T.S. Eliot, What is a Classic?

Virgil’s maturity of mind, and the maturity of his age, are exhibited in this awareness of history. With maturity of mind I have associated maturity of manners and absence of provinciality. I suppose that, to a modern European suddenly precipitated into the past, the social behavior of the Romans and the Athenians would seem indifferently coarse, barbarous and offensive. But if the poet can portray something superior to contemporary practice, it is not in the way of anticipating some later, and quite different code of behaviour, but by an insight into what the conduct of his own people at his own time might be, at its best. House parties of the wealthy, in Edwardian England, were not exactly what we read of in the pages of Henry James: but Mr. James’s society was an idealization, of a kind, of that society, and not an anticipation of any other. I think that we are conscious, in Virgil more than in any other Latin poet – for Catullus and Propertius seem ruffians, and Horace somewhat plebeian by comparison – of a refinement of manners springing from a delicate sensibility, and particularly in that test of manners, private and public conduct between the sexes.

It is not for me, in a gathering of people, all of whom may be better scholars than I, to review the story of Aeneas and Dido. But I have always thought the meeting of Aeneas with the shade of Dido, in Book VI, not only one of the most poignant, but one of the most civilized passages in poetry. It is complex in meaning and economical in expression, for it not only tells us about the attitude of Dido – still more important is what it tells us about the attitude of Aeneas. Dido’s behaviour appears almost as a projection of Aeneas’ own conscience: this, we feel, is the way in which Aeneas’ conscience would expect Dido to behave to him. The point, it seems to me, is not that Dido is unforgiving – though it is important that, instead of railing at him, she merely snubs him – perhaps the most telling snub in all poetry: what matters most is, that Aeneas does not forgive himself – and this, significantly, in spite of the fact of which he is well aware, that all that he has done has been in compliance with destiny, or in consequence of the machinations of the gods who are themselves, we feel, only instruments of a greater inscrutable power.

Here, what I chose as an instance of civilized manners, proceeds to testify to civilized consciousness and conscience: but all of the levels at which we may consider a particular episode, belong to one whole. It will be observed, finally, that the behaviour of Virgil’s characters (I might except Turnus, the man without a destiny) never appears to be according to some purely local or tribal code of manners: it is in its time, both Roman and European. Virgil certainly, on the plane of manners, is not provincial.

“My child’s death has affected me so greatly that I feel the loss as bitterly as on the first day. My wife is also completely broken down.”

—Letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 1856

Callimachus 37 (Gow-Page edition)

At dawn we laid to rest Melanippus.
At sunset the unwed girl, Basilo,
Died by her own hand.
To live, when her brother’s on the pyre,
That she could not bear.
The house of their father, Aristippus,
Has seen a two-fold evil.
All Cyrene grieved at the sight of a home
Once blessed with children now barren.

Ἠῶιοι Μελάνιππον ἐθάπτομεν, ἠελίου δέ
δυομένου Βασιλὼ κάτθανε παρθενική
αὐτοχερί: ζώειν γὰρ ἀδελφεὸν ἐν πυρὶ θεῖσα
οὐκ ἔτλη. δίδυμον δ᾽ οἶκος ἐπεῖδε κακόν
5πατρὸς Ἀριστίπποιο, κατήφησεν δὲ Κυρήνη
πᾶσα τὸν εὔτεκνον χῆρον ἰδοῦσα δόμον.

Marble grave stele of a little girl.
Circa 450-440 BC.
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Larry Benn has a B.A. in English Literature from Harvard College, an M.Phil in English Literature from Oxford University, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Making amends for a working life misspent in finance, he’s now a hobbyist in ancient languages and blogs at featsofgreek.blogspot.com.

Epictetus. Disc 2. 6.17-19

 “But if you say these things are annoying, what annoyance does the thing that existed experience in perishing? The tool of destruction is a blade, a wheel, the sea, a tile, or a tyrant. What does it matter to you what road you take to hell? All the paths there are equal in the end.

εἰ δ᾿ ὡς δύσκολα καλεῖς, ποίαν δυσκολίαν ἔχει τὸ γενόμενον φθαρῆναι; τὸ δὲ φθεῖρον ἢ μάχαιρά ἐστιν ἢ τροχὸς ἢ θάλασσα ἢ κεραμὶς ἢ τύραννος. τί σοι μέλει, ποίᾳ ὁδῷ καταβῇς εἰς Ἅιδου; ἴσαι πᾶσαί εἰσιν.

CW: Sexual assault, rape

5.199 in the Greek Anthology

Wine and toasts, the ploys, have put Aglaonike to sleep–
And the sweet love of Nicagoras has too.
Her things, all still dripping with perfume,
Are dedicated by her to Cypris,
The delicate spoils of a virgin’s passions:
Sandals and the soft garments which covered her breasts.
Witnesses to sleep and its occasional interruptions.

οἶνος καὶ προπόσεις κατεκοίμισαν Ἀγλαονίκην
αἱ δόλιαι, καὶ ἔρως ἡδὺς ὁ Νικαγόρεω,
ἧς πάρα Κύπριδι ταῦτα μύροις ἔτι πάντα μυδῶντα
κεῖνται, παρθενίων ὑγρὰ λάφυρα πόθων,
σάνδαλα, καὶ μαλακαί, μαστῶν ἐνδύματα, μίτραι.
ὕπνου καὶ σκυλμῶν τῶν τότε μαρτύρια.

Alongside the familiar topoi of broken oaths, frustrated desires, and the like, the “love” epigrams of the Greek Anthology record crude renderings of sex, and sexual assault. The disturbing subject of the poem below is in tension with the elegance of its construction. That should prompt us to think hard about what an elegant facade makes it possible to say (under the breath, as it were) in the most seemingly benign of the love poems.

Larry Benn has a B.A. in English Literature from Harvard College, an M.Phil in English Literature from Oxford University, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Making amends for a working life misspent in finance, he’s now a hobbyist in ancient languages and blogs at featsofgreek.blogspot.com.