The Glorious Twelfth
“That there was an art of making statues established in Italy also, and from an early date, is indicated by the Hercules dedicated in the Forum Boarium (Cattle Market), so they say, by Evander, who is called the triumphal Hercules and is dressed in triumphal clothes when triumphs are being celebrated; and also by the statue of Twin-faced Janus dedicated by king Numa, who is worshipped as presiding over peace and war, with his fingers so arranged as to indicate, by the sign of three hundred and sixty-five days, that he is also the god of time.”
A paragraph from Pliny the Elder (Hist. Nat. 34.33) which caught my attention a few months ago. There’s nothing original in what follows, but I’m thinking, on and off, about Hercules (Heracles, Verethragna, Vajrapani…), and this clarified some things for me about Hercules in Rome. There is no reason on Earth why my noodlings should be of any interest to you, needless to say.
Specifically, I was thinking, as I often do, about Hercules in Virgil’s Aeneid.
In Book VIII of Virgil’s epic Aeneas visits the future site of Rome, and is welcomed and entertained by the Greek king Evander, the alleged dedicator (Pliny is clearly sceptical) of that statue, who has settled there. Evander’s son Pallas will be crucial to the rest of the plot, his death at the hands of Turnus motivating Aeneas’ culminating revenge. But a lengthy section of this book is taken up by Evander’s account to Aeneas of Hercules’ exploits at Rome, how he had visited the site as he was herding the cattle of Geryon from Spain back to Argos, his tenth Labour, and slain a monstrous bandit called Cacus who was terrorizing Evander’s people.
Hercules is worshipped as a god by Evander (he has in the interim died and been deified), and it turns out that Aeneas has arrived on the very day of the festival of Hercules, suggesting a parallel between Aeneas and Hercules that Virgil periodically activates in the course of the poem. This festival, celebrated in Virgil’s day at the Ara Maxima, the shrine of Hercules in the Forum Boarium, fell on August 12, and that date opens up an entirely different dimension of significance.
Book VIII will end with the scene of Augustus’ Triple Triumph in 29 B.C., as represented by Vulcan on the shield he has forged for Aeneas. The triumph was a spectacular procession of troops, captives and spoils through Rome, staged by a successful Roman general, himself dressed in impressive clothing and riding in a chariot. In 29 Augustus celebrated triumphs, for military victories in Dalmatia and then over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium and in Egypt, on three consecutive days, August 13, 14 and 15. Augustus thus formally arrived at Rome, in preparation for these processions, on the day that Aeneas first comes to Rome, according to Virgil, but also the day on which Hercules had rid the city of the scourge of Cacus, and on which his delivery of Rome was to be celebrated thereafter. Denis Feeney (Caesar’s Calendar p.162) calls this a kind of wormhole, times widely separated, in the case of Hercules or Aeneas and Augustus by a thousand years, but identified in Roman minds by the sanctity of the day. It’s clear enough that Augustus had timetabled his triumphs so as to associate himself with Hercules in his role as Rome’s saviour, and that Virgil is elaborating on that.
What Pliny’s information about the statue of Hercules gives us is further reason for Augustus to align his own arrival in Rome with Hercules’s. What we learn from that “Triumphal Hercules” at the Ara Maxima, supposedly dedicated by Evander himself, and dressed up in the same elaborate clothing as a triumphing general during his triumph, is that Hercules could be understood to be the original triumphator, the model for every triumphing general, and that Augustus was in this respect as well something like a reincarnation of Hercules as he processed through the streets of Rome in 29 B.C.
As I say, there’s nothing remotely new about any of these observations. Here, for example, is Matthew Loar batting around similar ideas in greater depth and with much greater sophistication. What follows, furthermore, is provoked by a rereading on my part of Mary Beard’s The Roman Triumph, and some hints there of the depth of the connections Romans came to perceive, and Virgil was able to exploit, between Hercules and the triumph. It seems clear, at any rate, or at least clearer to me than it used to, that the very name of Hercules could evoke the triumphal ceremony. Horace in one of his Odes, 3.14, welcomes Augustus returning from campaign in Spain “in the manner of Hercules”, Herculis ritu, suggesting the Hercules who had also come to Rome from that direction, but also bestowing on Augustus’ arrival something of the character of a triumph.
What Mary’s book made me think of more, though, was food. There is a persistent association, albeit hard to pin down in detail, between Hercules, the triumph, and feasting. Athenaeus, citing the Stoic philosopher Posidonius, a visitor to Rome in the first century B.C., describes a feast at Hercules’s shrine (presumably the Ara Maxima), laid on by the triumphing general, the generosity of which, Posidonius remarked, was itself “Heraclean” in the provision of wine and food (Deipnosophistae 4, 153c; cf. 5, 221f). There seems to be some connection here to a ritual described by Plutarch (Roman Questions 18) whereby wealthy men would gift 10% of their wealth to Hercules at the Ara Maxima by throwing a massive dinner for Roman male citizens (women were forbidden access to the Ara Maxima).
Plutarch on the Hercules tithe, courtesy of Lacus Curtius
Quite what the connecting threads were between the dinners at Hercules’ shrine and the triumphal dinners is elusive, but one thing all this emphasis on feasting illustrates is a fundamental, and fascinating, tension in the Greco-Roman perception of this, their greatest, hero. Hercules was a god-like bringer of peace and order, but Hercules was also an all-too-human and notorious carouser, according to Plutarch somehow both gluttonous (ἀδηφάγος) and frugal in his lifestyle (ἀπέριττος τῷ βίῳ).
At the Ara Maxima in Rome he was all of these things, on the one hand one of Rome’s many founder figures (like Romulus, and Aeneas himself), and on the other the instigator of unrestrained self-indulgence. Propertius 4.9, which playfully continues Hercules’ story in Aeneid VIII after his conquest of Cacus, exploits this contrast to comic effect, depicting a Hercules ravenous with thirst after his exertions begging for entry to the shrine of the Bona Dea, a sanctuary that excluded men (just as his shrine excluded women). The statue in the photo above is from Alba Fucens in Central Italy (now in the Museo archeologico nazionale d’Abruzzo in Chieti), a cult of Hercules closely related to that in the Forum Boarium (involving a further dimension of Hercules, as a god of commerce, but that’s another story). He strikes a relaxed pose, wine cup in his left hand (perhaps the wooden scyphus that Servius at Aen. 8.278 tells us Hercules brought with him to Italy) and garland on his head.
It is with feasting at the Ara Maxima in honour of Hercules that the day ends in Aeneid 8, too, before Evander leads Aeneas through Rome-before-Rome to Evander’s simple hut on the Palatine hill. This feasting is seemingly as strong an allusion to triumphal ritual as anything else.
Was it a statue like the one from Alba Fucens, Hercules relaxed and tipsy, that was decked out in the elaborate gear of a triumphing general, I wonder? It would capture something essential about this culture hero if it was.
Genre, gender (& some genitalia)
A seasonal blog about how heroes die. Draw your own conclusions about my state of mind at the end of 2018.
One of the most celebrated/notorious episodes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the Calydonian boar hunt in Book VIII (270-444), and it typifies Ovid’s irreverent approach to epic narrative. An impressive band of heroes (Theseus, Jason, Peleus, Telamon, Laertes, Nestor and many more: the generation before the Iliad, so in principle even more heroic than Achilles, Ajax or Odysseus) gathers together to help Meleager deal with a monstrous boar that is wreaking havoc in Calydon, but Ovid turns material that might make a very acceptable epic narrative into a “boisterous comedy”, in Nicholas Horsfall’s words.* Telamon trips over a tree root, for example, and Nestor polevaults onto a branch. Most outrageously of all, it is a woman, Atalanta, who shows most physical prowess, drawing first blood from the boar.
Ovid’s approach to writing epic, in simple terms, is not to do what an epic is supposed to do, but at the same time constantly remind us what a respectable epic should be doing. An essential characteristic of epic, perhaps its quintessential quality, is its masculinity, its concern with males who are more male than ordinary males and excel in stereotypically male activities, warfare and violent physical activity especially, but also forceful speech and charismatic leadership. Promoting a female character at the expense of the male suits Ovid’s aims perfectly: the prominence in Ovid’s telling of this myth of a woman huntress, alongside male heroes falling far short of the heroic ideal, strikes epic at its core.
Which brings us to the business of this blog. Ancaeus is another hero who meets a humiliating end in the course of the boar hunt, but his mode of death is particularly meaningful. An exaggeratedly male, bombastic hero, wielding a double axe, Ancaeus responds to Atalanta’s success by commanding his comrades to stand back and “Learn how far men’s weapons surpass women’s,/ and make way for my action” (discite femineis quid tela uirilia praestent/ o iuuenes, operique meo concedite, 392-3), before being peremptorily despatched by the boar with a blow from both tusks in the groin. There is nothing coincidental about the location of Ancaeus’ terminal wound. As I wrote a few years ago,** citing Adams’ seminal reference work The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (p. 93 n. 3), “tela, uirilia, and opus are all terms regularly used of the penis, and ‘there was a marked tendency for adjectives of the base femin- to be applied… to the female parts.'” Alternative translations of operique meo concedite may suggest themselves. But if epic is all about uirtus, “manhood”, this caricature of an epic hero dies a death that encapsulates Ovid’s contrarian attitude to the genre he’s supposed to be writing.
My mind turned back to poor Ancaeus a couple of weeks ago when preparing a MOOC for my old student Chris Tudor (Massolit is a great resource, incidentally, which I enthusiastically recommend). I was talking about Aeneid XI, and one of my lectures was on Camilla, the female warrior whose exploits occupy the latter part of the book (and who is a key model for Ovid’s Atalanta). Here also we find an epic investigating its own gender biases, but Virgil’s poem is altogether more conventional in this respect than Ovid’s. Camilla is a formidable warrior, dominating the battlefield and seeing off a number of male antagonists (aduenit qui uestra dies muliebribus armis/ uerba redargueret, “the day has come for a woman’s weapons to refute your words”, she vaunts over one victim, 687-8). But her death is occasioned by a dramatic reversion to (a stereotype of) conventional female behaviour: Alison Keith^ talks of “a Greco-Roman stereotype regarding women’s excessive interest in clothing and personal adornment” (p. 29). Distracted by the sight of a gorgeously bedecked Trojan priest called Chloreus, Camilla forgets her military priorities and goes in pursuit, burning “with a womanly desire for plunder and spoils” (782). Her defences down, Camilla is easily picked off by a nonentity called Arruns (whose own, weirdly anonymous, death shortly after is one of the eeriest passages in the Aeneid).
Camilla’s death seems in some respects like a crude replay of Dido’s departure from Virgil’s epic. In a similar way, a woman’s presence in this overwhelmingly male space of epic is condoned for as long as she acts like a stereotypical man, in Dido’s case as a head of state and dux, in Camilla’s as a fighter. But when women start to behave like (the ancient stereotype of) women, falling in love, acting and speaking irrationally, indulging their own selfish interests, distracted by beautiful superficialities, their time in epic is limited.
Of course Virgil, in this as in other respects, was well able to exploit the rigid generic expectations he inherited by contravening the rules for effect, and the intrinsic power of these female characters derives not least from their anomalous status in epic. “Ce qui fait l’expressivité, c’est la règle enfreinte”, as Joseph Hellegouarc’h^^ succinctly expressed it: classical literature is rule-bound, but drew much of its power of expression from that very fact. Ultimately, however, Virgil’s treatment of women in the Aeneid cannot fail but represent an endorsement of the misogyny enshrined in epic poetry, the most culturally authoritative of ancient poetic genres.
Returning to topic, a case in point is the detail that reminded me so strongly of Ancaeus, another mortal blow delivered in a significant location. Arruns’ spear strikes Camilla below her “exposed breast” (exserta papilla, 803): Camilla is portrayed as dressed for the fight like an Amazon, one breast uncovered, the archetypal ancient image of a fighting woman. (What made this the archetypal image is worth contemplating: see Adrienne Mayor,^* Chapter 5.) Again, the death of a warrior, and the location of the terminal wound, defines the character of the poem, Virgil’s conventional epic focusing on Camilla’s gender as she exits the poem, as Ovid had highlighted Ancaeus’s.
But what imperils those tidy categories just a little bit is the episode that immediately precedes Camilla’s death, again foregrounding gender/genre-defining concerns and indeed clearly setting the scene for what follows. The Etruscan leader Tarchon, mythical founder of Virgil’s hometown Mantua, rallies his cavalry against Camilla’s by hurling himself into the heart of the enemy forces, actually seizing hold of one of them, Venulus, and carrying him off bodily on his own horse. It is a spectacular exercise in male bravado: Tarchon grapples with Venulus while still on horseback, snapping off the point of Venulus’ spear and trying to drive it into his opponent’s throat. And as he gallops forward Tarchon berates his own men for their effeminacy in failing to resist Camilla. femina palantis agit atque haec agmina uertit?, 734, “Is a woman driving you off in disorder and routing these ranks?!”, he asks incredulously.
Virgil sums up this peculiar scene in a very suggestive way: uolat igneus aequore Tarchon,/ arma uirumque ferens, “Tarchon flies like fire over the plain, bearing the man and his weapons”, 746-7. Arma uirum, “Arms and the man”, deliberately recalls the opening words (and alternative title) of the Aeneid, and the central role it promises for the uir, the heroic man, the embodiment of uirtus. Back in Book 9 the Latin warrior Numanus Remulus in a vaunting speech had dismissed the Trojans as eastern effeminates, and there also the poet had implied that “toxic masculinity” was of the essence of his own poem: sinite arma uiris et cedite ferro, Numanus tells the Trojans, “Leave weapons to the men, and renounce the sword” (Aen. 9.620). “Virgil’s readers will take sinite arma uiris in the further sense of a command to leave the world of martial epic”, Philip Hardie comments.*^ Epic is male territory. If the Trojans are indeed inadequately male, as Numanus suggests, they have no role to play in it.
Well, Virgil’s narrative enacts a similar judgement on Camilla and Dido, expelling them when they start acting too much like women. But it is well said that Ovid finds almost all the material he needs to mock epic values already present in conventional examples of the genre like the Aeneid, working on details in Virgil or Homer that threaten the clear-cut definitions epic aspires to project. Ovid fashions Atalanta from Virgil’s Camilla, but Tarchon isn’t so different from Ancaeus, either. The hyperbole that makes Tarchon a character worthy of epic, superhuman and extraordinary, is also what makes Ancaeus’ overblown antics so absurd. What distinguishes the two is not much more than the license Ovid gives us to laugh at his creations (there is much of great value in the Aeneid, but very few laughs). Tarchon’s exploit carries a hint of the ritual of devotio, the last word in Roman military heroics whereby a general ensured victory by hurling himself into the midst of the enemy and vowing himself and the enemy to the gods of the underworld (for Tarchon and devotio see Matthew Leigh in this volume of Proceedings of the Virgil Society),^*^ which is a further disincentive to laugh at him.
Once again, though, especially if we happen to writing a chapter about it, we can say thank God for the Metamorphoses, and Ovid’s acute sense of the instability of epic bluster. After reading Ovid on Ancaeus, certainly, it’s hard to take Tarchon very seriously.
The Latin for “toxic masculinity”, by the way, is temeraria uirtus (Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.407).
^A. M. Keith, Engendering Rome: women in Latin epic (Cambridge, 2000);
*^P. R. Hardie, Virgil, Aeneid Book IX (Cambridge, 1994);
^*A. Mayor, The Amazons: lives and legends of warrior women across the ancient world (Princeton, 2014);
*N. Horsfall, “Epic and burlesque in Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII,” CJ 74 (1979), 319-32;
^*^M. Leigh, “Hopelessly devoted to you: traces of the Decii in Virgil’s Aeneid,” PVS 21 (1993), 89-110;
^^J. Hellegouarc’h, Le monosyllabe dans l’hexamètre latin; essai de métrique verbale (Paris, 1964);
**Ll. Morgan, “Child’s play: Ovid and his critics,” JRS 93 (2003), 66-91.
When words collide
In Poem 84 Catullus has a go at a man named Arrius.
Arrius’ fault is to aspirate, add an initial aitch to, unaspirated Latin words, turning insidiae into hinsidiae and commoda into chommoda, the ch not as in church but (W. Sidney Allen’s example, Vox Latina p. 26) quite like the initial sound of cot. Catullus’ target may be Q. Arrius, a lower-class, self-made orator snootily dismissed by Cicero in his history of oratory at Brutus 242-3. There are other open questions about the poem (what the point of calling Arrius’ uncle “free” is, for example, and whether the joke in the last line is just that Arrius and his aitches are on their way home), but Catullus’ objection to Arrius’ hypercorrection no doubt carries an edge of disdain from the upper-class (and self-consciously sophisticated) poet toward a social inferior, someone socially as well as phonetically aspirational. Romans were terrible snobs, needless to say.
I’m interested in something more specific, though. Line 8, audibant eadem haec leniter et leuiter, describes the halcyon aural conditions that obtain when Arrius and his aitches have left the country; literally, “they (either everyone, or everyone’s ears) heard these same words smoothly and softly” in Arrius’ absence, leuiter hinting at the spiritus leuis or “soft breathing”, the symbol that indicates a lack of aspiration over an initial vowel in Greek (Quinn, Catullus, the poems, ad loc.). But what there also is in line 8 is an example of the meeting of two words in a poetic line generally known as elision, but more accurately as synaloepha (“melding”): the four syllables eadem haec become three, because -em and hae- coalesce into one.
Synaloepha is a common feature of Latin poetry, and it happens when a vowel or diphthong at the end of one word meets a vowel or diphthong at the start of the next. In this poem, for example, we see it in line 2, dicere, et (pronounced diceret), and 3, se esse (sesse). In most cases it was not strictly a matter of “elision”, a syllable being entirely lost, but some kind of combination of the two vowels or diphthongs into one–hence the preference for “synaloepha” as the term to describe it. Eadem haec, one word ending with -m, the next starting with h-, doesn’t at first sight look like it should be subject to the same process. But a vowel followed by m in Catullus’ Latin was pronounced as a nasalized long vowel, while the aspiration of h was so weakly realised, in elite Latin at least, that it was as if the word simply opened with the diphthong ae.
That said, how exactly the blending of eadem and haec would have sounded is hard to reconstruct: a nasalized contraction of long e and ae, maybe (W. Sidney Allen, Vox Latina p. 81), or (J. Soubiran, L’élision dans la poésie latine p. 132, supported by Quintilian, Inst. 9.4.40) something like ewae, the -em expressed by “rounding the lips as if to end with a -w” (A. Gratwick, Plautus, Menaechmi p. 251).
If that seems awkward, there are indications in the poetic use of this kind of synaloepha of -m, as Soubiran remarks, that it could be heard as an unpleasant sound: the textbook example (for ancients and moderns) is Virgil’s description of Polyphemus at Aeneid 3.658, monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens (monstruworrenduwinformingens), a splurge of sound that destroys the elegant fabric of the heroic hexameter and is clearly designed to convey the ugliness of the Cyclops. That doesn’t exhaust the expressive power of synaloepha of -m, though: a line in many ways similar to the Cyclops line, Aen. 9.170, describing Latinus’ palace, tectum augustum, ingens, centum sublime columnis (tectuwaugustuwingens), seems to suggest a building soaring beyond one’s ability to discern its structure, dissolving the structure of the hexameter for different effect, or so I once proposed (Musa pedestris p. 331). More persuasive is E.J. Kenney’s remark, in a review of Soubiran (CR 17 (1967), 325-8), that synaloepha can be “used, especially by Virgil, to produce an almost unlimited range of effects.” Elsewhere Catullus himself, at 17.26, ferream ut soleam tenaci in voragine mula, “as a mule [leaves] her iron shoe in the clinging mire”, “smears together” two normally separate elements of a composite verse to evoke, in tenacin, a horseshoe left stuck in the mud.
Returning to Catullus 84, what cannot assert itself in this encounter between eadem and haec is any aspiration of the h. The synaloepha in line 8 is tackled in a very acute reading of this poem by E. Vandiver (“Sound patterns in Catullus 84”, The Classical Journal 85 (1990), 337-40). Her suggestion is that it would have been pronounced eadhaec (a true elision of -em, in effect), and thus might evoke the aspirated consonants like ch that Arrius was in the habit of inflecting on everyone. In fact, though, as I’ve explained, that kind of elision of vowel + m isn’t generally considered the most likely account. But even if it were, an h with sufficient force to persist in this way wouldn’t admit synaloepha (by compromising the preceding vowel sound) at all.
So my suspicion is that something like the opposite is true. My polymathic colleague Jonathan Katz points out to me that unless Catullus is making a point about haec, there’s really no need to include this word at all. What is his point in introducing an h only to suppress it, then? Surely, rather than echoing Arrius’ crimes against good Latin, the line that describes a life (temporarily) free of Arrius’ aspirations is serving up an aitch pronounced as it should be pronounced, i.e. not pronounced at all.
For as long as Arrius is away, in other words, even when there’s an h on the page, no one ‘as to ‘ear it.
Swat II: on Heracles’ track to the Indus
In 1926 Aurel Stein, the Hungarian/British archaeologist and explorer, spent two and a half months touring Upper Swat, then an independent princely state beyond the boundaries of British India. In 1926 it was for the first time peaceful enough, and friendly enough with the British authorities, for Stein to secure access. As with Afghanistan, Swat was a place that Stein had long aspired, and strived, to visit.
Aurel Stein’s aims in Swat were twofold, to explore Buddhist sites along the Swat valley, and to trace the route of Alexander the Great in his conquest of Swat in 327-326BC. In particular, he wanted to identify the site of one of Alexander’s most celebrated military exploits, the mountain fastness of Aornos where the people of Swat had taken refuge from Alexander’s attack. This assault was in part motivated, the ancient sources tell us, by Alexander’s desire to rival Heracles, who had long before tried and failed to capture the “Rock”. Stein’s account of his tour, On Alexander’s Track to the Indus (a great read, I should say), opens with an apology to Xuanzang, the seventh-century Chinese monk whose account of his travels to India in search of sacred texts had been Stein’s guide across Central Asia (and was again in Swat), but who on this occasion was playing second fiddle to a fascination with Alexander that Stein had harboured since boyhood.
Aurel Stein’s trip to Swat inaugurated the archaeological investigation of the valley, subsequently taken up by the Italian scholar Giuseppe Tucci and his successors in the Missione Archaeologica Italiana in Pakistan. Tucci himself, who had a special expertise in Tibetan Buddhism, came to Swat after the Chinese occupation of Tibet in the 1950s.
Stein had a candidate for Aornos, and it was was Pir-Sar, “Peak of the Saint”, some distance to the east of the Swat river. At the climax of his book (p.119) this exceptionally fit 63-year old reaches the top of the mountain and establishes to his satisfaction that it was indeed Aornos:
“It was long after midnight before I could seek warmth among my rugs. But the growing conviction that Aornos was found at last kept my spirits buoyant in spite of benumbed hands and weary feet. Alexander, so Arrian and Curtius tell us, offered sacrifices to the gods when he had gained possession of the ‘Rock’. I had no victory to give thanks for. Yet I, too, felt tempted to offer a libation to Pallas Athene for the fulfilment of a scholar’s hope, long cherished and long delayed.”
In another blog (one I feel great fondness for, as it secured me an invitation to Swat) I expressed my view, which is entirely indebted to other people’s research and insight, that Stein was wrong about the location of Aornos, as well as about his idolisation of Alexander: there is a more plausible site for Aornos first proposed by Tucci, and that site also gives its capture a very different complexion. Here in Alexander’s track, though, Stein elegantly links the sacrifices that Alexander made to Athena and Victory on the summit of Aornos (Curtius 8.11.24) with Athena’s role as the protector of artisans and scholars such as Stein. In fact Athena’s patronage of Stein was even more intimate: on the front cover of his books was embossed an image of Athena which he had unearthed in Xinjiang, China. (As I explain here, I don’t think Stein appreciated quite how closely tied to Alexander his image actually was.)
I went to Swat (just a week in my case) interested in both these Pallas Athenas, the warrior’s and the scholar’s. In other words, I wanted to see for myself why Tucci, and more recently Luca M. Olivieri, were so convinced that Alexander’s Aornos was not Pir-Sar but Mt. Elam, a mountain much more central to Swat. (It is, as I shall explain, in important ways a matter of seeing.) But I also wanted to understand why Stein was so determined to locate Aornos at Pir-Sar, because I think his misplacement is potentially just as fascinating as anything to do with Alexander.
Stein had devoted a lot of time and effort to this question. In 1904 he had managed to visit Mt. Mahaban, on the right bank of the river Indus, a site that had been proposed for Aornos fifty years before by James Abbott, an imperial functionary at the cutting edge of British expansion into N-W India, and the man who gave his name to Osama bin Laden’s adopted home at Abbottabad. On this occasion Stein was able, with regret, to rule out Abbott’s theory about Mahaban, but he could investigate no further himself until 1926.
When he did, it was another site on the Indus he plumped for: Pir-Sar overlooks the river some way upstream of Mahaban. It’s worth considering why Abbott, Stein and a host of others were determined to locate Aornos by the Indus. The obvious reason is that in three ancient accounts it is explicitly stated that the base of the mountain was washed by the waters of the river (Diodorus 17.85.3; Strabo 15.1.8; Curtius 8.11.7, cf. 8.11.12)–they are clearly following a common source. Classical sources of course carried authority for the classically-educated Europeans engaged in this quest.
But something that is altogether clearer when you’re physically there, specifically when you’re approaching the Indus in a taxi from Islamabad airport, is the psychological compulsion for the British to locate Aornos by the Indus. British jurisdiction extended as far as the Indus and no further at the relevant point: Swat never fell under British control. Abbott had developed his theory about Aornos by a combination of local intelligence and a telescope trained on the mountains from the eastern side of the river. (He painted a watercolour of his view.) Bound up with the British search for a defensible boundary to its Indian possessions was the pursuit of a pretext for their presence in this territory. The activities of Alexander, a familiar historical figure in this profoundly alien space, were of intense interest to all the colonial officials involved in the borderlands: my favourite example is Alexander Burnes squandering a few days of his mission to Bokhara scouring the Punjab for a trace of the twelve altars to the Olympian gods raised by Alexander on the river Hyphasis. Abbott training his telescope on the far side of the Indus is an intensely imperial moment too. The British occupied one side of a river both strategic and fraught with classical associations. The site of Alexander’s exploit was all-but in their grasp, and it had to be one of those shadowy mountains just on the other side of the Indus.
Abbott’s sketch of “Aornos”, from his article “Gradus ad Aornon”, viewed from the far side of the river Indus (f).“The construction of a map of Sohaut (Swat) is a matter of much importance,” Abbott says by way of conclusion to his long argument for Mt. Mahaban: “Sooner or later the Sohauties will compel us to punish them. Every possible means should then be applied to add to our knowledge of the features of that rich and extensive valley, and imperfect as is the sketch map now offered, it will yet I trust serve as a foundation for more satisfactory charts, and if so, the toil it has cost me, will be well rewarded.” The search for Alexander and the work to extend and consolidate colonial territory were, as I say, thoroughly intertwined. Even in Stein’s case, it was an officer involved in a border campaign along the Indus, Col. R. A. Wauhope, who had given him the tip about Pir-Sar, and Stein himself had crossed the river and investigated Buddhist sites while attached to a punitive force dispatched in 1898. Commenting in The Times on Stein’s “discovery” of Aornos in 1926, Francis Younghusband describes how, “during the Chitral campaign of 30 years ago, when the engineers were road-making through the Malakand Pass into Swat, they came across evidences of an ancient road made in Buddhist times, as well as many artistic remains of the period” (27 May 1926 = H. Wang, Sir Aurel Stein in The Times p. 84).
That winding road up to “the once blood-soaked heights of the Malakand” is still the main route into Swat. Here is a view back from Malakand toward Mardan and the Kabul river:
Whatever their reasons for placing Aornos beside the Indus, Abbott and Stein and all their many fellow Aornos-hunters were almost certainly wrong, and it took the proper access to Swat achieved by Giuseppe Tucci (as well as, I believe, an academic mind somewhat less fettered by respect for classical authors) to offer a better solution. (The Indus detail is perplexing, for sure, but I need no persuading that the ancients could get their geography very badly wrong.) Tucci proposed Mt. Elam, his persuasive argument being that it was just the kind of place the people of Swat would take refuge in, a mountain considered sacred by the people of Swat since time immemorial. Elam is an important place of pilgrimage for Hindus, site of the Ram Takht, the throne of Rama, the Indian deity, while Xuanzang claims “Hilo” as the place where the Buddha in an earlier existence had surrendered his life in return for hearing half a line of scripture. Buddhist foundations on the slopes of the mountain confirm its sanctity. The stupa of Amluk-dara stands just off an ancient path to the summit of Elam–in the words of Dr Olivieri, it is a station on the pilgrimage route to the summit, and a watchtower nearby from the Hindushahi period (tenth century) underlines the importance of this, the shortest route to the mountain top.
The stupa at Amluk-dara, with Elam/Aornos behind, a perennially sacred place, photo (much better than any of mine) courtesy of Luca M. OlivieriIn my earlier blog I made something of Tucci’s idea that the very name Aornos, as recorded by Greek sources, might conceal “aarana”, “a common name for any sheltered place”: this was a place of refuge, of protection by the gods. A different kind of sense of the centrality of Elam to the part of Swat attacked by Alexander can be got from a remarkable text found and translated by Tucci, the account of a thirteenth-century Tibetan monk Orgyan pa. Tucci compares the author to Kipling’s unworldly Lama in Kim: his description of Swat is “quite possibly an almost contemporary record of a journey to a country which was already considered as a magic land, and was seen through the eyes of a man who [because of his Buddhist beliefs] had no sight for reality”, capable (in other words) of conveying less the reality of Elam than the awe that this mountain could command:
“To the east there is the mountain Ilo, which is the foremost of all mountains of the Jambudvipa (the World).There is no medical herb growing on the earth which does not grow there. It is charming on account of its herbs, stalks, leaves and flowers. Sarabhas and other antelopes wander there quite freely. There are many gardens of grape; beautiful birds of every kind and of gracious colours make a deep chattering.
From that country we went to the west for seven days;
Up to the mountain Ilo, the peak of K’a rag k’ar
In the mountain, sarabhas play
And there are gardens of grape in abundance.
I did not covet any thing.”
From reading Susan Whitfield and Gregory Schopen*, who explain the Buddhist association of thought between natural beauty, especially the cultivated landscape of the garden, and religious sanctity, I realise that when this Tibetan monk describes Elam as verdant and fertile, he is in effect saying that it is an intensely sacred place. If I understand Aurel Stein correctly, Xuanzang had converted the ancient name of Swat, Uddiyana, into the Sanskrit word for “garden”, udyana, with the same implication that Swat is a beautiful and thus a sacred space. But for Orgyan pa, Mt. Elam is the most beautiful, the most sacred place in the “magic land” of Swat.
For me, in my resolutely secular way, a comparable effect was achieved simply by standing in the archaeological site of Bazira in Barikot (a city captured by Alexander) and looking toward Mount Elam. Not for the first time I discovered that there’s nothing like physically placing yourself somewhere for understanding ancient perceptions of a place. Elam simply dominates the view. This really cannot be conveyed by a wide-angle shot, but I’ve done my best.
Obviously, though, this is where you would seek refuge from Alexander the Great.
II
A detail recorded by all the ancient sources, as I’ve mentioned, is that Alexander’s motivation for storming Aornos was partly that Heracles had unsuccessfully attempted it before him. Heracles’ failure to reach the summit was presented as an act of piety, after divine displeasure had been signalled to him by an earthquake. More Heracles than Alexander, I failed to see the summit of Aornos because I heeded warnings that Elam is still a refuge, these days for a type of person best not encountered if possible.
But another thing I’ve been reminded of in Swat is how fundamentally tied to the landscape Heracles is. Any unusual island, promontory, rock-formation, hot spring or mountain was very likely to be associated with this hero in his wanderings across the world. And while they probably shouldn’t be pushed too far, the parallels between what Westerners (and especially British) saw in Alexander and what Alexander and his army found in Heracles are striking.
In Alexander the British Empire found a precedent for their own presence in Central Asia, evidence that they were not the rank interlopers they appeared to be. If the ground was “Classic”, it was familiar–it was, in a sense, “ours”. In antiquity Heracles had long played a similar role for Greeks on the move, a god of trade and travel and colonisation whose myths of wandering always offered Greeks the option that Heracles had been there (and “there” might be Cadiz or Monaco or the Nile Delta) before them. Alexander had a special connection to Heracles, claiming descent from him, and he put the hero on his coins: it is sometimes hard to distinguish images of Heracles and Alexander, so close is their assimilation. The stories associated with Aornos are another illustration. Wherever Alexander went, so also had Heracles, assuring the Macedonians and Greeks that this was a place to which they had a valid claim.
The Heracles that came to India with Alexander entered the local artistic repertoire. This is a link to a Heracles apparently from Pakistan, now in the Ashmolean Museum, and here is a fragment of a jug handle from Charsadda, ancient Peshawar, which represents either Heracles in his lionskin, or Alexander as Heracles in his lionskin (from M. Wheeler, Charsada p. 115 and pl. XXXVIb; for a similar artefact, cf. J. Marshall, Taxila 2.433 and 3. pl. 130f, no. 226b):
I did find myself wondering if this silver repoussé head found at Sirkap, Taxila by Marshall (but stolen from the Taxila Museum in 1999), and identified by him as Dionysus or Silenus (J. Marshall, Taxila 2.614-5), might actually be Heracles, who is often depicted garlanded and drinking, and more often than Dionysus depicted bearded:
More dramatically, and excitingly, Heracles found his way into the visual language of Buddhism, a religion of which the Indo-Greek kings who ruled this area in the second century BC, indirect heirs of Alexander, seem to have been significant patrons, the most famous such king, Menander, especially. In Gandharan art Heracles becomes Vajrapani, a figure accompanying the Buddha who holds the vajra or thunderbolt (this is what his name Vajrapani means) which symbolises the power of Buddhist insight, but also regularly sporting a lionskin and/or physically evoking Heracles. Here is one of a very large number of Vajrapanis I snapped in Swat and Peshawar, this one in the Swat Museum in Saidu Sharif, and originally from the site of Nimogram:
Why this Heracles/Vajrapani became so important to Gandharan Buddhist art is a matter of much debate. Vajrapani has the role of guiding and protecting the Buddha, and the physical presence represented by Heracles suits that well enough. One explanation by Katsumi Tanabe, though, emphasises the connection of the vajra with the Indian god/hero Indra, a god of war (also, like Heracles, fond of a drink) who is regularly represented attending the Buddha: the Gandharan Vajrapani, so the theory goes, is a Greek-influenced realisation of some version of this same Indra (my thanks to @kaeshour for pointing out to me that Indra is called vajrapani with a small v, so to speak, in the Mahabharata and elsewhere).** (Heracles is certainly very good at being mistaken for non-Greek hero-deities, whether Indra or Melqart or Verethragna.) Tanabe cites this Vajrapani in the Peshawar Museum, who clearly carrries more than a hint of Heracles, but also wears Indra’s characteristic spherical cap (also to be seen on the Kanishka casket, where Indra and Brahma attend the Buddha):
I am way beyond any knowledge of what I’m talking about by now, needless to say, but what anyone can see here is an interesting mix of heroic exploits localised in Swat. Olivieri plausibly explains the idea in the Alexander historians that Heracles had tried and failed to capture Aornos as a Macedonian/Greek reinterpretation of a local myth, maybe a story of Thraetaona or Indra, Persian and Indian versions of the Indo-European dragon-fighting hero.*** From many centuries later comes a peculiar appropriation of similar heroic myth for the Buddha. It is a story concerned, as in the classic form of such stories, with a dragon and a water source crucial for agriculture. As told in Xuanzang’s account of his travels, the dragon Apalala was interfering with the flow of the river Swat, on which the valley’s prosperity of course depends, and the Buddha, out of his universal pity for creation, persuaded the dragon to relent. He did so either by striking the mountainside himself with the vajra, Indra’s characteristic weapon, or by bringing along with him Vajrapani, brandishing the vajra, as the muscle.
In either case, some more or less distant relation to the story that Alexander’s army heard in Swat had persisted and entered Buddhist belief, and it isn’t hard to see how Heracles could also have maintained an existence for centuries in this resonant environment. The transformation from Alexander’s ancestor to an attendant of the Buddha and enforcer of his universal empathy is pretty remarkable, all the same.
After the Buddha subdued the dragon, according to Xuanzang, he left this imprint of his feet in the rock, the size of which is supposed to vary with the merit that the viewer has accrued (I’ve left my own feet visible to give an idea how huge they are, and how colossal my, and now your, merit is). These footprints were also seen by Faxian and Song Yun, both also Chinese monks, in the fifth and sixth centuries, and by Aurel Stein in 1926, at Tirat on the right bank of the Swat: they are now in the Swat Museum at Saidu Sharif.
Song Yun says that it looks like an imprint left by the Buddha in the mud, and in the well-watered, fertile, much-coveted, and for all these reasons sacred valley of the Swat that certainly seems appropriate.
*G. Schopen, “The Buddhist ‘monastery’ and the Indian garden: aesthetics, assimilations, and the siting of monastic establishments,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 126 (2006), 487-505;
**K. Tanabe, “Why is the Buddha Sakyamuni accompanied by Hercules/Vajrapani? Farewell to Yaksa-theory,” East and West 55 (2005), 363-81;
***L. M. Olivieri, “Notes on the problematical sequence of Alexander’s itinerary in Swat, a geo-historical approach,” East and West 46 (1996), 45-78.
Swat I: the Jahanabad Buddha
I have just spent a week in Swat, N.-W. Pakistan, the guest of Dr. Luca M. Olivieri and the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan, based in Saidu Sharif. I had been planning to blog a daily journal once I was back in the U.K., but the best-laid plans, etc.: a bout of food poisoning got in the way, and I’ll blog selected highlights over the next few months instead. Today I’m starting with one of the last sites I visited, which was also one of the most memorable.
Jahanabad lies in a side valley off the main River Swat. The road from Saidu Sharif and Mingora tracks along the edge of the main river: when Aurel Stein visited in 1926 there was no road, and he had to ride his horse through the river. Then at Manglor or Manglawar we turned up to the right, and before long we could see what we were aiming for: a huge 7th-century Buddha carved on a cliff dominating the approach up the valley. At six metres tall the Jahanabad Buddha was claimed to be the largest carved buddha in Central Asia after the Buddhas of Bamiyan. The connection to Bamiyan would prove to be regrettably apt in other ways.
Seeing the Buddha from afar is one thing. To get up close to it you walk up the mountain through an orchard of persimmon trees underplanted with onions (which scented the path), fragments of ancients structures visible at the edges of the orchard. I was being led by Akhtar Munir, also known as Tota, who as a young man (he showed me a photo) had worked for Giuseppe Tucci, the great Italian scholar who established what is now called ISMEO, Associazione Internazionale di Studi sul Mediterraneo e l’Oriente, and the Missione Archeologica Italiana in Pakistan, based at the Mission House in Saidu Sharif. Tota and I communicated in basic Italian on this hillside in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, to the intense amusement of the policeman who was accompanying us, and Tota put me to shame with the cracking pace he set as we climbed. He was careful, as we went, to pick out an ancient staircase that survived in fragments up the mountain–the original staircase associated with access by the pious to the Buddha image above.
We passed a spring, then at length emerged onto a ledge below the Buddha image. In 1926 Aurel Stein commented how difficult it was to take a decent photo, and this is partly because, as restorers of the image recently discovered, it is designed to be viewed from a precise location ten metres below it. The head alone is 1.6m high, rendered disproportionately large for reasons of perspective. My best shot, with apologies:
The Buddha may be hard to photograph, but the view back down the valley toward Manglawar and the Swat river conveys how dominant was the position occupied by the Buddha. Tota and the policeman are taking a breather in the foreground:
We were in fact in the middle of a massive ritual complex. The architectural fragments in the orchards below were what remained of a Buddhist monastery encompassing the spring, with the staircase rising up through the monastery toward the Buddha. Above us, on the top of the mountain, were the remains of a stupa, to which paths from our location led up. Further images and inscribed rocks in the vicinity, and caves with indications of ritual use, confirm how significant a cult centre it was in its day.
In a recent article (“The itinerary of O rgyan pa in Swat/Uddiyana (second half of 13th Century)”, Journal of Asian Civilizations 40 [2017]), Dr Olivieri establishes that additional confirmation of the site’s importance comes in an account by a Tibetan pilgrim to Swat (ancient Uddiyana) in the 13th Century, O rgyan pa (whose name means “the man of Uddiyana”: his trip made him famous), originally translated by Giuseppe Tucci in Travels of Tibetan pilgrims in the Swat valley (Calcutta, 1940), at p. 52. O rgyan pa describes a temple called Mangalaor, founded by king Indraboti, “where there are various stone images of Buddha (Munindra), Tara and Lokesvara” (aspects of the Buddha). Mangalaor must be Manglawar, and Indrabhuti, in the Tibetan tradition, was both himself an important teacher and also the spiritual father of Padmasambhava or Guru Rinpoche, the figure credited with the establishment of Buddhism in Tibet.
Aurel Stein may have complained about the difficulties of photographing the Jahanabad Buddha, but he also commented that its elevated position had protected it from anyone who might have wished it harm. In September 2007, however, the Buddha was defaced by Taliban looking to emulate the achievements of their fellow-militants over the border in Afghanistan. The attack on the image, with rockets and later explosives, was a highly symbolic gesture at a time when the Taliban were extending their control over Swat. In 2009 they also blew up a boulder decorated with an image of Avalokitesvara, “pre-eminently the dispenser of mercy and help in the northern Buddhist Pantheon” in Stein’s words. Over five seasons from 2012 Dr Olivieri and the Italian Mission have meticulously reconstructed the Buddha’s face, a task complicated further by the subtle issues of perspective mentioned earlier. The result is a fine piece of contemporary reconstruction, which advertises what is new but manages also to convey the impact of the original monument. The Avalokisvara boulder, blown to pieces by the Taliban, has also been reconstituted, and just this year was installed in the garden of the Swat Museum in Saidu Sharif, itself almost entirely rebuilt after a huge bomb blast severely damaged it in 2008:
This story is bound to resonate with me, so reminiscent of Bamiyan but with an overwhelmingly positive outcome. More importantly, though, it illustrates both the determination of the people and authorities of Swat to preserve their incredibly rich archaeological environment, and the commitment of the Italian Mission to apply their academic and technical skills to supporting them in that task. The symbolism of this restored Buddha looking down over its valley is intensely powerful.
The archaeological study of Swat began with Aurel Stein’s visit to the princely state of Swat in 1926. (On Stein’s activities in the North-West Frontier Province and beyond, now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, see this excellent account by Wannaporn Rienjang.) His description of the Buddhist remains in this valley in his popular account On Alexander’s Track to the Indus ends with some charming speculation about the persistence of ancient observation in this remarkable place (p. 80):
“About half a mile to the east of [Manglawar], alongside of the track leading up the valley, there are some large trees where wild-duck abound by day and night. They gather there in great numbers from their feeding-grounds on the network of channels and pools formed by the Swat river and the large stream that joins it from the side of Manglawar. The birds while in the trees or flying to and from them are considered sacrosanct, though elsewhere the Swatis eagerly shoot and trap them. No explanation was forthcoming of the asylum thus granted. Could it possibly be connected with the fact that the mound of the great ruined Stupa already mentioned rises not far off?”
Desperately seeking Sulpicia
A blog on something that caught my attention at a conference this week, an epitaph (AE 1928, no. 73) discovered in Rome in the 1920s:
Behold, traveller, the ashes of Sulpicia the reader,
to whom had been given the slave name Petale.
She had lived in number more than thirty-four years
and had given birth to a son, Aglaos, in this world.
She had seen all the good things of nature. She flourished in art.
She excelled in beauty. She had grown in talent.
Jealous Fate was unwilling for her to lead a lengthy time in life;
their very distaff failed the Fates.
The suggestion made during the conference was that what I’ve given as the translation of the first three words, “the ashes of Sulpicia the reader”, was only one option: they could also be read as “the ashes of the reader of Sulpicia”, i.e. Sulpicia was not the name of the dead woman, but of her employer or owner. In either case we’re dealing with a servant who apparently had the job of reading to her current or former owners. This person would be a rarely-attested example of a female reader, a lectrix rather than a male lector. If her name was Sulpicia she had certainly been freed, as I’ll explain, whereas if she was “of/belonging to Sulpicia” she might still be a slave; in the latter case, too, the identity of Sulpicia would offer scope for speculation.
I had not heard of this inscription before yesterday, but it struck me as obvious on reading it that the subject of the epitaph was Sulpicia Petale the lectrix, and that there was no other Sulpicia directly relevant to this inscription: it really wasn’t ambiguous. The key was the second line, quoi seruile datum nomen erat Petale, “to whom the slave name Petale had been given”. Why would the inscription specify the subject’s “slave name”, rather than simply recording her name as Petale, unless she was no longer a slave? And if, as it seems, she had been freed, why wouldn’t her freed name be given? Manumitted slaves assumed the name of their former masters: Tiro, freed by M. Tullius Cicero, became M. Tullius Tiro. If Petale had belonged to Cicero and then been freed, she would have become Tullia Petale. Our Petale belonged to a family of Sulpicii, hence when freed became Sulpicia Petale. What the first couplet of this epitaph is doing, then, is naming the dead person, albeit in a more elaborate fashion than usual. “These are the remains of Sulpicia, whose name when a slave was Petale.” Her respectable name leads; her older, slave name is consigned to the end of the couplet. It’s very elegant composition, and that can’t be said of everything in this poem.
I really can’t think of any other way of understanding the second line, and I find the popularity of the idea that there’s ambiguity here quite hard to fathom. For that matter, an epitaph beginning not with the name of the person honoured but their employer or owner seems awkward even in a Roman context, and taking Sulpiciae as governed by lectricis and unrelated to cineres feels like a very unnatural way of reading the Latin. Nevertheless this is a reading found in all the recent discussions of the inscription that I’ve seen, and it originated with no less an eminence than Jérôme Carcopino, who introduced the newly-found inscription to the Société Nationale des Antiquaires de France in 1928: “De Sulpicia la lectrice (ou: De la lectrice de Sulpicia?)” is the translation he offered of Sulpiciae … lectricis.
Carcopino’s interest in this inscription, as expressed in his presentation to the Société, explicitly consists in the possibility that it offers a connection to the most celebrated bearer of the name Sulpicia. This Sulpicia was a poet some of whose compositions (which poems in particular is fiercely debated) are included in the third book of Tibullus’ elegies: she is in fact the only female poet in Latin whose poetry survives from antiquity (Carcopino speculates that this epitaph is another one of her poems), and in the past this has drawn to her an interesting kind of attention. Mathilde Skoie’s book in the bibliography is a brilliant study of the reception of Sulpicia from the Renaissance onwards, responses she sees as united by a determination “to write scandal out of the text”, a refusal to acknowledge the truly scandalous force of a woman speaking of sexual desire in the context of a culture as male-dominated as Rome (cf. Stevenson 36). Carcopino doesn’t escape this style of patronising chivalry himself, speculating that Petale’s name, which suggests Greek petalon, a leaf, bears a resemblance to the name of Sulpicia’s lover in her elegies, Cerinthus, from kerinthon, honeywort, “as if, in the house of Sulpicia, all the names she gave had to breathe a perfume similarly mingled with flowers and Hellenism.” Hmm, though, to be fair, he does also study the language of the epitaph, concluding that it could be dated to late Republic/early Empire–Sulpicia the elegist’s time, in other words.
If seems clear enough that nobody would have paid much attention to this inscription if it hadn’t featured the name Sulpicia. But I think I’d go further and say that it’s this wish to find Sulpicia the poet in the epitaph that also explains the peculiar determination, in the face of fairly obvious objections, to find its opening ambiguous. Some kind of connection to the poet is not entirely precluded if we read “Sulpicia the lectrix” (she belonged to, and was freed by, people bearing the name Sulpicius), but it’s much more tenuous. If it were “the lectrix of Sulpicia”, on the other hand, there would be someone other than the dead woman identified as Sulpicia, and this Sulpicia would be someone who enjoyed having literature read to her.
Well, my concern in all this is really just a question of interpretation: I can’t make the Latin say what Carcopino and many others want it to be able to say. Not everything in this epitaph is crystal-clear, but the first couplet is: the dead woman was a Sulpicia with the slave name Petale, Sulpicia Petale. But there is another dimension to all this. Sulpicia the poet, while a truly remarkable individual, was the aristocratic daughter of Servius Sulpicius Rufus, renowned jurist and correspondent of Cicero, and niece of M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus, one of the most prominent figures in Augustan Rome, both in poetry and politics.
Sulpicia Petale had by sheer ability escaped slavery and earned the immortality represented by this versified inscription. Well, maybe that’s me being as sentimental as Carcopino, but I can’t help feeling that Sulpicia Petale, the real subject of this epitaph, is where we should be directing our attention.
M. J. Carcopino, “Épitaphe en vers de la lectrice Petale”, Bulletin de la Société Nationale des Antiquaires de France 1929, 84–6;
P. Hallett, “Absent Roman Fathers in the writings of their daughters: Cornelia and Sulpicia”, in S. Huebner and D. M. Ratzan (eds.), Growing Up Fatherless in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2009), 175-91, at 187-90;
P. Hallett, “Ovid’s Thisbe and a Roman Woman Love Poet”, in B.W. Boyd and C. Fox (eds.), Approaches to Teaching World Literature: Ovid and Ovidianism (New York, 2010), 414-433, at 367-370;
P. Hallett, “Scenarios of Sulpiciae: moral discourses and immoral verses”, EuGeStA 1 (2011);
E. Hauser, “Optima tu proprii nominis auctor: The semantics of female authorship in ancient Rome, from Sulpicia to Proba”, EuGeStA 6 (2016);
M. Skoie, Reading Sulpicia: Commentaries 1475-1990 (Oxford, 2002);
J. Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2005), (on this inscription) 42-44.
A lay-by in Bulgaria
Fifty years ago today I got as close as I’ve ever got to a truly historical event, so it justifies a post. It would count as a reminiscence if I could remember anything about something that happened when I was a bit less than two-months old.
I was with my family, six of us in total, and we were sleeping in an Ace Ambassador caravan in a lay-by in Bulgaria. To understand how we had ended up in this unlikely situation you need to know two things about my father: first, that in his view a holiday was not a holiday unless it involved driving a couple of thousand miles each way (with a caravan attached), and secondly, that he refused point-blank to pay any money for camping sites, toll roads, etc. Apparently this caused less of a problem in the Eastern Bloc than one might imagine, and I can only think that a family of Western caravanners was so spectacularly out of the ordinary anyhow that we could get away with quite a lot.
By the time I was conscious of these holidays, a little after the event I’m talking about here, the destinations had become slightly more mainstream. Greece and Turkey were still a heck of a long way to drive, but didn’t involve crossing the Iron Curtain, unless you count Yugoslavia. Before I was born, though, and for a short time afterwards, my father indulged a fascination for communist Eastern Europe, visiting Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as Bulgaria. He had no political sympathy with communism, though he was a (minor) politician, and that might explain the welcome we got in parts of Romania (which had interesting differences with the rest of the Warsaw Pact), especially. I have only one memory of Eastern-Bloc countries, a plague of beetles covering the car one year on the border between Hungary and Bulgaria.
Most aspects of what I’ve been describing now strike me as pretty insane: the huge distances towing a caravan (we had an average of three punctures per holiday), the massive catering operation undertaken by my mother without any help whatsoever from my father, and of course all the time spent touring around the Eastern Bloc. It seems especially foolhardy to me, though I recognise I may be biased, to take a very small baby to a place where, for example, baby food could be quite hard to find. But the holidays I remember were simply amazing. Until the age of 14 I hadn’t spent a single day of the month of August in the U.K., but I’d visited far more historical sites than I’ve ever seen since, and we saw Turkey, in particular, before its tourist industry took off: Gordion, Side, Goreme, Didyma… Since this was before the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, we were often travelling the same route as long-distance lorry drivers (a nice blog about that culture here), and hippies on the overland route. Again, I can’t imagine how a middle-class family in a 14-foot caravan towed by a Volvo looked to them, but we all seemed to get along swimmingly.
But back to that lay-by in Bulgaria. It was nighttime, and we were sleeping, but our sleep on this occasion was interrupted by a terrific noise from the road, the sound of a huge line of very heavy traffic. My father went out to investigate, I think; at any rate the traffic was quickly identified as a line of military vehicles, and it took most of the night to pass our camping place. We must have assumed that we had stumbled into a military exercise, and the next day we continued on our way, into Yugoslavia and up towards Maribor, now in Slovenia, the border town for the crossing into Austria. It was only here that we discovered what had been rolling past us that night in Bulgaria. The night in question was August 20-21, 1968. The military convoy had been heading for Prague, one component of the massive Warsaw Pact forces converging on Czechoslovakia in a surprise invasion. There in our caravan we were the most unlikely witnesses to the suppression of the Prague Spring.
‘Prague Spring’ was the name given to the period of liberalization introduced by the Czechoslovak leader, Alexander Dubček, which he himself famously described as ‘socialism with a human face’. In April 1968 Dubcek had relaxed restrictions on free speech and movement, and on the press; a greater role for market economics was envisaged, and in the longer term democratic elections. In August the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev sent Warsaw Pact forces in to suppress the “counterrevolution”: what we had seen from our caravan was part of the Bulgarian contribution, a fraction of the 200,000 or so troops and 2,000 tanks that entered the country that night. There was some popular resistance — most tragically, a student named Jan Palach burned himself to death in Wenceslaus Square in Prague in January 1969 — but Dubček’s reforms were reversed, liberals were purged from government, and Czechoslovakia would not experience the same freedom until the Velvet Revolution of 1989. In the meantime some 300,000 Czechs and Slovaks fled to the West.
The border between Yugoslavia and Austria presented a dramatic contrast at the best of times, shabby and impoverished towns on the eastern side, prosperous in Austria, like going from black-and-white to colour. But when we reached the border in Maribor in 1968 we encountered something altogether more distressing, a huge gathering of Czechs trying to decide whether to cross into Austria or return to their now occupied country. One effect of the liberalization of Czechoslovakia had been to allow its citizens greater freedom of travel abroad, and Yugoslavia had been a popular destination. Now these tourists were in a state of shock, and faced a terrible quandary. My older sister remembers a woman trying to decide whether to flee to the West or return to her children in Czechoslovakia. My mother felt a compulsion to apologise to the Czechs she met for what she saw as the failure of her country to come to their help twice in one generation, in 1938 and 1968.
In 1989 I visited Prague itself, but missed the moment on that occasion after a stupid argument with my travelling companions about using foreign-currency shops. I left Prague in a huff. The next day, December 10, a government was formed which for the first time contained a majority of non-communist members. A huge, joyful crowd filled Wenceslaus Square; meanwhile I was on a train back to Berlin.
Metamorphic metametricality
Any blogs from me will be short and sweet this summer, my writing schedule being what it is, and highly likely to be about Ovid for the same reason.
For this one, two assumptions are required: first, that Ovid is so very self-aware a poet that his narrative might at any moment enact his literary principles; and secondly that the metre of poetry in antiquity, and in Rome specifically, was meaningful in its own right.
I’m here concerned with the Metamorphoses, unusual among Ovid’s works for being composed in the dactylic hexameter, stereotypically the metre of epic, the highest form of poetry. The hexameter was known as the herous or ἡρωικός, the “heroic” metre, its very name implying it was intrinsically suited to tell the deeds of great men: I discussed an ancient response to the hexameter and its ethos, the sotadean metre, in another blog here. The Metamorphoses is ostensibly a heroic epic, as its metre and length and cast of heroes imply, but Ovid is throughout this poem superbly disrespectful of the sublime values an epic was supposed to embody.
Ovid’s inappropriate approach to writing epic has been noted, and deplored, ever since he wrote it, and a recurrent theme of the criticism of ancient figures like the Senecas Elder and Younger and Quintilian and more modern critics like John Dryden, as an article of mine argued many moons ago,* was that Ovid’s approach to writing epic, properly the task of a mature and serious sensibility, was mischievous–childish, to use a metaphor regularly found: Seneca the Younger chastises Ovid’s addiction to pueriles ineptiae, “childish silliness”, for example, and Dryden talks of the “boyisms” that mar the dignity of his epic poetry.
The main point of my article was to show, not just that Ovid was perfectly aware how far he was falling short of epic respectability in the Metamorphoses, but that Ovid took poetic self-awareness to an ever higher level, actually anticipating within his poem the criticisms that would be directed at it. At three points in particular, Cupid’s encounter with Apollo in Met. 1, Phaethon’s piloting of the sun chariot in Met. 2, and the famous story of Daedalus and Icarus in Met. 8, I suggested that these accounts could be read as “metaliterary drama”, vignettes programmatically encapsulating the deeper character of the poem. In each case, simply put, a heroic circumstance is disrupted by a child, Apollo transformed from the conqueror of Python into a plaintive lover, the horses of the sun careering out of control and scorching the earth under Phaethon’s inadequate control, and Daedalus’ momentous achievement of flight ruined by Icarus’ boyish refusal to obey instruction. Ovid was staging in his own narrative the childish subversion of epic values he would later himself be told off for.
It’s Icarus’ story that I want to bring back to metre. One metaliterary vignette, I’d suggest, is the scene from Met. 8 where Daedalus is meticulously constructing wings for himself and his son. Icarus does what children do, getting in the way (193-203, with the Miller Loeb translation, slightly adapted).
tum lino medias et ceris alligat imas
atque ita conpositas paruo curuamine flectit,
ut ueras imitetur aues. puer Icarus una 195
stabat et, ignarus sua se tractare pericla,
ore renidenti modo, quas uaga mouerat aura,
captabat plumas, flauam modo pollice ceram
mollibat lusuque suo mirabile patris
impediebat opus. postquam manus ultima coepto 200
inposita est, geminas opifex librauit in alas
ipse suum corpus motaque pependit in aura.
Then Daedalus ties the feathers together with twine and wax at middle and bottom;
and, thus arranged, he bends them with a gentle curve
so that they look like real birds’ wings. His son Icarus
was standing by and, little knowing that he was handling his own peril,
with smiling face now snatched at the feathers
which the shifting breeze had blown about, now moulded the yellow wax
with his thumb, and by his play hindered
his father’s wondrous task. When now the finishing touches
had been put to the work, the maestro himself balanced his body
on two wings and hung poised in the beaten air.
We all know how this story ends. What for me is typical of Ovid about this passage is how he paints a picture which is vividly true to life, the child chasing feathers and moulding the wax into shapes, but which at the same time works perfectly as a metaphor for the Metamorphoses as a whole, a poem that refuses to abide by the rules, a world where things never go for its heroic protagonists as they should. (Denis Feeney once explained to me why he liked Toy Story so much: “It’s just like the Metamorphoses: Buzz Lightyear thinks he’s a superhero, but in fact he’s just a toy.”)
But what about the metre?
Bear in mind that I’m currently thinking too much about Ovid, and I’ve been thinking too hard about metre for years. But just note how the boy Icarus enters and exits this scene, puer Icarus una… in 195 and impediebat opus in 200: in each case Icarus isn’t just disrupting Daedalus’ wondrous task, but interrupting the heroic measure, intervening halfway into the dactylic hexameter, departing halfway through.
Ovid’s intense self-consciousness undoubtedly extends to the metres he uses, we know that from elsewhere. And whether or not there is metrical self-awareness here, it is poetically effective to have Icarus butting in unexpectedly after the line has started. But I suspect that Ovid thinks of the metre of his poem, as much as any other element of it, as a conventional epic feature ripe for his mischievous attention, and wants us to appreciate it as such.
Here, I think, as heroic action is disrupted by this childish impulse, whether we call it Icarus’s or Ovid’s, so is heroic form.
*”Child’s play: Ovid and his critics,” Journal of Roman Studies 93 (2003), 66-91.
Incense and patchouli
Here is Nisbet & Hubbard on an unusual, arresting word used by Horace at Odes 2.7.8, malobathro. It’s a fascinating word in itself, as N&H explain, a borrowing from Sanskrit interestingly distorted in the process of transfer. It reminds me a bit of how we got “orange” from “naranj”.
The clever explanation of the Greek loss of ta-, as N&H say, comes from Eduard Schwyzer; meanwhile Bertold Laufer suggests that the source of μαλάβαθρον was what we call patchouli leaves, which Henry Yule in Hobson-Jobson records as being “sold in every bazar in Hindustan,” and “used as an ingredient in tobacco for smoking, as hair-scent by women, and especially for stuffing mattresses and laying among clothes as we use lavender.”
“In a fluid form,” Yule continues, “patchouli was introduced into England in 1844, and soon became very fashionable as a perfume,” especially popular on the hippie scene in the 1960s and ’70s. In Horace’s poem the malobathrum, not so differently, is a fragrant oil worn in the hair at symposia or drinking parties, and it features in Horace’s reminiscence of a scene from his younger, wilder days. In the tiny poetic forms of his lyric verse Horace selects his words very carefully indeed, and while thinking about this poem for a Natalie Haynes programme recorded last week I got to wondering what he saw in this peculiar word.
Let’s start with Odes 2.7.
The poem welcomes an old friend and comrade back to Rome after a long absence. Many years before, Horace and Pompeius had shared the experience of fighting for Marcus Brutus against the forces of Mark Antony and the future Augustus, the assassins of Julius Caesar against his heirs. After the crushing defeat of the “tyrannicides” at Philippi in 42 BC, Horace had made his peace with the victors and returned to Rome, before long finding a patron in Augustus’ right-hand man Maecenas, and enjoying the literary celebrity that followed. But Pompeius, so this poem tells us, had continued the fight against Augustus, perhaps with Sextus Pompey (to whom he may have been related) until his final defeat in 36 BC, and subsequently with Antony when he and Augustus came to conflict.
Now, finally, in middle age, Pompeius is back home, and Horace throws a party for him, or perhaps give him a party in poetic form in lieu thereof. The general scenario has parallels elsewhere in the Odes: in 3.14, for example, Horace contrasts his peaceable state of mind in a Rome ruled by Augustus with his youthful bravado at Philippi; while in 1.7, addressed to L. Munatius Plancus, founder of the city of Lyons, Horace again seems to contrast the violence of the Civil Wars with the peace and friendship represented by a drinking party. The lyric poetry that Horace is writing spends a lot of time in the symposium, but Horace lends the act of drinking with friends a greater significance: his poetic symposium, a place where Pompeius, Plancus and we the readers come together as friends, is a space where Romans can forget about their differences and rediscover what they have in common. The oblivion brought by consumption of alcohol becomes a metaphor for Rome’s rejection of past conflict. Friendship, restored after the moral chaos of civil conflict is important throughout Horace’s poetry. Here in 2.7 the last word is amico: a friendship has been restored out of the turmoil of Roman fighting Roman.
Malobathrum, patchouli, is what I’m really concerned with, though. Here’s the whole poem, with David West’s translation slightly adapted, the malobathrum at l. 8:
O saepe mecum tempus in ultimum
deducte Bruto militiae duce,
quis te redonauit Quiritem
dis patriis Italoque caelo,
Pompei, meorum prime sodalium, 5
cum quo morantem saepe diem mero
fregi, coronatus nitentis
malobathro Syrio capillos?
tecum Philippos et celerem fugam
sensi relicta non bene parmula, 10
cum fracta uirtus et minaces
turpe solum tetigere mento;
sed me per hostis Mercurius celer
denso pauentem sustulit aere,
te rursus in bellum resorbens 15
unda fretis tulit aestuosis.
ergo obligatam redde Ioui dapem
longaque fessum militia latus
depone sub lauru mea, nec
parce cadis tibi destinatis. 20
obliuioso leuia Massico
ciboria exple, funde capacibus
unguenta de conchis. quis udo
deproperare apio coronas
curatue myrto? quem Venus arbitrum 25
dicet bibendi? non ego sanius
bacchabor Edonis: recepto
dulce mihi furere est amico.
You and I have often been led to the edge
of doom with Brutus in command,
and now who has made you a Roman again
and restored to your ancestral gods and Italian sky,
O Pompeius, first of my friends, with whom
I so often broke into the lagging day with neat wine,
head garlanded and hair sleek
with Syrian malobathrum?
With you I knew Philippi and speedy flight,
leaving my little shield behind, shame to say,
when virtue snapped and the chins
of blusterers touched the base earth.
I panicked, but swift Mercury carried me off
in a dense mist through the enemy ranks,
while a wave sucked you back into war
and swept you along in a boiling sea.
So pay to Jupiter the feast that was vowed,
lay down your body weary with campaigning
here under my laurel tree, and have no mercy
on the casks of wine I have reserved for you.
Fill up the polished Egyptian cups with Massic
for forgetfulness and pour fragrant oils from full shells.
Whose business is it to run
for garlands of moist celery
and myrtle? Whom will Venus choose as master
of the wine? l shall run wild as any Edonian
at her Bacchic orgies. My friend is back.
What joy to go mad!
In the second stanza, with a few deft strokes, Horace sketches that youthful existence he led with Pompeius in Brutus’ camp, the informality of sodales, “mates”, the drinking initiated far too early in the day, garlands, Horace’s hair still full and sleek (at Epistles 1.20.23 a couple of years later, as West notes, Horace is praecanus, prematurely grey), and the indulgence of malobathrum. I think this exotic word, and the substance it denotes (“Syrian”, as Nisbet & Hubbard remark, could imply a source much further east), suggests in its own right not just a place apart, far from the “Italian sky”, but also a distant, irrecoverable time. Smells are notoriously evocative: for research purposes I have been sniffing patchouli oil, and it’s a scent that stays with you. I don’t know if the name of a scent can share any of that evocative power, but I do think that Horace, on the tiny canvases he allows himself in his lyric poetry, gets as close as any poet to making words do for us what a scent can.
Here one exotic vocabulary item, as exotic to read as to smell, vividly evokes… what? Long-distant youthful abandon, it seems to me, time out of mind.
The noblest of their sons
One of the big surprises that Virgil springs on his readers as the Aeneid gets under way is to take them straight to Carthage.
This city is really the last place that a Roman epic should start, the most relentless and dangerous enemy that Rome in its long history felt it had faced: the threat of Hannibal coming to get them was a favoured Roman method for getting the kids to eat their greens, long after the city (and the threat) had been eliminated in 146BC, so deep ran the fear evoked by Rome’s greatest imperial rival.
But Virgil doesn’t just drag his Roman epic to enemy HQ, he then compounds the scandal by making a place that Romans very well knew represented all that was most despicable in human behaviour, all that was most uncivilized, most un-Roman, a really rather decent place, even — terrifyingly — a place quite reminiscent of Rome. I tell my students, though they probably don’t believe me, that what is most clearly evoked by the scene that meets Aeneas as he approaches Carthage for the first time, the busy building activity of the rising city, is Rome in the first years of Augustus’ principate, the time and place of Virgil’s writing, and Romans’ first reading, of the poem.
It is indeed a shocking way to open a Roman national epic, almost as if Virgil was out to offer his Augustan readers no kind of simple answers.
By the time Aeneas leaves Carthage, it has assumed an altogether less friendly, though also more familiar, appearance. One way of understanding the trajectory of Aeneas’ stay in Carthage is as the creation of a Carthage recognisable to Roman readers, answering to the deep prejudices they had developed about their mortal Mediterranean rival during the Punic Wars. By the end of Book 4 Dido has sworn undying enmity to Rome, conjured up Hannibal from her own ashes, and generally started to look a lot like an existential threat. What’s quite interesting here is that Aeneas shares responsibility for the creation of this monster: Carthage would not be Carthage if Aeneas hadn’t met, loved and abandoned Dido.
But another respect in which Carthage becomes recognisably Carthage by the time Aeneas leaves it is in its religious character. In a brilliant article James Davidson* argues that Dido’s suicide at the end of Book 4 is meant by Virgil to inaugurate something that the Romans associated very strongly with Carthage, something they found especially deplorable: human sacrifice.
Now, a lot of what the Romans believed about the Carthaginians, for example their sexual immorality and their Punica fides, an alleged incapacity to honour an agreement, we can dismiss as the prejudice of a warring nation for its enemy. But it is generally accepted these days that the sacrifice of humans, and especially children (apparently children of the elite), at the temple of Tanit (Virgil’s Juno) was indeed an important element of Carthaginian religious observance. The sacrifice was a means to secure the goodwill of the gods, and Diodorus Siculus (20.14.4-6) records the frenetic activity occasioned by an unexpected raid on Carthage by the Sicilian tyrant Agathocles in 310BC, a crisis (it was evident to the Carthaginians) caused by their neglect of the gods which could only, the logic went, be resolved by appeasing those gods — with the most valuable thing it was possible for them to offer, their own children or themselves. Diodorus’ account is without doubt exaggerated, but the event itself, less some of the more lurid details, is entirely plausible:
“They also alleged that Cronus [i.e. Baal] had turned against them, inasmuch as in former times they had been accustomed to sacrifice to this god the noblest of their sons (τῶν υἱῶν τοὺς κρατίστους), but more recently, secretly buying and raising children, they had sent these to be sacrificed; and when an investigation was made, some of those who had been sacrificed were discovered to have been supposititious. When they had considered these things and saw their enemy encamped before their walls, they were filled with superstitious dread, for they believed that they had neglected the honours of the gods that had been established by their fathers. In their zeal to make amends for their omission, they selected two hundred of the noblest children and sacrificed them publicly; and others who were under suspicion sacrificed themselves voluntarily, in number not less than three hundred. There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus, extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.”
We have already contemplated two ways in which Virgil’s readers probably reacted to his depiction of Carthage: surprise at the friendly, principled face it presented to Aeneas on his arrival, and a familiar horror at the vengeful promise of eternal enmity voiced at his departure. But one of the most effective things Virgil does, in Book 1 especially, is to sow something else in his readers’ minds, periodically qualifying the positive impression made by Dido and her city with niggling hints of that more familiar, much more intimidating Carthage. Again Davidson picks up on these dissonant notes, and he almost says what I’m about to say, and I’m pretty sure thought it. It’s obvious enough when you think about it, but still a great example of Virgil’s ability to manipulate his readers’ responses to his story.
Someone who harbours serious concerns about the Carthaginians is Venus, Aeneas’ divine mother. At 1.643ff. Aeneas, who has by now met and been warmly welcomed by Dido, sends word to the Trojan ships for his son Ascanius to join him in Carthage, at which point Venus hatches a plan to substitute her divine son Cupid for Ascanius, and thus ensure that Dido, under Cupid’s influence, will fall in love with Aeneas and do him no harm. (Venus’ plan is not flawless.) The grounds for the goddess’s anxiety about Carthage are given at 661, quippe domum timet ambiguam Tyriosque bilinguis, “since indeed she fears the untrustworthy house and the two-tongued Tyrians.” Clearly here Venus’ concerns evoke those raw Roman prejudices about Punica fides, “Punic faith”, their congenital untrustworthiness, a jarring reminder of how Carthage really is amid the overwhelmingly positive representation of Dido and her city.
But I can’t help feeling that the swapping of Cupid for Ascanius is still a bit undermotivated, Dido perfectly capable of falling for Aeneas without Cupid’s intervention. And if we do need a bit more reason for Venus to keep the boy Ascanius well away from Carthage until she’s confident Carthage isn’t behaving like Carthage, well, perhaps the most deep-seated of all Roman misgivings about the place was what they did to children there.
As Diodorus suggests, the really valuable children were the high-born, the children of the elite; in fact only the highest-born would do. No child was more elite than Ascanius, ancestor of the Romans, and of the Julian family in particular: he is the character that represents in the Aeneid all the promise of Rome’s glorious future. Virgil intrudes, with exquisite subtlety, a reminder of what this place where Aeneas was busily making himself at home was in the habit of doing to boys of such extraordinary promise.
How terrifying a threat Carthage actually posed to Rome.
Image illustrating Diodorus, from “Carthage, l’histoire, sa trace et son écho” (1995) via Sophie Hay.
*J. Davidson, “Domesticating Dido,” in M. Burden (ed.), A woman scorn’d: responses to the Dido myth (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), 65-88.