A World in Ruins

War Is Hard. And Then There's Peace.

Aeneas chats with Turnus. Briefly.

I was stunned when I first read the following paragraphs by Bernard Knox. Frankly, I'm still stunned. They're in his introduction to the Robert Fagles translation of Virgil's Aeneid. This section of the introduction (pp. 39-41) is a personal reminiscence about his military service in Italy during World War II, and how Mr. Virgil came for a visit one day and effectively told Knox what he should do after the war. Knox followed his advice.

Born in Yorkshire, England, in 1914, Knox had studied the classics at Cambridge, and after the war he went back to the classics, earning a Ph.D. at Yale and winding up as director of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. He died in 2010, at the age of 95. 

Before we start, I need to explain something called the sortes Virgilianae. People seeking guidance for the future would open a copy of Virgil's writings and select a passage at random. People would also use the Bible for the same purpose. 

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"I consulted the Virgilian lottery in April 1945. The year before, while a captain in the U.S. Army, I had worked with French partisans behind the lines against German troops in Brittany, and after a leave I was finally sent to Italy to work with partisans there. No doubt the OSS [Office of Strategic Services] moguls in Washington figured that since I had studied Latin at Cambridge I would have no trouble picking up Italian. The partisans this time were on our side of the lines; things had got too difficult for them in the Po Valley and they had come through the mountains. The U.S. Army, very short of what the soldiers called 'warm bodies,' since so many of its best units had been called in for the invasion of southern France, armed them and put them under the command of American officers to hold sections of the mountain line where no German breakthrough was expected. I had about twelve hundred of them, in various units ranging from Communist to officers of the crack corps of the Italian army, the Alpini; but they had two things in common - great courage and still greater hatred of Germans. For several months we held the sector, which contained the famous Passo dell' Abettone, then impassable for wheeled vehicles since the German engineers had blown its sides down. We made frequent long patrols into enemy territory, sometimes bringing back prisoners for interrogation, sometimes passing civilian agents through the lines. In April we were given a small role in the final move north that brought about the German surrender of Italy. The main push was to the left and right of us, where tanks and wheeled vehicles could move - on the coast road to our left and on our right  through the Futa Pass to Bologna. We were to attack German positions on the heights opposite us, take the town of Fanano, and then go on to Modena in the valley. 

'We killed or captured the German troops holding the heights without too many losses, liberated Fanano, and started north on the road to Modena. ... 

"Every now and then we met a German machine-gun crew holed up in a building that delayed our passage. Usually we too occupied a building to house our machine-guns and keep the enemy under fire while we sent out a flanking party to dislodge them. On one of these occasions we occupied a villa off the road that had evidently been hit by one of our bombers; it had not much roof left and the inside was a shambles, but it would do. At one point in the sporadic exchanges of fire I handed over the gun to a sergeant and retreated into the debris of the room to smoke a cigarette. As I looked at the tangled wreckage on the floor I noticed what looked like a book, and investigation with my foot revealed part of its spine, on which I saw, in gold capitals, the letters 'MARONIS.' [Virgil's full name is Publius Vergilius Maro.] It was a text of Virgil, published by the Roman Academy 'IUSSU BENEDICTI MUSSOLINI,' 'By Order of Benito Mussolini.' There were not many Italians who would call him 'blessed' now [Benedictus means Blessed]; in fact, a few weeks later his blood-stained corpse, together with that of his mistress, Clara Petacci, and that of his right-hand man, Starace, would be hanging upside-down outside a gas station in Milan. 

"And then I remembered the Sortes Virgilianae. I closed my eyes, opened the book at random and put my finger on the page. What I got was not so much a prophecy about my own future as a prophecy for Italy; it was from lines at the end of the first Georgic:

"... a world in ruins ... / For right and wrong change places; everywhere / So many wars, so many shapes of crime / Confront us; no due honor attends the plow. / The fields, bereft of tillers, are all unkempt ... / ... throughout the world / Impious war is raging. 

"'A world in ruins.' It was an exact description of the Italy we were fighting in - its railroads and its ancient buildings shattered by Allied aircraft, its elegant bridges blown into the water by the retreating Germans, and its fields sown not with seed by the farmers but with mines by the German engineers. 

"The fighting stopped; it was time to move on. I tried to get the Virgil into my pack, but it was too big, and I threw it back to the cluttered floor. But I remember thinking: 'If I get out of this alive, I'll go back to the classics, and Virgil especially.' And I did." 

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About the picture at the top of the story: At the end of the Aeneid, when Aeneas has finally reached Latium (the future Rome), there's a big fight over who gets the girl (Lavinia, the daughter of Latinus, the king of Latium) and also who gets the country (which goes with the girl). The local boy, Turnus, is very unhappy that an outsider (Aeneas) looks like he's going to get it all without a fight. And so there's a big battle.

A lot of people get killed, but eventually Aeneas has Turnus on the ground. Turnus says, hey, let's make a deal. We can live together peacefully. But too much blood has been shed. And, frankly, I think Aeneas has PTSD. He kills Turnus. Or, as Virgil puts it, Aeneas "plants / his iron sword hilt-deep in his enemy's heart. / Turnus' limbs went limp in the chill of death. / His life breath fled with a groan of outrage / down to the shades below." (12:1109-1113). These are the last five lines of the Aeneid. 

Today, killing an unarmed and defenseless soldier is a war crime. But back then it wasn't. 

I didn't learn about this part of the Aeneid when I was in school. I recall Dido and Aeneas, and the call of duty, which trumps all desires for a peaceful life. But the idea that the Roman empire was based on murder was not a message taught to me in school.  

Luca Giordano made the painting in 1688; I found it on Wikimedia Commons. 

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If you're interested in what the girl at the center of this story thought about all these goings-on, have a look at Ursula K. Le Guin's novel Lavinia (2008). It's a pretty amazing work of reimagination. 

See also Narcissism and Dictatorship, Jim Crow Was a Failed State, Fascism, Mussolini's Personal Sex Factory, What Happened in Ferrara?