The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (21 page)

Thucydides’ search for the large lesson, the general idea, explains, too, his economy of style. For a study of civil disturbance (
stasis
), since the detailed experience of Corcyra will suffice, he need not recount the numerous other such civil disorders during the war. And in Athens after Pericles he elides many others to put the spotlight on Cleon, in whom we can see clearly enough the character of the demagogue. He gives similar leading roles to Pericles (his model statesman), Themistocles, and Brasidas. This selectivity troubles the modern historian who relentlessly chronicles the whole succession of characters and events; for Thucydides it makes an economy of style focusing on lessons of politics and empire.

Some, denying the title to Herodotus, have called Thucydides the first “scientific” historian for abandoning all supernatural causes and finding a human cause for every event. His history of the Peloponnesian War, Maurice Bowra observes, is written in a “clinical” spirit—showing how an Athens in good health suffers the corruptions that bring its downfall. Perhaps his approach to political events owed something to the medical science of Hippocrates. Himself a victim of the plague of 430-429, he was lucky enough to survive and to describe the symptoms and course of the disease with a medical precision that still impresses clinicians. Still, Thucydides’ momentous influence was as the creator of political history—a by-product of the Athenian polis. He interpreted his whole known world with a view to those political interests. That emphasis was not entirely wholesome, but has never ceased to dominate the writing of history in the West. And that same political obsession helps explain why, compared with other classic Greek forms of inquiry, Thucydides’ kind of history in Greece was not fertile of successors.

But he did earn a high place among modern political theorists. Of all the Greek historians, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) “loved Thucydides best.” In fact, he loved Thucydides so much that he gave his leisure hours to translating the
History of the Peloponnesian War
(1628) “in order that the follies of the Athenian Democrats should be revealed to his compatriots.” “He made me realize,” Hobbes notes in his autobiography, “how silly is democracy, and how much wiser a single man is than a multitude; I translated this author who would tell Englishmen to beware of trusting orators.” Thucydides himself was wary of such simplicities. Athens under Pericles, he noted, was “nominally a democracy, but actually a monarchy under the foremost man.” Yet there was never a more eloquent or more idealized picture of Athenian democracy than that Thucydides paints in his version of the funeral oration of Pericles. The constitution of Athens, he insists, is an original, a pattern for others to imitate. “Its administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy.” While all are equal before the law, in politics Athens is an aristocracy of merit. “As a city,” he boasts, “we are the school of Hellas.” So Thucydides fueled a debate that has never ceased.

From Myth to Literature: Virgil

While the Ionian spirit of inquiry added new ways of thinking about the past, it did not destroy the perennial appeal of ancient myth. In later centuries across the West, schoolchildren would be charmed by the Homeric epics, and especially by the adventures of Ulysses, though they had scant interest in Herodotus and Thucydides. While Homer survived in ancient Greece, the new spirit of history brought ways of giving myth and religion the plausibility of history. What was the relation between the gods, the traditional heroes of the epic bards, and the real events of history?

One of the most influential of those who asked this interesting question was Euhemerus of Messene (flourished c. 300 B.C.) on the southwest Peloponnese in the century after Thucydides’ death. He must have been a bold imaginer, for he devised his own myth to give a historical basis for the traditional myths. He recorded his imaginary voyage to the mysterious island of Panchaea in the Indian Ocean. This fantasy was called “Sacred Scripture” from the inscriptions on a golden column at the center of the island. Inscriptions recorded the great deeds of Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus, who had once been benevolent kings of the island. The grateful people then worshiped them as gods.

This was a welcome precedent for Hellenistic rulers claiming worship from their subjects. Euhemerus’ ingenious work had wide implications for Greek heroic traditions. It suggested that the Greek gods were originally heroic kings—later deified for their service to their people—and seemed to justify the ruler cults of Euhemerus’ own time. The original work now surviving only in fragments was summarized by Eusebius, then translated and adapted by Ennius (born 239 B.C.). His Latin work
Euhemerus
had wide influence. Some saw it as rationalizing atheism, but Christian apologists like Lactantius (c. 240-c. 320) argued that Euhemerus had exposed the real foundation of Greek gods. The theory called Euhemerism argued that all gods may have originally been only human rulers elevated to divinity by later generations for their benefits to mankind. But Christian thinkers like Saint Augustine and Lactantius turned it to their purpose. The divinity assigned to human rulers, they said, came not from their virtues but from their demonic vices, which inspired fear in humankind. Then popular worship of them was not from adoration but for propitiation. The Roman author Statius (A.D. c. 40-96) had similarly observed, “The first reason in the world for the existence of the gods was fear.”

Still the reach for the past was passionate and relentless. Myth, born in community tradition preserved and embellished by bards singing heroic epics, survived as a fertile form of literature. It produced its own classics tying past to future. The Romans had known writing since the seventh or sixth century B.C., and their pontiffs, guardians of the sacred books, had begun keeping archives. And this helps explain the poverty of Roman national myths, just as the rise of literacy in Greece had brought there the decline of the spontaneity of the heroic bards. In Rome the arts of oratory had developed and been celebrated by Cicero, under the republic. By the second century B.C. the new career of man of letters had been born. The full-time writers now depended on the patronage of the great families. When Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 B.C., power was concentrated in him as
princeps,
though republican forms survived. This did not call him a monarch, yet set him above all other citizens. The name Augustus was conferred on him in 27 B.C. The Augustan Age would be fertile of the great Latin writers—Horace, Ovid, and others. This new Roman Empire called for a new national literature, which soon would appear.

The hero of this re-creation was Virgil (70-19 B.C.). Like most of the great Roman writers, he was not born in Rome. He came from a respectable but not prominent family in what was still called Cisalpine Gaul near Mantua, not far from Venice. Educated at Cremona and Milan, Virgil then studied in Rome before returning to his Mantuan farm. There he began composing his
Eclogues
in 43 B.C. After his farm was confiscated during the civil wars, he lived for a while in Rome, where the powerful Maecenas (born between 74 and 64 B.C.) introduced him to the emperor Augustus. Maecenas himself had literary ambitions and was the patron of a literary circle that gathered in his mansion on the Esquiline hill. Virgil’s
Eclogues,
a Latin adaptation of Theocritus’ Greek pastorals, attracted the attention of Maecenas, who was close to Augustus. Maecenas may have suggested the subject of Virgil’s next work, the
Georgics
(from Greek
georgos,
“farmer”), a didactic poem of two thousand lines on the model of Hesiod’s
Works and Days
on agriculture, which Virgil dedicated to him.

Maecenas tried to persuade the poets in his stable to write epics in praise of his friend Augustus. Virgil took up his suggestion and spent eleven years composing the
Aeneid,
his epic of the wanderings of Aeneas. When Virgil had nearly finished his epic, he traveled to the East to verify his descriptions of sites in the poem. He fell ill en route, died, and was buried in Naples. Virgil’s project had aroused Augustus’ interest. The emperor had asked to see parts of it as it was written, and Virgil read portions to Augustus and his family in 23 B.C. Augustus appeared to see it as the epic of his vision of Roman grandeur. The work was never revised to Virgil’s satisfaction. It was said that as he was dying Virgil ordered the manuscript destroyed, but this was countermanded by Augustus himself.

Virgil had led the life of a devoted man of letters, seeking perfection in his writing. He spent his life in poetry, he never married, never held a military or political position. The first half of his life he was a retiring scholar. After his poetry had made him famous, he won the friendship of leading Romans. But he never lost the awe of Rome that he felt from his youth as a provincial, an outsider. In the first Eclogue, one of his earliest poems, the visiting shepherd Tityrus reports:

The city, Meliboeus, they call Rome,
I simpleton, deemed like this town of ours. . . .
Comparing small with great; but this as far
Above all other cities rears her head
As cypress above pliant osier towers. (trans. James Rhoades)

Although the
Aeneid
shows signs of not having been finally revised, it still survived as a model of Latin style. Just as Homer was the educator of Greece, Quintilian recommended that Virgil’s works should be the basis of the Roman education. For all the centuries since, students of the classics have been enchanted by Virgil’s epic of the adventures of Aeneas. In the Middle Ages, Virgil was Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory toward Paradise. And the
Aeneid
would provide Milton his model for
Paradise Lost.
Translation of Virgil has invited the talents of English poets from John Dryden to William Morris, C. Day Lewis and Robert Fitzgerald.

Myth, which had been the spontaneous accumulation of oral tradition over centuries, in Virgil’s hands now became literature—the vehicle of nations and empires. He turned the kudos of myth to the needs of the new emperor Augustus and the grandeur of expanding Rome. It would have been difficult to write an epic with Augustus himself as the hero. Nor was the Battle of Actium, in which Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra in a naval battle, somehow an appealing theme. There had been very little fighting. It might have seemed absurd to feature the gods in such recent events. And perhaps there were too many suicides for a heroic epic. Antony had committed suicide on the false report of Cleopatra’s suicide. Then Cleopatra, failing to seduce Octavian, and fearing being forced to adorn his triumph in Rome, did the same, while Egypt was added to the Roman Empire.

Octavian celebrated three triumphs and closed the temple of Janus to signal the restoration of peace throughout the Roman world. The Homeric bards, who sang of ancient times, had little fear of contradiction. But Virgil had taken on an epic foreshadowing the present and the future. Virgil once confessed in a letter that he must have been mad to attempt it. How to create a credible myth—in literature that would celebrate Roman virtues, encompass all Italy, and prophesy the glory of Augustan Rome? To do that while satisfying the envy and amour propre of his own age was an achievement. And at the same time to create an epic of pathos and tragedy that would long outlast the Roman Empire and delight generations who knew no Actium and cared nothing for Antony, Cleopatra, or Octavian. This was the
Aeneid,
Virgil’s way of seeking meaning in the empire—encompassing past, present, and future.

Virgil succeeded in this first national epic by drawing on the Homeric epics, proven over centuries. It would have been folly not to build on themes so long tested. So he found ways to adapt the themes of a preliterate heroic age to the aspirations of a world-reaching empire. But how tie the imperial future to a mythic past? A secondary figure in the
Iliad,
Aeneas, son of Anchises and Aphrodite (Venus) and a member of the younger branch of the royal family of Troy in disfavor with Priam, gave him his clue. In the
Iliad
“The shaker of the earth Poseidon” predicted that “the might of Aeneas (Aineias) shall be lord over the Trojans and his sons’ sons, and those who are born of their seed hereafter.” Aeneas was thus the one legendary Trojan who had a promising future. While Romans naturally looked to Greek legends for their founding epic, in a time when they were conquering Greece they preferred a hero from among the enemies of Greece. The image of the Trojan Aeneas, refugee from Greek brutality, with his father Anchises on his back and leading his son Ascanius by the hand, filled the prescription. In the
Iliad,
Aeneas is said to have been respected equally with Hector and to have been honored like a god. While his recorded deeds are not heroic, Aeneas is noted for his piety, a conspicuous Roman virtue. Roman
pietas
meant not mere religious piety, but devotion to father and mother and the gods and to the grand destiny of Rome. By Virgil’s time there was already a legend of Aeneas’ flight from Troy with his ancestral gods (Penates), of his wanderings and his founding of cities. Towns with names resembling Aeneas or with temples of Venus claimed him as their founder. The Sicilian Greek historian Timaeus in the fourth century B.C. had mentioned Aeneas as the founder of Lavinium on the coastal plains of the Tiber, from which settlers were said to have come to found Alba Longa, birthplace of Romulus and Remus, about twenty miles from the future site of Rome. Drawing on these and other legends, Virgil composed the
Aeneid.

While inspired by Homer, Virgil was wonderfully free in adapting his models. He reversed the order of the Homeric story. He made the
Odyssey
his model for his first half, starting with six books on the wanderings of his hero Aeneas, after his flight from Troy (his
Odyssey
). The next six books (his
Iliad
) was a saga of battle scenes of Aeneas enlisting allies and founding Rome. And he reenacts Homeric themes in an exhilarating Roman manner. When Ulysses visited the Underworld, the world of the dead, he saw the shades of his mother and his fellow Greeks killed at Troy or on their way home, along with heroes of the mythic past. Similarly, Virgil’s Aeneas in the Underworld, guided by his father, sees the heroes of the Roman future. While the canny Ulysses personifies the bold Greek seafaring adventurer, Aeneas personifies
pietas,
the Roman morality of discipline and duty that built a world-encompassing empire.