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.

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: