Virgil

Hac casti maneant in religione nepotes.

The tomb of Virgil and that of the first emperor lie buried beneath the bricks and mortar of populous Italian cities, surrounded by the bustle of our modern life. Virgil is known to us through historical records even to the date of his birth. To be able to celebrate its two-thousandth recurrence must inspire every lover of Rome with a shudder of pious joy. This is no scholarly reminiscence; it is a day of living remembrance, a reverent solemnization.

It would often seem as if our present, hurried generation had lost time through tempo, the past through lust for contemporaneity. We divagate into the far reaches of space — only to pay for our truancies with an undignified, ignoble contraction or a chimerical, flimsy expansion of our sense of time. It is well, therefore, that anniversaries that move to the rhythm of millennia should exhort us to reflection: the six hundred years since the death of Dante, the fifteen hundred years since the death of Augustine, the two thousand years since the death of Virgil. The one hundred years since Goethe only make plainer the meaning and value of millennial dates.

Virgil's anniversary is not popular, and for that reason doubly significant. Rightly understood it could be a landmark in the great mysterious movement of Western self-consciousness: in the dim unfolding of a process that would be memorable even if its struggle to be born occurred only as the dream of our highest, as the ineffable word of our best spirits — a process of integration and restoration of the Occident such as was envisaged by the profound and intuitive mind of a Hofmannsthal, whose meditations spanned centuries.

That the Virgil Festival impinges upon such connections, that it evokes or can evoke such reverberations should be enough to declare the uniqueness of the name in whose honor it is being held. And how inexhaustible is that uniqueness! We shall never be able to fathom what the Fourth Eclogue meant to its author. It enjoys the mystic privilege of inexpressibility of substance as does that Eastern book of erotic mysticism which has entered our Holy Scriptures as the Song of Songs. And nevertheless it may be permitted us to confirm the mediaeval legend in our own sense; to believe that in the synchronicity of the divinely human revelation and the poet of the Roman Empire a European mystery lies concealed and waiting to be rediscovered. For this belief we possess the time-honored testimony of Dante. And we may account it one of the happy auguries of our history that an indissoluble bond unites Virgil with Dante, the great Roman paganus, the singer of flocks and fields, and the great Roman Christian, the pilgrim of the next world and the institutor of order in this one.

No one who clings, consciously or unconsciously, to the outmoded aesthetics of original genius will ever understand Virgil. Virgil's greatness and importance, his irreplaceable and unreplaced mission through all our ages, does not, or does not solely, derive from what he was personally. It can only be grasped if we are aware of what the kairos is able to impart to the individual.

That Virgil could be taken up and enhanced, after thirteen hundred years, by a Dante, that his message could find a response in the Florentine of the Trecento as it found a sanction in the last poet of the collapsing temporal Empire — that is part of the very element and definition of Virgil's greatness. To appreciate this one has to break with all modern criteria and practice counting in long intervals of time. It is a way to which we are not accustomed. But might it not be wholesome and necessary for that very reason? What has lasted two thousand years will last another two thousand. That much at least we can know precisely — and should we really refuse to correct our current perspective in the light of this knowledge?

For previous ages the exempla maiorum were a confirmation; for us they are a confrontation, and tradition is reversed into a corrective. We are so far removed from tradition that it appears new to us. Periods like these are perhaps the dawn of all renaissances. Thus our present German estrangement from Virgil might be reinterpreted as a preparation and a guarantee. A deeper understanding of Romanitas seems to be awakening among us — and can it have a representative more valid and more binding, mightier and milder, sweeter and more sonorous, than Virgil?

He is the most official of poets, for it was his poetic task to trace the eternity of Rome from its primitive origins even as Augustus, with the founding of the Principate, elevated it to the highest realization of its power. Here, on the plane of world-history, is demonstrated that realism, that irrefutable solidity rooted in and bound to the soil, that is part of the Roman Genius, like the Travertine marble, hardened by time, of which the tomb of Cecilia Metella and the dome of St. Peter's alike are constructed.

There is scarcely a building material so resistant to the erosion of time as this stone of the golden patina. It has its intellectual equivalent in the material of which Virgil's work is constructed: in that Latin speech the source of which is the swamps of Mantua and whose stone flags support a universal poem and a universal empire. The passionate self-abnegating will to permanence has hardened this substance. It is deeply significant that an early poem of Virgil's contains a renunciation of rhetoric. Cicero's Atticist prose could still appeal to our forefathers; today its formal ostentation pales beside the cadences of the patient craftsman, who began with jesting, satirical poems and, in unparalleled fashion, worked his way free to ever stricter, ever greater tasks (paulo maiora canamus). However controversial the Appendix Virgiliana may be, one thing is certain: Virgil's poetic and emotional beginnings approach a frivolity of soul and sense that combines, in a fashion we can scarcely conceive, the faunic with the sentimental. We shall never know what event in his life raised the imitator of Catullus and Priapic poet to the vates of Orphism, to the laureled servant of the will of the State and prophetic annunciator of the...