The Odyssey, originally sung in Greek, has a Latin counterpart. Virgil’s Aeneid, still unfinished when the author died in 19 BC, is also a classic quest story. Its hero, Aeneas, survives the fall of Troy and, like Odysseus, sets out on an epic adventure under the guidance of a divine being. Aeneas’ life coach is the goddess Venus, who also happens to be his mother. One of the differences between classical gods and their Christian rival is that classical gods are rather fond of sex. In the classical world, being well bred involves having at least one immortal parent.
The Odyssey and The Aeneid are chalk and cheese. If The Odyssey is a book about getting home to bed, The Aeneid is a book about getting out of it. In that distinction lies something essential about the difference between Greek and Roman culture. Greek culture finds its most natural expression in philosophy, Latin finds it in law. We have cause to be grateful for both these legacies but Latin has had a stronger hand in shaping the culture that shapes Westerners these days. For my money, the strangest thing that ever happened in the history of Western culture was the attempt to make a Latin church out of a Greek New Testament. It was like mixing oil and water. It never worked. We ended up with a church unable to understand its core document.
We inhabit a culture which wants to tip us out of bed, to find our purpose in the big wide world, to make a mark. Greek philosophy has a stronger sense that purpose or meaning is part of the human hardware and comes free with every new person. It has a predilection for finding interior motivations, for seeking out a kind of harmony or balance or equilibrium which is precisely what many people mean when they use the word ‘home’, a concept far more resonant than a little piece of land buried under a big mortgage. In The Odyssey, ultimate purpose is found behind closed doors. In The Aeneid, it is the opposite.
The comic book version of The Aeneid runs something like this. Aeneas, a Trojan, survives the destruction of his city and sets sail, away from his home, to fulfil his sacred destiny, the establishment of an entirely new place called Rome. On the way, he and his crew encounter a storm, get shipwrecked and end up on the shores of north Africa. Here Aeneas meets Dido, the founder and queen of Carthage, and, despite her resolution that her first marriage to Sychaeus was more than enough for one lifetime, she falls in love with Aeneas. (Sychaeus had been killed by Dido’s jealous brother. Nice family.)
Take a look at the way the story is told. We don’t get the gory details of the last days of Troy, complete with Trojan horse, until Dido invites Aeneas to talk about it. One night, he agrees to open up about what he has been through, despite the fact that the hour is late and the stars themselves are starting to blink as though they can hardly keep their eyes open. Aeneas is part of a long line of storytellers whose purpose has been to cheat sleep of her due.
Often English translations give the impression that Aeneas delivers his great story from a dais or stage. Really, he addresses his audience from an elevated bed. Once again, there is a long tradition of this. The bed, especially the death bed, has often been used as a pulpit, a place from which to deliver ultimate truths, messages of sacred significance. The bed is the place for famous last words. On the day he died, Thomas Edison, for example, sat up and said, ‘It is very beautiful over there’; he was not so much dying as finding another project to work on, another place to go.
History does attest that some of the world’s great speech makers reserved their most paltry efforts for their final scene. Winston Churchill’s last words were ‘I’m bored with it all.’ His ally, F. D. Roosevelt, the man whose fireside radio talks sent Americans to bed under a blanket of thousands of words, died of a cerebral haemorrhage, slipping out on the tail of just five words, ‘I have a terrific headache.’ Karl Marx died after he announced that ‘last words are for fools who haven’t said enough’, a criticism that certainly didn’t apply to him. No one is either high or mighty in their pyjamas.
On the other hand, some of the most poignant things said from bed were delivered by people whose deaths hardly caused a ripple. In 1886, an unknown spinster called Emily Dickinson left the world before anyone had really noticed she was in it. As she passed, she said, ‘I must go in. The fog is rising.’ Meaning she was confused, meaning she couldn’t see, meaning it was night, meaning it was almost morning, meaning she was lost, meaning she was home, meaning . . . thankfully, she was gone before anyone got to ask. J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, said, ‘I can’t sleep’ and then died, which fixed the problem. That’s the thing about death. People dread it happening to them but seldom complain afterwards. There are other ways of dealing with insomnia but none as complete.
Aeneas also used his bed to great effect. It was more than a pulpit. In his case, it was a springboard, the place to launch his mission.
The word that Virgil uses to describe the place from which Aeneas narrates the fall of Troy, a slightly unusual word, is the same word he likes to use for the marriage couch, a word with formal sexual connotations. Ironically, the usual Latin word for ‘bed’, the word Virgil doesn’t use here, survives in English as lectern, a place for reading rather than sleeping, although it can be both if your book isn’t much good. Aeneas’ storytelling, which is pretty gruesome at times, is an act of unwitting seduction and Dido is impressed. She is wounded, set on fire, poisoned, ignited, driven to madness, afflicted, et cetera. Virgil is in full flight when describing Dido’s emotional state. For a minute, she sounds a bit like Troy, which Aeneas also left smouldering.
Aeneas and Dido get it together, at least for a while.
But Aeneas’ mum is not happy.
It’s hard to argue when your mum is divine. Venus has a fight with Juno, Jupiter’s wife, who wants the lovebirds to make their nest in Carthage. Juno is present throughout The Aeneid as the goddess who wants to mess up the plans which fate has drawn up. Venus is always going to win. She is the mother-in-law from Hades.
Back on earth, Aeneas can’t sleep. At the behest of his mother, the shade of his father, Anchises, appears to him to tell him what to do. (Being married to a goddess, it seems, is no easier than having one for a mother.) Venus also gets Mercury, the god who, as one translator puts it, ‘gives sleep and takes sleep away’, to intervene. Aeneas must wake up, get on his way, leave the emotional Dido in her proper place, and establish the city which, in turn, will establish the rule of law over the earth. There is more to this than callow duty. We are watching a tussle between desire and law and Virgil plays it masterfully. When Aeneas tells Dido that it is time for him to go, she turns on a scene and asks if he has time, at the very least, to leave her with a little Aeneas as a memento. He refuses and she collapses on her bed. Aeneas receives one of the coldest endorsements in literature, one whose overtones of family, destiny, virtue and loneliness are hard to convey in English: at pius Aeneas. ‘But faithful Aeneas’. If, by now, your sympathies lie elsewhere, you might say, ‘But the pious prick’.
What does Dido do? At night, after Aeneas has left, while Virgil sings a hymn to ‘gentle sleep’ – the time when, in Dryden’s translation, ‘peace with downy wings was brooding on the ground’ – Dido alone is awake. Even her insomnia is pictured as defiance of the laws of nature. She builds a fire and puts on it the clothes and weapons which you-know-who has left in her bedroom. Finally she adds to it the very bed she has recently shared with Aeneas. Virgil makes a point on a couple of occasions here of using the same uncommon word for Dido’s bed that he chose for the platform from which Aeneas delivers his seductive story.
Dido is not just burning her bed but also burning Aeneas’ place of rest. She will run herself through with a sword and throw herself on the fire as Aeneas takes to the water. As she does so, she calls down a curse on him and his people, an act of bitterness which legend supposed was the ultimate source of the war that was later to string across the Mediterranean between Rome and Carthage – a series of conflicts which the good priest who taught us Latin at school once had the misfortune of describing to a group of adolescent boys as ‘the pubic wars’.
As Dido’s bed goes up in flames, the lesson is unavoidable. Beds are significant props in both The Odyssey and The Aeneid. Odysseus’ bed, carved from the trunk of that olive tree, is immovable, a place of stability, identity and rest. In that epic, identity and rest are kindred ideas. But in The Aeneid, the bed gets burned and Dido incinerates herself along with it: there is no rest for the good.