The Irish poet Seamus Heaney's Seeing Things was first published in 1991, to immediate acclaim. The collection is framed by translations of two passages of canonical poetry, Virgil's account of Aeneas' consultation of the Sibyl and the instructions he receives from her about finding the golden bough, often read as a symbol of wisdom and initiation, prior to his descent into the Underworld, and Dante's meeting in Inferno 3 with Charon the ferryman of Hell, itself inspired by another episode in Aeneid 6. The first original poem in the book, 'The journey back', describes an encounter with a more immediate poetic predecessor, Philip Larkin, whose shade quotes from Dante and describes himself as 'A nine-to-five man who had seen poetry'; the piece resonates with earlier poetic meetings, T. S. Eliot's with the 'familiar compound ghost' in part two of 'Little Gidding' and - one of Eliot's intertexts here - Dante's with the shade of Virgil at the outset of the Divine Comedy. In his new pursuit of the visionary Heaney was also coming home to some of the most influential traditions of Western poetry. Five years later Heaney is a Nobel Laureate, and Seeing Things is already in Britain an A-level set text. Successful canonisation can be achieved with surprising rapidity - the Aeneid itself, greeted (according to some with a degree of irony) by the elegist Propertius in advance of its publication as 'something greater than the Iliad', almost instantly became a school text, and part of the furniture of the minds of educated Romans.

Introduction

Virgil's cosmos comprises gods and humans and nature. These are huge topics. In this chapter I shall analyse the complex relationships between these elements by taking a broad view of Virgil's religious and philosophical ideas.

Virgil's gods - especially in the Aeneid - have always been a major focus of attention for scholars. Typical is Camps's chapter (1969), 'The higher powers: Fate and the Gods'. A recent, crucial contribution to the subject is Feeney's The Gods in Epic (1991) which devotes considerable attention to the Aeneid and provides a guide through the massive bibliography on the subject. Feeney's approach constitutes an advance on earlier rationalising or allegorising accounts of Virgil's gods. Instead he insists on the complexities of representation of the gods and explores issues of power in epic as they relate to the characters, human and divine. By contrast, the philosophical flavour of Virgil's views is not explicitly the subject of any single, entire book. Hardie in Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (1986) says much of significance about cosmology, but critics' analysis of Virgil's ethics is mostly subsumed in discussions of character, for example, in articles arguing for or against the Stoic dimension of Aeneas' conduct.

Since Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 Dionysus has been the dominant Greek deity in the imaginations of scholars. His glamorous and ambiguous personality has stimulated a great deal of research and interpretation, recently intensified by the discovery of new evidence for Dionysiac mystery cult. Not all the factors at work have been academic and intellectual; in the 1930s, for example, the power of Dionysus could be strongly felt in the rallies orchestrated by Hitler and Mussolini (R. P. Winnington-Ingram wrote his pioneering Euripides and Dionysus under the influence of his response to fascism). Since the Second World War Dionysus has found a new place in theatrical life, largely because Bacchae has seemed to actors, directors and audiences to need so little mediation as a play for the times, in which drug culture, rock music, sex and violence, the many varieties of modern ecstatic cult, and even football hysteria all find recognisable analogues.

Yet despite the intensive and brilliant work devoted to Dionysus in his ancient context we still have to face some obstinate puzzles. If tragedy at Athens was originally and essentially under the sign of Dionysus, though other deities would appropriate drama for their own festivals in due course (see Ch. 9, pp. 223-4), what was it about this art form that was particularly Dionysiac? Was there a logic in the Athenian construction of Dionysus that made him uniquely appropriate as god of the drama, and especially of tragic drama? (Comedy has seemed to pose less acute problems because of its more obvious appropriateness for performance at festivals in honour of the wine-god.) Was it a matter of stories about Dionysus shaping the mythological groundwork and plot patterns of tragedy, as used to be the standard view, or of the god's symbolic characteristics - as the Other, the outsider, sexually ambivalent, transformative, elusive - making him good to think with, or of the distinctively dramatic features of his rituals (the mask, ecstatic possession, mystic initiation)?

Of all the classical authors it is Virgil whose visual legacy is the most difficult to define. With most other writers, artists were mainly concerned with illustrating their works, though the choice of subject represented and its interpretation or intended reading by the viewer may be inflected by the time and context in which it occurs. So, for example, while allegorical meanings were sometimes imparted to otherwise literally rendered episodes from writers like Homer and Ovid, or some historical event described by Plutarch or Livy could be used to express an ideal of exemplary action or to point a moral, on the whole the iconographies associated with particular authors predominantly fall into the category of illustration. Virgil is different because his influence on artists is so varied in its content and interpretation.

There are, of course, a great many works of art which individually or in series draw their subjects directly from what he wrote and which very accurately reproduce his words - indeed, only Ovid has been more frequently or more exhaustively illustrated - but Virgil's presence in art goes much further than the process of translating texts into images.

LIFE IMITATES ART?

Theatre as we understand it in the West today was invented in all essentials in ancient Greece, and more specifically in classical Athens. In Athens, however, theatre was always a mass social phenomenon, considered too important to be left solely to theatrical specialists or even confined to the theatres to be found both in the centre of Athens itself and in some of the constituent demes (villages or wards) of the surrounding civic territory of Attica. Athenian tragic drama did not have merely a political background, a passive setting within the polis, or city, of the Athenians. Tragedy, rather, was itself an active ingredient, and a major one, of the political foreground, featuring in the everyday consciousness and even the nocturnal dreams of the Athenian citizen.

This was especially the case after the establishment of an early form of democracy at Athens, the world's first such polity, towards the end of the sixth century BC, although some kind of tragic drama seems to have been developed and officially recognised several decades earlier during the relatively benign and populist rule of the aristocratic dictator Peisistratus (c. 545-528). Indeed, democratic Athenian political life in the fifth and fourth centuries was also deeply theatrical outside the formally designated theatrical spaces. Not only did the Athenians theatricalise their ordinary experience through ritual dramas of everyday life, in the manner of the African Ndembu studied by Victor Turner. There was a formal analogy or even identity between their experience inside and that outside the theatre, most notably in the performance of the constitutive communal ritual of animal blood-sacrifice.

'Virgil' does not just denote the 13,000 or so lines of verse which are now usually attributed to the poet who is believed to have lived between 70 and 19 BC: the word also connotes all the interpretations which have accreted around those lines over the past two thousand years. A study of English translations - over a more modest period of five hundred years - can help us to understand what kind of Virgil has become embedded in English culture. Someone who has taught us, or someone who has taught someone who has taught us, will have read and absorbed, say, Dryden's Virgil - and Dryden had read widely in earlier translations, and was read by almost all later translators. When we interpret we usually think that it is simply we alone who are doing the interpretation. But our language contains buried fragments of the past, and to know the origins of at least some of these fragments can enable us to realise that some of what we think of as being our own views come from dark corners of history. This chapter aims to show the genesis of two more or less irreconcilable tendencies in recent responses to Virgil. The first is the belief that Virgil is a poet of divided loyalties, whose poems cannot completely align themselves with the empire of Rome. The second is the very widespread view that a perfect translation of Virgil would be so accurate that its translator would be invisible. Both of these beliefs emerge, as we shall see, at very specific and surprisingly early periods. What also comes out of this survey, albeit partial, of Virgil in English translation is that Virgil has only rarely appealed to poets who enjoy the patronage of English monarchs. Most English translators of Virgil are anxious about their own standing, and usually they support losing political causes. Virgil tends to be adopted into English by poets who need the consolation of his authority or the sustaining dream of his imperial vision.

To offer a survey of modern receptions of Virgil in this chapter would be to follow, with unequal footsteps and all too close behind, Theodore Ziolkowski's magisterial account in his Virgil and the Moderns, which appeared as recently as 1993. Ziolkowski suggests that Virgil's presence in the twentieth century is particularly apparent as a cultural icon and avatar appropriated by poets, novelists, historians and politicians to configure their aspirations and anxieties in the period between the two world wars:

The status accorded to the text of Virgil in this period was almost scriptural, explicitly so for Theodor Haecker, the passionate anti-Nazi whose Vergil. Vater des Abendlands of 1931 was one of the most popular works of the period on the poet, and was translated into English in 1934 (as Virgil. Father of the West), French and Italian in 1935, Dutch in 1942 and Spanish in 1945. Haecker proclaims:

The story of Greek tragedy in the fifth century BC is an extraordinarily difficult one to tell. On the one side there are thirty-two well-known plays transmitted from antiquity through the medieval tradition, plays that have exerted a profound, even immeasurable, influence on Western culture, while on the other there are fragmentary scraps of evidence, often enough distorted by the preconceptions of later times, from which scholars try to reconstruct a whole history of an institution. How Dionysiac festivals were organised, what the earliest theatres, masks and costumes looked like, how the music sounded, what sort of performance-styles and dramatic conventions developed, how far the surviving plays are typical of the hundreds, or thousands, that must have been composed during the period, and what tragedy meant for the contemporary Athenian - and non-Athenian - audiences that watched it: these are the questions that need answers. What is lacking is systematic documentation, surviving from the fifth century itself, of this new and extremely successful artistic and civic phenomenon, and there is no prospect that anything of the kind will ever be recovered.

The best that modern research can hope for is new fragments of evidence - a vase-painting or an inscription, a papyrus text of part of a lost play or of a scholar's introduction (hypothesis) - which will fill some of the gaps in the story. The most striking example was the publication in 1952 of a small papyrus scrap of a hypothesis which proved that Aeschylus' Suppliant Women was not the earliest surviving Greek tragedy but belonged to the 460s, and therefore to a late stage in the poet's career. This play, with its chorus of the daughters of Danaus (the myth said there were fifty of them), had previously been taken as a sample of the tragedy of the 490s and was thought to have a chorus of fifty like the dithyramb; it was read as a 'primitive' piece more akin to choral lyric poetry than to the true dialectic of drama.

This is a chapter about change: the complex and largely irrecoverable process whereby Athenian tragedy transformed itself into an international art-form which became familiar and influential throughout the Greek-speaking world, was translated and imitated by Roman playwrights, mutated into various types of balletic and operatic performance, and as a select corpus of classical texts helped to shape the educational system, and inform the culture, of later antiquity. The small group of plays that survived into the Byzantine period and beyond have of course had a continuing history of reception, which in recent times has once more become a history of performance (see Chs. 10-12 below). But even for the history of tragedy in the ancient world, the range of space and time covered is too vast, the evidence too diverse and uneven, and the phenomenon itself too elusive for a comprehensive account of this momentous process to be written. As one element in what became an elaborate entertainment industry, tragedy cannot easily be studied in isolation from other dramatic media: in terms of performance and organisation it needs to be considered alongside comedy and (increasingly) alongside musical performance and pantomime. And since the language and iconography of theatre in general invaded the life of later antiquity in innumerable ways, its deeper cultural influence is to be found almost anywhere one cares to look.

Coleridge's famous question, 'If you take from Virgil his language and metre, what do you leave him?', is often taken to mean there is little but style to praise in Virgil, and Coleridge does speak elsewhere of Virgil's lack of 'deep feeling'. But the remark may have been prompted by Coleridge's reading a month before of Wordsworth's translation of Aeneid Book 1, and thus be a comment on how much is lost when Virgil is read only in translation. At the end of the twentieth century, the percentage of readers who encounter Virgil only in translation is much higher than in Coleridge's day (that specific comment comes from his Table Talk of 8 May 1824). Further, the tendency for those who do read Virgil in Latin to do so after only a few years of study of the language means that his Latin is not so much 'read' as translated or even 'metathesised', that is to say the Latin words are (at least mentally) rearranged and supplemented to fit some combination of the syntax of the reader's own language and his or her expectations of how a Latin prose sentence should read. At the same time, however, that fewer and fewer people on the planet can read Virgil's Latin either at all, or well, a tiny minority can arguably read the poet's language better than anyone has for several centuries.

How are the texts of ancient drama to be understood by modern interpreters - separated as we are by so great a distance of time and difference of culture? This problem has been treated in many ways in this century, as the study of ancient literature, like the study of other literatures, has undergone rapid institutional and intellectual changes. There are many paths and genealogies that could be traced through this history, and not only do many different methodological approaches overlap and interrelate in a variety of complex ways, but also there is great variety within any one broad heading (such as 'structuralism'). In this chapter I shall try to unravel some of the main threads that make up the texture of contemporary debate about critical methodology with regard to Greek tragedy. The methodology of each critic who works on Greek tragedy - myself included, for sure - is not the application of a ready-made theory so much as the product of (at least) teachers' and colleagues' influence, reading and study within classical scholarship and other fields, institutional pressures, laziness, acumen ... In attempting to trace some of the main lines of enquiry, it is inevitable that the siting of each scholar within the intellectual and social institutions of classical scholarship cannot be finely nuanced. What is more, the teleology of a history that ends with a necessarily partial view of the here and now must distort the picture of the critical developments to be traced. None the less, some lines on the map - however tentatively drawn - will help an appreciation of how contemporary understandings of Greek tragedy have developed.

By 300 BC or so Athenian tragedy had become the property of every Greek city, performed in its local theatre and reflected in its visual arts. This iconic prominence was sustained throughout the Graeco-Roman world for the next 600 years and more. That is why, for example, many of the wallpaintings discovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum show tragic subjects, and even more include the motif of the tragic mask. These provide their own interest, but this chapter will concentrate on the period from 500 to 300 BC, the era when Athens was still the active centre of drama. It will also concentrate mainly on painted pottery, if only because very little that is relevant survives of the wall-paintings, sculpture, metal-work or other artforms.

As is amply shown throughout this Companion, tragedy was a major prestigious event within the cultural and political life of classical Athens. Pottery-painting was, by comparison, a humble and domestic art-form. Detailed paintings in the red-figure techniques were, none the less, an especially Athenian achievement; and, like drama, this Attic product was disseminated to all corners of the Hellenic world. While many of the vessels were standard and mass-produced, many others display elaborate workmanship, and must have been objects which expected individual attention. A fair number, furthermore, represent mythological and heroic scenes; and they do so in a dignified and serious style - at first glance not unlike that of tragedy.

Servius (called Marius or Maurus Servius Honoratus in MSS from the ninth century onwards) was a grammarian of the fourth century AD, the author of a celebrated commentary on Virgil. This is generally held to be based on a commentary (now lost) by an earlier fourth-century AD commentator, Aelius Donatus (the teacher of St Jerome), and exists in two forms: the longer, known as Servius Auctus, Servius Danielis, DServius, or DS, was first published in 1600 by Pierre Daniel, and is thought to be a seventh- to eighth-century expansion of the shorter form on the basis of material from Donatus' commentary not used by Servius himself. We know little about Servius' life, but he appears as a young man in Macrobius' dialogue the Saturnalia (dramatic date 383-4, but probably composed later in the fifth century) as a respectful follower of the pagan leader Aurelius Symmachus (Sat. 1.2.15).

Servius' commentary comes at the end of a long period of Virgilian commentary, which had begun in the first century BC. The commentary form itself goes back to Hellenistic and earlier Greek scholarship, above all on Homer, and in a sense Servius' work bears the same relationship to Homeric commentary as the Aeneid does to the Iliad and Odyssey. The format is the familiar one of a lemma (one or more words of the text) followed by comments, in the manner of a modern variorum edition: sometimes scholars are named, but more commonly (especially in the shorter version) we have merely expressions like 'some say . . . others . ..' The text is typically seen as raising a 'problem' (quaestio), to which a 'solution' is offered: the methodology goes back to the beginnings of Homeric commentary.

In 1930 Europe celebrated the bimillennium of Virgil's birth. The celebrations fell in the middle of Mussolini's dictatorship (1922-43), strengthening the links that Mussolini sought to establish between his Italian regime and ancient Rome. The Aeneid, singing of the birth of a new city and a new empire, helped to validate Mussolini's imperialist policies, and in 1936 a new Italian empire was born. In the same year the Austrian writer Hermann Broch began to meditate upon Virgil's position in the modern world and by 1937 he had conceived his novel The Death of Virgil. This envoi will focus in particular on Broch's novel, since it probes and anticipates many of the anxieties attached to twentieth-century responses to Virgil.

The opposed political approaches to Virgil offered by Mussolini and the anti-Fascist Broch typify the variety of Virgilian studies proliferating at this time. A renaissance of interest in Virgil was due not solely to the bimillennium, but more suggestively to the sense of crisis pervading Europe in the entre-deux-guerres period. George Steiner has observed that after the First World War the European ear became more attuned to the Virgilian voice of exile than to the Homeric cry of triumph. Such a claim seems validated by the wealth of Virgilian biographies published in the 1920s and 1930s.