In a previous post, I wrote about how I've been thinking through the present situation with help from students in my course on "Ancient Worlds in Film & Television." That course is centered on adaptations across mediums--from aural performance through written literature to moving images on screen--and so we've developed tools that, as it happens, can analyze our own ongoing shift from in-person classes to interacting only online.
Given the subject, that application of theory suggested itself 'naturally': the sad impossibility of 'going to the movies,' now, recalls how we could never really 'go to ancient literature' or to the ancient world--and yet we can study the traces, engaging with and enjoying what remains. That's meaningful, and more: I think there's a curiously similar kind of romance to considering ancient poems and to seeing 'old familiar places' on screen ...
... and sometimes the two are one and the same:
Thus the images above show televisual materials depicting ancient literature, texts, directly, whether audibly (top: Horace quoted) or visibly (bottom: Sappho painted; analysis by my colleague Dr. Tom Jenkins in his book Antiquity Now). Such direct depiction is unusual but illustrative: insofar as ancient poetry and film are both suggestive of absence--each points to (is an index of) something not here--they can help us with displacement and loss.
Of course mine isn't anything like the only word on this. There are good examples in venues like Eidolon (post by Dr. Nandini Pandey at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Sententiae Antiquae (post by Dr. Joel Christensen at Brandeis University).
Here, I discuss examples of poetic language that have struck me recently, in coursework and personally. They culminate in the title images: a basin, a riverbank, and an aubade. I hope to suggest how, at a time of limited motion, such verbal art can be deeply moving.
My current meditation on the possibility of considering ancient literature as a way of contemplating displacement and loss began with a coincidence: a line shared by the start of a course, "Intermediate Latin II," and by the first page of a volume of poetry, the Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson's Room in Rome (Habitación en Roma, 1952). The line comes from the Roman poet Virgil, in the first poem of his first collection, the Eclogues (c. 39 BCE).
I had picked up a recent bilingual edition of Eielson's volume, with English translation by David Shook (Cardboard House 2019), about a month into the semester. I was drawn by the title--and, frankly, by the prettiness of the printing--which suggested a potential connection to the course, which I'll describe, and in the meantime struck a chord in me: I study Rome but haven't visited, not meaningfully, in nearly twenty years.
What a pleasant surprise, then, to open the Eielson and find, as the epigraph, the Latin line:
Et quae tanta fuit Romam tibi causa videndi? (1.26; click through to hear the Latin)
Or in English: "And what was your overwhelming reason for seeing Rome?"
In Virgil, the line is spoken by one rustic shepherd character, called Meliboeus, to another, Tityrus: for Tityrus has returned from Rome, the city, and he waxes on about how different it is from their country village. Buoyed by the trip, Tityrus is feeling carefree and 'lounging in the shade': he is lentus in umbra. And there is the major contrast with Meliboeus, who must travel for a different 'overwhelming reason': he is dispossessed of his land by war.
That's the theme of this semester's "Intermediate Latin II": how Virgil envisions Italy, his beloved country, as a land of displacement and other losses due to war. For Virgil lived in the last generation of 'the Late Republic' and into the 'the Augustan Age': fifty years split between civil war, as Rome struggled to reconcile its traditions with the demands--and depradations--of empire, and 'peace imposed' as a kind of cultured, imperial martial law.
Thus Virgil's development, over his career, of vivid images of characters in literal motion and in depths of feeling; and thus, too, Virgil's reputation as the ancient poet perhaps most sympathetic to human suffering. That is most evident in his epic poem, the Aeneid, written wholly under Augustus and indeed--apocryphally--published by him after its author's death. Virgil has the main character, Aeneas, say that:
"there are reasons for tears, and death has a hold on the mind."
Although the utterance is almost gnomic, a timeless truth, Aeneas speaks from his own experience of history: a prince of Troy, he watched his city fall in the War--saw from rooftop the Olympian gods kicking it down, saw from a distance as it burned to the ground--and, at this point in the story, he has been leading the remnants of his people on a long and difficult journey across the Mediterranean to found a new home.
My students and I read the Eclogues earlier this semester, and we're reading part of the Aeneid now. Doing so with an eye on present-day Italy, Virgil's beloved country, in the midst of a different but deeply displacing crisis; with an eye on a Rome whose public places, many harking back to Augustus' transformations of the city, have emptied ... Reading thus, we've felt a bit like Meliboeus, unable to visit Rome--and with a changing sense of our 'homes' ...
Aeneas, too, is a kind of Meliboeus: each is a 'shepherd' of sorts whose homeland is lost and who now stands guard over a meager, diminishing flock. Aeneas also has broader resonance today. As others have noted, the Aeneid can seem profoundly relevant--even prophetic--as a story of refugees making their way across the Mediterranean to southern Europe. Thus that basic story has been detected in social-critical science fiction ...
... and has appeared in other poetic forms. An ancient-epic focus on displacement and loss helps structure recent fictions about real-world refugees and other peoples experiencing diaspora. Crossing the Mediterranean to southern Europe plays a central role, for example, in two recent French novels, Alice Zeniter's The Art of Losing (L'Art de perdre, Flammarion 2017) and Marie Darrieussecq's The Sea Upside-down (La Mer à l'envers, P.O.L. 2019).
In L'Art, Zeniter writes a multigenerational history of a family displaced from Algeria to France.
At the beginning of the second section, a character seeking to uncover her family's history compares part of it to the beginning of the Aeneid, when Aeneas' story is called into being.
(Click here to hear that passage read aloud, first in my English translation and then in the original French.)
Darrieussecq's La Mer centers on a Frenchwoman who meets a refugee named Younes when her cruise ship takes on passengers from his boat.
(Click here to hear a passage in which the Frenchwoman's experience of the sea evokes that of ancient Ulysses.)
Virgil is thus of course not the only ancient author here: Homer's Odyssey pervades recent fictions, including L'Art (click here for an event compared to Homer's story about the Cattle of the Sun).
Likewise, there are variations on other ancient themes. A recurrent theme from Virgil that has been used to frame displacement and loss is 'journey into the Underworld' and related 'encounter with the dead.' That forms a central part of my course on "Afterlives of Antiquity." Since I'll be teaching it again in the fall--when, sadly, I expect that the subject will be personally relevant to some students--I'll turn to some examples in future posts.
In the meantime, that ancient feeling of familiar places lost and changing. Obviously, in each example above--and more could be cited--the places vary. Certainly not all are ancient Italy. Indeed, even Virgil's 'Italy' ... isn't, in important ways: partly running counter to the 'authorized' vision coming from Rome, it also isn't wholly real, with fantastic elements forming crucial parts of its poetic fiction.
But even if each lost 'place' is different, the elegiac feeling of displacement is the same. It's a feeling of being cut off from the familiar, or equally--as for many of us now--of the familiar having changed. In other words, it's 'the uncanny,' when we have no right to recognize something novel, but do, or when something that should be recognizable somehow isn't.
For me, and I think for many of us at this moment, that uncanny feeling is deepened by being attached, paradoxically, to home. Under stay-at-home orders, sheltering in place, we're living a kind of displacement. As a way of putting words--albeit others'--to the strangeness of the experience, I've been drawn to ancient literary images.
Perhaps considering such language art can be a way, too, of starting to prepare for what's yet to come. It seems likely that displacement will be followed by loss. Faced with that expectation--feeling what has been called 'anticipatory grief'--I've found comfort, or at least clarity, in poetry. Of course it needn't be ancient; e.g., here's some Icelandic, a little Swedish. Nor must it be poetry, specifically; hence the prose I've noted above.
As the novel coronavirus became a global pandemic, though, it was ancient poetry that first struck me as a means of considering displacement and loss, when I encountered that line of Virgil 'in the wild' even as I was teaching him. So, unable to go to Rome or otherwise travel, and amidst a changing sense of 'home,' with my students I returned to Virgil. Since the break we've been reading Aeneid book 8, when finally reaches the site of future Rome.
Our reading experience feels doubly uncanny. Aeneas doesn't--can't--recognize the place as Virgil's ancient readers did, since their historical city is, for him, the unrealized stuff of prophecy. And for those of us who have visited Rome, seeing ancient histories through the palimpsest of the modern city, Virgil's descriptions, already shimmering temporally, are shifted further by media images of Rome in lockdown, Italy in crisis.
(Forum Romanum, 13 March 2020.)
And yet there is potential comfort, or, again, at least a clarity to be found in the poetry. Early in book 8, Virgil describes Aeneas' feelings in terms that resonated with me. In an epic simile, Aeneas' heart is compared to light reflected off water in a copper basin, flickering across walls and hammering at a tiled ceiling: a finely drawn image of fruitless motion (the meaningless, moving light) in confinement (the capped room).
(Copper bowl, c. 4th century CE, the Louvre.)
The image is precise but not cool or clinical: Virgil is perhaps the most sympathetic ancient poet, and he continues the scene with an artistic logic whose warmth is nearly magical. Just as Aeneas' turbulent feeling is framed in terms of 'water,' so too is his first dream at this site of his refugee people's future home. When he falls asleep on a riverbank, the divine River Tiber appears to him, in a flowing blue-grey cloak, and offers words of comfort.
(River Tiber; click here for the Latin of the scene.)
Once the river-god has spoken, Aeneas wakes: 'he rises looking at the rising sun.' Thus elemental comparison continues as the new day symbolizes and strengthens his changed feeling. If still solemnly, then now also warmly he lifts two handfuls of water from the river and prays, 'pouring out' words and water together. It is a typically Roman image of peace, no less sincere for being ritualistic--and for looking ahead to further meaningful sacrifice.
Indeed, the scene beginning Aeneid book 8 is, if anything, more meaningful for echoing not only older epics--especially Homer's 'rosy-fingered dawn' (rhododaktylos Eös)--but an earlier passage in Virgil. The beginning of book 7 describes another significant daybreak: Aeneas has performed a ritual sacrifice, and as the goddess of dawn, Aurora, 'shines saffron in her rosy chariot,' the refugees catch first sight of the Tiber.
(Birds in the dawn at Ostia Lido.)
Here is my English translation of the scene (and click here for the Latin):
" ... there Aeneas, from the calm water, beheld an enormous
grove. Between the trees, Tiberinus, an unbounded river,
with rushing eddies and tawny with much sand,
burst into the sea. All around were various birds,
accustomed to the banks and hollow of the river,
and they softened the ether with song, flying about the grove.
His companions changed course, turning prows to land
at his command, and joyfully he started up the shaded river."
Like the passage in book 8, this is a beautiful moment of peace. Sadly, it is followed directly by this martial epic's 'greater task,' the turn to war. Such, in Virgil's tragic view, must be our lived experience of history, especially when living through times of crisis.
And yet I think that the power of the images, their power to move, remains. Light off water in a copper basin; a night of peaceful dreams on a shaded riverbank; the warming colors of dawn (or the song-type of aubade)--for me, such examples of art speak to the strange experience of movement in stillness, that uncanny mixture of turbulence and quiet ...
Like birdsong on the Tiber, such moving poetic images are sounds to offer comfort in--or, like verbal brushstrokes, clarify--the experience of displacement and worse, the loss that, sadly, is to come. I wish that we could be spared that awful feeling; Virgil's, and other poetic authors', sense is that, sadly, we cannot.
And so I'll keep returning to literature: with my "Intermediate Latin II" students to the Aeneid; with my "Antiquity & Diversity" class, this coming week, to Jesmyn Ward's breathtaking Hurricane-Katrina novel, Salvage the Bones; and at home--alone when need be, with my partner when we can--to the widest range of literature I can muster.
I'm hoping always for that happy coincidence of hearing an echo of experience in the wild, or, as good, a beautiful fragment recalling a larger work--and suggesting a deeper feeling. For the present moment is difficult in part because our obligatory stillness and distance don't seem to match the speed of interconnected change.
My own feeling, then--and it may not be for everyone--is that the gap between immobility and chaos can be bridged, in pieces and places, by the moving images of poetic art.
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