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starladyJo Graham, Black Ships (New York: Orbit Books, 2008).
Ursula K. LeGuin, Lavinia (New York: Harcourt, 2008).
Both these books tell, in completely different ways, the story of the woman who helped Aeneas found his new kingdom in Italy after his wanderings following the fall of Troy.
For Graham, that woman is Gull, the daughter of a slave taken in the first sack of Wilusa (the name of Troy in the HIttite archives) to Pylos; after she is lamed in an accident, Gull becomes an acolyte of the Pythia, and then the Pythia herself; following the will of her Lady she sails with Prince Aeneas and his seven ships after they come to Pylos to take back the slaves stolen from Wilusa in its second, final destruction. Obedient to Gull's vision, the refugees of Wilusa make their way through the Middle Sea at the end of the Bronze Age, finding the world they knew falling into fire and barbarism as they go; after escaping Egypt and Pharaoh's vicereine Basetamaon, they make their way slowly to Latium, by way of the underworld navel at Cumae, where Aeneas saves a kingdom from destruction and becomes its king, living to a ripe old age and world made anew.
LeGuin, by contrast, focuses on Lavinia, Aeneas' Latin bride who in Vergil's poem never speaks, but who in LeGuin's telling speaks the whole story, even to her poet, with whose dying shade she communes while wandering the sacred groves of Latium, her father's realm. She even gets Vergil to wish he could give her a voice, and her true hair color (brown, not gold), but it's too late, the poet is dying, he has someone else to lead through a dark wood, and Lavinia is left to hold to her fate, to marry a foreigner rather than her cousin Turnus, in the face of madness and war, given life in the poem, but not enough to die.
It sounds almost sacrilegious to say this, but I liked Graham's novel better than LeGuin's; Graham made me cry at several points, and she manages to integrate brilliantly history, archaeology, legend and myth--she weaves the collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the eastern Mediterrannean in credibly with both the epic tradition and Greek mythology, as well as completely plausible Ancient Near Eastern religion, into her story, so that her final product is recognizably an origin-story of Vergil's Aeneid, in which Dido was an Egyptian princess because Carthage didn't exist yet, and the Trojan War was two wars a generation apart. Graham also weaves in a number of futurity in-jokes that add to the atmosphere--Gull has visions of Rome to be, and Aeneas, when they sail past Vesuvius, has a vision of Pliny the Younger fleeing the eruption of that volcano in which his uncle lost his life. Graham's interpretation of the mythological tradition in particular seems inspired, and her research is clearly both top-notch and up to the minute. It's also, more importantly, a really good book--Gull is a wonderful narrator, a servant of Death who finds that death is part of life, and vice versa. And even the trauma of war, and of violence in general, even on warriors and the violent, is dealt with when it arises in both men and women, even in Aeneas himself. I've been to a few of the places Graham describes, particularly the site of ancient Pylos and other contemporary fortresses, and it seems to me that she also captures the feeling of those places vividly.
I liked LeGuin's novel, but several aspects of it set my teeth on edge. To begin with, she takes Vergil more or less at his word in regards to the mythological tradition--Carthage, one ten-year war--and sets her story in roughly the eighth century BCE; her Trojans and her Latins, and especially her Aeneas, are also very, very Roman. On one level LeGuin's story takes place almost within the poem itself, the poem's past, though I felt rather...almost annoyed, at times, at how utopian her Latium seemed, especially in the beginning of the book; it wasn't a paradise, particularly outside the Etruscan league. Also, LeGuin's feminism here--her continued harping on the differences between men and women, and between Greek and Latin treatment of women--seemed to me to be veering into gender essentialism territory. I didn't mind these sort of gender/power questions popping up in her other works, particularly the later Earthsea books, but here it seemed discordant. Still, though, it's certainly a clever book, and a fascinating take on the origins of Rome; LeGuin also at several points has Lavinia talk about her poet, and his poem, in ways that make LeGuin's knowledge of and affection for the original poem clear. I also fully support her reading of the Aeneid as a tragedy, which I think makes eminent sense in regards to Vergil's politics and his relationship with Augustus. At one point Lavinia asks why Aeneas must kill helpless men, and her poet answers that that's how empires are founded. I've always regarded Vergil as a shill and Aeneas as a literal tool--you try slogging through the end of the Aeneid, it lapses almost into dramatic incoherency at points--but LeGuin has made me reconsider my interpretation. The triumph of the empire, and its founder, is also its tragedy.
I too have wandered with Aeneas through the burning streets of Troy seeking Ascanius and Creusa, and both these books provide excellent interpretations of and tributes to Vergil's masterpiece. I'm less sympathetic to LeGuin lamenting the death of the Aeneid because today fewer people learn Latin than a century ago. A lot of people still read the Aeneid, in original or in translation, and I think that as long as European civilization continues to have an influence on our society, that will still be true.
Finally, another contemporary novel that provides an excellent interpretation of mythology is Barry Unsworth's The Songs of the Kings, which deals with the sacrifice of Iphigenia prior to the Achaians' sailing to Troy.
Ursula K. LeGuin, Lavinia (New York: Harcourt, 2008).
Both these books tell, in completely different ways, the story of the woman who helped Aeneas found his new kingdom in Italy after his wanderings following the fall of Troy.
For Graham, that woman is Gull, the daughter of a slave taken in the first sack of Wilusa (the name of Troy in the HIttite archives) to Pylos; after she is lamed in an accident, Gull becomes an acolyte of the Pythia, and then the Pythia herself; following the will of her Lady she sails with Prince Aeneas and his seven ships after they come to Pylos to take back the slaves stolen from Wilusa in its second, final destruction. Obedient to Gull's vision, the refugees of Wilusa make their way through the Middle Sea at the end of the Bronze Age, finding the world they knew falling into fire and barbarism as they go; after escaping Egypt and Pharaoh's vicereine Basetamaon, they make their way slowly to Latium, by way of the underworld navel at Cumae, where Aeneas saves a kingdom from destruction and becomes its king, living to a ripe old age and world made anew.
LeGuin, by contrast, focuses on Lavinia, Aeneas' Latin bride who in Vergil's poem never speaks, but who in LeGuin's telling speaks the whole story, even to her poet, with whose dying shade she communes while wandering the sacred groves of Latium, her father's realm. She even gets Vergil to wish he could give her a voice, and her true hair color (brown, not gold), but it's too late, the poet is dying, he has someone else to lead through a dark wood, and Lavinia is left to hold to her fate, to marry a foreigner rather than her cousin Turnus, in the face of madness and war, given life in the poem, but not enough to die.
It sounds almost sacrilegious to say this, but I liked Graham's novel better than LeGuin's; Graham made me cry at several points, and she manages to integrate brilliantly history, archaeology, legend and myth--she weaves the collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the eastern Mediterrannean in credibly with both the epic tradition and Greek mythology, as well as completely plausible Ancient Near Eastern religion, into her story, so that her final product is recognizably an origin-story of Vergil's Aeneid, in which Dido was an Egyptian princess because Carthage didn't exist yet, and the Trojan War was two wars a generation apart. Graham also weaves in a number of futurity in-jokes that add to the atmosphere--Gull has visions of Rome to be, and Aeneas, when they sail past Vesuvius, has a vision of Pliny the Younger fleeing the eruption of that volcano in which his uncle lost his life. Graham's interpretation of the mythological tradition in particular seems inspired, and her research is clearly both top-notch and up to the minute. It's also, more importantly, a really good book--Gull is a wonderful narrator, a servant of Death who finds that death is part of life, and vice versa. And even the trauma of war, and of violence in general, even on warriors and the violent, is dealt with when it arises in both men and women, even in Aeneas himself. I've been to a few of the places Graham describes, particularly the site of ancient Pylos and other contemporary fortresses, and it seems to me that she also captures the feeling of those places vividly.
I liked LeGuin's novel, but several aspects of it set my teeth on edge. To begin with, she takes Vergil more or less at his word in regards to the mythological tradition--Carthage, one ten-year war--and sets her story in roughly the eighth century BCE; her Trojans and her Latins, and especially her Aeneas, are also very, very Roman. On one level LeGuin's story takes place almost within the poem itself, the poem's past, though I felt rather...almost annoyed, at times, at how utopian her Latium seemed, especially in the beginning of the book; it wasn't a paradise, particularly outside the Etruscan league. Also, LeGuin's feminism here--her continued harping on the differences between men and women, and between Greek and Latin treatment of women--seemed to me to be veering into gender essentialism territory. I didn't mind these sort of gender/power questions popping up in her other works, particularly the later Earthsea books, but here it seemed discordant. Still, though, it's certainly a clever book, and a fascinating take on the origins of Rome; LeGuin also at several points has Lavinia talk about her poet, and his poem, in ways that make LeGuin's knowledge of and affection for the original poem clear. I also fully support her reading of the Aeneid as a tragedy, which I think makes eminent sense in regards to Vergil's politics and his relationship with Augustus. At one point Lavinia asks why Aeneas must kill helpless men, and her poet answers that that's how empires are founded. I've always regarded Vergil as a shill and Aeneas as a literal tool--you try slogging through the end of the Aeneid, it lapses almost into dramatic incoherency at points--but LeGuin has made me reconsider my interpretation. The triumph of the empire, and its founder, is also its tragedy.
I too have wandered with Aeneas through the burning streets of Troy seeking Ascanius and Creusa, and both these books provide excellent interpretations of and tributes to Vergil's masterpiece. I'm less sympathetic to LeGuin lamenting the death of the Aeneid because today fewer people learn Latin than a century ago. A lot of people still read the Aeneid, in original or in translation, and I think that as long as European civilization continues to have an influence on our society, that will still be true.
Finally, another contemporary novel that provides an excellent interpretation of mythology is Barry Unsworth's The Songs of the Kings, which deals with the sacrifice of Iphigenia prior to the Achaians' sailing to Troy.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-16 15:40 (UTC)On the Aeneid as tragedy: my impression is that the 'Harvard school' of a politically cynical Vergil is in the ascendant these days; people are more willing to see the end of the Aeneid (and the end of the DRN) as deliberately abrupt rather than incomplete. And they've mostly (and I hate that I have to say 'mostly') dropped the interpretation of Lucretius as a pessimistic madman. I don't know just what the modern take is on Vergil's personality, as opposed to his persona, but hopefully I'll be able to say more after my seminar this year.
As a minor point of curiosity, how do these books treat Ascanius?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-17 00:08 (UTC)I'm not sure I can comment intelligently on the end of the DRN because I've not read it; I have an English translation around here somewhere but I've not gotten around to it, so I only know what we read in class (and what sticks out to me in memory is mostly the first and second books). I never got the impression that Lucretius was crazy, though I'd buy the ending of his poem being deliberately abrupt based on the parts that I have read, or rather his tone in some parts. I can see why "pessimistic" wouldn't be in favor, either; a lot of what we read seemed to just accurately be reflecting the demented parodoxes of the late Republic.
I didn't explain that part well, did I? Lavinia goes to the sacred grove of the Albuneum at times (LeGuin's really good on primitive Latin religion), and she starts to commune with a spirit there, who is Vergil as he lies dying on the ship from (or was it to?) Brindisium--he's going back in time, and also forward, as he dies.
Ah, Ascanius! LeGuin sets him up as the minor villain of Lavinia's life after Aeneas' death; he doesn't measure up to his father and tries to control Lavinia and Silvius (and has rigid ideas about the place of women, etc). In Graham's book Wilos is about four years old when Gull joins Neas, so he doesn't have much of a part, but in the epilogue it's made clear that all Aeneas' children get along well.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-17 14:11 (UTC)Contemporary politics in an epic poem is so much harder to pin down, and I just don’t know enough about the arguments made for the end of the Aeneid. The DRN ends with the plague at Athens and stops just as people are throwing bodies on somebody else’s funeral pyre. I read a book making the case that the DRN is incomplete by comparing it to Epicurus’ On Nature (probably the main source), and it was actually quite convincing overall, but I really think the DRN is a lot cooler the way it is. Vergil imitates it elsewhere (Georgics 3, I think) by putting a plague at the end of a book, which is suggestive, and then both of those poems become suggestive for the end of the Aeneid.
The “Lucretius is a madman” mantra started with Jerome, who records that Lucretius was driven mad by a love potion and committed suicide. There’s no other source for the story, and it’s clearly the kind of thing that could be drawn from his assault on love in Book 4 and made up by a detractor (Epicureanism has always had lots of detractors). If it were about any other author about whom we know more, nobody would give it a second thought; as it is, we know next to nothing about Lucretius, so people grasp at straws when trying to explain difficult parts of the poem.
Lavinia and Vergil sound a lot like Numa and Egeria. Except I’m pretty sure Egeria wasn’t dying....
I should have guessed on Ascanius, I suppose. It’s kind of fun to see such different takes, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-17 14:19 (UTC)I think you're right about the ancients not thinking along those lines; LeGuin, however, does. But I think her central argument still holds, namely that killing Turnus is nefas but necessary to found the empire/take over the kingship of Latium, which is completely fas--so yes, Aeneas is very definitely in the grip of Destiny.
Yeah, reading these two books together was really interesting. I'd definitely recommend both of them, but particularly Black Ships.