Classical World

My contribution is a hybrid; I was the respondent to the four good papers in our January 2016 panel and will begin by including some of those remarks here, on the two printed in this volume, but then end with brief, largely autobiographical reflections of my own on the Harvard School.

Nandini Pandey's fine paper shows how Vergilian texts, from Eclogue 1 through the Aeneid, lend themselves to a dialectical interpretation compatible either with the Harvard-School approach or with balancing the Harvard approach with other approaches.¹ Almost half of her paper is on the Eclogues, and I'll comment almost exclusively on those sections. Of Eclogue 1, Pandey notes that "[t]he music of this poem arises from the counterpoint between the pessimistic Meliboeus, displaced from his land, and the optimistic Tityrus, saved by Octavian. In other words, Vergil's earliest work was already characterized by 'dual voices.'" Her paper nicely shows how Eclogue 1 can teach us how to read Vergil, and that what it teaches us is to expect conflicting attitudes and positions, as here we see two characters with a bright future and with a grim future. The pattern of winners and losers set up by the depiction of Tityrus and Meliboeus in Eclogue 1 continues with Aristaeus and Orpheus in the Georgics, and in the Aeneid Aeneas and Dido, and then finally Aeneas and Turnus. My small book on inconsistencies (2007) is one of several works that have argued that many Latin poems offer oppositions like these, because Greek and Latin poets knew that texts tend to fly apart, tend to contain multiple voices, and that they therefore worked with, rather than struggled against, the interesting problems that this produced. More formidably, Conte (2007) has more firmly established these claims for the Aeneid. He argues well that "Virgil, the epic poet of [End Page 47] pathos, learned from them [i.e., from 'the great dramatic poets'] how to grant space to those individual voices, making himself their witness and their champion" (34) and that "for Virgil . . . destabilizing the meaning of his text by fuelling it with internal contradictions is a genuine strategy of composition, a strategy by which the 'ambiguous' manner of Greek tragedy infects the language of epic" (161).

Pandey nicely analyzes Eclogue 9.44–50, where Lycidas quotes an earlier song by Moeris about Daphnis and Caesar, which recalls and re-contextualizes Eclogue 5's lamentation for Daphnis, which "becomes highly ironic in the context of Moeris' current plight as a refugee." She notes that "Moeris' grandsons, unlike Daphnis' (50), will emphatically not be able to harvest the pears he planted." I offer the reminder that Eclogue 9.50, insere, Daphni, piros: carpent tua poma nepotes ("graft pears, Daphnis, your grandsons will pluck your fruit"), echoes Meliboeus' words in Eclogue 1.73, who on his way out of town sarcastically and bitterly says insere nunc, Meliboee, piros, pone ordine vitis ("graft pears now, Meliboeus, place vines in order"). Meliboeus knows he will get no benefit from his careful grafting and viticulture. Eclogue 9 reprises not only some concerns of Eclogue 5, but also some of the issues of Eclogue 1. Eclogue 1 tells us that somebody has had their farm or their ability to farm saved. Eclogue 9 almost cancels that out: we might paraphrase, "Didn't the poet save the day?" "No, that's what we thought, but that's not true."

In Pandey's approach to Eclogue 9 I also see possible insight into the Fourth Eclogue. That poem offers a gloriously optimistic prophecy, with a dramatic date of 40 bce, about the birth of a wonder child and the wonderful age to follow. But what happens if we recontextualize this poem in exactly the same way that Eclogue 9 recontextualizes earlier songs, and put it in a collection of poems in 38 or 37 or 35, when everyone knows both that neither Antony nor Octavian had a son, and that the Peace of Brundisium did not work out?²

My one micro-comment on the Aeneid: given discussion of Aeneas' reading of...