Walter Scott’s novel Peveril of the Peak (1823) is prefaced by an epistle written by Scott’s fictional antiquarian Dr Jonas Dryasdust to Captain Clutterbuck, the equally fictional editor of some of Scott’s novels. Dryasdust has a strange story to tell. He had received from the author of Waverley a manuscript of a new historical fiction, Peveril of the Peak, and applied himself to reading it with his usual pedantic zeal: ‘“Here are figments enough”, said I to myself, “to confuse the march of a whole history – anachronisms enough to overset all chronology!”’ Dryasdust then relates how he had his usual afternoon doze, only to be interrupted by an unexpected visitor – the author of Waverley himself (at this stage not openly acknowledged as Scott). There ensued a discussion of the merits of historical fiction in which ‘the Author’ appealed to the precedent of Shakespeare’s history plays, but Dryasdust remained unconvinced:
Dryasdust: I doubt if all you have said will reconcile the public to the anachronisms of your present volumes. Here you have a Countess of Derby fetched out of her cold grave, and saddled with a set of adventures twenty years after her death, besides being given up as a Catholic, when she was in fact a zealous Huguenot.
Author: She may sue me for damages, as in the case Dido versus Virgil.
Dryasdust: A worse fault is, that your manners are even more incorrect than usual.
When the Author departs, Dryasdust notes that his decanter is empty – and his manservant denies that he even received a visitor.1
Dryasdust’s account of his tipsy afternoon typifies the self-conscious engagement with anachronism in Scott’s fiction. A propensity to anachronism is frequently acknowledged, and sometimes excused, in his prefaces and notes. He added to later editions of Waverley and Ivanhoe footnotes responding to critics: in the former, he admitted that his account of Scottish agriculture ‘Sixty Years Since’ had rightly been ‘censured as an anachronism’, while in the latter he defended his inclusion of ‘negro slaves’ in the entourage of a Templar knight.2 In some works, as in Peveril of the Peak, he used the preface to pre-empt criticism: thus in Rob Roy ‘the Author’, after explaining that the work is based on a parcel of papers delivered to his publisher with a request to edit them, confesses that ‘several anachronisms have probably crept in’.3 In Peveril of the Peak, however, he went beyond merely acknowledging anachronism and offered instead a defence of historical fiction by appealing to Shakespeare’s history plays and to Virgil’s epic.
Dido’s complaint against Virgil is based on the temporal gulf that was conventionally thought to separate the Trojan War from the foundation of Carthage. The Aeneid reports that Aeneas’ fleet is driven by a storm from Sicily to North Africa in the seventh summer of his journey from Troy. There he finds Dido, a princess from Tyre who has fled from her brother Pygmalion and is now founding a new city, Carthage. Aeneas and Dido proceed to have a love affair, culminating in Dido’s suicide when Aeneas leaves for Italy. The chronological problem with this story lies in the date of Carthage’s foundation. Some ancient sources (Philistus FGrH 556 F47; Appian, Punic Wars 1) place this earlier than the sack of Troy (a key date in ancient chronology) and exclude Dido from any involvement in it. The majority (including Timaeus FGrH 566 F60, Velleius Paterculus 1.12.6, Justin 18.6.9 and Solinus 1.27) date it either some decades before or at the same time as the foundation of Rome – which in the world of the Aeneid lay 333 years after Aeneas’ arrival in Italy. In either scenario the meeting could not have taken place as described in the poem. Virgil (or whoever was responsible for the story) seems to have adapted an earlier version in which Dido was a chaste princess who committed suicide to avoid the advances of a barbaric neighbour.4
By the time Scott penned the preface to Peveril of the Peak, Virgil’s account of the love affair between Dido and Aeneas was long established as the anachronism above all others. It is, for instance, the only example offered in definitions of anachronism in treatises of universal history such as Thomas Hearne’s Ductor Historicus and Edward Button’s Rudiments of Ancient History.5 It is similarly the only citation in entries on ‘anachronism’ in classic reference works of the eighteenth century such as Diderot’s Encyclopédie and Samuel Johnson’s English dictionary (where the preface to Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid is cited).6
The canonical position of the Dido episode in definitions of anachronism was derived from its role in discussions of the licence poets should be permitted in dealing with historical events. It established itself in this role soon after the word ‘anachronism’ was adopted in Italy. In 1587 the critic Jacopo Mazzoni (p. 18) acknowledged that Virgil ‘altered the truth of history with this anachronism’, but defended his version as ‘poetically credible to the populace’.7 The anachronism was also discussed by Torquato Tasso, author of a partly fictionalized epic on the First Crusade, in his 1594 Discourses on Heroic Poetry. Drawing on Aristotle, Tasso distinguished between the false (the meeting of Dido and Aeneas), the fabulous (Aeneas’ descent into the underworld in the sixth book of the Aeneid) and the unhistorical (the war between Aeneas and the Latins, which was based on fact but included wrong details). False though the story was, it could be defended, Tasso argued, by the example of ancient practice and theory as well as on aesthetic and political grounds (the erotic theme mitigated the poem’s seriousness and the episode assigned ‘an ancient and hereditary motive’ to the conflict between Rome and Carthage).8
The terms of these Italian debates were echoed in the seventeenth century in both France and England. Jean Regnault de Segrais devoted a section of the preface to his translation of the Aeneid to a defence of Virgil’s anachronism. He started by citing Tasso on the poet’s patriotic goals. He further suggested that it would not be permissible to make Scipio and Hannibal contemporaries of Alexander,9 but that the meeting of Dido and Aeneas was justified by virtue of temporal distance and (with appeal to Aristotle) the poet’s concern with probability rather than truth.10 In England, an anonymous 1697 treatise on Homer and Virgil (which Walter Scott was involved in re-publishing11) took the opposite view, berating Virgil for his ‘achronism and slander’ – ‘a base and unpardonable fault’ that involved ‘ruining the good name of a woman’ for the glory of Rome.12 The same year saw the publication of John Dryden’s strong defence of Virgil. Dryden drew extensively on Segrais’ arguments, but added a contemporary political spin, praising Virgil for not making himself a ‘Slave’ to ‘the Laws of Poetry’: ‘he might make this Anachronism, by superseding the mechanick Rules of Poetry, for the same Reason, that a Monarch may dispense with, or suspend his own Laws, when he finds it necessary so to do’.13 Dryden, who had served as Historiographer Royal under James II, here alludes daringly to James’ suspension of legal restrictions on Catholics – the perceived abuses that led to his deposition in 1688.14
Dryden’s political terms were picked up in a literary dispute between the Catholic Alexander Pope, a Jacobite sympathizer, and the Whig critic John Dennis. In his Essay on Criticism (published in 1711) Pope came out in favour of obedience to the traditional rules of poetry: ‘And tho’ the Ancients thus their Rules invade, / (As Kings dispense with Laws themselves have made) / Moderns, beware!’15 In a response in the same year, Dennis initially conceded that in poetry the periods of time should not be ‘transpos’d or confounded’, but then noted that Virgil broke this rule in the Dido episode ‘by a bold and a judicious Anachronism, in order to make his Poem more admirable, and the more to exalt the Glory of the Roman Name’: ‘Whatever the Ancients justly did, the Moderns may justly do.’16 Dennis was here taking his stand in the contemporary ‘quarrel of ancients and moderns’ – and helping his cause by cutting Pope’s poem short (it continues: ‘Or if you must offend / Against the Precept, ne’er transgress its End’).
While critics from Tasso to Dennis discussed Virgil’s anachronism with an eye to the precepts of ancient criticism, the French aristocrat and royalist François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) approached it with typical self-absorption in describing his thoughts at the ruins of Carthage. Chateaubriand visited the site on the return leg of a journey in 1806 from Paris to Jerusalem, and this visit closes his later account of the journey. He lingers on the varied historical associations of Carthage – brave women such as Sophonisba and Hasdrubal’s wife who killed themselves to avoid captivity; the legions of Hannibal and Scipio that fought nearby; and not least St Louis (Louis IX of France), who died at Carthage on his way to the Holy Land. As he reflects, too, on ‘the happy anachronism of the Aeneid’, he concludes that the imaginative freedom of poetry enables fiction to be as weighty as truth:
Such is the privilege of genius that the poetic misfortunes of Dido have become a part of the glory of Carthage. At the sight of the ruins of this city, one searches for the flames of the funeral pyre; one believes one hears the imprecations of a woman abandoned; one admires these powerful falsehoods that can occupy the imagination in places filled with the grandest memories of history.17
The obsession with ruins that Chateaubriand parades throughout his Eastern journey comes to a head at Carthage as he cuts away at historical distance, bringing the past in all its multiplicity into the present of his own imagination.
Walter Scott, then, was drawing on a long critical tradition when he summoned up the case of Dido versus Virgil to justify the occasional anachronism in his historical fictions. But the greater weight he attached in his prefaces to the depiction of manners points to the transformation by which ‘anachronism’ came to be applied to practices felt to be outdated. By contrast with the typology of the Aeneid, where Dido’s eventual hostility to Aeneas stands as precursor of the wars of Rome and Carthage, Scott’s anachronisms are linked to a more complex national-historical trajectory (see p. 124).
The reception history of Virgil’s Dido narrative tracks not just shifts in poetics from the Renaissance to Romanticism but also earlier shifts in the word ‘anachronism’. Attention had been paid to Virgil’s anachronism in Western Europe long before the adoption of the term itself. In late antiquity Augustine (Confessions 1.13) suggested that learned readers viewed the story as ‘untrue’; Servius (on Aeneid 1.267) called the story ‘invented’ (ficta) on the grounds that Carthage was founded seventy years before the city of Rome; and Macrobius (Saturnalia 5.17.5) argued that readers connived in the fiction because of Virgil’s poetic power.18 These comments were in turn cited by Petrarch in a letter (Letters of Old Age 4.5) in which he argued that ‘Aeneas and Dido were not contemporaries nor could they have seen each other, since she was born about 300 years after his death’.19 The chronological problem was linked for Petrarch with the question of Dido’s character: like many others in his time, he favoured the image of a chaste Dido found in the non-Virgilian tradition.20 For him, as for the ancient writers he cites, Virgil’s story was a falsehood rather than an anachronism.
It was, as we have seen, in the second half of the sixteenth century that the meeting of Dido and Aeneas came to be called an anachronism. But from the start it was generally seen as a temporal breach different in kind from the retrojection of later practices that was typically covered by the term anachronismos. Mazzoni recognized that it was impossible to say whether Dido had been retrojected to the time of Aeneas or Aeneas projected forward to the time of Dido,21 while Tasso pointed both to the term’s novelty with his gloss ‘the figure that the Greeks called anachronismos’ and to the shift in usage with the qualification ‘or rather … the licence that Plato and the Greek poets first took in introducing men conversing together who lived centuries apart’.22 This usage prepares for the shift of anachronism from the realm of literary exegesis to that of chronology.23
Chronological concerns went hand in hand with poetics in discussions of Virgil. Mazzoni, for instance, noted the variations in the evidence for the foundation of Carthage, while Segrais (drawing on a letter from the biblical scholar Samuel Bochart) thought that the anachronism could be securely established only with the help of the Bible and some ‘Tyrian annals’ preserved by the historian Josephus (Against Apion 1.106–11). The notion that Dido’s encounter with Aeneas was an anachronism even met resistance. The translator Michel de Marolles offered a generation count for Dido that made her coeval with Aeneas; he suggested that Dido had founded the acropolis of Carthage, Bursa, rather than the city.24 The anachronism was rejected, too, by Isaac Newton, who downdated the Greek chronology of the heroic age by hypothesizing that reign- and generation-lengths had been confused; on Newton’s reckoning, Troy was sacked in 904 BC, twenty-one years before Carthage’s foundation.25 Newton’s reconfiguration of chronology found some support at first with the youthful Edward Gibbon and with critics who found Virgil’s ‘monstrous anachronism’ inexcusable, but soon fell from favour.26 More commonly, authors gave a rough figure of 200 or 300 years for the anachronism. But there were attempts to measure its extent more precisely. Joseph Scaliger calculated the interval between the sack of Troy and the foundation of Carthage as 299 years; Walter Ralegh made it ten years less; the timeline in Helvicus’ Theatrum historicum separates the two events by 291 years; while Thomas Hearne went one higher.27 Behind all these calculations loomed the presence of Virgil: ‘By so many years did Aeneas antecede Dido’ was the pithy conclusion to Scaliger’s discussion of the Near Eastern evidence.
Modern scholars continue to debate Virgil’s anachronism. Whatever their explanations, they are concerned with the ideology and artistry of Virgil’s temporal breach rather than with its extent; the early modern scholarly enquiry into the order of time has come to seem an anachronism. Virgil is seen rather as offering a self-conscious comment on the anachronism through the allegorical figure of Fama, ‘Rumour’ or ‘Renown’, that haunts the fourth book of the Aeneid,28 or else through chronological inconsistencies internal to the poem: it is still, oddly, the seventh summer of his wanderings when Aeneas finds himself back in Sicily, despite spending a winter in Carthage – an ‘annihilation’ of time and space that marks his stay in Carthage as nothing but a fictional interlude.29