In Plato's Republic, when Socrates is describing the imperviousness to fear of the Guardians of his new Republic, he catches himself using rather grand metaphorical terms, and he immediately rebukes himself for speaking tragikos, 'tragically', 'like a tragic character' (4i3b4). Demosthenes, the great orator, dismisses the rhetoric of Aeschines, his opponent, as bombast with the verb tragoidein, 'to play in a tragedy' (which is also a dig at his former career as an actor) (18.13; 19.189). The comic playwright Aristophanes, who repeatedly parodies the language of tragedy, has a character in his play Peace wonder why the hero didn't fly on Pegasus rather than a dung-beetle, and thus appear tragikoteros, 'more tragic', 'more like a tragic hero' (136). Already, in the classical polis, 'the tragic' has become synonymous with a certain grandeur of expression, high-flown periphrasis and even heroic posturing. Tragedy is - and was perceived to be - made up of a particular register of language: there is a style and vocabulary proper to the genre. So how is the language of tragedy to be characterised? There are several types of answer that can be given to this question, that take us far beyond generalisations about the grand and the heroic. What is more, the tragic texts themselves are deeply concerned with how language is (to be) used. This chapter will explore the questions of tragic language.

The first type of answer that can be developed is a formal one. One basic articulation of tragedy is the difference between scenes and choral odes. The scenes are conventionally divided into rhēseis and stichomythia. A rhēseis (plural rhēseis) is a set speech of varying length (rarely more than a hundred lines) in which a figure offers an exposition of his or her position, or a description of an event, or a reflection on events.

The Virgilian Vitae impose on the poet's life a strong pattern of linear development, a teleology which constructs the Aeneid as the simultaneous closure - ideological and narrative - of Virgil's life and his writings. Within this pattern, which distinguishes Virgil from his contemporaries and makes of him a paradigm for his successors, the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid become part of one text, which we might call 'the Book of Virgil', or (referring to the development from the relatively modest beginning in the short Eclogues to the final project of the Aeneid) 'the poetic career'. In the Middle Ages for instance, the biographical sequence found in the Vitae, which links the heroic epic with its bucolic and didactic predecessors, is mapped onto a hierarchy not only of literary genres but also of social rank: the Rota Virgilii (the 'Wheel of Virgil'). Here, the triadic career is pictured in the form of concentric circles, a quasi-cosmic image, in which the texts of Virgil come to stand for all possible forms of human life and expression. The notion of the career, a triadic biography to match the triadic oeuvre, may also be found in the well-known epitaph quoted by Donatus:

Since antiquity Virgil the epicist has also been viewed as Virgil the tragedian; Martial describes him simply as Maro cothurnatus, 'Virgil in buskins' (5.5.8, 7.63.5). The task of collecting the numerous parallels between the Aeneid and tragedies both Attic and Roman was well under way by the time of the late-antique commentators Servius and Macrobius. But why should the poet who set out to write the definitive Roman epic include so many elements from the distinct (if historically related) genre of tragedy?

A recent study shows the inseparability of formal study of tragic sources for the Aeneid from wider questions of interpretation. Oliver Lyne exploits an allusion to the Sophoclean Ajax in the characterisation of Aeneas to reinforce a prevalent modern reading of the Aeneid as a 'tragic' (with a small 't') poem: 'a further [non-epic] voice naggingly insinuates a quite different message', a message that makes of the poem a pessimistic, even subversive and anti-Augustan epic. Here the opposition of 'epic' and 'tragic' implies a conflict between the Aeneid's function as a public panegyric of Roman history and the valuation to be given to the private experience of loss and grief.

Despite the innumerable labours of many critics, Virgil's Georgics remains one of the most fundamentally intractable works of ancient literature. In recent years, most interpreters have agreed that the poem does not really tell us about farming but about ourselves and our world: 'didacticism about agriculture proves metaphor for didacticism about man'. While this consensus may result in part from a modern distaste for and unfamiliarity with agriculture, it has yielded a diversity of compelling interpretations that cannot be wholly explained by changing cultural needs. If we are to understand more fully what this poem does, we need to abandon the interpretive paradigm that seeks some authoritative discursive unity without taking refuge in mere relativism (quot homines, tot sententiae). I would like to argue that the diversity of compelling interpretations is part of the Georgics' larger value and meaning.

We do not need to choose between a poem about dirt and dung and a poem about metaphysics, because this poem addresses the great abstracts (knowledge, history, power, psychology, ethics, art, death) in the way our lives do: by 'contact' with things, by fictions and interpretations, by witty and elegant postures, and ultimately by the failure of projects and systems. The poem captures a double movement: particulars serve as allegories of human problems and values, while allegories are inhabited by things with their particular tasks, objects, and (sometimes colliding) perspectives.

Scrutiny of character has long been a concern of conventional literary criticism. As a result, the notion of character has come to be ignored or bypassed by critics and theorists who do not want to be conventional. They see the study of characterisation as the haven of connoisseurs. However, characterisation involves a large set of questions which bear on fundamental issues of textual interpretation. The way we attempt to answer common questions about Virgil's characters will determine - or be determined by - the way we read Virgil's corpus in general.

For instance, a preoccupation with characters as 'types' (e.g. as epic or tragic figures) is often indicative of a generic reading of Virgil's poetry. Alternatively, to regard Virgilian characters as 'individuals' is to presuppose that his poems function as forms of representation: simply postulating the 'development' of a character like Aeneas involves an essentialised notion of a person which the Aeneid would then be supposed to portray. Again, appreciation of Virgil's construction of character could equally require a conception of his poems as forms of expression. In characterising Dido or anyone else, the poet is simultaneously characterising or expressing himself. Such a view of character could entail a type of rhetorical criticism of Virgil's poetry.

The fact that Virgil's poetry exhibits many points of contact with the literature of the past is beyond dispute. What to make of this fact is much less certain. The view taken here is that the poetics of intertextuality is one of Virgil's most powerfully evocative tools for communicating ideas, for establishing his place in the literary canon, and for eliciting the reader's active collaboration in making meaning. In this essay I shall try to suggest something of what attention to the intertext can do to enhance the appreciation of Virgil's poetry.

The phenomenon of 'intertextuality' (or 'allusion', 'imitation', 'reference', etc.) is present in all poetry and, to some extent, in all language. Some poets deliberately cultivate an allusive style, and thus encourage their readers' expectation of seeing through one text to its source or model. Virgil alludes constantly to a wide range of authors, and we are fortunate in possessing complete texts of many of his favourite works, both Greek and Latin. In the case of works now lost, we rely on ancient summaries and modern collections of fragments. In fact much of our knowledge about early Latin poetry derives from ancient students of Virgilian intertextuality, who quote many of the fragments we now possess to illustrate their influence on Virgil.

It may have been at the suggestion of his patron Asinius Pollio, aristocratic promoter of the new poetics which began with the generation of Catullus, that Virgil undertook to become the Roman Theocritus. At all events his decision to imitate a collection of sophisticated Hellenistic literary experiments, and in the process to 'pastoralise' them (only a minority of the Idylls have a rustic setting), was to have important and unexpected consequences. Without the Eclogues pastoral might never have become one of the major, exemplary genres of European poetry. E. R. Curtius declared that anyone unfamiliar with the First Eclogue 'lacks one key to the literary tradition of Europe'; while for Paul Alpers the collection constitutes 'probably the single most important document in the history of poetry'. Moreover Virgil's canonical status and the eventual shape of his poetic career as it appeared in retrospect, with its apparently purposeful upward march through the genres, meant that pastoral became an appropriate point d'appui for a youthful poet with aspirations for immortality; both Spenser and Milton, for example, consciously shaped their artistic lives to the Virgilian example.

In Book 8 of the Aeneid, when Aeneas visits the Arcadian settlement of Pallanteum, he is led by Evander through the site of the future city of Rome. What greets them is a rustic scene: wooded hills, herds of cattle, a simple village of humble immigrants. As Aeneas' ship comes up the Tiber, the waves themselves marvel at the unfamiliar sight of armed men on an oared ship. Virgil's readers might have reacted similarly to the novelty of the scene, a view of Rome before historical Rome existed: a small settlement surrounded by forest near the banks of a river, occupying the place of the buildings and grandeur of Augustan Rome, with the commerce of the Tiber and of the Forum Boarium where Aeneas landed. As the Trojans arrive, the contrast between past and present is made explicit: they see Evander's small village 'which Roman power has now raised to the heavens' (8.99-100). So too, during Aeneas' walk through the future city, Evander is described as 'the founder of the Roman citadel' (313); they pass the gate 'which the Romans call Carmentalis' (338-9); the Capitoline is 'golden now, once bristling with wooded thickets' (348). As they reach Evander's house, they see herds of cattle 'mooing in the Roman Forum and the fashionable Carinae' (361).

The celebrity of Virgil's works in the Roman world was immediate and lasting. The Aeneid enjoyed the rare distinction of being hailed as a canonical poem while it was still being written: 'something greater than the Iliad is being born' {nescioquid mains nascitur Iliade), wrote the elegist Propertius in the mid-20s, perhaps with a touch of irony, but anticipating the serious comparisons with Homer that would become conventional. Virgil's first appearance as a school author also dates from the 20s, when his published work still comprised only the Eclogues and Georgics; in the guise of a 'modern poet' he was lectured on by Q. Caecilius Epirota, a freedman of Cicero's friend Atticus and an intimate of Cornelius Gallus, from whom he may have derived a fondness for neoteric poetry uncommon in a schoolmaster. Caecilius probably knew Virgil, and could have had personal reasons for including him among the authors he read with his students, but his decision looks forward to the central role Virgil was to play in Roman literary education for the rest of Antiquity.

Acclaim by fellow-poets and early embalmment as a school text are not unusual fates for a major Latin poet; as much could be said, for example, of Horace, especially the lyric Horace of the Odes. What makes the reception of Virgil unique among Roman poets is the pervasive quality of his influence, which is visible both at the level of popular culture and of official ideology.

In modern criticism the term 'ecphrasis' ('description') is used specifically to refer to a literary description of a work of art. In ancient criticism the term belongs to a much wider area of reference, covering both the visual force and the emotional impact of verbal art (not only poetry but historiography and rhetoric). Heroic epic, in particular, was held to be a narrative form oriented towards the production of visual effects and the re-creation of an eyewitness reaction to events. Virgil is particularly famous as a maker of impressive descriptions, including e.g. a dramatic study of a brook (G. 1.104ff.), a bold vision of monstrous snakes swimming in the Dardanelles (Aen. 2.203ff), a miniature of a tame stag (7.483ff.). Didactic hexameter and heroic epic are alike very concerned with visual impact, although with divergent emphases: didactic poetry focuses on the typical and repeatable, while heroic poetry is a narrative of striking events, traditionally geared towards the grandiose and the violent. Yet in both forms the challenge of representation is at stake: how adequate is the verbal medium to convey an impression of what is being described (whether the context requires that this be vivid and fresh, or realistic and typical, or unique and shocking)? More specifically, with regard to ecphrasis in the modern sense of a verbal re-creation of a visual work of art, verbal representation tests its own limits through a confrontation between literary description and representations in other media. In this case the verbal message will be measured both against direct perceptions of reality (or visual imagination) and against the model of the visual arts.

TRAGEDY AS REPETITION AND INNOVATION

In the Middle Ages, when tragedy as an enactment on stage had been all but forgotten, Chaucer still knew the right shape for a tragic tale. In such a scheme, only the names need be changed, for the form of the tale - and its meaning - always remain the same. Of course, Chaucer's definition is far too restrictive to describe the shapes that Greek tragic plots actually took, but even the much more knowing and differentiated analysis in Aristotle's Poetics, from which Chaucer's notion of tragedy ultimately derives, appears to certify only some of the plots used by the tragedians as properly tragic. Still, it is clear that in practice not any subject was a tragic subject, not any plot-shape suitable to the requirements of the tragic stage. First, the plots of Greek tragedies were drawn largely from a limited repertoire of legends, the great cycles in which the Greeks came to terms with their own past - the stories of 'a few families', as Aristotle says, above all the legendary histories of Troy and Thebes.

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines a fidus Achates as 'devoted follower, henchman'; and one of the aims of this Companion is to be as helpful as possible to its readers. It is devised for anyone, whether a classicist or not, who is seeking guidance and orientation for a fuller understanding of Virgil. We have assumed that most of those who consult this volume will have read parts of Virgil's poetry if only in translation - for those with Latin the best introduction is to read some of the texts with a good commentary, of which there are many. We certainly cannot attempt to replicate the work of the commentators here; rather we offer a series of essays on topics which can constitute useful entry-points for the devoted student of Virgil. And though we aim to help and to provide what is sometimes called 'basic information', we do not seek to simplify or to offer any sort of bland orthodoxy. We assume that our readers (even if not expert on the subject) are seeking intelligent and sophisticated comment, and we hope that the book will prove exciting as well as useful, and will point to the shape of Virgilian scholarship and criticism to come.

INTRODUCTION

In the modern sense of the word 'democracy' it is the tragic treatment of the un-democratic aspects of Athenian society which has been the focus of much recent scholarship. The Athenian democracy was a xenophobic, patriarchal, and imperialist community, economically dependent on slavery and imperial tribute, and tragedy has proved susceptible to interpretations disclosing its expression of ideas necessary to the system's perpetuation, ideas implying the inferiority of foreigners, women and slaves. This scholarly perspective is inseparable from its own social context, which has since the early 1960s been characterised by the unprecedented success of feminism and anti-racism.

This chapter suggests that through some recurrent types of plot-pattern tragedy affirmed in its citizen spectators' imaginations the social world in which they lived. The focus is on three types of pattern - plays in which male Athenian performers represented (i) mythical Athenians interacting with outsiders, (ii) women, (iii) significant slaves. Non-Athenians, women, and slaves were in reality excluded from the assembly and normally had to be represented by a citizen in the lawcourts (cf. Chs. 1 and 3 above, pp. 26-31; 61-6).

Virgil is at first sight an unlikely prospect as a politically engaged writer. As depicted by his ancient biographers, he is a retiring, even reclusive type, of a philosophic rather than an active nature, uncomfortable in Rome and eager to leave it. By comparison, his fellow-poet Horace, who fought at Philippi and may have witnessed Actium, assumes an almost Hemingway-esque air of bravado. But the ancient Lives also insist on Virgil's proximity to figures of power throughout his literary career, from Asinius Pollio to Maecenas and ultimately to Augustus himself, and repeatedly trace connections between those personal contacts and the prominence of contemporary history in Virgil's poetry. Thus the First Eclogue, in which the shepherd Tityrus relates how he was forced to give up his property but regained it in Rome through the intervention of a godlike youth, was soon read as a poeme a clef with Tityrus representing Virgil and the youth Octavian. We are told that the Georgics, which contains in the proem to Book 3 clear references to the triple triumph of 29 celebrating victory over the forces of Antony and Cleopatra, was read by Virgil to Octavian on his return to Italy from the East in the summer of that year.