roman conquest and accumulation of agricultural wealth.

It is in Vergil’s observations of nature that his poetic genius truly shines, and unsurprisingly, it is what originally drew him to Caesar Augustus’s inner circle. At the time, both were young men. Augustus had just begun his rule and had much to prove, seventeen years after the assassination of his uncle, Julius Caesar. Vergil, after having won great acclaim for his pastoral poetry and Georgics, was coming to be recognized as the finest up-and-coming poet in the land, though always in frail physical health and living largely on the support of wealthy patrons. But genius or not, it still puzzles me that Augustus saw in the odes to the goat farmers of Mantua and quaint verses about the hay harvesting peasants of the Tuscan plains the poet who would tell the story of conquering armies, the subjugation of people and land – an empire won by blood.

Book one opens up at the miserable end of the Trojan war – the same starting point of Homer’s Odyssey. Like a work of fan fiction, Vergil chooses to build his story around a minor character who only appears briefly in Homer’s much older text. The Trojan warrior Aeneas, who flees his burning, crumbling city, carrying his father Anchises on his back, has no idea where to go. Anchises, though, has been fortunate in his alliances, as he is an old lover of the goddess, Venus (Aphrodite in the Iliad). She is, in fact, the mother of Aeneas and hers is one of the first voices we hear, as she appeals to Jupiter on behalf of her son:

“O, you who for eternity govern, with power

And with your lightning bolt, both men and gods,

What crime could my Aeneas have committed,

How have the Trojans so offended you,

That after so much suffering they are kept

From every land and kept from Italy, where,

According to your promise, from their line,

The line of Teucrian kings, there would come Roman

Leaders to govern all nations and all the seas?”

In reading these lines, notice the phrases, “your promise,” and “govern all nations and all the seas.” In other words, Roman rule without limits, promised by the most powerful god in the Roman pantheon. And in case you suspect that this goddess of erotic love has overreached herself, Jupiter’s response should clear up any doubt:

“Be not afraid, my lady of Cythera.

The promise I made to your children of what their fates

would be is what it was. You are to see

the fortress walls of Lavinia’s city, and you

will bring great-hearted Aeneas to his high

destined rightful place in the starry heavens.”

He then unrolls a scroll on which is written the destiny of the Trojan people. Jupiter tells Venus,

“Your son shall wage

Great wars in Italy against fierce tribes,

And crush them utterly, and raise up cities,

And give his people laws to govern them.”

These lines, recited in Caesar Augustus’s time would have immediately evoked the recent wars of the conquest of Gaul under Julius Caesar’s command. The phrase  “laws to govern them” carries with it the implication that laws had been unknown to the Celtic and Germanic peoples prior to the Roman invasion, an essential piece of propaganda that forms part of the notion that these people were conquered for their own good; that they were “civilized” by Roman conquest. Jupiter goes on with the prophecy:

“Then Romulus, wearing

A she-wolf’s tawny hide, and proud to wear it,

In honor of that wolf who was his nurse

Will build the city of Mars and call his people

Romans, after Romulus, his name.

For them I ordain no limits of time or space;

I grant dominion to them, without end.”

Beyond the blatant divine endorsement of the imperial project of Rome, we also see here a crucial difference between Homer’s epic and Vergil’s. Book One of the Odyssey opens very similarly, as Athena appeals to Zeus to be allowed to intervene on behalf of her beloved Odysseus. But the similarity ends there. For at no point is Odysseus’s destiny announced in advance. The idea of one’s fate written indelibly on a divine scroll would be laughable in Homeric times, if only because any god might raise enough hell to undo the will of any other god at any time. Thus the gods struggled over Odysseus, who only received Athena’s decisive help when he had demonstrated enough guts and smarts to prove worthy of it.

Scholars have debated this stark difference between Greek and Roman ideas regarding divine predestination, with some, especially theologians, seeing it as part of the slow transformation of the Homeric worldview of mortals’ helplessness before warring gods to one with a heightened role for the fates (think of the Roman goddess Fortuna.) This view helps us understand how we eventually got to the concept of Divine Providence (which later made possible the ideology of Manifest Destiny.)  But whatever was going on religiously at the time, there can be no doubt of the propaganda value of a mythos in which the glorious destiny of the Roman Empire is literally written on a scroll and read aloud by the most powerful of the gods. After hearing that, why would a Roman soldier doubt even for a moment the value of perpetual wars of territorial expansion? What would be the use of fighting an invading army with that kind of power on their side? Give up now, Barbarian.

Reading Ferry’s translation, I was alternately struck by the naked propaganda of verses like the one above, and then transported by beautifully rendered description of the lands Aeneas traversed and the trials he endured. Sometimes, though, this descriptive verse can come off as inexplicably klutzy. In Book IV, Aeneas’s son Ascanius is out hunting and sees:

“…Startled wild goats

Run down along the ridges and the cliffs,

And deer in crowds and clouds of dust race down

And across the open fields to get away

from the hills and get away…”

I can hear the thundering hoofbeats here and smell the dust, but I can’t account for the odd repetition of to get away and get away. Nor do I understand the choice of crowds and clouds of dust to describe the deer stampede. The awkwardness of the phrasing calls attention to itself in a way I find somewhat irksome. Because I can’t understand enough Latin to know exactly what Ferry was doing here, I can only speculate. A translator’s job is often a tortuous balancing act between being loyal to the original words of the text, seeking the closest possible word-for-word translation, and then performing a kind of alchemy: producing an interpretive, artistic rendering of that translation into something that is also poetic and equally evocative in the new language. It is a rare talent that can do it well. Try too hard to cleave loyally to the original words of the poet, and you find the exact word you need doesn’t exist. The translator then must bend the text just enough to accommodate a word or phrase that evokes the closest thing to the original. You must be intimate with the original writer, but not too intimate. But if Ferry occasionally blurs this boundary, it usually comes off as a curiosity of the text more than a problem. Keep reading, and you’ll soon be feasting on a banquet of lines like this:

“And then Aeneas becomes

Aware of a grove in this deep secluded vale,

And of thickets with the breezes rustling through them,

And the river Lethe peaceably flowing past,

And hovering along the banks, a crowd

Of men and nations, more numerous by far

Than he could possibly count, as if they were,

On a summer’s day, unnumerable bees

Alighting on the many-colored blossoms

And swarming around white shining lily flowers,

And all the fields around murmured and hummed.”

Here the allusion to bees is so rich and satisfying, you can smell the honeysuckle and the freshly-cut meadow grass. But what makes it so poignant is that this is a vision Aeneas sees on his trip to Dis, Rome’s version of Hades. The men and nations he’s seeing are all dead. This both is, and very much is not the Underworld that Odysseus visits. Vergil adds some definite new twists. This bank of bee-like, swarming souls, explains the shade of Anchises:

 “…are the souls

Whose fate it is to be given bodies again,

And they are there to drink forgetfulness

From the soothing waters of the river Lethe.”

Anchises himself is not embodied. When Aeneas tries to embrace him, just as when Odysseus meets his mother in Hades, his father’s form becomes a vaporous wisp of smoke. But these souls on the riverbank have a physical form, because when they arrive after death to the Underworld their souls “are tainted still with faults,” and “must be punished to eradicate these faults,” explains Aeneas’s father. Some are to be “suspended upon the winds,” others to be “washed through with flooding waters,” or “eviscerated by fire until at last/their souls are purified and purged.”

Souls housed in bodies were certainly not in Homer’s afterworld. This is Vergil’s addition, and if it seems starkly un-Pagan, and even somewhat Medieval, it’s good to remember that theologies do indeed borrow, and even plagiarize from one another, particularly when theologians are avid readers of the classical texts that predate their own religion. St. Augustine of Hippo wrote extensively on the nature of Hell, including this idea that part of the wages of sin is to have the body itself resurrected in the afterlife, so as to feel the pain of Hell’s punishments. Indeed, Hell really wouldn’t make any sense without this caveat. We don’t know for certain, of course, that St. Augustine swiped this idea from Vergil, but we do know that Vergil changed the nature of the afterlife significantly from Homer’s all-equalizing, vast plane of shifting shades. He added a moral dimension, the idea of punishment and purgation, even a kind of Roman bureaucracy to the categories of castigation. Sin may not yet have been a thing in the Roman popular consciousness, but crime and punishment and the rule of law certainly were.

Of course, anyone who is familiar with Dante’s Inferno will recognize the layout of Vergil’s Dis, complete with guided boat crossings and souls clustered on the riverbanks. In fact, it’s difficult to fully appreciate the genius of Dante’s Divine Comedy without reading Vergil’s text that inspired him. The two make a wonderful back-to-back reading experience.

An odd thing that I often reflected on while reading Ferry’s Aeneid was the question of who Aeneas actually is. I wasn’t even sure by the end of the book if I liked him. In one way, his single-minded fixation on finding a new homeland in which to settle the survivors of Troy is poignant and easy to identify with. But his willingness, once he arrives, to slaughter the inhabitants of that land, to mow down any who would not ally with him in his colonial pursuit  – this is always where I lose sympathy for him, no matter the translation. In fact, I am most with Aeneas as a protagonist when he is behaving badly, as when he runs off to Carthage to have a fling with Dido, a detour as tangential to his divine mission as it is inexplicable – that is, until we remember that Dido, for the Roman reader of the times, was a stand-in for Cleopatra – another North African queen who nearly brought Rome to ruin with her seducing ways. This does not mean that Aeneas is Mark Antony – far from it. Vergil, in his subtlety, only faulted him with Antony’s tendency toward lust – in other words, made him human. But ultimately, Aeneas cannot escape his preordained fate. He is a hero – the son of the divine patroness of Rome. As such, he ultimately rises above his base impulses and sets the example of what Antony should have done: to leave that conniving queen to her own suicide and continue leading Rome to glory.

The last three books of the Aeneid are focused on the Trojan’s enemy, Turnus, and his Latin armies. He is the strongest of the leaders arrayed against Aeneas, and the last to surrender. When he finally does, in the concluding verses of the book, Aeneas is prepared to offer him mercy, and spare his life in return for laying down of arms (sparing the conquered, like a good Roman.) That is, until he notices that Turnus is wearing the armor of the slain Trojan leader, Pallas. This fills Aeneas with sudden, bloodthirsty rage.

“Did you

Think that you could get away with this,

Wearing this trophy of what you did to him?”

He then unsheaths his sword, and...

“…ripped open the breast of Turnus, and Turnus’s bone

Went chilled and slack, and his life, with a groaning shudder,

Indignant fled away to the shades below.”

Just as with his dalliance with Dido and self-mastering correction, the impression Aeneas leaves at the end of the book is one of a double nature. He is impulsive and passionate, and yet restrained and disciplined. He is diplomatic and square-dealing, yet brutal and merciless. His power is the rule of law, and at the same time it is the harnessed violence of “might makes right.”

 I have always wanted to believe that Vergil was too smart, too subtle, and too ingenious of a writer to have sold his talents to Caesar Augustus as a pure propagandist for Rome. Surely, he must have encoded some subversion into this text. Honestly, if he did, he hid it extremely well. But perhaps it lies in Aeneas himself. If Aeneas is Rome, and Rome is Empire, then we cannot help but be left unsettled by this scene at the end of this tale. It reveals just a little too much about the nature of our own empire, and the stories we tell ourselves about it.

*I have used here the original Latin spelling of Vergil, but most American publishers prefer Virgil, including University of Chicago Press.