More Aeneid
(After reading my own description of the Fall of Saigon in "Existence and Uniqueness".)
It's amazing that when Hector says "sat patriae Priamoque datum", Aeneas refuses to believe him. But on second thought, it's not incomprehensible; it makes sense. It has everything to do with who Aeneas is, and what Troy means to him.
I've thought about how Hector is telling Aeneas to "keep the faith and run away". The song I mentioned in April, and am now mentioning again, is by Real McCoy and is called "Run Away".
Run away, run away, run away and save your life,
Run away, run away, run away if you want to survive,
It's time to break free, oh, oh, oh, oh, run away, oh, oh, oh, oh,
You better break free, oh, oh, oh, oh, run away, oh, oh, oh, oh
[...]
You gotta keep the faith, you gotta keep the faith,
You better keep the faith and run away.
(I want to go buy this song on CD; I miss the New Year's parties at Eric's place where I'd always hear it.)
Isn't this exactly what Hector is saying to Aeneas?
It seems that part of Aeneas's initial refusal to "keep the faith and run away" is the desire to prove his loyalty:
Iliaci cineres et flamma extrema meorum,
testor, in occasu vestro nec tela nec ullas
vitavisse vices Danaum, et, si fata fuissent
ut caderem, meruisse manu.(II, 431-4)
Aeneas doesn't want to be called a coward for having fled Ilium merely to escape hardships to himself. More than that, he doesn't want to be a coward, even if other people would still have called him brave. He has to prove, both to his various audiences and to himself, that he had to flee, that it was the will of the gods, that he had no choice (so that later when he says "Italiam non sponte sequor" (IV), he is not just referring to leaving Carthage, but also to leaving Troy!). So he tries repeatedly to fall with Troy: "pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis" (II, 317), "moriamur et in media arma ruamus" (353). And his father takes just the same attitude: "me si caelicolae voluissent ducere vitam / has mihi servassent sedes" (641-2). There are many other examples; over and over again, Aeneas either tries to die fighting, expresses a wish to die fighting, expresses regret that he didn't die fighting, or expresses admiration and envy for those who did die fighting: "O terque quaterque beati / quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub moenibus altis / contingit oppetere!"
It's clearly only with vast difficulty that Aeneas accepts the advice of Hector. And this advice is repeated over and over -- by Hector, by Panthus, by Venus, by Creusa, and by others. "Fuit Ilium, fuimus Troes", but who can stand this? "Si Pergama dextra / defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent", but who can stand that? Ilium and its defense are Aeneas's life, up to this point, as he has understood it. Outside those walls is nothing for him. It's strange to expect that he could imagine the value in saving his life if he loses Troy. But here he hears that Troy, his beloved city, is in ashes, is in flames, is shattered, is falling from its height ("divum inclementia, divum!"), and those who stay behind "deseruere omnes defessi, et corpora saltu / ad terram misere aut ignibus aegra dedere"! Troy is not only ruined but has become a trap which will destroy Aeneas if he stays. Yet even when he knows this, when dead Hector and dying Panthus warn him of the trap, his loyalty to the lost city is so great that he can't say for sure that he will "run away and save [his] life".
Aeneid II is incredibly powerful. Not only is the story of the fall of Troy suspenseful, exciting, and tragic, but the story of Aeneas is so real for me: arma virumque. He is presented with the mission of the fugitive hero who must utterly abandon his lost and burning world "dum conderet urbem" and must take up his gods
hos cape fatorum comites, his moenia quaere
magna, pererrato statues quae denique ponto
for another time and place. And we can relate perfectly well to this mission because we've heard all about it beforehand, but Aeneas doesn't know how to deal with it, raised as a warrior and abruptly separated from the fate of the "beati / quis [...] contingit oppetere" fighting for something already ruined.
I could and should say much more about this, yet I'm already repeating myself here; I'm just so moved by the description of his experience. This isn't critical exegesis, really, this is just Seth saying that Aeneid II is real life. It was real for Vergil and it's real for me just the way the epigraph to Gardner's Annotated Rime of the Ancient Mariner says it:
But I do not think "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was for Coleridge an escape from reality: I think it was reality, I think he was on the ship and made the voyage and felt and knew it all.(Thomas Wolfe, in a letter of 1932, included in The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, edited by Elizabeth Nowell, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956, p. 322)
"You gotta keep the faith, you gotta keep the faith..."
