There was no thunderbolt of understanding; no flash of enlightenment. My first reading, as a teenager, brought me painfully through only a tiny fraction of it. Reading each line was messy and laborious, a dismemberment of language rather than a decipherment. But I can’t think of another book that has invaded me more thoroughly.
It is the Aeneid, an epic poem in 12 books that its author, Virgil, left unfinished at his death in 19BC. It is a story of identity and anxiety about nationhood. It presents – invents – the founding mythology of Rome, its ideological boundaries. In it, Aeneas, on the wrong side at the end of the Greeks’ siege of Troy, flees the city and sets sail with a raggle-taggle of survivors. He – himself the son of a goddess, Venus – is encouraged on his way by a series of divine portents. As he crosses the Mediterranean, he has adventures: he encounters the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, in conscious echoes of Homer’s Odysseus. Most memorably, he falls in love with Dido, the Queen of Carthage, but abandons her when the gods remind him of his responsibilities to the future nation of Rome.
Also like Odysseus, he visits the Underworld, where he encounters his dead father Anchises, who prophesies the whole future of Rome up to Virgil’s own day and lays forth its destiny: it will have imperium sine fine, empire without limit; its role is parcere subiectis et debellare superbos, to spare the conquered and “war down” the proud. The second half of the poem sees Aeneas and his companions at last reach Italy, where, unwillingly, they wage war against the Rutulians, a local people. The poem ends, dark and dreadful, with Aeneas slaughtering the leader of the Rutulians, Turnus, as he begs for mercy.
The Aeneid doesn’t quite have the wild onward rush of its models, Homer’s poems. It has often been unfavourably compared with the great fount of Greek literature: by comparison with all that raw muscularity it is too effete, too mannered, too baroque. But the Aeneid is the product of an unimaginably different time from the archaic Greek texts: it is urban, self-conscious, and invested in an attempt to forge a poetic identity for Rome, a cultural framing for the strange destiny of this city, once just another insignificant town straddling a handful of hilltops and a marsh in Latium.
It is a foundation myth of a great and proud empire, but doubts seep out of it like water from a sieve. Aeneas is a tricky hero. When I read the second book of the epic, aged 15, I remember discussing, in class, a section where Aeneas struggles with the dilemma of whether to stay in Troy – and go down fighting – or leave and follow his god-allotted path. He hesitates, he prevaricates, he agonises. I remember thinking: how unheroic. I argued with my teacher about it, who was an adamant Aeneas cheerleader. It was a strangely formative moment: a realisation that texts are many-pathed and that there is no “right” route through them, especially one so labyrinthine as the Aeneid with its shadowed coves, dark woods and starless nights; with its deceptions, tricks and hostile gods.
Last year my book Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain was published, and I was blessed with a number of wise reviews that paid me the compliment of seeing more in it than I thought I had put in. “Virgil’s Aeneid is her master-text,” wrote one critic. Was it? Well, on reflection, it was. Thinking about Roman Britain and its remains had made me become a little obsessed with cycles of ruination. I thought, for example, about the way that so much of Roman London, which had lain undiscovered for centuries, had been revealed by the Blitz; and how the bombed city itself quickly came to resemble a classical ruin.
I read Rose Macaulay’s descriptions of “the new ruins” in her 1953 book The Pleasure of Ruins (which itself takes its title from Henry James’s observation about the “note of perversity” that is attendant on pleasure in “aspects of sentient ruin”). “Very soon,” she wrote of the war-wrecked buildings of Britain, “trees will be thrusting through the empty sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon the ruin will be enjungled, engulfed...” The brambles and rose-bay pushed into my brain: fronds of ivy creeping over window panes now give me a kind of Macaulay-esque shiver. Things are fragile. One day everything we know, to use Macaulay’s wonderful word, will be enjungled. Sunt lacrimae rerum, as Aeneas exclaims in the first book of the Aeneid – “the world is a world of tears”, as Robert Fagles (my recommended translator, by the way) renders this most vibratingly tender, and translation-resistant, half-line.
Virgil had been there before us. In book eight of the epic, Aeneas is taken round the site of what, centuries in the future, will become Rome, founded by his descendants Romulus and Remus. Time collapses dizzyingly in this description: where the forum and the fashionable shopping streets are in Virgil’s time, cattle wander. A numinous presence seems to seep from the hill that will one day be the site of the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, a spot that for Aeneas is silvestribus horrida dumis, bristling with thorny thickets. Evander, his tour guide, a settler from Arcadia, points out the ruins of some former civilisation: reliquias ueterumque uides monimenta uirorum – you see the relics and monuments of ancient peoples. Virgil could not have foreseen that in medieval times the pompous forum of his own day would have recrudesced into pasture, becoming known as the Campo Vaccino (Cow Hollow); nor that by the 21st century it would have reverted to picturesque, oleandered ruins, monimenta ueterum uirorum, the monuments of ancient peoples, once more.
Virgil’s Aeneid travels with me through life. It is a wonderful tool to think and feel with. It even has something of the uncanny about it. The sortes Virgilianae, a kind of Virgilian divination technique, has been used since ancient times. You take a text of Virgil, allow it to open at a random page, close your eyes and let your finger stop at a random point – then read the line. Charles I and Mary Shelley were fans. I have just done it: book seven, line 356, Queen Amata of the Rutulians is being sent insane. “Before her mind was seized by the flame in her heart,” translates the line. Time to stop, then.
