Did Virgil die of stubbornness?

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Did Virgil die of stubbornness?

Although in existence since 1991, [1] it took twenty-two years for the scientific community to recognize the theory of Virgil’s murder by the emperor Augustus as a valid hypothesis. Until the publication of the Virgil Encyclopedia (entry “Virgil (death of)”), the common practice was to avoid this alarming notion, if not flatly reject it,[2] but it has now become possible and even advisable for scholars to look into it.

By all means, the matter has been neglected for far too long. Fortunately, as if to prove its increasingly urgent relevance, the theory of Virgil’s murder recently gained an important believer in the person of Professor Anton Powell. [3] That is all the more encouraging, considering that this scholar has reached his conclusions on Augustus’s crime quite independently of my own works, of which he appears to have no knowledge. It renders his achievement extremely valuable for my thesis.

This being said, I am, ironically, obliged to disagree with his stance on Virgil’s death. According to Powell, Augustus possessed all the traits of a “serial killer”, yet the poet was in favor of the regime and the Aeneid reflected his political sentiment. [4] Powell’s evidence for this last assertion? Augustus, as the sources inform us, did everything in his power to have the poem edited with or without its author’s consent. As to why the emperor would kill a poet who had served him so faithfully and who had no intention of antagonizing him, the reason would appear to be simple: the Aeneid was finished, requiring but one ultima manus, and Augustus wished to take possession of it at once. But Virgil, on the other hand, had expressed the desire to spend three more years polishing it to perfection. [5] It would therefore seem he had invited death from sheer stubbornness. [6] Powell says however that evidence is scarce, leaving us to form little more than guesses, [7] not to mention that his theory in no way impacts the way we are supposed to interpret the Aeneid.

Presented from this angle, the idea of Virgil’s murder is hardly likely to convert anyone. Powell may have built a convincing argument in favor of Augustus having been a remorseless killer capable of orchestrating large-scale political murders, mysterious disappearances and sudden illnesses, but even though few would argue this point, it does not render Virgil’s murder self-explanatory. There is little doubt thattheemperor was impatient to see the Aeneid edited, but the fact remains that the poem was published no earlier than in 17 BC, two years after its author’s death. In other words, all Virgil had to do to appease Augustus’s wrath was cut his planned delay (supposing this detail is accurate in the first place)[8] by a single year. How suicidal could he be to refuse such a reasonable concession? Besides, he was willing, by all accounts, to abandon his (hypothetical) [9] travel plans and return to Italy upon meeting Augustus, which is not the gesture of a stubborn man. If, as Powell is certain, the poet was favorable to the regime, this gesture had to be done of his own free will, in which case the emperor had no motive for getting rid of him. But if the Aeneid happened to be a secretly subversive text that threatened Augustus, the murder would have made sense, serving both as revenge against a political enemy and as the means of acquiring the poem to edit it at will.

As Powell states, “The matter of editorial control of detail may just have been of lively importance between emperor and poet” (191), except that one does not kill for details. Besides, Powell himself assumes a little further that the ruler intended to “contaminate” the Virgilian text with additions likely to reorient the political meaning of the poem to his advantage. I fully subscribe to this assertion (contradictory, it must be noted, to the claim that Virgil was pro-Augustan), and, as a result, I believe it is important to distinguish in a way two Aeneids: on the one hand, the original version that Virgil left on his death, and that Augustus did not want to see published as such, on the other hand the Aeneid as we read it today, Augustus’s own Aeneid, as Ovid says (tuae… Aeneidos, Tr. 2.533),  that is to say a text containing a number of additional verses scattered in strategic passages [10] so that the secret meaning of the poem—the anti-Aeneid [11]— is systematically countered and made more difficult to apprehend. [12]

This would explain why Augustus took such care to inform the public how closely, how religiously the poet’s last instructions had been followed. Indeed, according to Vita Suetonii vulgo Donatiana (VSD) 40-41, “Virgil left his writings to Varius and Tucca on condition that they should not publish anything that had not been published by him (ne quid ederent quod non a se editum esset). [13] But Varius published the text on Augustus’s authority, corrected, however, lightly (summatim emendata), in as much as he even left any unfinished verses as they were.”

However, there is a problem, for VSD states just before (§ 39) that Virgil “made no specific disposition about the Aeneid” (nihil quidem nominatim de ea cavit). Are we therefore to believe Virgil had left no stipulations on his poem, only to be told in the same breath that he had forbidden it from being published? [14] As Horsfall denounces, that makes no sense, [15] but he concludes perhaps too hastily that the different versions of what was to happen to the Aeneid “rest on nothing except speculation”; likewise, Powell, 191-92 suspects the information that “the poet forbade additions” of being false and invented purely “in the Augustan interest”.  But one can safely assume, it seems, that neither Donatus nor Suetonius would have invented such a nonsense, which on the contrary would be perfectly explainable from Augustus, who wanted us to concede at the same time two incompatible statements: 1) that Virgil had no suspicions at all about possible additions (“he gave no precise stipulations in regards to the Aeneid”); 2) that Virgil vetoed the publication of his poem (so the murderer gained the glory of saving the Aeneid against its author himself).

We are never explicitly told the reason behind this prohibition either, though according to § 35, [16] it was due to an exaggerated sense of perfectionism, which the emperor was wise enough to disregard (auctore Augusto). But perhaps a more credible scenario would be that Virgil refused publication for fear of manipulation of the text, or (but it amounts to the same thing) that he conditioned it on the prohibition of any addition. But, in reality, once he was in the clutches of Augustus, he was not asked his opinion. He was condemned in advance.

Finally, Powell has the merit, and courage, of asking a real question, but his accusation is based only on (strong) presumptions, since he can produce no evidence to underpin them. By desperately clinging to the myth of a decidedly and sincerely pro-Augustan Aeneid, he forbids himself to search for the true motive of the crime, and – why not? – to find the proof of it, for example by identifying in the Aeneid some of the lines he suspects to have been secretly added by Augustus. [17] A challenging task – and an exalting one too. [18]

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Jean-Yves Maleuvre

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Article previously submitted for publication to Academia [https://www.academia.edu/44341320/Did_Virgil_die_of_stubbornness]

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Footnotes

[1] Maleuvre 1991.

[2] See especially Berry 1995, 164.

[3] Powell 2017, 173-198. 

[4] “Virgil’s support for Octavian-Augustus and closeness to his minister Maecenas are explicit and evident to all in his own texts.” (191-192). But let us not be so sure about putting an equal sign between Maecenas and Augustus.

[5] VSD 35: statuit in Graeciam et in Asiam secedere triennioque continuo nihil amplius quam emendare ut reliqua vita tantum philosophiae vacaret, “Virgil decided to retire to Greece and Asia [Minor], in order to put the finishing touches on the Aeneid. He meant to do nothing but revise for three straight years, so that the remainder of his life would be free for philosophy only.” The translation is by Wilson-Okamura 2007 (1996 on http://www.virgil.org/vitae/a-donatus.htm), the Latin text is from Vitae Vergilianae antiquae, G. Brugnoli and F. Stok (eds), 1997.

[6] “the wilful poet”, 192. Powell even adds that Virgil’s death might have been a “poetic justice” of sorts (194).

[7] As he says, Augustus “may have been innocent” (195).

[8] Horsfall 1995, 21.

[9] With the Aeneid requiring nothing besides one final revision, was it really the time to go for a journey that could prove fatal (si quid sibi accidisset) and, by extension, entail the destruction of the entire poem? As stated by Horsfall 2006, XXIII: this is “the last thing a Stubengelehrter would want to do.” Actually the whole scenario from Virgil’s depart from Italy to his sudden sickness and death at Brundisium might have been concocted by Augustus to hide his crime.

[10] See infra N. 17.

[11] For such a concept, see Hardie 1990, 229: “But an alternative reading of the Aeneid might see the story of Aeneas itself as containing its own ‘anti-Aeneid’, the text at war with itself.”  Virgil is certainly a prince of ambiguity, a sphinx. As Perkell 1994, 64 writes: “The Aeneid is an ambiguous text (in my view, deliberately ambiguous)”.  

[12] If Augustus had thought, as Powell supposes (193), that “the poem, even with its alleged ‘Two Voices’, might yet on balance do the regime more good than harm”, he would not have had to “contaminate” the original text.

[13] I follow the interpretation of Horsfall 1995, 23. Wilson-Okamura (supra n. 4) translates quod non a se editum esset as “nothing that he himself had not revised”, but there is no reason for not lending the verb edere its usual meaning, “to publish”, in each of its three occurrences in the passage (ederet, editum esset, edidit).

[14] On the reliability of VSD, see Naumann 1981; Jocelyn 1990, 245-251; Horsfall 1995; Horsfall 2001, 3-4; Stok 2010, 110-112; Lowe 2010, 483-485. Powell condemns what he calls a “sweeping scepticism” towards VSD, and argues convincingly for “a more respectful approach” to this Life (173). But he also shows how deep is the Augustan mark on it (183-186), pointing out that “what Virgil said or did on his deathbed, or indeed the terms of his will… were exposed to Augustan invention or suppression” (195).

[15] Horsfall 1995, 23.

[16] Cf. supra N. 5.

[17] Among my proposals to this end, see in particular: for 7.583-584, Maleuvre 1995, 231-232; for 8.229b-230a-231 (with 230b read ter temptat feruidus ira), Maleuvre 1992a, 87-88; for 9. 446-449, 640-644, 760-761, 774 (or 775)-777, Maleuvre 1994; for 10.502, Maleuvre 1992b, 92.

[18] Not to mention the philological pleasure involved: “It is as if the most admirable critical efforts of a philologist were not those directed to repairing the damage done by time and chance but those that lead to victory over a forger’s deceptions, when a skeptical mind and matchless skill foil the attempts of one who would give to falsehood all the colors of truth”, Conte 1986, 196. But such a task cannot fail to be met with hostility, which may partly be rooted in psychology rather than philology. As Thomas 1990, 67 pointed out: “when previously comfortable, unitary texts are disrupted the result is anxiety and even rage.”

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