M.C. GARDNER
Agamemnon’s Queen commits her adultery in circumstance of less extenuation. The horrors of which Clytmestrya and family sup are the courses of a curse served nightly at the house of Atreus. King Atreus, at the height of a royal pique, slew his brother’s sons and fed them to his sibling in a ghastly pie. Even the gods were appalled. The sons of Atreus, Menelaus and Agamemnon, (and through them all of Greece), became inextricably entwined within their father’s crime.
Concerning Queens and their passions, the most famous is, of course, Helen. Despite her great beauty, the valor of the Trojans to keep her and the exploits of the Greeks attempting to secure her return — she is rarely thought an innocent. Imagine Patty Hearst inscribed upon an ancient urn. In Homer, Helen thinks herself a whore and in Virgil, Aeneas itches to put her to the blade.
In Greek drama, as in the work of Eugene O’Neill, its American counterpart, payback is on the installment plan and threads itself through many generations. Paris — precipitating the Iliad and a decade of war; kidnaps Menelaus’ wife; she whose face will launch a thousand ships. Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter, Iphigenia so those same said sails will catch a desperate wind, heretofore denied. Upon return from Troy his wife’s lover, Aegisthus — surviving brother of those who like the 4 and twenty blackbirds were put within a pie, slits Agamemnon from nape to neck upon an altar stone. Orestes avenges his father by murdering his mother and so on and on the telling blood will flow. Only in the court of David in a pair of centuries yet to fall will history record as sordid an intrigue.
The last queen we will consider is the only unsullied of the three. Queen Dido of Carthage doesn’t figure in Homer but rather in Homer’s greatest enthusiast, Publius Vergilius Maro or more familiarly, Vergil. The great legacy of Rome’s thousand years was the gift of Greece, whose culture it had assimilated. In architecture, art and literature, Rome closely followed the lead of its superior teacher. In conquering Greece, Rome allowed Greece the more lasting empire.
Virgil was so enamoured of Homer that he combined both the Iliad and the Odyssey into the structure of his Aeneid. He does, however, reverse the order of the stories and comports Aeneas with his wanderings in the first six books of the poem and with his war stories in the last six of the twelve that comprise the epic.
As in the Odyssey, the story begins “In Media Res” and is told in flash back. After the sack of Troy, Aeneas and followers set off to found a city that is destined for immortality. Vergil’s prescience is aided by being composed for the court of Augustus Ceasar who rules the Roman world in the generation preceding the birth of Christ.
The Aeneid chronicles much more of the Trojan Horse episode than we find in Homer. There is palpable horror in Virgil’s description of the fall of Troy and the murder of its king.
What was the fate of Priam, you may ask.
Seeing his city captive, seeing his won
Royal portals rent apart, his enemies
In the inner rooms, the old man uselessly
Put on his shoulders, shaking with old age,
Armor unused for years, belted a sword on,
And made for the massed enemy to die.
Now see Polites, one of Priam’s sons, escaped
From Pyrrus’ butchery and on the run
Through enemies and spears, down colonnades,
Through empty courtyards, wounded. Close behind
Comes Pyrrhus burning for the death-stroke: has him,
Catches him now, and lunges with the spear.
The boy has reached his parents, and before them
Goes down, pouring out his life with blood.
Now Priam, in the very midst of death,
Would neither hold his peace or spare his anger.
To the Altar Pyrrus dragged the old king slipping
In the pooled blood of his son,
He took him by the hair with his left hand.
The sword flashed in his right; up to the hilt
He thrust it in his body.
That was the end
Of Priam’s age, the doom that took him off,
With Troy in flames before his eyes, his towers
Headlong fallen — he that in other days
Had ruled in pride so many land and peoples,
The power of Asia;
On the distant shore
The vast trunk headless lies without a name.
Note that the Virgil’s description of Priam also applies to Troy. Recalling another of the mighty fallen to a hapless fate, note Shakespeare’s Harry on the death of Hotspur:
When that this body did contain a spirit
a kingdom for it was too small a bound,
now two paces of the vilest earth is room enough
Shakespeare borrowed many of the portents in Julius Caesar and Macbeth from the classics we have been considering. The most famous portent of them all is that which persuades the Trojans to their doom.
It will be remembered that the priest Laocoon was wary of Greeks bearing gifts, especially one as ominous as the abandoned wooden horse. The priest had hurled a spear into the horse’s flank in disapproval. The following day during a sacrificial service to his gods he learned that he and sons were to be the offering split upon the stone. Two giant serpents swallow the priest and his star crossed sons.
Now came the sound of thrashed seawater foaming;
Now they were on dry land, and we could see
Their burning eyes, fiery and suffused with blood,
They slid until they reached Laocoon.
Each snake enveloped one of his two boys,
Twining about and feeding on the body.
Next they ensnared the priestly man, Laocoon.
Drenched in slime, his head-bands black with venom,
Sending to heaven his appalling cries
Like a slashed bull escaping from an altar,
The fumbled axe shrugged off. The pair of snakes
Now flowed away …
Persuaded by the portent, the populace drags the gift inside the city and seals its fabled doom. Aeneas’ mother, the goddess Venus, pleads with her son to flee. In a surreal moment of invention, Virgil has the goddess remove the “films” from his mortal eyes so he might see the true warp and woof of the fated world.
Look: where you see high masonry thrown down,
Stone torn from stone, with the billowing smoke and dust,
Neptune is shaking from their beds the walls
That his great trident pried up, undermining,
Toppling the whole city down.
And look:
Juno in all her savagery holds
The Scaean Gates, and raging in steel armor
Calls her allied army from the ships.
Up on the citadel — turn, look — Pallas Trionia
Couched in a stormcloud, lightening with her Gorgon!
The Father himself empowers the Danaans,
Urging assaulting gods on the defenders.
Away, child; put an end to toiling so.
I shall be near, to see you safely home.
The founding of Rome is a deferred event. Aeneas will visit some of the vaunted haunts of Homer’s Odyssey before setting course for Latium. The Cyclops is once again engaged and other phantasmagorias of Homer’s voyage reviewed.
Dido listens to these tales as intently as King Alcinous had earlier entertained those told by Odysseus. The purpose of each was to provide a narrative to bring the reader up to the current chronology of the story. In Virgil it serves the additional purpose of inspiring Dido’s love for Aeneas.
For Berlioz the exigencies of Homer and Virgil are spiritual. The demands of the flesh are tempered with a classical devotion that deepens the concluding tragedy. Here now is Berlioz;’ sublime Act 4 Septet. Aeneas, Dido and her court reflect on the beauty of the evening and the stillness of the sea.
Gradually the court disperses leaving the Queen and Virgil’s hero alone in the moonlight to sing one of the three or four loveliest love-duets of the 19th century. At the conclusion of the duet the stern voice of Mercury is heard to intone the will of the gods:
Italie, Italie, Italie!
Hear now the classical restraints that the most romantic of composers brings to Aeneas and the passion of a Queen.