Looking at Epic Poetry Through 21st-Century Eyes

Looking at Epic Poetry Through 21st-Century Eyes

New translations of the “Aeneid,” “Beowulf” and other ancient stories challenge some of our modern-day ideas.




A 17th-century depiction of Aeneas and Dido.Credit...Los Angeles County Museum of Art


By Talya Zax
July 23, 2020

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The “Aeneid,” Virgil’s epic about the founding of Rome by the Trojan refugee Aeneas, is so influential that T.S. Eliot once described it as “the classic of all Europe.”

Shadi Bartsch, a classics scholar at the University of Chicago, thinks that for the past 2,000 years, we’ve been reading it wrong.

Before Virgil wrote the “Aeneid,” Bartsch said, Aeneas was considered a traitor who helped the Greeks take Troy. In recasting him as a hero, Virgil changed our understanding of Rome’s history. What readers have historically missed, according to Bartsch, the author of a new translation of the “Aeneid” (Random House) coming out in October, is that Virgil’s depiction was self-consciously political, designed to frame Rome’s expanding empire as just, virtuous and divinely mandated.

“He’s writing an epic that points to itself and says, ‘Hey look, I’m in the process of creating a national myth,’” she said. Looked at closely, the “Aeneid” is really a story “about how you rewrite a character into history, turning him from someone who was criticized into someone who is praised.”

Bartsch’s translation is one of several new books, including Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of “Beowulf” and Catherine Nicholson’s “Reading and Not Reading ‘The Faerie Queene,’” to re-evaluate the lessons of epic poetry, a genre consisting of book-length narrative poems that tend, in the words of the poet and critic Edward Hirsch, to be “exalted in style, heroic in theme.”

In addition to providing the underpinnings for world literature, epic poetry has for much of history been used to define social values and shape nations’ political identities. The new books explore subjects ranging from Apollonius Rhodius’s “Argonautica,” a Greek epic from 300 B.C. that predates the “Aeneid” by three centuries, to Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” published in England at the end of the 16th century. The books, arriving in the politically turbulent landscape of 2020, suggest that it’s time to take a hard second look at these tales, which have for so long shaped the West’s understanding of the world.

Those second looks have turned up several shared themes. One is a new skepticism regarding the relationship that has developed between the epic and prevailing ideas about male heroism. “A lot of toxic masculinity has been shaped by imperfect understandings of epic poetry,” said Headley, whose “Beowulf” translation is due in August from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

That result, she and Bartsch agree, is a consequence of particular choices made in reading, not the substance of the epics themselves. Bartsch pointed to the story of Aeneas’s love affair with the Carthaginian queen Dido, whose eventual suicide male scholars have historically framed as the act of a woman who has “deluded herself out of passion.” But her suicide isn’t just a matter of a broken heart, Bartsch said, it’s a response to a position of unexpected political weakness.
“To whom do you/abandon me — to what sort of death?” Dido accuses Aeneas. “Should I await Pygmalion, my brother, who’ll raze my city? Iärbas, who’ll enslave me?”


“I think we have the idea, as readers, ‘I’m looking for the superheroes, and the superheroes are going to be presented as simplistically good guys,’” said Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation of the “Odyssey,” the first by a woman in English, helped set off the current trend of re-evaluation, which has been led largely by women. In addition to Wilson, Headley and Bartsch’s translations, novels like Pat Barker’s “The Silence of the Girls,” Madeline Miller’s “Circe” and Headley’s own “The Mere Wife,” all published in 2018, have attempted to re-envision the stories of epics — the “Iliad,” the “Odyssey” and “Beowulf,” respectively — through the eyes of secondary female characters.




ImageThe circa-1000 manuscript that contains the original “Beowulf.”Credit...British Library


But the new focus on women’s voices isn’t just about a wish for greater equity in the epic. It’s reflective of a sense of urgency about restoring nuance to the public’s understanding of the genre. As a series of political crises have, in the West, posed fresh challenges to the stories that have shaped our norms and principles, those who study epics see critical readings as an increasingly vital endeavor.

“Epic poetry has shaped the way that we perceive our universe. We’ve used these epics to justify ourselves,” Headley said. “Now is the moment to open the doors.”

Why now? Nicholson’s “Reading and Not Reading ‘The Faerie Queene’” (Princeton University Press), published in May, notes that the word “crisis” was initially a medical term referring to “the decisive juncture in the course of a disease, after which a patient either dies or begins to recover.” Spenser wrote “The Faerie Queene” in the 16th century “out of a protracted sense of crisis,” Nicholson said. As she began work on her book in the 21st century, she found herself “thinking about what it would mean to read in crisis.”

Now, reflecting on the fraught period between her book’s conception and publication, she said, “one of the things I’ve realized about the experience of crisis is it makes us prone to allegorize everything. Part of the experience of reading at a moment when you feel the world is changing into something you no longer recognize is the impulse to look to literature and say, ‘Aah, it’s like this.’”


In many ways, the history of epic poetry is the history of political change — and, yes, often crisis. Dante Alighieri — the subject of John Took’s forthcoming “Why Dante Matters” (Bloomsbury) and Guy P. Raffa’s “Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy” (Belknap Press) — produced “The Divine Comedy” while his city, Florence, was being torn apart by a battle between the Guelphs, whose political lodestar was the pope, and the Ghibellines, who looked to the Holy Roman Emperor.




Image
“The Faerie Queene” was published in England at the end of the 16th century.Credit...British Library


Spenser wrote “The Faerie Queene” while working as a high-level British colonial administrator in Ireland, implementing brutal tactics of oppression against the native population. Virgil wrote the “Aeneid” in the first years of the Roman Empire, as Augustus attempted to reshape his image from that of a ruthless, warmongering autocrat to that of a beneficent leader. The “Odyssey” was composed around the end of the 8th century B.C., close to a century before Greek city-states began to develop the first form of democracy.

By “grappling with questions about the relationship of individual to community,” Wilson said, Homer anticipated that shift.

Perhaps because epic poems have so often originated in times of political upheaval, the lessons readers have taken from them have changed, sometimes radically, over the decades and centuries. The history of the “Aeneid,” Bartsch said, shows how great the range of interpretations can be: Early Christian medievalists “chose to read the poem allegorically as a bildungsroman of the good Christian everyman”; Mussolini upheld it “as supportive of the resurgence of the Roman Empire”; and certain 19th-century Americans saw it as a “poem about a group of refugees who head westward to found a new nation, defeat the natives in war, take over that land and call it God’s will.”

Those interpretations aren’t necessarily mistaken, Bartsch said; they’re an understandable result of “people thinking their reading supports their set of enduring values.”

But what most unites this new set of books is that they seek, by embracing the neglected complexity of their source texts, to challenge existing values, not affirm them. As Tom Phillips, the author of “Untimely Epic: Apollonius Rhodius’ ‘Argonautica’” (Oxford University Press), put it: “You can’t simply act as Homeric heroes did.”

Headley gave an example. Readers of “Beowulf,” she said, often “have this understanding that we are essentially on the side of the human characters.” But the monsters the humans battle are “described as canny, and brave, and intelligent,” and given persuasive emotional back stories. “Beowulf,” seen from their perspective, is a story about the human instinct to “create a situation in which your neighbor is the monster.” The accepted value may be that humans are the heroes; the monsters, for their own good reasons, have a different idea.




“The Faerie Queene” concludes with a sequence known as “The Mutability Cantos,” which first appeared in editions of the poem issued a decade after Spenser’s death. Tacked on to the poem’s original six books — out of the 12 Spenser planned — it’s a conclusion of startling ambiguity. “Not only does it fail to provide us with a unified world vision, one of the things epic is meant to provide, but it ends by reflecting on its own failure to do that,” Nicholson said. The poem concludes “with a prayer for a moment when things would be clear, and resolve.”

That moment never came. But the point of the epic might have been somewhat different from what Spenser imagined: not to provide a cohesive vision for society, but rather an opportunity for each generation of readers to imagine, anew, what that vision ought to be.

“The voice of the people is always going to change,” Wilson said, “because the people change.”

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Talya Zax is the deputy culture editor of The Forward.