Our position is to some extent paradoxical: to review for an academic journal, intended mainly for specialists, a book that claims not to be addressed to the classical scholar but which the classical scholar will read not without interest.[1] Pearcy recognizes the traits of his ideal reader: “Mine is one of my former students, someone who has read the Aeneid, perhaps in school and in Latin, perhaps a long time ago.” And indeed, one begins to read this book like a student attending the presentation of a course. The life surrounding the university campus creeps, as in the best teachers’ lessons, into the classroom: and Pearcy, in a few introductory lines, sketches a socio-political panorama –the admittedly painful transition from Obama to Trump—in intimate relation to the way in which a new generation will face—or should we say “would face” in the event– the reading of a bimillennial classic.[2]
“On Not Liking Aeneas” (chapter one) starts, in fact, with some initial, innocent questions about the hero’s character, as part of the Erwartungshorizont, or level of expectations, of these new students who Pearcy knows well. Pearcy does not disregard the bien-pensant prejudices of his students, but he accompanies them in pursuit of the complexity of character and work, “beyond disliking,” toward the promised land of poetic meaning: “a mystery at the heart of the Aeneid” (16).
Chapter 2, “The First Three Words,” clearly sets a historical background. This is marked by the disasters of war and posits the sublimation of those experiences in the art of Virgil and Horace through the figuration of a Golden Age (in the fourth Bucolic and in Epod. 15.53ff.). These are the years (the decade from 29 to 19 BC) in which the Aeneid takes shape: “in their poems from the thirties and early twenties BC, they tried to imagine a way beyond that world. Their attempts reveal the despair, pessimism, and anxiety from which Vergil’s Aeneas was born” (51). The young reader will understand how “the broken world of proscriptions and confiscations intrudes on Arcadia” (88).
The next four chapters outline the hero’s character: The Choices (3)… Silences (4)… Tears (5)… Anger (6) of Aeneas. At the beginning of his journey, of his flight, “he has a story and an identity. As he stabs Turnus to the heart at the end of the poem, he refuses that identity: ‘Pallas, yes Pallas, sacrifices you with this wound’ (Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas / immolat, 12.947-948)” (99). There is much of interest in the pages that Pearcy devotes to the katabasis of Aeneas, a turning point where the past, the heroic akmé and the future, the story of what has happened and the foreshadowing of what the future holds: “in the second half of the Aeneid, he shows no sign that he consciously remembers any person or event from the underworld. Aeneas will, however, emerge with surviving traces of the ingrained, fratricidal impulse that he shares with the souls of Caesar and Pompey, Brutus, Romulus, and other Romans. That flaw will lead him to the necessary conclusion of the Aeneid, when he loses contact with his past identity as he kills a foe who has in many ways become his twin, at the end of a conflict that Vergil has presented as a kind of civil war” (120-121).
The first part of the Aeneid reveals itself to be Odyssean in nature; the second, Iliadic (and here we might recall the words of the contemporary Propertius 2.34.66 nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade). “By the end of book 12, Aeneas’ identification with the Greeks has become complete: he has become another Achilles, pursuing Turnus/Hector and killing him before the walls of the city that the Rutulian prince attempts to defend” (163). At this point, the reader-student will perhaps have understood that the hero is accompanied by dark shadows (düstere Schatten) in his immoderation, no matter how long his adventures last. As Kerenyi writes about Achilles: “so much ‘born for a short time’ that he above all others must be called the ‘mortal hero’, maintained in the face of death, and taking death upon himself, his half-divine form with the dark shadow which it bore” (The Heroes of the Greeks, Thames and Hudson, 1974, transl. Rose p. 347). In chapter 5, Pearcy reconsiders the familiar scenes and words of the Carthaginian episodes in the light of the tears of Hercules (10) and of Aeneas himself (11), who smiles only once. He points out the origin of the conflict “not between Aeneas’s words and his feelings but between his present situation and his destined future” (131) and thus resolves or explains what a superficial reading would identify as mere hypocrisy or cynicism: that is, the hero’s pathetic traits.
The epilogue, “The Hero Vanishes,” culminates with the dismantling of the Trojan identity, whose paradoxical survival will only be possible through its transformation into something else: the future Rome. “Trojans will become Italians, and they will lose their identity in the process […]. Aeneas knows that Italy must be his country and his love, but he cannot know that Trojans must become Italians, that his Amor will eventually become Roma, or that the price of that transformation will be his own identity, his pietas” (167-168).
Very useful and instructive are the pages dedicated to “Further Reading,” the indexes and the bibliography. Here, every reader will miss some favourite references (but this is not so much an error attributable to the author, as a tic of the reader). For example—and this is no mere boutade—Cervantes[3] may have more to say about the evolution of the hero’s identity than Charles Taylor, Foucault or Lacan, who, on the other hand, are barely sketched in the pages of Pearcy’s Aeneas.[4]
The book easily fulfils its stated purpose: to serve as a first glimpse, a reading or re-reading guide for the young educated reader, an introduction to the Virgilian universe.[5] And there is, in addition, something that the seasoned reader will find valuable: the sensation of attending the classes of a colleague, remembering those almost remote times when we studied Virgil and translated the Aeneid as the culmination of our studies.
Pearcy’s considerations of the relationship between the revelation of Anchises in the underworld show considerable perceptive understanding, as well as his views on the fragile memory of the hero, and the way in which the identity of Troy and the nascent Rome overlap, complement or seem to exclude each other, as a kind of communicating vessel.[6] “When he plants his sword into Turnus’ chest, Aeneas founds Rome, but in doing so, he also destroys Troy and himself” (166). Indeed, Pearcy’s reading strengthens our understanding of the structural coherence of this literary landmark and effectively reveals Virgil’s moral vision or intention: I find particularly apt his assessment of the historical and political transcript in relation to the hero and the redefinition of the pietas that drives and characterises him, but which will be modulated like the identity of Aeneas and the Trojans, to such an extent that one might ask with the author: Will the son of Anchises end up being “less a human hero than an abstract symbol of Rome’s future”? (148). The hero’s greatness and misery lie in the—happy only from a poetic point of view—conjunction of both traits.
Notes
[1] Pearcy’s pedagogical vocation is evident, having previously explored at large the teaching of the classics (The Grammar of our Civility: Classical Education in America, 2005) and participated in the intense debates that became known as the Classics Civil War. A good balance to Thomas Palaima, “Classics: Apocalypse Now or Working toward the Future?”, The Classical Bulletin 75.2, 1999, 199-211.
[2] In footnote 44 (p. 174) Pearcy offers an estimate of the number of readers who will read the Aeneid in Latin today (and in the U.S.) of only a few thousand: “In 2014, for example, only 6,542 students took the College Board’s Advanced Placement Latin exam”.
[3] Remember the quixotic “I know who I am” versus the sceptical Pedro Alonso (part I ch. V) in relation to the limited perspective of Aeneas. Regarding the dissolution of the hero’s identity at the end of his journey, we could quote that magnificent sonnet by Borges that culminates as follows: “¿dónde está aquel hombre / que en los días y noches del destierro / erraba por el mundo como un perro / y decía que Nadie era su nombre?” (“Where is that man now / Who in his exile wandered night and day / Over the world like a wild dog, and would say / His name was No One, No One, anyhow?”; transl. R. Fitzgerald, Selected Poems 1923-1967, Penguin, 1972, p. 165)
[4] To do justice to Pearcy’s philological theory and pedagogical practice, it must be said that—contrary to what happens to certain epigones of post-structuralism, the foucaultphiles of Mandosio—our author does not emulate the abstruse style of those schools; moreover, on his discreet use of postmodern theory, allow me to quote the entire concluding paragraph of his paper “Five Pedagogical Problems in Catullus,” The Classical World 95.4, 2002, pp. 432-4: “In their encounter with Catullus, our students recapitulate the early modem discovery of his text, the Romantic Era’s exaltation of his direct presentation of experience, Modernism’s obsession with the poem as an unmediated vehicle of meaning, and the discovery of Callimacheanism at Rome. Can we expect them to become postmodern readers, to de-authorize Catullus and to interrogate the unitary subject? Can you deconstruct when you’ve barely constructed? I have advocated ‘un-editing’ the philologist’s Catullus, particularizing the universally human Catullus, problematizing the unmediated Catullus, and intertextualizing the learned Catullus. I hope it is clear that the Catullus in my classroom owes much to the ideas of Micaela Janan, Paul Allen Miller, and other postmodern critics. I am content, however, to leave the explicitly postmodern Catullus to the next stage of my students’ growth with this author, and to my colleagues in colleges and universities. Postmodern theories are part of the foundation of my teaching, but the foundation is below the surface of what I do in the classroom. My students never see it.” It seems to me of unquestionable honesty.
[5] The errata are minimal: I only found, on p. 17, line 16, “horn”, where it should read “ivory”; and on p. 188, a reference to Putnam 2004, which may have been 2001 (?).
[6] During the process of correcting this text, I was able to read the magnificent Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis, and Pearcy’s assessment of the hero’s memory in relation to historical becoming is perfectly comparable to the desolate image of a Saul Bellow whose dememory provoked by Alzheimer’s disease coincides with the abrupt historical turn: “When September 11 happened Saul couldn’t quite take it in. And soon, for him, history would indeed be over, in the sense that the past would be over, memory would be over. Laughter would be the last to go.” Unlike the New Yorker, the Trojan hero has only tears left.