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Overview
Gilbert Highet has analyzed all the speeches in the Aeneid, using statistical techniques as well as more traditional methods of scholarship. He has classified the speeches; identified their models in earlier Greek and Latin literature; analyzed their structure; and discussed their importance in the portrayal of character. He finds that Vergil used standard rhetorical devices with discretion, and that his models were poets rather than orators. Nevertheless, this study shows Vergil to have been a master dramatist as well as a great epic poet.
Originally published in 1972.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691619491 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1491 |
| Pages: | 392 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Speeches in Vergil's Aeneid
By Gilbert Highet
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1972 Gilbert HighetAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06234-1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
IN THE Aeneid, the speeches are one of the most important elements of Vergil's art. Through them he shows us the inmost hearts of his characters; recalls the past and forecasts the future; and expresses conflicts almost as violent as a duel in armor. They contain some of his most subtle and some of his most powerful achievements in style and meter. In several of them he deploys the devices of Greek rhetoric, highly developed, and yet, in his hands, neither unnatural nor ostentatious. By the skillful disposition of short and long speeches through the twelve books of his epic, he shows us the failure or success of a character, the growth of a determination, and the movement of a long and deadly struggle.
The speeches were studied by Roman critics and imitated by Roman writers as enthusiastically as the rest of the Aeneid. Quintilian often cites them to illustrate points of oratorical technique when we might expect him to quote a prose author. But on the whole, unlike many of his successors, he is aware of the difference between prose oratory and poetic epic: et poesis ab Homero et Vergilio tantum fastigium accepit et eloquentia a Demosthene atque Cicerone (Inst. 12.11.26); and he treats Vergil purely as a poet when discussing his literary merit (Inst. 10.1.85-86). Later Roman authors, however, came to regard the entire Aeneid as a work of oratory, and Vergil himself as an orator. Early in the second century A.D., P. Annius Florus wrote a dialogue called Vergilius orator an poeta. It cannot now be judged, since nothing survives but part of the introduction. But the idea indicated by the title survived, and reappeared in the Saturnalia of Macrobius. In the fourth book of his Saturnalia one of the speakers sets out to prove that Vergil understood all the methods of exciting pathos known to rhetoric. To show how what he calls an oratio pathetica achieves its effects, he chooses Juno's second soliloquy (Aen. 7.293-322) and points out such features as initial exclamation ("heu stirpem inuisam!"), breues interrogatiunculae, hyperbole, irony, and so forth. In Book Five, the symposiasts agree that Vergil should be styled an orator as much as a poet. A vague expression of admiration, we should think — except that one of them, Avienus, seriously inquires whether one would become a better orator by studying Vergil or Cicero. To this Eusebius replies that Vergil's genius embraces all forms of eloquence, Cicero's only one. He then classifies the Roman orators into four types, each with its own style: Cicero, rich; Sallust, curt; Fronto, dry; Pliny and Symmachus, full and flowing. When he declares, "Vnus omnino Vergilius inuenitur qui eloquentiam ex omni genere conflauerit," he has forgotten, or chooses to ignore, the fact that Cicero himself was proud of being able to speak in different styles and to maintain the manner proper to each type of subject. Cicero's ideal was the orator who could "parua summisse, modica temperate, magna grauiter dicere," as he says in Orator 101, where he proceeds to illustrate the ideal by three of his own speeches. It is difficult to take Eusebius seriously when he proceeds (5.1.16) to distinguish styles of oratory which are "dispari moralitate diuersi," to assign one to Crassus and one to Antonius (the two chief speakers in Cicero's De Oratore, whose speeches were not extant), and then to say that Vergil parallels them with the speech of Latinus to Turnus (Aen. 12.19-21) and a taunt of Aeneas to a doomed opponent (Aen. 10.599-600). Finally Eusebius declares that Vergil was better than all the ten Attic orators put together: at which one of his listeners rather ineffectually protests. This kind of thing was energetic propaganda for the national classic, and perhaps necessary in an age when culture was threatened, but it contributed nothing to the serious study of the speeches in the Aeneid.
In the same era, late in the fourth century A.D., one Tiberius Claudius Donatus wrote a continuous commentary on the Aeneid in which he treated the entire poem as oratory. Long before his time, professional teachers of rhetoric had been using the Aeneid as a manual by which to illustrate the principles of their art. The treatise of Donatus is the sole surviving example of this system. It is not wholly misconceived. Donatus tries to interpret Vergil on a level higher than that of the grammaticus, the explainer of hard words, unusual genders, peculiar syntactical usages, and similar linguistic problems, whose questions and answers fill many a page of Servius. He himself says, "Si Maronis carmina conpetenter attenderis et eorum mentem congrue conprehenderis, inuenies in poeta rhetorem summum atque inde intelleges Vergilium non grammaticos, sed oratores praecipuos tradere debuisse." However, he and his contemporaries believed oratory to be the central literary art. He treated the Aeneid therefore as an orator's masterpiece. He defines it (prooem., p. 2) as belonging to the laudatiuum genus, and explains it as something between a gigantic eulogy and a subtle speech for the defense: "purgata persona (sc. Aeneae) quam propria defensione Vergilius tuebatur, quod ad oratoris officium pertinebat, diuersae partis, hoc est inimicae (sc. Iunonis), fuerat deformanda" (prooem., p. 4). He does not regard the Aeneid as an imaginative poem which contains some speeches. He sees it as a single long speech delivered by Vergil. Furthermore, when he points out what he identifies as rhetorical devices used within the speeches of the epic, he does not make the basic distinction between a formal oration, in which the poet manifestly arranged the arguments according to the rules of art, and those rapid spontaneous utterances which would be suggested to any creative poet by the character and the situation. Thus, it is correct to analyze the opposing orations of Venus and Juno before the council of the gods (Aen. 10.18-95) as pieces of formal rhetoric. But when Andromache tells Aeneas how she was carried off by Pyrrhus as a concubine and then discarded (Aen. 3.321-329), it is quite inappropriate to treat her words as a quasilegal speech in which she denies the implied charge of sexual immorality: "ecce egit oblique causam suam qualitate absoluta, ... adserens non in facto esse crimen sed in uoluntate." This, like much of Donatus's work, is a sad example of dogged industry misdirected. Of a similar Greek commentator, Spengel observes, "Vix credas hominem ita delirare, ut versus Homeri explicans artem rhetoricam docere sibi videatur" (3, praef., p. ix).
Some examples of this misplaced rhetorical subtlety can be found in the commentary of Servius. Naturally. Long before his day rhetoricians had gone through the entire epic, cutting it into sections suitable (in their view) for the teaching of oratory: "et Titianus et Caluus ... themata omnia de Vergilio elicuerunt et deformarunt ad dicendi usum." Servius himself is more of a grammarian, but brief remarks on rhetorical interpretation are not infrequent both in his commentary and in that of "Servius auctus." Some are appropriate enough in a superficial way — as when he calls Venus's coaxing speech to Vulcan (8.374-386) a rhetorica suasio and Anna's reply to Dido (4.31-53) a suasoria omni parte plena. Others are trivial or misconceived. For example, when Vergil describes the casualties of the first conflict between Trojans and Latins (7.531-539), why does he mention, first Almo, then many unnamed Italians, and then Galaesus, who attempted to make peace? Clearly because Almo was a brother of Silvia, whose pet stag was shot by Ascanius — so that the accidental injury done by the Trojans became a major wrong; and because Galaesus was a just man, not a hot-headed belligerent — so that the Trojans who killed him appeared to be ruthless marauders. But Servius explains it thus: "rhetorice uiles trudit in medium, nobiles uero primo et ultimo commemorat loco." He is thinking of the rhetorical device by which the more powerful arguments should be placed first and last, with the weaker between them —"in the Homeric manner," says Quintilian. But is it really likely that Vergil had this pattern of persuasion in mind when he wrote his narrative of the unhappy combat? Surely this is to neglect deeper emotional values for the sake of neat external arrangement. Or again: one of the most moving moments in the epic is the appearance of Hector's ghost to Aeneas (2.289-295). The speech of the phantom is instant with urgency, heavy with doom. It is repugnant to the sense of poetry to have these few lines classified into arguments designed to persuade Aeneas, in spite of his undoubted courage, to take flight from his home; and yet Servius does so, saying that they form a suasoria employing the three main arguments — advantage ("eripe flammis"), necessity ("hostis habet muros"), and honor ("sacra suosque tibi commendat Troia penatis"). Eventually we come to distrust the common sense of scholiasts such as Servius, and the critical validity of rhetorical principles which can be so crudely misapplied.
Partly because of this distrust, modern scholars have paid less attention to the speeches in the Aeneid than to other aspects of Vergil's poetry. For example, in his long and careful article on Vergil in Pauly-Wissowa, Karl Buchner allots them no separate treatment. Nor does Brooks Otis in Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford, 1963), who devotes only five pages to the two great debates of Books Ten and Eleven.
One of the first modern critics to consider the speeches as a separate element in the Aeneid was J. Kvicala, whose Neue Beitraege zur Erhlaerung der Aeneis (Prague, 1881) contain the results of many years' careful and loving analysis of the poem. On the speeches his work was chiefly statistical. There are reasons for modifying some of his results, but his keen eye for detail, his fine taste, and his tireless industry make him an admirable example for all Vergilians.
Eduard Norden remarked in the first appendix of his Antike Kunstprosa that Vergil, with his delicate aesthetic sensibility, made a very limited use of "das Rhetorische" — which term, as the context shows, means both oratorical principles of structure and figures of speech and of thought. But later he came to believe that rhetoric was a most important adjunct of Vergil's art. In his edition of Aeneid 6 (Leipzig, 1903) he analyzed many of the speeches in that book along rhetorical lines. Here, as Richard Heinze was to point out, he sometimes went too far. It is always tempting to apply the neat patterns of the rhetorical manuals to any extended speech, whether the author meant it to be a piece of oratory or not. Like others before and after him, Norden fell into this trap. When the sad ghosts of Palinurus and Deiphobus meet Aeneas in the underworld and describe the manner of their deaths (Aen. 6.347-371 and 509-530), is it even remotely likely that Vergil laid out their speeches in accordance with rhetorical schemata? Not in the slightest; and, as Norden applied them, the schemata do not fit. Nevertheless Norden helped all students of Vergil by pointing out the exquisite symmetry underlying some of the great passages of the Aeneid: even though that symmetry was not always, or even frequently, rhetorical in inspiration.
Few scholars have written more wisely and sympathetically about Vergil's use of rhetoric than Richard Heinze. See in particular pp. 403-435 of Virgils epische Technik. Out of these pages, rich in learning and good sense, some central points emerge. One is that in the Aeneid the speeches are emphatically different in character from those of Homer: far more intense, more concentrated, less rambling, more carefully built and motivated. They contain many more arguments: for example, Latinus's address to Turnus (Aen. 12.19-45) is more diplomatic and versatile than Priam's plea to Hector (Il. 22.38-76). Nevertheless, Heinze points out that (unlike Ovid and others) Vergil is usually careful to conceal the structural plan of his speeches. He knows the frontier between prose and poetry, and prefers to stress emotion rather than intellectual ingenuity. Both in this section and elsewhere in Heinze's book there are many illuminating remarks on the models (Homeric and other) which helped to inspire Vergil in composing his speeches. We can only wish that Heinze had gone further and given us a close analysis of them all.
When the second edition of Heinze's book came out, Wilhelm Kroll was moved to write a knowledgeable but slightly perverse review-article, "Die Originalitat Vergils." In this there is a suggestive critique of Vergil's speeches. The Aeneid is not, says Kroll, a set of declamations like the poetry of Ovid. Yet the study of rhetoric is obvious on every page; and Vergil's brilliant speeches constitute one of his chief claims to true originality. Kroll gives many examples of the poet's effective use of figures of speech and figures of thought which can properly be called rhetorical. From a sometimes captious critic who rather distrusted rhetoric, this is praise.
A Johns Hopkins thesis, Aspects of the Speech in the Later Roman Epic, was published by H. C. Lipscomb (Baltimore, 1909) and summarized by him under a slightly different title in CW 2 (1908-1909) 114-117. It is almost wholly statistical. It analyzes the length and frequency of the speeches in Vergil, Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, Statius, Silius Italicus, and Claudian; lists the different types of speaker in the different poems; compares the extent of dialogues and of grouped speeches (which become markedly fewer after the Aeneid); and examines the use of monologues. Although this is a dry little book, it contains many useful and some curious facts; and in spite of a few oversights it deserves consideration in any study of the Roman epic poets.
Eduard Norden's practice of citing rhetorical manuals when analyzing Vergil was attacked with some subtlety (and perhaps a dash of anti-German rancor) by a young French scholar who later rose to eminence. This was Mile. A. Guillemin in her doctoral dissertation at the University of Dijon: Quelques injustices de la critique interne à l'égard de Virgile (Chalonsur-Saône, 1921). In her third chapter she asked whether the rhetorician Menander's rules might not have been inspired by the study of Vergil, rather than that (as Norden suggested) Vergil followed rules codified by Menander's predecessors. She did admit that the tone of the Aeneid was "notably oratorical." She proposed that Vergil was following, not manuals of rhetoric, but the practice of Roman orators: in particular the pleas for sympathy, commiserationes, which marked the climaxes of some of Cicero's finest speeches, e.g. Cael. 79-80, Mil. 102-105, and Mur. 88-90. She also pointed to Vergil's use of enthymemes ("une sorte d' a-fortiori") such as Aen. 1.39-48, 7.304-310, and 10.81-84, and to certain other usages borrowed from oratory, such as the exclamation "mene ...!" (Cic. Mil. 102 and Aen. 1.37).
Writing at Tübingen in the depths of the depression after the First World War, Ernst Conrad produced a valuable thesis entitled Untersuchungen zu der Technic der Reden in Vergils Aeneis (1923). Suggested by Gundermann, supervised after his death by Weinreich, and submitted in typescript, it was never printed and never reviewed. A pity: because it is both learned and intelligent. It is an examination of twelve strongly emotional speeches — for instance, those of Euryalus's mother (9481-497) and Pallas's father (11.152-181). Many parallels from literature and inscriptions are cited to illustrate them. Among other good observations, Conrad reminds us that, in order to appreciate a speech in Vergil, we must read it aloud — Vergil himself recited some of his poetry with great power and passion;17 and that no two speeches in the epic follow precisely the same pattern, since each is rooted in its [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].
In 1932 Karl Billmayer pushed the subject back to the fourth century with his Würzburg dissertation Rhetorische Studien zu den Reden in Vergils Aeneis. He began by assuming that all the speeches in the poem, without exception, were rhetorically constructed (because the "principles of form" were absolute and infrangible rules which not even a genius such as Vergil could transgress), that each of them necessarily fell into one of the three main classes of formal oratory (deliberatiuum, demonstratiuum, iudiciale), and furthermore that each could be divided into the sections specified for formal oratory by the youthful Cicero (De lnu. 1.14.19). Since most of the speeches in the poem will not respond to such analysis, this was a serious misconception. Billmayer made it worse by misapplying the rules: for example, by asserting that when the Penates reinterpret the oracle of Apollo (Aen. 3.161-171) their words are the solution of a controversy classifiable as a constitutio incidens. Many other such abuses of rhetorical theory disfigure this laborious but careless and wrongheaded little book.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Speeches in Vergil's Aeneid by Gilbert Highet. Copyright © 1972 Gilbert Highet. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. v
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
- 1. INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
- 2. THE SPEECHES AND THEIR SPEAKERS, pg. 15
- 3. FORMAL SPEECHES, pg. 47
- 4. INFORMAL SPEECHES, pg. 97
- 5. THE SPEECHES AND THEIR MODELS, pg. 185
- 6. VERGILIVS ORATOR AN POETA, pg. 277
- APPENDIX, pg. 291
- SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 345
- INDEX LOCORVM, pg. 351
- INDEX NOMINVM ET RERVM, pg. 370