Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
So begins Auden’s ‘Epitaph on a tyrant’, published in 1939 and prompted, partly, by his time living in Berlin under the Third Reich. The poem continues:
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And he was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Poetry and totalitarian politics sit uneasily, of course. Great poetry concerns itself with what is known and half-known and unknowable: it embraces all the messy ambiguity of human experience. Whereas the tyrant’s impulse is to simplify, reduce, select and suppress.
To read well a great poem, we need to undertake the difficult – and democratic – task of asking more questions than we answer.
And here lies the problem of Augustus and the Aeneid, and teaching poetry to teenagers.
A sensible launch point is the poem’s social and historical context.
It’s an attractively simple story: Republic implodes > Augustus comes out on top > artists are enlisted to glorify his settlement: the hard power of the Roman legion, death lists, and confiscations gives way to the soft power of culture.
So what’s not to like?
I mean, pupils feel reassured; they get a fun dose of Roman history; and the historical ironies of Books 1 and 2 are now nicely visible. And there’s no sleight of hand here: the Aeneid was a national epic, indisputably. It was the epic of empire, and we know Augustus endorsed its author throughout the ten years of its composition.
Here comes the ‘but’: it’s very easy to over-emphasise the context of the poem’s original reception, to the detriment of reading the poem as a poem: a complex work of art which speaks to the human experience first and foremost.
Can we control our own lives?
How do we process the past?
Should we fear the future?
How do we relate to our communities?
Whose needs take priority?
Where do we find our identity?
What is the point of war?
Does the cosmos have a moral code?
Epic poetry is high-stakes poetry for many reasons, not least because it poses huge questions about human existence – of the sort listed above. These are questions which resist the perfectionist urges of a tyrant, and resist the perfectionist urges of anxious GCSE candidates.
Does that mean for our pupils that the Aeneid can never become ‘easy to understand’, like the poetry of Auden’s tyrant?
Yes: and that’s why it’s a poem still worth reading two millennia after it was written. The poem’s ambivalence towards the great transition from Republic to Principate and towards the toll taken by imperialism on not just the losers but also the ‘winners’: this is what challenges and stimulates its readership.
If we allow our pupils to read into every line of the poem a favourable allusion to Augustus, we are doing them and the poem a disservice. We are also misrepresenting the social and political dynamic of the early Principate – when Augustus’ social and moral reforming was far from smooth; when the brutality of his armies was still fresh in the collective memory; and when his own imperial household was struggling to uphold the values he championed.
That world contained as much tension, unease and uncertainty as our world does now. Respite from open civil war had been achieved, yes, but like the monstrous impius furor in Book 1, the horrors of recent history were as yet only contained – not eradicated. And did anyone think they could ever be eradicated?
A fuller, more nuanced social and political context is indispensable to a full and nuanced appreciation of the Aeneid. But if we start with this context – a quite complex picture – are we not in danger of denying pupils the opportunity to respond to the poem on a personal, human level first?
Perhaps Art must collude with Power to some extent always?
It’s a problem very visible in the early Principate, owing to the extensive biographical detail we have for Horace at one end, and Ovid at the other. We’d be forgiven for viewing the Augustan establishment as the polarising influence on artists of that generation. But Virgil’s beauty and power lies in conveying the complexity and paradoxes of empire-building and self-identification.
A choice we have as teachers of the Aeneid is whether to let the empire-building – the state story – overwhelm the pathos of the individual’s experience.
My inclination is to emphasise the poem’s treatment of those events and individuals which don’t sit comfortably with the values and projections of the Augustan set-pieces found in Books 1, 6 and 8.
For me, the poem operates primarily on the human level.
Give the historical context its due, but handle with care and, perhaps, let pupils into the poem through a different door – at least to begin with?
