If there is Paradise, it must be here

 

It is a scorching afternoon in the arena of Naples. Not a cloud in the sky. Out of the shadow under the canvas marquees emerges a plump hand and signals down the ranks to the assistants with shoulder bags full of coins. They take bookings on the gladiators. It had been again a day for the man with trident and net, the third in a row.

In the exit tunnel, opposite of the animal cages, a stocky, grey haired wrestler of a man with huge shoulders can't turn away his eyes from the restless pacing of a lion. His face is a frozen wilderness of grime and stubble. For no apparent reason he had thrown his wife out of the window from a five story apartment. The court sentenced him to die in the arena. Shaking with muscular spasms the man is waiting for the hour of the feeding. He listens to the voice in the royal box. A middle-aged man of somewhat heavy build gives a reading from his poetry. Unassuming and without the airs of an educated man he speaks with a rustic accent; his voice barely carries through the arena. Suddenly, all that people can hear is a violent fit of hacking coughs. Some begin rising from their seats. Eventually the whole arena follows; even the bookies look up from their wax-tablets. The crowd is chanting the poem back to the visibly moved poet:

"I am an exile from home, but you Tityrus, without a care in the world, sit under the shade, singing ditties to your beloved Amaryllis. Not that I’m not jealous, but why must things be so confused in the land, why must it be I, who is sent away with his goats, leaving behind the dear hazel-thicket where my she-goat once had given birth to twins? I am sick in my heart! To whom do you pray, that he has spared you, despite of the ominous raven crying from the thunder-stricken oak? How is it that freedom has come to you at last, after so many visits to the barber for a shave of your grizzled beard? Why you? Why not I? So many years of bondage, so many times back from the city with nothing to show for the cheese sold at the mart, and yet divine help was so near at hand?"

It is a rare thing to hear Virgil himself giving a recital. Usually he only reads to a small circle of friends and only from unfinished drafts, so as to profit from their criticism. Virgil (70 – 19 BC) is a very shy person, swarthy and afflicted with tuberculosis. The opposite sex doesn't mean much to him and the people know this. Poetry in Virgil’s days is the equivalent to a modern rock concert. His Eclogues are reaching all walks of life, even the uneducated.

Professional singers repeatedly bring them to the stage. Tickets are sold at the box-office, space is rented at the local basilica (Juvenal VII, 43) – to put in chairs comes for an extra charge – or a rope cordons off space under the portico near to a bookstall; sometimes, as in this case, there is a time-slot at the arena. Like a rock singer a Roman poet is not really expressing his own feelings. What he does is staging an attitude. The poet Catullus (84 – 54 BC) and his circle of poets nouveau have introduced a new genre – poems that seem to bewail the humiliation inflicted by the poet’s bitch of a mistress. It’s an act and in a war stricken world Virgil is not interested in bullshitting his audience: "Let the fields and stream-washed vales be my comfort, let me love the rivers and unassuming woods" (Georgics) he says, and it appeals to the poor, who do not own traditions, chariots and mistresses and listen with bitterness to the empty rhetoric of their politicians and generals.

 An upper floor tenement in suburban Rome is looking out on a pandemonium of nocturnal traffic congestion. At daylight oxcarts and carriages are off limits. From the construction sites, dunes of dust drift through the streets. The smoke from the shrines carries sticky flakes of soot and the foul stench of butchered carcasses. Undernourished children, naked and grimy, contribute to the family’s income scavenging the garbage dumps and collecting scrap-glass from house to house to sell it for a few coppers to the manufacturers of windowpanes and glass bottles. The sound of drizzling sand in the wall of your apartment will make your heart stop. Every day there is news of the collapse of another apartment block. Cooking at home is against fire regulations.

Nevertheless the sculptors love to depict low life figurines in faience, showing every realistic detail, warts and all. Feisty scullery maids, bald fishermen with protruding veins on their fore-arms, an open-mouthed old woman with a single tooth left, dozing off her liquor. For the rich poverty is a comical predicament, something staged for their amusement, a decorative piece on the mantelpiece. Slavery is a misfortune that befalls you either as the deserved consequence of insolvency or as an act of clemency to a prisoner of war. Be grateful, you are allowed to stay alive. “It may befall all of us,” says the philosopher Seneca, “for we are all men, subject to the same tricks of fate as these unfortunates. In wartime even the noblest of man can be reduced to slavery. It is fortune that determines a man’s fate. What then is our duty? To do well wherever fate is placing us, as king, as citizen, or slave. If it is your lot to be a master, be a good master.” Leaving the tavern late at night, drunk and alone carries the risk of abduction and rolling dough in the state-run bread factories, never to be seen again. Slaves offered on the market don’t come cheap. It is like buying a modern car. There are high-end luxury models with custom-made modifications. Only one of three survives the surgical procedure for an eunuch. Still attached to the man the testicles are cooked in boiling water or oil. At the low end, there is the unskilled nag, put up for sale because of age, and the convicted criminal.

No doubt, the system is brutal but not completely without hope. A slave, contracting out his skills at the employment station, receives the same minimum wage as his free colleague. In Pompeii, construction firms keep up to five slaves on staff. The entrepreneur is taking out his cut from their pay and the law keeps a lazy eye on the percentage. A skilled slave, if diligent with his money, can in the end buy his freedom and start a business of his own, albeit under the patronage of his former master.

Not that every slave would want to.

We know of slaves with legal access to their owner's signet ring, conducting business on the master’s behalf and enjoying all the privileges of an elevated position. The days of Spartacus are gone; nobody is raising his voice for universal manumission, not even the religious radical St. Paul. Slaves can play a role as powerful as Colbert and Fouquet in the cabinet of Louis XIV; they handle administrative chores and staff the bureaucracy with experts. For the funeral solemnities of his family, Emperor Augustus has set up a college of priests, filling the positions with slaves. Slaves gather in their own banquet societies, the ancient equivalent of a modern insurance scheme. It remains, however, a legal offence to offer asylum to a fugitive slave or encourage him to flee. “A master who wants to be respected by his servants should not joke with them and be the first to rise at morning,” says Plato, the Nazi’s favorite Greek. But many slave-owners like to crack a good joke and without any worries about security have breakfast with their slaves at the oil press. Killing a slave is now manslaughter, punishable by deportation and even death, provided death has occurred within four days after the assault. A famous physician therefore recommends never to punish a slave with your own hands and to postpone the decision for punishment until the following day.

Yet it would be wrong to assume that Rome’s economy is based on slave labor. Even on the large estates, sharecroppers and hired hands outnumber bonded labor. Philostratus speaks of a vintner who resigns to personally tending his vineyard because the keep for his handful of slaves does cost him too much. In Egypt rural slavery is unknown. Some professions, however, can only be conducted by slaves. Except for a handful of Asclepeions in the East there is no such thing as medical schools or university clinics in the ancient world. A Roman physician instructs his slave in the practice of medicine and when the education is finished he manumits the apprentice, installing him as a free practitioner under the provisions for freedmen. It is ironic. Without slavery there would be no medical progress and no healthcare.

Virgil comes from a rural middle-class family. Legend has it that Virgil’s mother was on the way to the fields when the water broke and she gave birth in the ditches. She is a religious woman, praying "to Ocean, Father of the Universe, and the sisterhood of nymphs, the wardens of vegetation and running water" (Georgics). Virgil’s parents live a cut above the common peasant. The father had worked as a potter and local bailiff with a seat in the council, before he turned to farming and keeping bees: "The old man, living under the turrets of Oebalia, where the river Galaesus washes the banks at the yellowing fields, came from Corycus and had a few acres of neglected land for his lot, as useless for the grazing herd as it was for the plodding steer, or the creeping vine. Yet in the plenty of his bees, he, living among garden herbs and white lilies and walking on the rolling carpet of lean poppies, would not have traded it for the wealth of kings" (Georgics). In his later years Virgil's father has lost his eyesight. For his three sons he provides for the best education money can buy; yet of the three, Silo dies of a childhood illness and Flaccus passes away of unknown causes in his late teens. The family’s remaining hopes rest on Virgil.

There is an encouraging example. The son of a moneychanger from a small town in rural Italy has climbed all the way to the top position. Augustus’ enemies gossip about sexual favors traded with his late uncle, Caesar the dictator, but Caesar was a man with an eye for people. Whatever attracted him to that scrawny bundle of freckles and straw-blond hair, Caesar also saw in the boy’s big eyes the spark of ruthless determination that promises greatness.

Virgil, on the other hand, doesn’t seem interested. Not in politics, not in a career. He likes to be by himself and even in his youth it was impossible to tear him away from his wax tablets: "I want to know; show me all things, your customs and the sources for our passion; explain to me the stars in heaven and their paths, the sun's eclipses and the labors of the moon. I want to know from where the earthquakes break, by what power the sea is swelling up to our beaches, breaching the dikes, why the winter-sun is in such a rush to dip beneath the ocean, or why the lingering night keeps the sleepless waiting" (Georgics).

The world is torn by civil war when his parents sent Virgil to a boarding school at Cremona and later Milan. As he is coming home, the regime, desperately out of funds, is about to confiscate his parent’s land to provide for the discharged veterans. Virgil and his neighbors defy the eviction order. They are removed by force. Virgil even has to swim for dear life.

The governor of Gaul on the Italian side of the Alps, Senator Asinius Pollio, saves the poet from certain ruin. He presents him with the gift of a slave boy, the "Alexis" in the Eclogues. Virgil repays the favor with a poem on the birth of Pollio’s son, the famous 4th Eclogue: "Not everybody finds pleasure in a coppice or a lowly tamarisk, and now, as announced by Cumae's Sibyl the end of time has come and the majestic wheel of the centuries moves on for a new turn. There will be justice again and under the reign of Saturn rises a new breed of men. When the boy is born he shall end the days of the sword and usher in an Age of Gold. This time of glory, oh Pollio, will set out with a mighty stride in the months under your consulate. Under your guidance shall the earth become free of fear forever. And the boy shall be immortal and like the heroes of old mingle with the gods, even be one of them. With his father shall he reign over a world at peace. As for you, my boy, the earth will freely yield her gifts; will mix the sprawling ivy-spray with foxglove and bean-flowers from Egypt and with the laughing acanthus. The flocks shall have no fear of lions and the old serpent breathe his last under withering leaves of poisonous plants. And crops of wheat shall swing in wide circles around the briar that supports the blushing grape, and the tribes of bees seek shelter in the stubborn oak. Although ancient wrongs still wait to heal, there will be rest at last and the traffic over land and sea come to a halt. Oh baby-boy! Your mother bore for you ten months of weariness."

Future generations will think of this enigmatic poem as a prediction of the arrival of Christ. The Eclogues six and ten celebrate important friendships in Virgil's life, often mixing the jocular with the tragic. To the modern reader the term "idyllic poetry" usually suggests something nostalgic, the good old times, summer days on wooden clogs, mum's potato chowder, playing doctor with Monica in the willows, long evenings under the apple tree, the bitter taste of the first sip from dad's pint, simple life, conservative votes. But Virgil had it not in him to wax sentimental.

In his very first poem Virgil introduces an evicted farmer who has lost his homestead to a retired war-veteran. The man goes for a last visit to his former neighbor, a manumitted slave, who offers him a warm welcome: "This night you may rest with me on pillows of green leaves. There are ripe apples in my store, soft chestnuts and curdled milk.” They talk and there is no happy ending to this story. All that is left is a last gaze at the close huddle of cottage-roofs. “Oh look! The plume of smoke on the chimneys under the hill! The creeping shadow stretches to lap it up" (1st. Eclogue). It is a moment of sheer magic. Something enduring is suggested, a recurring archetype, a refrain ringing through the fragility of our existence. Peasants come and go; yet farming will be here forever. It doesn't make it any easier for the dispossessed emigrant, but the world is essentially good and beyond reproach. "A good and honest life, tending to a variety of yield and yet at ease among the wide swinging acres. The mooing of the heard lulls you into sleep at grottoes and teaming lakes, in the dozing woods or in the cooling shade of a rustic temple. There is no penury, grass and game abound. The youth grows and hardens by incessant labor to live with patience a life close to the needs, finding refreshment in prayers to the hosts of heaven" (Georgics).

Virgil’s reputation is beginning to open doors. Maecenas is the emperor's indispensable financial wizard and the regime’s spymaster. Of Etruscan stock with royal blood in his veins, he is the proverbial patron of the arts. Virgil, Horace and Gallus belong to his stable of talents. Maecenas is a man of effeminate appearance. He likes to dress in transparent fabrics, flaunting his decadent tastes and gay love affairs. When called upon he acts as minister without portfolio. This Maecenas, of all people, requires Virgil to write something “uplifting and conservative.” Virgil goes to work. At times his unassuming choice of words provokes the ancient critic to berate him for his lack of ornate decorum. A critique, interestingly, that comes from a person of plebeian background and untutored tastes.

If purity of style is his ambition, then Virgil is the purest and least ostentatious poet of all times; classicism at its finest! "Oh Bacchus and Ceres, of your bounty I sing, which transforms the barren earth. Sing of bitter acorn and the plump ears in fields of nodding wheat and of the wind of Aeolus, of the elfin fauns and dryads, messing in the grapes" (Georgics). We no longer speak his language; we have lost the feel for Virgil's greatest asset, his melody of speech and his onomatopoetic highlighting. A therapist, however, may find in the obsessive polish of Virgil’s poetry a symptom of clinical depression, or even a mild form of autism.

The sculptures depict Virgil with a heavy brow and a wry smile. Virgil is reported to have studied the philosophy of Epicurus, a man who teaches that the gods take no interest in this world and Virgil repeats after him: "Happy is, who has the skill to understand Nature's unseen causes, throwing off the senseless terrors, even death and the roar of Styx" (Georgics). Yet Virgil's line of work demands more than the cursory nod to the mythological paradigm, and that seems all right. As a farmer's son Virgil never loses an affectionate regard for the elfin spirits inhabiting trees and houses and the running water. The genies of forest and orchard are more to him than mere allegories for the forces of Nature; to Virgil they are manifestations of the numinous, his familiars to be addressed in prayer: "Listen Pan, shepherd-god, Lord of Tegea, listen, I need your help!" (Georgics). Virgil is a slow composer.

Beginning the day with some thirty to fifty lines, chalked on the walls of his bedroom, he has it whittled down to three or two at sunset. It takes him seven years to compose altogether 2,188 lines.

The "Georgics" contain everything a poet would want to celebrate: life, labor the seasons and why it is good to be here, even if it is the hard and unsentimental existence of a peasant: "He serves the fields and with his harrow breaks the soggy soil and shatters the fallow plain and crisscrosses the furrowed ridges. He leans on the plough with all his weight behind the groaning ox, and stroke-by-stroke he assails the earth and subdues the field. Surely, everything is founded on the fruit of toil." Virgil loves his country, nothing can compare with Italy, "not Iran with its wealth of woods, nor fair Ganges, nor Hermosa rolling in gold, not even India, or the Caucasus. This land of ours has never been ploughed under by fire-breathing bulls nor sowed with dragon's teeth, and the sight of the merry ears of corn and the grapes of Campania, of the bleating flock and the boughs bending under the olive warm our affection. Here is everlasting spring and summer beyond the season; the ewe gives birth two times and twice yields a tree his fruit. This is not a land of tigers and no shady leaf betrays with poison." A cause for gratitude and celebration: "Watch the months and at night the skies, the direction of Saturn's arctic revolution and the scorched cycle traveled by Mercury. Worship the gods, and when the winter ends and spring smiles at you, pay your yearly dues and sacrifice to Ceres. Then the lambs shall be fat and the wine mellow, and sleep shall be sweet when darkness falls upon the mountains. Mix your honeycombs with milk and the best of last year's wine and lead in procession the sacrificial victim to the planted field where the youngsters sing the hymns."

An existence in anonymity and yet the peasant "will not bend to the rods and axes of the men in power, nor be impressed by kingship and the purple, nor envy a shyster for his eloquence. His eyes may never see the forum, yet he will not trade places with the merchant who vexes the hungry waters of the ocean with his ships and scars the mountains in the search for ore. He will not lobby at the courts of princes to make them fall upon a city and its helpless homes so that he can drink from gem-incrusted beakers or lounge on oriental rugs. He does not hoard his wealth nor agonizes over buried bullion. If visiting the senate he would stare in blank amazement at the sudden transports of cheer, the shouts and sneers running up and down the benches, the applause for so called "heroes" bathing in their fellow humans' blood between intermittent spells of exile. Unlike them, he turns the soil with his hooked ploughshare and his year of labor sustains the country, senate, merchants and generals, while himself he houses in a lowly cottage, always on the go with his herds and at fall filling with yield his bursting barns.” He is a heroic figure, standing up “even to the anger of Heaven, when the fruit is blighted on the stem and wolves take away the sheep, when the water in the pool is spoiled and death itself has become a labor of fever, thirst, and blood, of sleepless nights and listless thrashing on the bed, of hunger without appetite and of a cramping chill" (Georgics).

The greatest miracle in Virgil's Georgics is something that remains invisible.

Originally the poem had ended with an address to Virgil's lover, M. Aelius Gallus. Two years later, in 27 BC the emperor is appointing Gallus as commissioner of Egypt. Then, for some unknown reason, Gallus falls from grace is recalled and bullied into committing suicide. Virgil barely contains his grief. His powerful patron is either not capable or not willing to save Gallus. So, Virgil thinks it necessary to replace the address to his friend with the narrative of Orpheus' quest for his wife in the Underworld, a clear enough message to everyone who knows about him and Gallus. "In the throes of death, in a mess of torn off limbs floating in the river, the dismembered head has not yet lost its voice and cries for Eurydice, his poor Eurydice. And the echo reverberates on the riverbank, calling for poor Eurydice" (Georgics).

We are told, Virgil was enjoying special favors with the regime, then why the intrusive changes? Maybe it has something to do with his former benefactor, the consular Asinius Pollio.

By now Pollio has become an outspoken leader of the opposition against Emperor Augustus. It is not easy to shut him up. The politics of the period resemble a bowling match. One by one the opposition in the senate tries to knock down the pins surrounding the emperor’s person, indicting them for not always trumped up corruption charges. In one case the emperor himself is subpoenaed to make a statement under oath in the witness box.

The imperial master repays with insults to the seniority of the Senator Pollio and M. Antistius Labeo, the jurist. He annually reviews the ranking list of the senate – that’s where the word “censoring” is coming from – and time and again Pollio and Labeo find themselves at the bottom of the league table. It works. When Cremutius Cordus publishes a pamphlet in praise of the republican past, the intimidated house condemns the book to the flames by senatorial decree. To make an end to the incriminations, the author starves himself to death. The sorry spectacle moves Senator Titus Labienus, before a gathering crowd, to burn in protest his own adulatory history of the emperor. The senate duly condemns the act and orders the incineration of the rest of Labienus' writings. Labienus' friend Cassius Severus answers with libel, calling the senators “soft in their knees.” Banished to the island of Crete, Cassius continues to circulate inflammatory prose. So the regime relocates the troublemaker to a godforsaken fishing village where the mail arrives only every other year. It seems Virgil fears his association with Pollio could implicate him.

He is making plans for a travel to Greece. He says he needs the ambiance to give his Aeneid the finishing touch, yet on his arrival at Athens he is falling fatally ill. Emperor Augustus, just back from an inspection tour, offers the dying poet a lift on his navy cruiser.

Virgil's ashes are laid to rest at the Via Puteolana, near Naples.

© – 3/10/2009 – by michael sympson, 4,200 words, all rights reserved