Epic and tragedy
The tragic epic: Paradise Lost and the Iliad
I
There has been remarkably little disagreement about the place of Paradise Lost in the epic tradition ever since Patrick Hume first published his collection of Milton's classical allusions Hume 1695. Scholars and critics have focused almost exclusively on the relationship of Milton's epic to the Aeneid, which they considered to have been his dominant model. There are a number of reasons for this consensus. First, there is the frequency and brilliance of Vergilian allusion in Paradise Lost. Second, the Aeneid holds the central position in the epic tradition and at least until the middle of the eighteenth century dominated all theories of the epic. It was therefore natural to assume that as a poeta doctus who observed the laws of decorum, Milton would acknowledge the central position of the Aeneid by making it the chief model of a work that was to realize the deepest ambition of every Renaissance poet, the creation of a heroic poem. Third, there can be little doubt that most scholars who have studied the classical antecedents of Paradise Lost have known the Aeneid more intimately than any other epic and were thus predisposed to seeing Vergilian influences. This is especially true of the eighteenth-century annotators, who collected much of the material on which modern investigators of Milton's allusions have based their work. Without disputing the fact that the Vergilian perspective has greatly contributed to our understanding of Milton's work, I should like to argue that its uncritical acceptance has obscured important structural and thematic affinities between Paradise Lost and the Iliad—affinities which not only illuminate the principles of organization of Paradise Lost but also invite us to reconsider the nature of Milton's attitude towards the epic tradition. Milton himself drew attention to the thematic affinities between the central actions of Paradise Lost and the Iliad, for in his poem he followed the Iliad more closely than any other epic. The poet of the Iliad opens his epic with the announcement of his subject: he will sing of the wrath of Achilles. Unlike Vergil or the author of the Odyssey, he takes an action, not a man, as the subject of his epic. Milton follows the Iliadic proem in its general outline. Like the poet of the Iliad, he invokes the Muse to sing, and to sing about man's first disobedience. ‘Disobedience’ here means an act of disobedience, just as mênis means an action caused by wrath; in both cases the abstract noun is used in the concrete sense, a parallel that extends to syntactic similarity: ‘Man's first disobedience’ corresponds precisely to ‘mênis . . . Pêlêiadeô’ ‘the wrath of Achilles’. Milton follows the Iliad in describing the consequences of disobedience: whereas the deaths of many Achaeans resulted from Achilles' wrath, disobedience and ‘the fruit of that forbidden tree’ ‘brought death into the world and all our woe.’ The structural debt points to a thematic resemblance. Like Achilles' wrath, man's disobedience causes death, and in both poems the factual statements of the opening lines lead to the central theme of the work. The Iliad is an epic of death. At its centre stands a destructive action, the wrath of Achilles, which results in the death of many Achaeans—particularly Patroclus, the friend of Achilles. Beyond that, it leads to the deaths of Hector and of Achilles himself. Ultimately the fall of Troy looms behind the deaths of the major and minor characters. Death is also the subject of Milton's epic, and like death in the Iliad, it is the result of a destructive action. In choosing such a subject, Milton ignored the precedent established by the Aeneid. G.N. Knauer has suggested that Vergil's interpretation of Homer was based on a typological view of the Homeric epics Knauer 1964, 354-59. The events in the Aeneid repeat, reverse, and fulfil Homeric history, and in retrospect the events of the Iliad are shown to have been pregnant with future history. On one level the Aeneid is a poem of Trojan revenge. It tells the story of the Trojan victory over the Achaeans as realized by the Romans and symbolically anticipated in the defeat of Turnus, whose Mycenaean connections are deliberately emphasized by the poet. But this repetition and reversal of events does not merely mean that the same events are now happening with changed roles. The Iliad was an epic about the destruction of the Trojans by the Achaeans; but the Aeneid is not an epic about the destruction of the Achaeans by the Trojans, either in the present or in the distant future. It is a poem about building.1 The action of the Aeneid is constructive, and by an act of deliberate challenge, it is set against the destructive action of the Iliad: the fall of Troy, foreshadowed at the end of the Iliad, is the beginning of Aeneas' story. Thus Vergil reverses not only the roles of Trojans and Achaeans but also the direction and character of the action. Constructive versus destructive, however, only sums up part of the difference that separates the Aeneid from the Iliad and from Paradise Lost. Death and disobedience are indeed announced as the main themes of the two epics, but in both works the tragic theme of destruction is counterpointed by a theme of reconciliation that mitigates the tragic effect. The wrath of Achilles culminates in the maltreatment of Hector, but the epic concludes with the ceremonious meeting of Achilles and Priam. Their reconciliation and the ransom of Hector balance the theme of wrath which had been announced in the proem. Just as the first programmatic lines of the Iliad do not exhaust its full range, so the title of Paradise Lost does only partial justice to its content. Milton invokes the Muse to sing of disobedience, but a crucial part of the poem deals with the slow process by which Adam and Eve become obedient again: the story of ‘Paradise Lost’ includes that of Paradise Regained. In Milton's epic the reconciliation even leads to a resolution of the tragic situation. The reconciliation of Achilles and Priam changes nothing; that of Adam and Eve, everything. But in both poems, the reconciliation of two characters gives at least a sense of ‘calm of mind, all passion spent.’ Both poets aim at distancing the reader from the horror of events before dismissing him. Once again, a comparison with the Aeneid is instructive. The last book of the Aeneid has baffled many critics, not only because it ends so abruptly, but because the cruel death of Turnus seems to conflict with the spirit of Aeneas' mission. Vergil sanctions the Trojan invasion of Latium by the reconciliation of Juno and Jupiter 12.791-840. But this divine concord finds no counterpart on the human level; the scene of reconciliation between Juno and Jupiter is followed by one of the cruellest actions in the entire work, Aeneas' execution of the helpless and wounded Turnus as he implicitly asks for his life. The poem ends on a jarring discord, and no interpretation of the last book can explain away the curious paradox that Vergil was able to formulate the theme of reconciliation but, for whatever reason, did not want to or failed to represent it in an action on the human level. The abrupt and discordant end of the Aeneid contrasts significantly with the quiet conclusions of the Iliad and of Paradise Lost. The action of the Aeneid determined later notions of a proper heroic poem. Its subject had to be some great enterprise of prosperous design. So Camoens chose the circumnavigation of Africa, and Tasso the liberation of Jerusalem. Milton chose differently. In his epic the event that corresponds to the destruction of Troy is the eventual defeat of Satan by Christ. But this final victory is no more the subject of Paradise Lost than the Achaean triumph over the Trojans is the subject of the Iliad. The wrath of Achilles and the disobedience of Adam are both apparent setbacks in the larger struggle, but paradoxically they make the final victory all the more certain. The main concern of both poets was not with the splendour of that triumph but with the bitterness of the disastrous event that impeded, and by impeding, necessitated, the final success.II
According to Aristotle, the author of the Iliad deserved praise for his choice of subject matter. Instead of giving an account of the entire Trojan War, which would have resulted in a work either too long or too condensed to be aesthetically pleasing, he chose one part of the story for his central plot and told the remaining events in episodes. The total structure of the Iliad that results from this technique has its only parallel in the structure of Paradise Lost. In the linear narrative of the Odyssey, plot and story are very nearly co-extensive. The same is true of the narrative structure of the Aeneid, even though in that epic the events of Vergil's founding myth point beyond themselves to future history in an almost allegorical fashion. In both these epics, there are many digressions, but their subordinate nature is never in doubt, and even the mechanical device of interrupting chronological sequence by means of flashback narrative does not disturb the linear progress of the story, which comes to its end with the final event. In the Iliad, on the other hand, we can distinguish very clearly between two narrative strands: the story of Achilles and the story of the Trojan War. The critic who is not content with the primitive explanation that the poet turned an Achilleid into an Iliad by adding background episodes must ask himself why the Achilleid was chosen as a representative action, how the story of the war is related to it, and what constitutes the aesthetic unity of the resultant whole. Watson Kirkconnell gave his collection of sources and analogues of Paradise Lost the serendipitous title The Celestial Cycle Kirkconnell 1952.The choice points to the structural problem that Milton had in common with the author of the Iliad. He too drew on a tradition that was loosely organized as a sequence of stories. He had the encyclopedic ambitions of the author of the Iliad: Paradise Lost was to be as comprehensive a treatment of the total Christian myth as the Iliad was of the Trojan War, but the size and complexity of the material precluded a chronological approach. Milton, too, chose a part of the story and told the remaining events in episodes. Thus, both in Paradise Lost and in the Iliad, the critic's task consists in extracting the skeletal action, assessing its significance, and discovering the principles that relate it to the total action. The central action of Paradise Lost is in Aristotle's words a μυτηος δραματικος. The term dramatic, as Aristotle uses it, does not primarily refer to drama, nor has it anything to do with direct representation, vividness, excitement, and similar qualities that are usually designated by the term. It is derived from a Greek word for action and, equally embracing epic and tragedy, it refers solely to the composition of the action, which is the first and greatest requirement for tragedy and for epic as well Poetics 7.50b22-3. In Aristotle's theory of plot, the emotional effect is not merely due to the impact of the story's raw material—the physical violence which he calls pathos—but to the audience's realization of the logic and coherence of the action. The most dramatic plot is the plot in which the proper pleasure of tragedy is achieved by the arousal of pity and fear by intellectual means, in particular the devices of peripety and anagnorisis, which crystallize the horror of the deed in one moment of awareness, as in The Women of Trachis or in Oedipus Rex. Aristotle's theory gives meaning to the rigidly observed stage convention of excluding physical violence from the scene. It is not a mere rule of decorum but is rooted in the conviction that physical suffering has limits. Not death, but the death-in-life of tragic survival, is the ultimate degree of suffering in Greek tragedy. Paradise Lost is dramatic not only in this Aristotelian sense but in a more conventional sense as well. The Fall had been a tragic subject in the literary tradition, and Milton originally conceived of his work on the Fall as a tragedy. Dryden complained, and from his point of view quite rightly, that Milton's epic was a tragedy in disguise: Paradise Lost is far more effective in terms of dramatic organization than any of the plays on the Fall that preceded it, and the tragic potential inherent in the story is far more fully realized in its plot than even the most imaginative critic would have guessed from the surviving outlines for a tragedy on the Fall that the young Milton had planned to write Dryden 1962 2:84, 233. As told in Genesis, the Fall is a story with two peaks: the fall of Eve is followed by the fall of Adam. The account of Eve's temptation presented the dramatist with at least the outlines of the debate between her and the serpent, but the Bible says nothing about Adam's fall beyond the bare statement that he ate the apple which Eve gave him. Most writers of plays on the Fall merely invented a second scene of persuasion which was modeled on Eve's temptation. We find, therefore, scenes in which Eve alternately pleads seductively or violently, threatens suicide or weeps helplessly, and finally prevails over a reluctant Adam.2 This additive solution, in which Adam's fall more or less repeats Eve's, may be theatrically effective, but it is undramatic because it fails to establish a cogent logic of events. Such a logic was established by Augustine, who in The City of God 14.11 distinguished between the motives of Adam and Eve and gave a reason why the fall of Eve determined that of Adam. Eve was deceived by the serpent, ‘but we cannot believe that Adam was deceived, and supposed the devil's word to be truth and therefore transgressed God's law, but that he by the drawings of kindred yielded to the woman, the husband to the wife, the one human being to the only other human being. ... He was not on this account less culpable, but sinned with his eyes open’ Milton not only chose to express this distinction in his plot, but his choice enabled him to keep close to Genesis, which does not include an account of Adam's persuasion by Eve. His Adam falls as soon as he knows of Eve's fall, which he considers irrevocable from the very first. Its consequence is equally irrevocable: ‘. . . for with thee/Certain my resolution is to die’ 9.906-7. For Adam, the sight of the fallen Eve is the moment of tragic recognition and peripety. Milton uses a powerful Homeric allusion to show the instantaneous reversal: The duel of Hector and Achilles takes place while Andromache, ignorant of the real situation, prepares a bath in anticipation of Hector's return. When she hears the shrieks of Hecuba, she rushes to the tower only to see her husband dragged in the dust: ‘The darkness of night misted over the eyes of Andromache.She fell backward, and gasped the life breath from her, and far off
threw from her head the shining gear that ordered her headdress,
and diadem and the cap, and the holding-band woven together,
and the circlet, which Aphrodite the golden once had given her
on that day when Hektor of the shining helmet led her forth
from the house of Eëtion, and gave numberless gifts to win her.
’ 22.466-72 The apparent digression vividly recalls the beginning of the happiness of which Hector's death is the tragic end. When Andromache regains consciousness, she makes a speech in which she expresses what the incident of the fallen circlet had suggested symbolically. Adam's first reaction to Eve's fall is likewise speechless. He had been weaweaving a wreath of flowers in anticipation of Eve's return: ‘On th' other side, Adam, soon as he heard
The fatal trespass done by Eve, amazed,
Astonied stood and blank, while horror chill
Ran through his veins, and all his joints relaxed;
From his slack hand the garland wreathed for Eve
Down dropped, and all the faded roses shed.
’ 9.888-93 The dropping of the wreath fulfils the same symbolic function as Andromache's loss of her circlet, for Eve had been consistently identified with flowers from her first appearance in the poem:3 ‘Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gath'ring flowers
Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis
Was gather'd, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world ...
’ 4.268-72 Adam's speech, like that of Andromache, only expresses what we have already seen. The implicit use of flower imagery in Adam's speech 9.901 firmly connects the speech with the speechless reaction. Although Adam's situation does not bear any resemblance to a particular Greek play, he is quite recognizably the tragic survivor so common in the plays of Sophocles and Euripides. But the structure of the Fall in Milton's epic also has striking analogues to the plot of the Iliad, if one abstracts the tragic mechanism of that plot from its concrete embodiment in the story of Achilles, Hector, and Patroclus. The pathos of the Iliad is the killing of Hector by Achilles. In Aristotelian terms it is a specifically untragic act: a man kills his enemy. A tragic element is introduced by the fact that the death of Hector entails that of Achilles. By deciding to kill Hector, Achilles chooses the glory of a short life, and he is fully aware of the consequences of his deed 18.114-26. But since this resolution is Achilles' own choice, the complication is hardly tragic. Here, the next complication helps: Achilles must kill Hector because the death of Patroclus forces him to revenge. He has no choice; but he wants no choice because the death of Patroclus has robbed him of everything that gave meaning to his life. Even this concatenation of events, however, lacks tragic quality because Achilles appears as the victim of events that have their origin outside himself. The author raised the story above the level of determinism by tracing the chain of events back to an action for which Achilles was responsible. Achilles' actions are motivated by his desire to earn the glory that will recompense his short life. When he calls the assembly that leads to the quarrel with Agamemnon, he for the first time takes his fate into his own hands, and the story of the Iliad from that point on may be described as a series of disastrous blunders by Achilles—steps which he takes to speed up the acquisition of the glory he considers his birthright, but which seem to lead further away from that goal. In a disastrous final reversal, however, the events reveal that they have led towards that goal all the time, but with a tragic difference. The reversal that reveals the coherence and necessity of the tragedy is the death of Patroclus, in which Achilles experiences his own imminent death. But the action that ultimately determines this necessity is Achilles' request from Zeus to support the enemy 1.407-12.The poet emphasizes its disastrous consequences by having Achilles allude to this request in the prayer in which he asks for the safe return of Patroclus 16.236-7. The immediate cause of Patroclus' death, however, is Achilles' decision to allow Patroclus to borrow his own armour and fight Hector. The decision is that of a tragically blinded man, as the poet reveals to us in Achilles' motives for resigning to his friend the responsibility that is so patently his own. Achilles imagines that the victorious return of Patroclus will reflect honourably on himself and that the Achaeans will bring him gifts, the same gifts that he had so violently refused earlier. Achilles indulges in a wish fulfilment that contrasts point by point with the reality that awaits him. He concludes his speech with the outburst: ‘Father Zeus, Athene and Apollo, if only
not one of all the Trojans could escape destruction, not one
of the Argives, but you and I could emerge from the slaughter
so that we two alone could break Troy's hallowed caronal
’ 16.97-100 In reality, neither of them will be alive when Troy is taken. Patroclus not only dies in the armour of Achilles, but the circumstances of his death quite deliberately foreshadow that of Achilles. When Thetis comes to comfort the mourning Achilles, she cradles his head in her lap in a gesture that recalls ritual mourning: she treats her son as if he were dead. Kakridis 1948, 65-75 And Achilles himself, once the death of Patroclus has awakened him from his delusions, acts in full consciousness of his imminent death.4 Aeschylus later was to use as a symbol of tragic recognition the fable of the eagle who recognizes as his own the feathers on the arrow that fatally wounded him.5 Homeric characters are less self-conscious than the characters of Attic tragedies, but even so, the tragic reversal of Achilles' fate is less the result of a changed situation than of Achilles' insight into the nature of his own actions, an insight that is not expressed by reflection but by the instantaneous and wholehearted acceptance of their consequences. The relationship of the fall of Eve to that of Adam strangely resembles that of the Patrocleia to the Achilleid. Adam's fall hinges on Eve's in such a manner that it becomes a mere consequence of and reaction, to it. That is to say, the fall of Eve determines the fall of Adam in much the same manner that the death of Patroclus determines that of Achilles. The parallels can be pushed further. Although Adam's fall is sudden, it is not unexpected: in the scene in which Eve persuades Adam to let her work by herself, Milton had shown that Adam could not resist his wife. No source is known for this scene, and it is apparently Milton's own invention. But the position and function of the scene in the drama of the Fall bear an astonishing resemblance to the scene in which Patroclus persuades Achilles to let him fight the Trojans. It is the duty of Adam and Achilles to protect Eve and Patroclus, but at the request of the weaker character they both resign a duty that they should have kept. It was Achilles' responsibility to fight Hector; in letting Patroclus do it, he becomes responsible for his death. In letting Eve face Satan by herself, Adam repeats Achilles' disastrous error. Achilles and Adam are both full of warnings that are duly disregarded: Eve and Patroclus suffer precisely those things that Adam and Achilles had feared most. In both epics the hero's abdication of his responsibility also has fatal consequences for himself. The death of Patroclus causes that of Achilles, as Achilles himself is the first to realize. So Eve's fall causes the fall of Adam, as Adam likewise realizes immediately. The manner in which it causes the hero's death is also similar. Eve's fall and the death of Patroclus lead Adam and Achilles to choose actions that will involve their own deaths. For both of them, shame and the horror of living without the person dearest to them far exceed the fear of death. But in both epics, the disaster that befalls the hero, the loss of his dearest friend, is something he himself has caused. In Aristotle's terms the tragic quality of a pathos depends on the bond of philia between agent and sufferer which it disrupts. In Paradise Lost and the Iliad this bond consists of the relationships of Adam and Eve and of Achilles and Patroclus respectively. Hence these relationships are comparable with regard to their function in the tragic mechanism of each work. These relationships provide the charge for the emotional intensity of the tragic climaxes, and without them the heroes' reactions to their tragedies cease to be credible. The crucial significance of these relationships for the credibility of the heroes' tragic reactions is demonstrated by the failure of the Aeneid in this respect. Although Vergil imitated the circumstances of the Patrocleia in the story of Pallas, Turnus, and Aeneas, the effect of Pallas' death on Aeneas is unconvincing because Vergil never succeeded in establishing a close relationship between Pallas and Aeneas that would explain or justify the furious revenge that Aeneas takes on TurnusOtis 1963, 361. In Paradise Lost as well as in the Iliad, the emotional effectiveness and credibility of the tragic crisis are achieved by a partial identification of hero and reader. The fates of Eve and Patroclus are witnessed by a reader who has been forced by the author to assume the hero's perspective. Milton apostrophizes Eve, but he never apostrophizes Adam. 6 This special expression of sympathy by the author, an expression also apparent in the pervasive flower imagery, guides the reader's reaction. Adam does not observe the fall of Eve, but the reader takes his place and the vicarious experience of Adam's feelings convinces him that the crystallization of these feelings in Adam's sudden reaction to the fall of Eve is emotionally credible. Precisely the same handling of the reader's emotions occurs in the Iliad. Patroclus is very much like Eve in serving as a contrast figure to the masculine world of the Achaean camp. Although he is a great warrior, his true nature lies in the domestic sphere. He is repeatedly called gentle, and he is compassionate, an example of which is his attention to the wounded Eurypylos 11.828-48. We see him as he entertains the Achaean envoys, prepares a meal, and later makes the bed for Phoenix 9.201-20, 658-9. As in Paradise Lost, the sympathy that the author shows for him is an expression of the hero's love. The poet several times addresses him in the second person; he marks the beginning of his tragedy by a rare editorial aside 11.604, and again he comments on the atê that Zeus sent to Patroclus when he had decided on his death 16.684-91. 16 The emotional identification of the author, listener, and Achilles is apparent above all in the account of Patroclus' death, which is not heroic, like that of Hector, but is deliberately pathetic in order to give poignancy to the self-accusations of Achilles 18.102-3. The listener replaces Achilles as the observer of the pitiful death of Patroclus, and this experience gives truth to the overwhelming reaction of Achilles when he learns the news of his friend's death. The comparison with Achilles reveals the formal elements of tragedy in Adam's situation, but in a Christian context the experience of tragic recognition undergoes a radical transformation. The pathos of Paradise Lost not only disrupts the relationship of Adam and Eve; above all, it disrupts the relationship of man and God, in which the former is grounded and of which it is a symbol. But for Adam the sense of his loss of Eve is so overwhelming that he takes the symbol for the truth and turns it into an idol. Hence we must distinguish between the false tragic dilemma in which he imagines himself and the actual tragedy of his betrayal of God. Milton puts Adam in the role of a hero confronted with a tragic reversal, but the situation is only apparent. Out of his sense of loss, Adam acts to prevent that loss and in doing so falls into his real tragedy. The death of Patroclus turns the blind Achilles into a seeing Achilles, who recognizes his fate and the connection between death and honour. For Adam, on the other hand, things come apart in the Fall. In choosing to fall, he becomes rapidly and increasingly blind. Adam's consciousness of Eve's fall is a false consciousness. In the Iliad, as in many Greek tragedies, the critical situations turn on the contrast of truth and delusion, knowledge and ignorance, rather than on good and evil. Knowledge brings disaster, as in the case of Oedipus, but the insight into the tragic coherence of things is the greatest source of human self-assertion, and thus the moment of tragic recognition is in a paradoxical sense a moment of intense pride, or at least a moment of supreme consciousness of the self. The plot conventions which Aristotle analyzed in the Poetics are designed to throw into fullest relief this existential situation of disaster and triumph, of knowledge in defeat. Milton took over the formal pattern of the tragic plot but rejected its metaphysical implications. The situation of tragic recognition becomes the scene in which man wilfully isolates himself from divine grace. The self-consciousness of the tragic hero becomes the source of evil in the Augustinian psychology of sin that governs Milton's epic. But Adam's tragedy is not irrevocable. The Fall cannot be undone, but its consequences are overcome in the Redemption. The reconciliation of Achilles and Priam leads both to a dignified acceptance of the events. The ritual of the ransom and of the shared meal mitigates the starkness of the disaster. But the meeting changes nothing: Hector and Patroclus are dead, Achilles will die, and Troy will fall. The relationship of Adam and Eve, on the other hand, develops beyond the tragic and towards their reconciliation with each other and with God. Thus, the real crisis of the work is not the illusion of tragic necessity but the gradual resolution of what appeared to be an irrevocable tragic situation. In Milton's universe, conscience replaces tragic consciousness. Adam, blinded by the illusion of tragic isolation, awakens to a new truth: ‘since our eyes
Opened we find indeed, and find we know
Both good and evil, good lost and evil got . . .
’ 9.1070-2 His conscience drives him into despair, but the mysterious interaction of his repentance and prevenient grace leads towards salvation.
III
The stories of Adam and Achilles are both episodes in larger struggles, but in the epics themselves these episodes become the central plots, and the rest of the narrative is turned into episodes. The critical problem raised by this curious subordination of the whole to one of its parts is one which Aristotle diagnosed but solved somewhat superficially by stating that the plot of an epic contains a dramatic skeleton fleshed out by episodes. In Aristotle's theory, an epic is basically a drama which compensates for its lack of structural compactness by the pleasure of variety. He did not ask whether the integration of episodes into the central plot might create a kind of unity different from the compact unity of drama, but valid in its own right. The presence of such a unity can indeed be demonstrated in both the Iliad and Paradise Lost by examining the organizing principles of the episodes and their relationship to the central plot. In both works the plot obviously deals with an important part of the story: the story of Achilles culminates in the event that seals the fate of Troy, and the Fall is one of the crucial stages in the Celestial Cycle. But in both works, the central plot is chosen not only for its pivotal position in the story but also because the event it deals with crystallizes the total range of experience of the poem's world. The death of the young man and the grief of the survivor, the inexorable logic of the revenge triangle in which the killer is killed—these themes, which run through the epic in innumerable variations, find their fullest expression in the story of Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector. 7Achilles' experience of the death of Patroclus reveals the truth about the hell of the Iliadic world. It is symptomatic of the human condition as the poet sees it. Such a thematic approach to the significance of the central plot explains why Milton chose the Fall as the pivot of his epic on the Celestial Cycle. As J.H. Steadman has emphasized, Paradise Lost is based on the polarity of human depravity and divine mercySteadman 1967, vii. Other Renaissance poets and critics might attempt a fusion of Christian and classical ethics, but for Milton, as well as for the creator of the Red Crosse Knight, a Christian epic had to deal with the central experience of sinful man. Tasso's crusading knights were not serious enough; a Christian epic that wanted to rival the great works of the Greek poets in moral and intellectual penetration had to reveal with ruthless honesty how lost a Christian was without Christ. A historical subject, which would necessarily have involved some compromise of this radical position, was therefore excluded. But the great events of the Celestial Cycle were likewise excluded, because they either did not deal with human experience at all or dealt with it from a divine perspective, as in the Incarnation. The Fall is the one event in the Cycle that is human; at the same time, it was the event which destroyed the original immediate relationship of God and man and created the need for Christ as Mediator. The Fall thus established the typological pattern of Christ and Adam, and showed man's need of Christ in the one man who needed him most: Adam. In both works the truth about the human condition as the poet sees it is demonstrated in the test case of an individual crisis, and this crisis expresses and crystallizes the experience that informs the work as a whole. In both works the story is organized in such a manner as to frame the central plot and throw into fuller relief its representative and universal nature. In the Iliad this frame consists of two gigantic montages that set the beginning of the war against its end Whitman 1958, 259-74. This technique arises from a fundamental habit of the poet's mind: he always expresses a whole by juxtaposing its extremes. Thus Hector, when he is forced to face Achilles, strays back to a past that is no more: ‘There is noway any more from a tree or a rock to talk to him gently
whispering like a young man and a young girl, in the way
a young man and a young maiden whisper together.
’ 22.126-8 When Achilles chases Hector from the city walls to the two springs and back, the poet takes the time to describe the springs and adds that ‘in the old days/when there was peace, before the coming of the sons of the Achaians,’ the Trojan women used to wash their clothes in those springs 22.152-6. The end looks back to the beginning so that we may know what it is an end of. Beginning and end, in these examples, are not primarily separated by time. They are polar opposites, and the passage of time is important only in so far as it marks the progression from happiness to unhappiness. Each of these contrasts suggests the totality of experience; each of them is a little war and peace, or rather peace and war, for the contrasts are dynamic and progress towards the tragic.8 This tragic dynamic is most powerfully expressed by the relationship of the montages to one another. The montage of the beginning is conceived as an ironic and distinctly ominous foreshadowing of the end, in which the tragic events of the future are rehearsed with as yet untragic consequences. Priam, who refuses to watch the untragic duel of Paris and Menelaus 3.304-9, must be the spectator of the tragic duel of Achilles and Hector. The foolish Pandarus is replaced by the heroic Hector as the victim of Athena's deceit, and Andromache, who rushes to the tower fearing that Diomedes' attack on Troy may be fatal 6.370-439, is in her house when Hector is killed, ignorant of the tragedy and preparing a bath for his return. These and many more ironic correspondences between beginning and end are supported by the geometric pattern of formal symmetry. The events of the last book, for instance, repeat those of the first but reverse their order. The resultant balanced pattern, which Whitman attributed to the poet's innate formalism, is dramatically justified by its relevance to the central action Whitman 1958, 255. The correspondences between beginning and end point to the profound differences that underlie the apparent resemblances of the situations, differences that were wrought by the tragic reversal of the central action. By thus appearing as the pivot on which the correspondent montages hinge, the central action receives universal validity. The framing of the central action in Paradise Lost bears obvious formal resemblances to the Iliad. The first and last two books clearly are montages (or tableaux) of the fallen world. Hell is an anatomy of the fallen world, and Michael's prophecy describes the fallen world as movement in history. They point inward towards the Fall and show its universal consequences. As in the Iliad, the central action occupies only a fraction of the narrative. In the Iliad the scenes of general fighting separate the scenes of the Achilleid; in Paradise Lost the story of Adam and Eve is divided into two groups of scenes by the narrative of the War in Heaven and the Creation, which occupies the physical middle of the poem. In both works the total structure that results from the interlacing of the central story with episodes and from the framework of corresponding montages maintains a chronological semblance, but it is not based on sequential narrative as the organizing principle. The poet's intention was to achieve patterns that would develop the central theme in multiple variations. The formal resemblances in the corresponding patterns of the two epics—resemblances which could be developed in considerable detail—must not, however, obscure the great differences in the relationship of the episodes to the central action. Homer's transformation of his story involved a change in the relative importance of events. The choice of the Achilleid as the master plot involved the abandonment of a separate focus for the story of Troy. Its agents—Agamemnon, Menelaus, Paris, and Helen—either become minor characters or exist chiefly in relation to Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector. Such a solution was impossible in Paradise Lost because it would have destroyed the typological pattern of Christ and Adam. Milton's subject demanded a bipolar structure: he could not tell the story of Adam at the expense of Christ in the same manner that the poet of the Iliad had told the story of Achilles at the expense of Agamemnon. Milton's problem, then, was to find a principle of organization that would keep the tragedy of Adam in the centre of the work but maintain the typological pattern of Adam and Christ without prejudicing the unity of the whole. His solution was brilliant and literary. He used the contrast of the epic and tragic hero, a commonplace in Renaissance literary criticism, to express the polar opposition of Adam and Christ. Far from compromising his theology to the demands of literary theory, he used literary conventions in the service of his theology. The central plot, which focuses on Adam, is based on the conventions of classical tragedy. Whatever is not part of this plot—the episodes, which have as their theme the struggle of Satan and the Son—is organized on epic principles. From a merely structural point of view, the epic constituted by these episodes is subordinate to the story of the Fall just as the story of the Trojan War is subordinate to the story of Achilles. But Adam's human tragedy is resolved when it is regarded as an episode in the divine epic. We may speak of a balance of structural subordination and thematic superordination. Milton made very sophisticated use of one particular epic convention to provide the double focus which the typological contract of Christ and Adam demanded. The flashback narrative is an essential feature of every post-Odyssean epic, and Milton employs it in very prominent fashion. But whereas in the Odyssey and in the Aeneid the hero tells his own adventures, the hero of Paradise Lost hears the adventures of someone else: Adam listens to an epic about Christ. The War in Heaven is the only part of Paradise Lost in which the plot conventions of the classical epic are consistently observed. The three days of fighting mirror the fighting in the Iliad from the initial encounter of Paris and Menelaus through the nocturnal council of the Achaeans to the final confrontation of Achilles and Hector. Milton's heavy use of epic conventions, which amounts to the creation of an epic within the epic, is more than a concession to the decorum of the genre: it is justified by his theme in two ways. In Milton's radical theology, Christ was the only figure to whom the perfection of the epic hero could be attributed, and the polarization of Christ and Adam as perfect epic hero and flawed tragic hero was a striking device for expressing the central theme. Moreover, the epic hero arouses in the listener that great urge to imitate virtue and valorous exploits of which Don Quixote is at once the parody and the immortal example. Sidney gave eloquent expression to this effect of epic literature: ‘Only let Aeneas be worn in the tablet of your memory, how he governeth himself in the ruin of his country, in the preserving his old father, and carrying away his religious ceremonies, in obeying the god's commandment to leave Dido, though not only all passionate kindnesse but even the humane consideration of vertuous gratefulness would have craved other of him ... and I think in a mind most prejudiced with a prejudicating humour, he will be found in excellency fruitful.’Smith 1904, 1:180 Adam is the listener to whom Raphael presents, in the form of a heroic poem and as a warning, the great model of willing obedience which he should follow. The imitation of the epic hero becomes the fitting literary symbol of the laconic biblical ‘Follow me.’ One of the most persistent epic conventions is the use of divine machinery. In the epics of Homer, Vergil, and their successors, there is a divine action that runs parallel to the human action. In Paradise Lost this literary convention is preserved, but it is radically transformed to fit the needs of the typological pattern. Whereas in the traditional epic the conventions of the genre govern the actions in both spheres, in Paradise Lost the conventions of the epic apply only to the divine sphere and the human sphere is governed by the conventions of tragedy. Because Satan is the idol, or hideous double of Christ, he necessarily acts within the conventions of the epic tradition. Christ and Satan do indeed re-enact the divine conflict of the epic tradition, which is most clearly represented by the antagonism of Juno and Jupiter, but their conflict is cast in terms of that of Turnus and Aeneas. The patterns of Juno and Jupiter and of Turnus and Aeneas are merged in the conflict of Satan and the Son. This deliberate restriction of epic conventions in Paradise Lost raises important questions about Milton's attitude towards the genre in which he wrote. Critics have, on the whole, been very naïve in their assumptions about his attitude. They have assumed quite unselfconsciously that Milton's relationship to the tradition was like that of Vergil to Homer. Vergil counterpointed his radical revaluation of the heroic values with a scrupulous imitation of the formal conventions and plot patterns of the Homeric epic: it is in the likeness of Homeric actions that Vergilian characters reveal their utter difference from the world of Achilles of Odysseus. Post-Homeric literary genres, particularly tragedy, had a great influence on the manner in which Vergil adapted the Homeric pattern, but however un-Homeric the Aeneid may be in spirit, there can be no doubt of the supremacy of the Iliad and the Odyssey as formal models: other literary genres only modified the inherited pattern. The resultant balance of formal sameness and thematic difference not only created the epic which became the great model for the theory and practice of the heroic poem; it also canonized the peculiar process of imitation by which Vergil proceeded. Hence the assumption, implicit in most studies of Paradise Lost and the epic tradition, that Milton did to Vergil and Homer what Vergil had done to Homer. But the truth is that Milton departed very radically from the kind of imitation that the epic genre prescribed. He did not, like Vergil, use epic conventions in the spirit of the faithful imitator, but he used them with the ironic consciousness of their conventionality. They are used deliberately wherever the action moves away from the immediacy of human experience; they are, in fact, a device by which the author raises the reader's skepticism about the literal truth of the story: the author faces the problem of Raphael and solves it by using the conventions of the classical epic for the purpose of ‘likening spiritual to corporal forms.’ Because the epic parts of Paradise Lost are not to be taken literally, Milton escaped the problems posed by the discrepancy between Christian and epic ideals, the discrepancy of which he was so keenly aware. The attribution of the perfection of the epic hero to the Son in the epic within the epic does not commit Milton to any positive judgement about its intrinsic value, because it is merely a literary image of the Son's transcendent perfection. In fact, the very use of the convention of the epic hero demonstrates its limits. As in the Iliad and in the Aeneid, the war moves towards a decisive confrontation of the two leaders. Milton even makes use of the scenes in the Iliad and the Aeneid in which the hero expressly forbids his followers to attack the enemy who is reserved for him Il. 22.205-7, Aen. 12.760-2, and he fuses this allusion with the biblical ‘vengeance is mine’ Rom. 12:19, PL. 6.812-21. But there is no duel, which would have done Satan the honour of elevating him to the level of the Son by making him his legitimate adversary; the Son by his mere appearance routs all the devils. This deliberate anticlimax not only saves Milton from a duel with embarrassing theological implications about dualistic patterns of good and evil, but it also reveals the inadequacy of epic perfection to serve even as the image of a higher perfection, and this inadequacy is further underscored in the quite unepic account of the Creation, which is explicitly called a greater deed than the War: ‘Great are thy works, Jehovah, infinite
Thy power; what thought can measure thee or tongue
Relate thee; greater now in thy return
Than from the Giant Angels; thee that day
Thy thunders magnified; but to create
Is greater than created to destroy.
’ 7.602-7 It is the use of epic conventions in the characterization of Satan which expresses Milton's judgement of secular heroism. Satan is circumscribed by these conventions, whereas for the Son they amount only to a role which he plays when he deals with Satan, partly because Satan understands nothing else. J. Steadman has called Milton's theological revaluation of the ethical norms of the epic a Copernican revolution of the heroic poemSteadman 1967, vii. But from a literary point of view, the formal consequences of such a revaluation are perhaps even more significant than the redefinition of the heroic ideal. Milton not only saw that the values of the epic had to be transformed; he also saw that the forms of the epic by themselves could not express the typological pattern which was the theological basis of his revaluation. Christian orthodoxy led to literary heresy, and the result was a unique fusion of the forms of epic and tragedy in such a manner that the new structure boldly transcends the limits of both. That the product of this act of heresy should bear an astonishing resemblance to the structure of the Iliad and constitute in a sense a return to the origin of the epic tradition is one of the ironies of literary history.
Dido and Bérénice
I
Dido tragedies figure prominently in the early development of modern European tragedy. As early as 1524, Alessandro Pazzi wrote a Dido tragedy, and in 1541, Giraldi Cinthio was commissioned by the Duke of Ferrara to provide a dramatic entertainment, to last for no less than six hours, on the subject of Dido. Some time before 1560, Jodelle wrote a tragedy called Didon se sacrifiant, and Marlowe began his career with Dido Queen of CarthageAllen 1962; Leube 1969. In addition to the considerable number of Dido plays, of which these are only four prominent examples, we must add those daughters of the Vergilian Dido that do not go by the mother's name. Garnier's Cleopatra, for instance, is only one of several literary Cleopatras who die like Dido. And when at the beginning of Trissino's Sofonisba the heroine puts her suffering into perspective by seeing herself as a descendant of the great and unhappy queen of Carthage, the genealogy points to a literary relationship. Trissino would hardly have chosen this possibly legendary sister of Hannibal as the protagonist of his play if he had not perceived the structural resemblance of her story to that of her more famous ancestor.9 Bérénice differs from these famous eastern queens, whose literary careers form an important part of European drama, by virtue both of her obscurity and of the absence of any obvious relationship with Dido. She merited a sentence or so in Suetonious' life of Titus and eked out a meagre existence in the undergrowth of French seventeenth-century literature until, for reasons that have been much debated but which remain obscure to this day, Corneille and Racine simultaneously made her the heroine of competing plays. Racine was the first to associate her with Dido, and he did so emphatically in the first paragraph of his preface to the play: ‘Cette action est très fameuse dans l'histoire; et je l'ai trouvée très propre pour le théâtre, par la violence des passions qu'elle y pouvait exciter. En effet, nous n'avons rien de plus touchant dans tous les poètes, que la séparation d'Enée et de Didon, dans Virgile. Et qui doute que ce qui a pu fournir assez de matière pour tout un chant d'un poème héroïque où l'action dure plusieurs jours, ne puisse suffire pour le sujet d'une tragédie, dont la durée ne doit être que de quelques heures? I1 est vrai que je n'ai point poussé Bérénice jusqu'à se tuer, comme Didon, parce que Bérénice, n'ayant pas ici avec Titus les derniers engagements que Didon avait avec Enée, elle n'est pas obligée, comme elle de renoncerà la vie.’ At first sight, Racine's comparison of the two heroines may appear to be no more than a piece of prefatory rhetoric, but as I shall argue below, Bérénice is the truest daughter of the Vergilian Dido. The distinctive features of this tragedy—in particular its ‘tristesse majestueuse,’ which we may alternately translate as ‘majestic sadness’ or ‘sadness of majesty’—appear in their proper light if we consider the play as the most successful response to the peculiar ambivalence that surrounds Vergil's tragedy of Dido—a response to which the many European Dido tragedies bear witness, but which they fail to articulate fully. My interpretation of Bérénice as a subtle and profound reponse to the paradigm of tragic love that Vergil created in the drama of Dido and Aeneas will involve a detour of some length, because the nature both of that paradigm and of the response to it by modern writers requires some exposition if Bérénice is to be seen as the product of Racine's elective affinity with Vergil.II
In analyzing the paradigmatic status that the Dido tragedy acquired for the European consciousness, we may conveniently begin by drawing out the implications of the fact that Trissino's Sofonisba, the first European tragedy to aim self-consciously at a restoration of Attic tragedy, is a displaced Dido tragedy. Trissino's choice of subject reveals a sophisticated degree of reflection on the problematical nature of imitation. Whereas with regard to form he aimed at a faithful reproduction of the dramatic conventions of Attic tragedy, with regard to subject matter he was intent on reproducing the relationship between audience and stage characters that obtained in his models. He saw the equivalent of Greek myth in Roman history. What Medea and Phaedra had signified in the drama of fifth-century Athens, Sofonisba was to signify for the new tragedy of sixteenth-century Italy. Did Trissino realize that this controlled and highly conscious transformation of ancient models into a modern equivalent was most innovative where it unconsciously betrayed its self-avowed intention of restoring the drama of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in a modern setting? In the drama of Sofonisba and Massinissa we recognize instantly what has become, for us, one of the oldest dramatic clichés, the conflict between love and honour. But we should also recognize, as Trissino almost certainly did not, that this conflict, while fully prefigured in the tragedy of Dido, is quite alien to Attic tragedy, and we must analyze the significance of his unwitting substitution of a situation like that of Dido and Aeneas for the sexual conflicts characteristic of Greek tragedy. Until German Romantic critics placed the opposition of ancient and modern tragedy in the philosophical context of the subject-object dichotomy, the treatment of love was generally considered the most important differentiating factor between ancient and modern tragedy. For Renaissance and neoclassical criticism, it was a matter of conventional wisdom that, in modern tragedy, love played a more dominant role, and that its treatment emphasized new sentimental and spiritual values.10 An Ovidian passage allows us to refine this crude distinction by formulating a typology of ancient and modern love conflicts. In the second book of the Tristia, Ovid asks why he should have been banished for writing love poetry when everybody else did it. Even the exalted genre of tragedy, he complains, is full of sexual references: ‘omne genus scripti gravitate tragoedia vincit:haec quoque materiam semper amoris habet.
’ ‘Every kind of writing is surpassed in seriousness by tragedy, but this also constantly deals with the theme of love.’ Tristia 2.383-409 Ovid adds a catalogue of some twenty-five love tragedies—mostly Euripidean—to demonstrate the truth of his assertion . For our purpose, the most striking feature of Ovid's catalogue is that it contains no relationship resembling the case of Dido and Aeneas, although he refers to it a little later in the same book: ‘et tamen ille tuae felix Aeneidos auctor
contulit in Tyrios arma virumque toros,
nec legitur pars ulla magis de corpore toto,
quam non legitimo foedere iunctus amor.
’ ‘And yet the blessed author of your Aeneid brought his ‘arms and the man’ to a Tyrian couch, and no other part of that work is read as much as the love joined by an illegitimate bond’ Tristia 2.533-6 The instant appeal of the Dido tragedy, to which these lines testify, has its roots not only in the aesthetic excellence of Aeneid IV, but in a new conception of tragic love to which Augustan Rome and later ages were able to respond with particular intensity and immediacy. This conception is no longer ancient; indeed, the transitional status of Vergil, which the Church Fathers recognized when they assimilated him into their tradition as an ‘anima naturaliter christiana,’ is nowhere so apparent as in the relative modernity with which Vergil explores the relationship between Dido and Aeneas. The tragedy of Dido is based on a separation of public and private values that is unknown in Greek tragedy. In Ovid's catalogue we find tragedies of marital infidelity, such as Medea and Trachiniae, as well as plays that turn on different forms of generational conflict, such as Pelops or Meleager plays. But the most interesting class is formed by those plays in which the crisis is brought about by the actual or potential violation of a sexual taboo that is both the source of desire and, in its violation, the cause of the tragedy. Ovid's examples include Phaedra's incestuous passion for her step-son, the incest between brother and sister in the story of Canace and Macareus, and adultery with the wife's sister (as in Tereus' rape of Philomela) or with the brother's wife (as in the case of Thyestes and Aerope).11 By contrast, the relationship of Dido and Aeneas does not violate any family-based sexual taboos; it conflicts instead with the fulfilment of the lovers' public roles. Vergil did not invent the conflict on which the tragedy of Dido and Aeneas is based. On the contrary, it had a venerable history in popular moral thought, where it usually appeared in the simple version of the destructive impact of invalid private desire on the fulfilment of valid public obligations. Didactic fables about the choice between virtue and pleasure are its earliest literary version. If one chooses wisely, as Hercules did at the crossroads, one will gain glory for one's deeds on behalf of mankind. But disaster ensues if one chooses foolishly, as Paris did when he chose Aphrodite over Hera and Athene. Nor did Hercules always choose wisely: the consequences of his submission to Omphale were humiliating, ‘as we see,’ to quote from North's Plutarch, ‘in the painted tables, where Omphale secretly stealeth away Hercules' club and takes his Lyons skinne from Him’Plutarch 1929, 4.362. Mark Antony, finally, the self-avowed descendant of Hercules, became the most famous historical exemplum of the fatal choice of pleasure. But if Vergil did not invent the conflict, he was the first poet to make it the subject of a dramatic exploration in which the clear premises of the moral fable were suspended. On one level, Vergil clearly intended to demonstrate the rightness of Aeneas' decision to leave Dido. Why else would he have emphasized Mark Antony's folly in the description of Aeneas' shield? Dido is indeed a Calypso or Circe whose sexual charms threaten the hero with the loss of his identity. But nothing illustrates more strikingly the suspension of moral certainty in the Dido tragedy than a comparison of Aeneas' final choice with the clear-cut moral triumph of the choice of virtue in the fable of Hercules at the crossroads. To begin with, sexual pleasure is not the initial cause of the mutual attraction of Dido and Aeneas. In the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, a very young Medea loves Jason at first sight, although she knows nothing about him. The onset of sexual passion is described from the detached and almost clinical perspective of Hellenistic erotic psychology, which nowhere transcends the physical sphere. By contrast, the process of Dido's falling in love with Aeneas is governed by hearing rather than by sight, and what she responds to in Aeneas' narrative is not the exotic but the all-too-familiar. Like Aeneas, she has been exiled and like him, she has lost her family. Dryden pointed out that the pathos of Aeneas' separation from Creusa was not lost on her. There is no other work of ancient literature in which the origin of a sexual relationship is based so exclusively on mature compassion, which recognizes and interprets the sufferings of the other in the light of its own experience. Through the biographies of Dido and Aeneas, Vergil conveys the sense that these are human beings destined for each other, who would integrate sexual passion into a mature human relationship and build upon that basis a life of successful public activity. One need only look at the paleness of Aeneas' eventual dynastic marriage with Lavinia to recognize that such an implication is just and that only a blind and self-righteous puritanism could blame Aeneas for responding to Dido's love. And yet, the vision of integration turns out to be a mirage; the gods themselves condemn Aeneas' response and order his departure. On the other hand, nothing reveals so clearly the genuine values on which the love of Dido and Aeneas is based as the act of departure in which these values are trampled underfoot. Sidney saw this, even though he praised Aeneas for ‘obeying Gods commaundement, to leave Dido though not only all passionate kindnesse, but even the humane consideration of vertuous gratefulness, would have craved other of him’Smith 1904, 1:180 . In many stories of sexual temptation the fate of the rejected temptress leaves us cold. If the Sirens plunge despairingly into the sea after Odysseus resists their song, we do not greatly care. As for Circe and Calypso, they are immortal goddesses who can look after themselves. It is different with Dido. Her fate is so much the focus of Vergil's attention that most critics see the episode as primarily her tragedy, the tragedy of a noble character destroyed by passion. Such a view is correct as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. The tragedy of Dido is also that of Aeneas, and the meaning of the tragic linking of these figures emerges only from a view of the Aeneid as a whole. The Aeneid firmly subscribes to the orthodox view, held by Roman historians and moralists alike, that the original strength of Rome resided in the identity of family, state, and religion. Aeneas carrying the aged Anchises from the ruins of Troy is the most moving symbol of this identity. The constitution of Rome on this triple basis is the goal of Aeneas, but his career involves a progressive severance of the values of the state from those of the family. In the end, even his relationship to his son is more formal and dynastic than his genuinely filial relationship to Anchises. The Dido tragedy is the crucial event in this process of disintegration. Aeneas must leave Dido, but he cannot make the right choice without incurring the responsibility of her destruction, and this constitutes a punishment for himself as well. In losing Dido, Aeneas is forever excluded from a life in the realm of common humanity which their first meeting appeared to have so firmly established. The poignancy of the Aeneid derives in large measure from the fundamental contradiction, not always under the poet's control, that on the one hand, the epic celebrates the founding of an empire on the simplest and most basic human values, but that on the other hand, its protagonist faces an irreparable division of the world into private and public spheres. This contradiction is the most important source of tragic effect in the Dido episode, which locates the cause of tragic destruction precisely in the divorce of public and private values and establishes the fortunes of Aeneas and Dido as complementary aspects of the destructive consequences that ensue. Furor is not the cause of Dido's destruction, but the symptom of a tragic division that exacts a human sacrifice: her exclusion from the satisfaction of the most fundamental human needs, long borne in a spirit of noble and melancholy resignation, leaves her vulnerabie to the onslaught of the sacrificed values transformed into ‘furor.’ The puzzling setting of the cave in which Aeneas and Dido consummate their love may be offered in support of such an interpretation. The world of the temptress usually presents a specious appearance to the unwary hero who, lured by the melodious voice of Circe, does not discover the reality of the pigsty until it is too late. The world of Carthage with its wealth and splendour is in part a false surface, a House of Pride that contrasts with the simple cottage of Evander. But it would be quite wrong to argue that the truth about Dido's world is exposed in the cave into which Dido and Aeneas are driven by the storm. What leads from the first appearance of the Queen who, seated in front of the temple, administers justice, to the creature seeking refuge in the cave, is not a process of disclosure but of regression. Both settings are equally real. But if Dido's regression is a measure of her tragedy, the threat of similar regression hangs permanently over the world of Aeneas, in which necessity has ruled out the possibility of mediating between the public and private poles of existence. From the perspective of Dido's fate, we begin to understand the instability and vulnerability of Aeneas' life of denial and may account for the uncontrolled rage that characterizes the slaughter of Turnus as well as for the discrepancy between the nobility of his intention and the cruelty of his deeds that has bewildered many critics of the past two decades Mueller 1969. The poverty, misery, and instability of a world denied integration are the deepest lesson of the tragedy.
III
‘Why, Sir, [the Romans] would never have borne Virgil's description of Aeneas' treatment of Dido, if she had not been a Carthaginian’Boswell 1934, 4:196. Johnson's well-known quip points to the fact that the response to the suspension of moral certainty has been the ground of the great fame of Vergil's tragedy of Dido throughout the ages of European literature. But the articulation of that response in conscious interpretation has taken strange forms. Medieval writers, inspired by the traditions of chivalry, were ardent partisans of Dido and turned Aeneas into a faithless villain. On the other hand, Sidney's brief comment on Dido is the expression of his deeply felt response to the Vergilian ambivalence. And from the status of the Dido episode as a paradigm of tragic love, we may assume that other Renaissance writers also responded strongly to this ambivalence. But their articulation of this response was hampered by a didactic perception of tragedy that assimilated the genre to the categories of rhetoric and moral philosophy. Trissino's Sofonisba, which I have already described as a kind of Dido tragedy, provides a good illustration of the limitations of this perspective. In Trissino's play, the dramatic conflict is thematized in terms of the simple and didactic opposition of virtue and pleasure that Vergil had suspended. For Massinissa, a rash and inexperienced young man and the very embodiment of the audience to which the moral lesson of the tragedy was addressed, Sofonisba is no more than an object of sexual desire. Youthful infatuation describes his feelings well enough; a sense of shared experience or the admiration of a noble and generous mind is in no way the ground of sexual love as it was in the Aeneid. Trissino's drama nowhere questions the opposition of virtue and pleasure on which it is founded and remains a rhetorical demonstration of moral commonplaces. And what is true of Sofonisba is true of the Dido tragedies of the later sixteenth century. Despite differences in emphasis and valuation, all of them dramatize the conflict in terms of the simple opposition of virtue and pleasure; none of them follows Vergil in complicating and finally suspending that opposition by exploring the interdependence of public and private values as well as the tragic consequences of their separation. That Racine did so, and succeeded magnificently in the undertaking, will be my contention below.IV
As in his earlier Andromaque, Racine's response to Vergil in Bérénice does not manifest itself at the level of plot construction, although Bérénice's curse and her physical collapse (4.7) are two details of plot that are most easily referred to the Aeneid. But the paradigm of Dido and Aeneas is the context within which the tragic consequences of the right choice in this play most fully disclose their meaning. The action of Racine's play is easily summarized. It begins eight days after the death of the emperor Vespasian. Bérénice, who has lived happily at court for five years, expects that Titus, who has not seen her since his father's death, will propose marriage as soon as he recovers from his grief. But what Bérénice interprets as filial grief is in reality Titus' despair at his recognition that he must part from Bérénice forever, since the laws of Rome do not permit an emperor to marry a foreign princess, let alone an eastern one. The play consists, on the one hand, of Titus' attempts to break this news to Bérénice through intermediaries, and, on the other hand, of Bérénice's growing recognition of the truth. It culminates in a confrontation between Titus and Bérénice in the fourth act and is resolved by their acceptance of their fate and their self-stylization as exempla of faithful but unhappy love. I have left out of this summary the misfortunes of Antiochus, an unrewarded suitor of Bérénice, who keeps the wheels of this most exiguous of plots spinning in slow but steady motion. Unlike Dido, who is initially an active monarch, Bérénice is a queen only by status. She is a radically private creature: her life is devoted to Titus; she lives ‘étrangère dans Rome, inconnue à la cour’ 2.2. The line epitomizes the double opposition that characterizes her being. If the Roman people resent her as another eastern queen, like Cleopatra an embodiment of licentious pleasure, that resentment is both unfounded and hypocritical. For the privacy of Bérénice not only turns away from the public duties of the state; it also opposes her to the pursuit of pleasure that characterizes the court. In fleeing it, she seeks to live only according to the values of the heart, which are equally threatened by the court and by Rome. The two oppositions differ structurally. Whereas Rome and the heart both denote genuine values, the court is an image of the world as the setting that forever opposes the realization of both values by inviting them to unrestrained gratification of power and pleasure respectively. Titus and Bérénice are at one in their opposition to the court. We hear this in the first lines of the play, in which Antiochus describes the setting as the place where Titus ‘se cache à sa cour’ in order to meet Bérénice. And the first words of Bérénice describe her as escaping from the world of the court to find a setting for her ‘heart’: ‘Enfin je me dérobe à la joie importuneDe tant d'amis nouveaux que me fait la fortune;
Je fuis de leurs respects l'inutile longueur,
Pour chercher un ami qui me parle du coeur.
’ 1.4 But the place at which she arrives has already been shown as inhospitable to such a desire. Antiochus has referred to ‘la pompe de ces lieux,’ and even the room in which Titus and Bérénice hide from the world is ‘superbe et solitaire’ 1.1 If their joint opposition to the court is the basis of their love, it is the cause of their tragedy as well. The same moral sensibility that causes Titus to recoil from the world of the court also makes him perceive the demands of the idea of Rome in all its purity and grandeur. ‘Une cour idolâtre’ would see in his marriage to Bérénice an act of sensual indulgence and would approve it just as it had approved the crimes of Nero. But Titus seeks justification before ‘un plus noble théâtre.’ Thus the play enacts the conflict of Rome and the heart on a stage opposed to the court, but our admiration for that exalted struggle is tempered by our melancholy awareness that outside the noble consciousness of Titus the idea of Rome has often succumbed and will again succumb to the temptations of the court. The word Rome resounds through the play with implacable hostility to human fulfilment, but the peculiar corruptibility of the idea also surrounds its abstract austerity with an aura of ambivalence. From Racine's careful orchestration of the Rome theme, which adds an increasingly hollow and ominous undertone to the play's ‘tristesse majestueuse,’ one might single out the climactic moment when Bérénice, in the confrontation with Titus, opposes the rights of the heart to the rights of Rome, and Titus answers with a catalogue of paradigms showing that ‘toujours la patrie et la gloire/Ont parmi les Romains remporté la victoire’ 4.5. A similar catalogue appeared earlier when Titus' confident, Paulin, warned him of the unalterable opposition of Rome to marriages with foreign princesses. Paulin argued that not even the wicked emperors had dared to break that rule, and cited Antony as an exemplum of the relentless hostility with which Rome pursued transgressors in this regard: ‘Antoine, qui l'aima jusqu'à l'idolâtrie,
Oublia dans son sein sa gloire et sa patrie,
Sans oser toutefois se nommer son époux:
Rome l'alla chercher jusques à ses genoux,
Et ne désarma point sa fureur vengeresse,
Qu'elle n'eût accablé l'amant et la maîtresse.
’ 2.2 Titus' catalogue lists paradigms in which loyalty to Rome overrode not only all concern for self-preservation but even led to the destruction of the closest family ties—as with Brutus and Manlius Torquatus, who did not shrink from executing their own sons 4.5. Whatever moral consolation Titus finds in thinking of himself as joining that exalted gallery, Bérénice sees only ‘barbarisme’ in his professed virtue. And indeed, Titus shares her view, and anticipated it when in the soliloquy preceding the confrontation he tried to steel himself for his task: ‘Car enfin au combat qui pour toi se prépare
C'est peu d'être constant, il faut être barbare.
’ 4.4 After the confrontation, his confidant Paulin attempts to cheer him up in language reminiscent of Corneille: ‘songez, en ce malheur,
Quelle gloire va suivre un moment de douleur,
Quels applaudissements l'univers vous prépare,
Quel rang dans l'avenir . . .
’ But Titus cuts him short and compares his own cruelty with that of Nero: ‘Non, je suis un barbare;
Moi-même, je me hais. Néron, tant détesté,
N'a pointà cet excès sa cruauté.
’ 4.6 At the highly theatrical conclusion to the fourth act, the polarization of values finds its most emblematic expression. Bérénice, like Dido, has fled from her lover's sight, and Titus receives the news that she has collapsed and may be dying. He is about to rush to her side when Rome imperiously demands his presence. In a messenger's report, the expectations of the Roman Senate and people reveal the true power relationship between Rome and her emperor: ‘Seigneur, tous les tribuns, les consuls, le sénat,
Viennent vous demander au nom de tout l'Etat.
Un grand peuple les suit, qui plein d'impatience,
Dans votre appartement attend votre présence.
’ 4.8 In the Aeneid, the consequences of choosing Rome are metaphorically expressed in the curse of Dido, which is the only reference in the poem to the death of Aeneas: ‘at bello audacis populi vexatus et armis,
finibus extorris, complexu avulsus Iuli
auxilium imploret videatque indigna suorum
funera; nec, cum se sub leges pacis iniquae
tradiderit, regno aut optata luce fruatur,
sed cadat ante diem mediaque inhumatus harena. (4.615-20)
’ ‘But let brave people harass him with war.
Driven from home, torn from Iulus' arms,
let him beg for help, and see his people die
disgraced. Make him surrender under terms
unjust, and know no happy years of rule,
but die untimely, untombed, in miles of sand.
’ The prophecy locates the curse of empire in the destruction of the most intimate human ties (‘complexu avulsus Iuli .. . videatque indigna suorum/funera’) and culminates in the most powerful negative metaphor of human fellowship in ancient literature, the image of denied burial. The reader of the second half of the Aeneid comes to verify the truth of Dido's clairvoyance when he sees in the career of Aeneas a progress towards, and anticipation of, this death, and if he knows Homer well, he may wonder whether it is not a happier fate to die and be mourned like Hektor than to live like Aeneas. Racine's play similarly foreshadows the human consequences of the choice of Rome, and in this foreshadowing a muted version of Dido's curse plays an important role. The spectator is bound to recall the convention of the dying curse when Bérénice protests that she does not seek vengeance. In particular, her ‘quelque vengeur’ alludes to the ‘aliquis . . . ultor’ of Dido's famous allusion to Hannibal, which follows immediately on the prophecy of the death of Aeneas (4.625). The Vergilian allusion lends to the words of Bérénice the status of a dying curse as clairvoyant prophecy, although the substance of Bérénice's curse is modern in its emphasis on subjectivity: ‘Si je forme des voeux contre votre injustice,
Si, devant que mourir, la triste Bérénice
Vous veut de son trépas laisser quelque vengeur,
Je ne le cherche, ingrat, qu'au fond de votre c?ur.
Je sais que tant d'amour n'en peut être effacée;
Que ma douleur présente, et ma bonté passée,
Mon sang, qu'en ce palais je veux même verser,
Sont autant d'ennemis que je vais vous laisser:
Et, sans me repentir de ma persévérance,
Je me remets sur eux de toute ma vengeance.
Adieu
’ 4.5 The final act of Racine's play reveals the truth of Bérénice's prophecy. If the end of the fourth act showed Titus as choosing Rome, the final act shows his inability to survive the consequences of this decision. We saw that in the Aeneid the tragic conflict of the love of Dido and Aeneas is complicated by the fact that the perception of virtue is the ground of sexual attraction. When Mercury seeks out Aeneas to deliver the command of the gods, he finds him ‘fundantem arces et tecta novantem’ (4.260), for Aeneas, even when in love, is always building or trying to build something. Vergil uses one line to describe Aeneas as engaged in a manly task—leaving aside for the moment the problem that he is building the wrong city—but a full four lines (261-5) are given over to the description of his rich attire, and the weighting of the description alone is sufficient to damn the oblivious hero by putting him in a context suggestive of luxury, indolence, and a future in which love would destroy the virtue from which it had been born. In Racine's play, this dilemma is even more finely shaped and explicitly envisaged in the consciousness of the protagonist. Here love is in part the cause of virtue, because the desire to please Bérénice and merit her love has been the motive that has diverted Titus' youth, ‘nourrie à la cour de Néron,’ from the pursuit of thoughtless pleasure and directed it towards virtue and glory 2.2. Titus sees clearly that for him there is no honourable way of choosing the values of the heart, since by choosing them he would destroy the identity of love and virtue that has characterized his relationship with Bérénice. He is acutely aware of the irony of this situation: ‘Je lui dois tout, Paulin. Récompense cruelle!
Tout ce que je lui dois va retomber sur elle.
Pour prix de tant de gloire et de tant de vertus,
Je lui dirai: Partez, et ne me voyez plus.
’ 2.2 But he is equally aware of the impossibility of a life with Bérénice in defiance of his duty to the empire. In his vision of such a life, we may recall Mercury's sight of the oblivious Aeneas—and also, on the low mimetic plane of the bourgeois novel, the futility of Anna Karenina's relationship with Vronsky. ‘Oui, madame; et je dois moins encore vous dire
Que je suis prêt pour vous d'abandonner l'empire,
De vous suivre, et d'aller, trop content de mes fers,
Soupirer avec vous au bout de l'univers.
Vous-même rougiriez de ma lâche conduite:
Vous verriez à regret marcherà votre suite
Un indigne empereur sans empire, sans cour,
Vil spectacle aux humains des faiblesses d'amour.
’ 5.6 Since Titus can neither live with Bérénice nor endure the thought of a life which counts as virtue the denial of the heart, he resolves to commit suicide, and is joined in this resolution by Antiochus, who is in his minor way equally unhappy. But Bérénice prevents both from executing this desperate resolution and urges them to follow her in stylizing their lives into memorials of their faithful but unrewarded loves. This ending must, I think, be read against the knowledge of the historical Titus that the audience was bound to possess and which it could not easily forget. Titus was the best-loved but one of the most short-lived of Roman emperors. He died within two years of ascending the throne. His death was surrounded by mystery: according to Suetonius (8.10.1), he confessed on his deathbed that his conscience was troubled by only one action, but he would not reveal what that action was. Ausonius' epigrammatic obituary reads: ‘Felix imperio, felix brevitate regendi,
Unum dixisti moriens te crimen habere;
Expers civilis sanguinis, orbis amor.
Set nulli de te, nec tibi credidimus.
’ ‘Happy in thy sway, happy in the shortness of thy reign, guiltless of thy country's blood, the world's darling, thou! Dying, thou saidst only one fault was thine; but we believe none speaking thus of thee—not even thee thyself.’ Ausonius 1919, 1:341 It is tempting, though perhaps too speculative, to interpret Bérénice as Racine's answer to the mystery of Titus' death-bed confession and to argue that the crime of Titus was his necessary betrayal of Bérénice. But there can be little doubt that Racine makes use of his audience's knowledge by foreshadowing Titus' early death and by interpreting it as the consequence of his decision to part with Bérénice. No other Racinian character speaks so explicitly about the possibility of imminent death as Titus does, or displays so much uncertainty about the time of life left to him. When Titus asks Antiochus to break the news of his decision to Bérénice, he also asks him to convey to her that his own future will be, like hers, a life of exile: ‘Mon règne ne sera qu'un long bannissement,
Si le ciel, non content de me l'avoir ravie,
Veut encor m'affliger par une longue vie.
’ 3.1 In Suetonius (8.8.1) we find the brief statement that whenever Titus had gone through a day without doing some good deed for a subject, he would say that he had lost a day. This motif appears in Act 4, where Titus reproaches himself for having neglected his empire during the first eight days of his reign, when he did nothing for honour and everything for love: ‘Sais-je combien le ciel m'a compte de journées?
Et de ce peu de jours si longtemps attendus,
Ah! malheureux! combien j'en ai déjà perdus!
’ 4.4 Titus himself raises the possibility that he will die from his decision: ‘Je sens bien que sans vous Je ne saurais plus vivre,
Que mon coeur de moi-meme est prèt à s'éloigner;
Mais il ne s'agit plus de vivre, il faut régner.
’ 4.5 In these passages, as in several others, the text yields its full irony only if the audience brings into play the external fact of Titus' early death. This is also true of another peculiar feature of this tragedy. Like Britannicus, Bérénice is full of references to past processes of specific duration that come to a head on the day of the crisis. The three years of Nero's virtuous reign correspond to the five years of the love of Titus and Bérénice. But in addition, Bérénice contains very prominent speculations about a future of indefinite extension. The confidant of Antiochus argues on two occasions that the passage of time will lessen the love of Bérénice for Titus and make her susceptible to the love of Antiochus. But this complacent view of the healing power of time is confuted in the most famous lines of the play, in which Bérénice envisages the ocean of the future: ‘Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons-nous,
Seigneur, que tant de mers me séparent de vous;
Que le jour recommence, et que le jour finisse,
Sans que jamais Ti tus puisse voir Bérénice,
Sans que, de tout le jour, je puisse voir Titus?
’ 4.5 To this uncertain future, the audience again opposes its knowledge of the two years that separate Titus from his death, and it is meant to see in the intended suicide of Titus a superfluous gesture, not only because Titus' death is imminent, but because in a sense it has already been enacted on the stage. Racine's use of the audience's knowledge serves the purpose of surrounding the decision of Titus with an aura of futility. Whether we think of Titus dying of his decision or as dying shortly after it, our knowledge of the little time that Titus has left to him, activated by a whole network of ironic allusions, threatens to deprive his sacrifice of meaning and raises the quintessentially Vergilian question: what possibility of achievement does Rome, with its abstract and cruel disregard of human happiness, offer in return for the private sacrifices it so relentlessly exacts? One is likely to hear this question even more insistently if one remembers Britannicus, with which Bérénice shares many thematic and technical features. Both plays turn on the theme of restraint that the idea of Rome imposes on the passions of individual emperors. In Britannicus, we are shown how after three years the criminal disposition of Nero emancipates itself from the restraints of Rome and ruins the lives of Britannicus and of Junie, whose purity, seclusion, and pastoral upbringing mark her as another private victim of the public world. In Bérénice, the idea of Rome prevails over the happiness of Titus and Bérénice. To see the two plays together is to gain yet another perspective from which a heavy shadow falls on Rome as an idea strong enough to defeat the values of the heart, but powerless to restrain man's criminal passions.
V
The paucity of tangible connections between Bérénice and Dido is an instance of the difficulty that the critic faces whenever he pursues Longinian affinities, that are no less significant for being elusive and even resistant to commentary and critical elucidation. Bérénice is not a transformation of the Dido tragedy in the same manner in which Buchanan's Jephtha or Racine's Iphigénie are transformations of the Euripidean Iphigenia. On the contrary, Racine purposely refrained from elaborating the relationship of his heroine to her ancient paradigm by an extensive network of explicit allusions, because here the model is more powerfully evoked by being dimly seen—almost in the manner in which in Aeneid IV the hero dimly sees and recognizes Dido, ‘per umbrasobscuram, qualem primo qui surgere mense
aut videt aut vidisse putat per nubila lunam.
’ ‘through dark shadows, as when someone sees, or thinks he sees, the new moon through a cloud.’ 6.452-4 Such a technique of transformation, in which the significance of allusions is measured by their very scarcity and obscurity, is appropriate to this most muted of tragedies, in which the plot is ‘quelque chose de rien,’ the violence of open death is eschewed, and the tragic emotions of pity and fear give way to a pervasive sense of ‘tristesse majestueuse’. 12 This procedure on the poet's part requires tact on the part of the critic: how is he to illuminate, without dispelling, the shadow of Dido so hauntingly evoked by the figure of Bérénice? In the end he can only say that it is there, and trust that the reader will see it with him in the infinite suggestiveness of its half light. In any case, comparison remains an effective critical tool, and perhaps one's sense of the Vergilian aura of Bérénice is enriched by a brief glance at a very different daughter of Dido—Shakespeare's Cleopatra. She is also a true descendant, in the sense that Shakespeare's dramatization suspends the traditional solutions of the moral oppositions on which it is based. But this suspension occurs in a most un-Vergilian manner, as Shakespeare indicates through Antony's astonishing vision of an Elysium in which Dido and Aeneas are forever united: ‘Eros!—I come, my Queen. Eros!—stay for me.
Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.
Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,
And all the haunt be ours. Come, Eros, Eros! (4.14.50-4)
’ Garnier's Marc-Antoine provides the genetic link that identifies Antony's vision as an allusion by contrast to what T.S. Eliot called the ‘most telling snub in all poetry,’ the encounter of Dido and Aeneas in the underworld Eliot 1957, 64. In Garnier's play, which I quote in the translation by Mary Sidney, the dying Cleopatra is cast in the role of the dying Dido, as she contemplates her image: ‘And now of me an Image great shall goe
Under the earth to bury there my woe.
’ Her resolution to die is enhanced by her desire to rejoin Antony, whom she sees in a doleful setting strongly reminiscent of Vergil's ‘lugentes campi,’ the posthumous haunts of unhappy lovers: ‘Die will I straight now, now streight will I die,
And streight with thee a wandring shade will be,
Under the Cypres trees thou haunt'st alone,
Where brookes of hell do falling seeme to mone.
’ 5.1971-74, Bullough 1960, 5: This crude assimilation of the posthumous life of Antony and Cleopatra to the Dido scene of Aeneid IV was in all likelihood the stimulus for Shakespeare to define the theme of imaginary fulfilment, which is so crucial to Antony and Cleopatra, by a deliberate transformation of the image of ultimate separation in Aeneid IV into the apotheosis of Antony's vision. The allusion measures the immense distance that separates Shakespeare's play from the Aeneid, but in so doing it also measures Racine's affinity to Vergil in Bérénice.
