Heroides 7: Giving and taking (II)

The previous post offered the notion that Dido's passion for Aeneas issues in a mode of giving that is complex, implicative, and carries the power of a taking. Ovid is entirely coherent in depicting this symmetrical model of giving in his Heroides 7, which begins, Accipe, Dardanide.

What does Dido ask of Aeneas in return for her gift? At first blush, she appears to ask nothing more than what any author asks -- to be read. What she is giving in the opening lines is her carmen (song, charm), the last words, in writing, of the dying author. She has no hope of his accepting what she had offered him -- everything, basically -- though at moments she'll seem to waver. After losing all, a few words is a light thing:

Sed merita et famam corpusque animumque pudicum     
Cum male perdiderim, perdere verba leve est.

But since I may have wholly lost my name for merit
and for modesty of body and soul, to lose words is little.

Within her carmen, Dido details all the things the Trojan prince has refused. And, she says,

Uror, ut inducto ceratae sulpure taedae,     
Ut pia fumosis addita tura focis.

I burn like waxen torches smeared with sulphur,
or pious incense cast into the smoking censer.

As she runs through her arguments, her reasonings and pleadings, Dido is also building inferential reckonings. If Aeneas leaves in midwinter on stormy seas, it is because he must hate her so much as to prefer death to staying with her. And, if his ship sinks, he'll have quite a lot on his plate:

Wicked man, you abandon both pregnant Dido
and that part of you hidden enclosed by my body.
You add the infant’s death to the unhappy mother’s,
and you’ll be author of the funeral of your unborn child. (133-ff)

The tacit perils of gift reciprocity are played out in Dido's gift of herself in the cave. Aeneas, until this moment unaware of the fruit of their amor, now knows and must reckon with the embryonic result of acceptance.

more....

The Virgilian Progression

A commonplace of Renaissance literary thought that is certainly relevant to Milton is the idea of the "Virgilian progression." Here's an allusion to it from a life of the poet Samuel Daniel:

Daniel continued to mount the ladder of literary achievement, charting a Virgilian progression from lyric poetry, tragic complaints, and drama to epic history in verse. link

The notion began with words that Virgil was believed to have used to introduce the Aeneid:

Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avena
carmen, et egressus silvis vicina coegi,
ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono,
gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martis
arma virumque cano. (translation here)

In brief, the idea is that just as Virgil began with lowly pastorals in his Eclogues, then graduated to the more robust, learned Georgics (which end with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice) before ascending to the epic muse of War and the destiny of Rome in the Aeneid, so later poets who aspire to greatness could do worse than tread in his footsteps.

The three moments correspond to the three levels of style identified in classical rhetoric -- the plain, or low style, the middle, or "mixed" style, frequently used for didactic poetry, and the high, florid, or epic style. See, for example, Cicero's Orator. Other classic works that exemplify the middle style would be Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, a philosophical work that freely mixes high and low, and Hesiod's Works and Days.

Virgil's "progression" was also understood as a recapitulation within a single poetic career of the entire history of Greek literary development, bookending it in reverse:

Homer --> Hesiod --> Theocritus <--> Eclogues --> Georgics --> Aeneid

As such, Virgil was understood to have done singlehandedly for Rome what took centuries for Greek poets to create, and this is part of why in 1944, when T.S. Eliot asked "What is a Classic?," Virgil was his touchstone.

Edmund Spenser, one of Milton's significant English models, employed the progression as a conscious programme in his own career, and used it as a structuring device within the Fairie Queene.

Milton is clearly following in his predecessors' traces in beginning with L'Allegro and Il Penseroso and then, in Lycidas, raising the ante as he seeks augmented poetic inspiration:

Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well,

That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring,

Begin, and somwhat loudly sweep the string.

From there it's yet another leap to the muse of Paradise Lost (much as Dante, in each of the three canticles of his Comedy, invoked a distinct spirit):

F Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth

10

Rose out of Chaos. Or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.