2

TIME FOR HISTORY

To encapsulate his thinking about time, Augustine used the illustration of reciting a psalm which he knew. The ‘life’ of this act, he suggested, was stretched two ways, into the memory and into expectation. The example of the psalm allows him to diminish the scale, from the psalm to its particular words and its individual syllables, or increase it, where the psalm is but part of a longer action. The scale can be further increased: ‘It is also valid,’ he continued, ‘of the entire life of an individual person, where all actions are part of a whole, and of the total history of “the sons of men” (Ps. 30:20) where all human lives are but parts’ (Confessions 11.28.38). Augustine significantly makes the psalm one which he knows: wherever he is in the psalm, he is aware of it as a whole. He knows what has been and what is still to come, what was the beginning and what will be the end. Augustine’s example can point up both the possibilities and limitations of narrative. In the Confessions, the narrating self ‘knows’ more than the narrated self by virtue of his later position within time: the significance of any individual event changes in the ‘light’ of subsequent events, of what eventuates. Thus events within a life, whether narrated by oneself or by another, exist, in Frank Kermode’s phrase, ‘under the shadow of the end’.1 That end moves on with time, and, as the scale expands to encompass ‘the total history of “the sons of men”’, the human viewpoint seems increasingly inadequate. God alone, Augustine would have it, is in a position to know this ‘text’, and in a way not granted to his creatures within time. He alone can see it as a whole, for he ‘spoke’ and created it as having the form it does.

For Roland Barthes, behind even something so seemingly straightforward as uttering a narrative past tense, ‘there always lurks a demiurge, a God or a reciter’, the time-bound writer’s timeless alter ego (the Author) who imposes form and order on chaos and sprawl: ‘the world is not unexplained, since it is told like a story.’ For Barthes, ‘reality’ is that chaos and sprawl, and it is the role of narrative and its sovereign Author to ‘reduce’ that ‘exploded’ reality to ‘a point in time’ and to a ‘slim and pure logos’ whose ‘sole function is to unite as rapidly as possible a cause and an end’. As we saw in Chapter 1, Augustine and Barthes occupy opposite poles of a field of theological thinking about time and texts. In this chapter, with Augustine and Barthes still very much in mind, I explore further the interplay of narrative and historical thinking and how historical narratives are constituted from the interaction of two perspectives, a ‘human’ one from ‘within’ time and the ‘God’s-eye view’ from ‘outside’ time. The major point of reference throughout will be Virgil’s Aeneid, which constructs a narrative that, for its own ends, artfully separates out these two perspectives. In the first section, I focus on the way in which various narrator-figures in the poem are given different temporal perspectives in such a way as to suggest that time and history as a whole have, in Aristotelian terms, a ‘plot’ with a beginning, a middle and an end. The Aeneid thus offers a dramatisation of the act of historical interpretation that (I go on to argue in the second section) is further worked out in the poem’s reception. I suggest how complex narratives (like the Aeneid) can be ‘condensed’ into terms (like ‘history’ or ‘empire’) which, viewed as metaphors, express the movement of historical time seen from ‘within’, and, viewed as concepts, seek to offer a perspective that is not time-bound.

(DE-)CONSTRUCTING HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

The narrative of the Aeneid directs us to a particular ‘point in time’. That phrase is, of course, Barthes’s, though as my argument goes on a further set of inverted commas should begin to emerge: a particular ‘point “in” time’. The first sighting we get of Aeneas in the poem’s narrative comes amidst the storm the god of the winds Aeolus has raised at Juno’s instigation as the Trojans are sailing from Sicily towards Italy, seven years into their wanderings after the sack of Troy. Aeneas and his men seem confronted by imminent demise: ‘everything’, the narrator remarks, ‘threatens them with present death’ (praesentem...viris intentant omnia mortem, 1.91). The elements seem to be personified in the way they ‘stretch towards’ their future goal (intentant), while for the men (viris), death seems ‘present’, here and now (praesentem...mortem). Under the shadow of what Aeneas assumes, at that moment, to be the end, the investment of passion in his repeated exclamations of his wish that he could have died fighting at Troy (1.94–101) emphasises his immediate sense of the meaninglessness of the intervening years of wandering. There is no overarching rationale to which he can gesture: those years seem to him pointless. Yet, as it turns out, this is not the end: Neptune intervenes to calm the storm, and Aeneas survives. However revealing it is of the depth of Aeneas’s despair as he believes he is confronting imminent death, his own judgement of the meaning and significance of his life is not definitive, either at this or any subsequent moment of his life. With the passage of time, his life becomes a part of a larger story ‘where all human lives are but parts’. My phraseology is derived from Augustine, but this is a crucial aspect of the narration of the Aeneid, the pagan text that was the favourite of the young Augustine, as the author of the Confessions attests (1.13.21–22).

Making land in Libya, Aeneas procures food for his companions, and reminds them that they are not unacquainted with setbacks, that they have suffered worse things, and that god will grant an end to these sufferings also (o socii [neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum]/o passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem, 1.198–99). Aeneas is once more looking forward, albeit cautiously; the end which he had thought was immediate is now postponed, though it still provides the frame of reference for his feelings. Following a brief description of the meal they prepare, and of the sorrow they express for the companions they believe they have lost, the narrator of the Aeneid cryptically remarks ‘and now it was the end, when Jupiter, looking down from the highest point of heaven...’ (et iam finis erat, cum Iuppiter aethere summo/despiciens...,1.223).2 The repeated word finis, emphasised by its position at the end of 1.199, and its obscure appearance in 1.223, assumes even greater importance in the scene in heaven that follows when Aeneas’s mother Venus challenges her father Jupiter. ‘From the beginning Jupiter is associated with the end,’ remarks Denis Feeney,3 and that end lies well beyond the stopping point of the narrative, the death of Turnus at the hands of Aeneas in the closing lines of Aeneid 12. Beginnings and ends are clearly of importance to this narrative, but for greater understanding let us step into the theoretical and conceptual world created by narratological analysis.

Few narratives begin at the ‘beginning’, the earliest event referred to within the narration, or end at the ‘end’, the latest: the storm off Carthage and the death of Turnus do not constitute the absolute temporal limits of the Aeneid. The analysis of narrative characteristically operates with a distinction between story and discourse.4 The distinction is offered as heuristic: the analyst, presented with a narrative – the ‘discourse’ – constructs a linear sequence of all the events alluded to in the discourse – the ‘story’ – so as to describe and interpret how this idealised, purely chronological, sequence of events is emplotted and evaluated by the narrator.5 The narrative discourse of the Aeneid takes us from the storm which shipwrecks the Trojans on the shores of Carthage at the beginning of Book 1 through to the death of Turnus at the close of Book 12, a narrative ‘present’ that moves through the events that are represented as taking for the characters a year or so. However, the narrative of the Aeneid makes reference to a number of events that took place long before the fall of Troy. Juno’s wrath, for example, is traced back to the judgement of Paris and the abduction of Ganymede by Jupiter (1.25–27). Evander recalls meeting the young Anchises (8.163), and there are intimations of an even more distant past as Evander draws the attention of Aeneas to the ruined cities on the site where Rome will one day stand (8.355–58). In a complex interweaving of times, we learn that Dardanus, the founder of Troy, hailed from Italy (3.167), so that when Apollo’s riddling instruction to the Trojans to ‘seek out your ancient mother’ (3.96) is at length understood by the Trojans, they reappraise their arrival in Italy as a return. Arguably, the speech of Anchises in the Underworld (6.724–51) takes us back to the very creation of the cosmos. The latest event referred to in the story is the death of Marcellus, stepson of the Emperor Augustus, lamented by Anchises in his prophetic catalogue of Rome’s greatest figures (6.882–83). The poem’s narrator makes a number of references that locate him, and the point of perspective of his narrative, in the time of Augustus.6 Even this is not the ultimate temporal limit of the story. Extrapolate all those events variously referred to in the narrative and put them in an order of succession and you have the story which the narrative emplots.

Narrative discourse is characterised by what Gérard Genette called anachronies, in which the narrative refers backwards from its present to events that happened ‘earlier’ (Genette calls this ‘analepsis’) or forwards to those that happened ‘later’ (‘prolepsis’). Genette cites as an inaugurating instance the opening eight lines of Homer’s Iliad, where the narrator ‘having evoked the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon that he proclaims as the starting point of his narrative (ex hou de ta prōta), goes back about ten days to reveal the cause of the quarrel in some 140 retrospective lines’.7 The narrative plunge ‘into the midst of events’ (in medias res), followed by an expository analepsis, becomes one of the formal markers of epic, as Genette goes on to remark;8 but it is also the ‘point in time’ to which Barthes has drawn our attention when he suggests that ‘the world is not unexplained since it is told like a story’, thus asking us not to draw any hard and fast distinction between narrative forms as diverse as ‘cosmogonies, myths, History and Novels’.9 Such expository flashbacks may be voiced by the narrator, but are frequently placed in the mouths of characters, as when Homer’s Odysseus narrates his wanderings after the fall of Troy in Books 9–12 of the Odyssey, and Aeneas tells of his to Dido in Aeneid 2–3. In many narrative forms, prolepsis tends to be a more elusive figure.10 Characters internal to the narrative at any one point within it may, of course, anticipate, desire or fear a particular outcome to events, as Aeneas does in the storm, without any guarantee that that will be the outcome. First-person narrators who are also characters within the narration, in Genette’s term ‘homodiegetic’ narrators, may offer accounts of their past which are ‘testimonies to the intensity of the present memory’,11 as is clearly the case with Aeneas’s account to Dido of the fall of Troy. He opens his account with an address to the queen – ‘you are ordering me to renew a grief that defies telling’ (infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem, 2.3) – and the way in which he describes events (such as the discovery of the Horse outside Troy after the Greeks have seemingly retreated) are shot through with inflections of his knowledge of the outcome.12 Narrators who are external to the narrative, whom Genette terms ‘heterodiegetic’,13 can, of course, relate events that are subsequent to the moving ‘present’ of the narrative which the characters experience. However, epic’s supernatural machinery provides it with a range of internal characters (gods, seers) and devices (prophecy, omens) that make prolepsis one of its most distinctive features.

All these narrators, internal or external, human or divine, seek to provide their narratives with meaning through the imposition of form, through emplotment. Aristotle’s famous analysis of plot in the Poetics is no less amenable to the narratological distinction between story and discourse: ‘by “plot”,’ Aristotle says, ‘I mean the arrangement of the incidents’ (Poetics 1450a4–5). Those incidents from which a plot is constructed may follow in linear sequence, but do not of themselves form a plot. Crucially, the plot must be a whole, which has a beginning, a middle and an end. A beginning, he says, is ‘that which does not follow another thing of necessity [ex anagkēs]’, that is, no necessary causal connection to what has gone before is asserted; an end, on the other hand, follows on by necessity or as a rule from something else, but has ‘nothing after it’, nothing, that is, that is seen as a necessary or plausible consequence of that end-point, and so would need to be included within the plot. So, ‘well-constructed plots must neither begin nor end in a haphazard fashion’ (Poetics 1450b27–33). Internal cohesion, consisting of necessary or probable causal connection between those incidents it contains, constitutes the well-formed plot. Such a plot will be a unity, and Aristotle’s comments on this are worth citing at length (Poetics 1451a16–30):

A plot [muthos] is not a unity, as some people think, if it is about one person. Many, infinitely many, things happen to one person, some of which do not combine to form a single entity; and so too an individual carries out many actions [praxeis...pollai] from which no unified action emerges [ex hōn mia oudemia ginetai praxis]. And so it seems that all those poets who have composed a Heracleid, a Theseid, and such-like poems have missed the mark, since they think that because Heracles was one man, a plot about him must also be a unity. Homer, exceptional as he is in other respects, seems, by his artistry or natural genius, to discern this clearly also. In composing the Odyssey, he did not include everything that happened to Odysseus, such as being wounded on Parnassus, or his feigned madness when the army was being levied, since there was nothing necessary or probable connecting either of these incidents to the other. Rather he constructed the Odyssey, and likewise the Iliad, around the kind of unified action I mean.

Aristotle’s theory links unity of plot (muthos) and unity of action (praxis) with intelligibility:14 thus a life, be it Odysseus’s or Aeneas’s or Augustine’s, is not to be understood in terms of all the ‘infinitely many’ incidents and actions that comprise it, but in terms of the form the emplotment imposes. That form, as so often for Aristotle, is conceived of as teleological: it looks towards the telos, the end or the goal. Always implicit in the events of narrative discourse is the Aristotelian relationship of necessary or plausible cause: ‘because of this, then this...’ Rather than being inert, events within a unified narrative discourse are dynamic and have a trajectory. This is a theory that has remained profoundly influential. In his analysis of Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow (1991), which traces the life of a perpetrator of the Holocaust backwards from death to birth, Seymour Chatman suggests that narrative discourse is ‘vectored’, directing its readers from one moment to the next, usually in a forwards direction (Amis’s novel is a rare exception), from an initial state of affairs to a final one.15 Aristotle’s thinking also lies behind Barthes’s formulation that it is the role of the narrator to reduce an ‘exploded reality to a slim and pure logos, without density, without volume, without spread’, and ‘to unite as rapidly as possible a cause and an end’.16

The narrated time that we are told elapses in the Aeneid as the narrative discourse moves from the start of Book 1 to the close of Book 12 may be no more than a year, but the narrator’s summary in the opening sentence of the epic (1.1–7) suggests a span from the wanderings of Aeneas to the glories of his own time.17 With its many analepses and prolepses, (the story that) the narrative (emplots) has an even greater temporal reach. But if the story gives the order of succession of events, it is the emplotment of those events into a unified whole within the narrative we read – their selection, which endows those incidents with not simply a temporal but a causal relationship – that endows them with their rationale and intelligibility. Within narrative, events do not sit inertly one after another, but are, as Chatman put it, vectored towards the end. A total narrative – the one gestured towards by Augustine – would show each and every event in its full intentional and consequential significance, and so offer total intelligibility, though, as Augustine remarks, this lies beyond human capacity; as Aristotle suggests, it would contain an infinite number of incidents. A narrative aims at intelligibility, and, so as to explain, has to have limits.

Following his initial summary of the story in the opening sentence, the narrator of the Aeneid asks the Muse to relate to him the causes (Musa, mihi causas memora, 1.8), and poses a number of questions about what motivated the events the poem emplots, in particular the role the goddess Juno played in them: ‘in what had her will been offended, what caused her to grieve that she, the queen of the gods, drove a man renowned for his sense of duty to work his way through18 so many misfortunes, to encounter so many hardships? Can heavenly minds feel such great anger?’ (quo numine laeso/quidve dolens regina deum tot volvere casus/insignem pietate virum, tot adire labores/impulerit. tantaene animis caelestibus irae? 1.8–11). On such a scale, any human perspective on events seems woefully inadequate. A human life is but part of that whole, situated somewhere (but where? What point in time?) within it. The human perspective is limited by its lack of knowledge, both of the past and of the future. Within the narrative of the Aeneid, Aeneas acts out that dilemma, and even the narrator of the epic presents himself as obliged to look beyond himself for an authority, the Muse, to answer the questions he poses. In resignation, Aeneas had said that ‘god will grant an end [finem] to these things also’ (1.199). The term finis in Latin can signify not simply an end, but a trajectory and a goal as well. Aeneas searches for a shape or form, in which the events which join beginning to end are meaningfully linked, so as to provide a rationale for the sufferings he and his people are undergoing and a belief that all will turn out to have been worthwhile in the end. He thus seeks to understand his own situation precisely in narrative terms. Virgil’s exploration of the term finis continues in the scene in heaven that follows. What is the end of the events narrated? In which direction are they moving?

That scene, dramatised in terms of the present concerns of Venus and Jupiter, is a masterclass in the manipulation of narrative temporality, and of some of its most familiar tropes. Venus approaches her father (who is gazing down on Libya and is described as himself preoccupied, though the text is not entirely explicit about the cause of his concerns)19 to express her anxiety about her son Aeneas. Without naming her, she cannot also suppress references to her continuing rivalry with, and suspicion of, Juno. She contrasts the current misfortunes of the Trojans with the promise20 that there would come a time when their descendants the Romans would hold the whole world under their sway (1.234–37). In what feels like a veiled reference to Juno, she asks her father, ‘Has some argument swayed you?’ (quae te, genitor, sententia vertit?, 1.237). She says that she used to console herself thus for the destruction of Troy, balancing one fate with another (fatis contraria fata rependens, 1.239), but ill fortune continues to pursue the Trojans. Echoing what Aeneas said in 1.199, she asks Jupiter, ‘what end of toils do you give?’ (quem das finem, rex magne, laborum?, 1.241). In his response, Jupiter ‘is carefully tailoring his prophecy to console Venus’21 and, picking up on her words, immediately reassures her that ‘the fate of your descendants remains unchanged, you’ll see...nor has any argument swayed me’ (manent immota tuorum/fata tibi...neque me sententia vertit, 1.257–60). He then launches into a rapid and selective proleptic narrative that vectors from Aeneas’s arrival in Italy22 through his death and the succession of Ascanius to the foundation of the city of Rome and way beyond. The significance of the toils endured by Aeneas and the Trojans is not to be assessed in terms of the present moment or the life of any of those involved, then or subsequently. ‘On the Romans,’ he says, ‘I place bounds neither of fortune nor time’ (his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono, 1.278), and, in response to Venus’s question ‘what end do you give...’, he subtly alters the tense and syntax of her words to announce ‘I have given dominion without end’ (imperium sine fine dedi, 1.279). Her most pressing concerns will be resolved in the reconciliation of Juno to the dominion of the Romans (1.279–82), a start to which will be narrated in the closing book of the Aeneid; subsequently, that power will be significantly advanced by a lineage of her own which is ‘to bound dominion by the Ocean’,23 and who will bring in a new order of peace and justice (1.291–96). The sacrifices, it is implied, will have been worthwhile. This seems to offer the prospect of fulfilment in spatial terms, but Jupiter’s speech is as much about time.24

Even if the latest datable events that can be specified in the Aeneid come from the Augustan period, the proleptic force of Jupiter’s statement indicates that the story of the epic does not end there. Jupiter sketches a trajectory that intersects the narrator of the poem’s ‘present’ in the Augustan Age en route to a future that stretches ahead infinitely. For narratologists, this can raise the intriguing conundrum of whether to classify the Virgilian narrator as a homodiegetic figure rather than a heterodiegetic one, internal to the narrative rather than outside it, as much one of the characters within it as Aeneas is – and no nearer the ‘end’ than he is. The narratee of the epic, anyone who identifies with the ‘Romans’ frequently referred to and even on occasion apostrophised, is no less in the midst of things than Aeneas or Virgil, no closer to the end, so readers too can be ‘within’ the narrative rather than looking at it from outside. A sense of an ending is offered, but it is a curious closure, which seems simultaneously an affirmation and a denial. ‘Dominion without end’ suggests there is no end to the toils, though they do have a trajectory, a goal, even if that is beyond the perspective of any individual at any particular point in time. The miracle of narrative endows those toils with an overarching purpose by offering the reader a fugitive glimpse of the ‘God’s-eye view’ of ‘the total history of “the sons of men”’.25

A fugitive glimpse is all it is, for Jupiter’s speech is extraordinarily tantalising. Denis Feeney reminds us that ‘Jupiter cannot be distilled out of the narrative, for he remains an agent, a character’, and something more than harassed patriarch or everyday family guy. Feeney continues,

Jupiter, to speak in social terms, is often seen in the poem presiding like a politic superior over an emerging consensus, preferring, if possible, not to force the issue. Vergil’s tactfulness in this matter creates many unresolved areas of vagueness around Jupiter, Fate and Providence, and this comparative reticence has opened the path to readings of Jupiter as an omniscient, omnipotent, and imperturbable – even impartial – Providence.26

A century ago, the great Virgilian Richard Heinze introduced a shrewd note of caution:

An all-powerful and all-knowing god, without whom and in opposition to whom nothing can happen, and who has himself relinquished his freedom to decide about anything and everything, is – perhaps – just about conceivable, but is completely unusable in an epic poem. Concessions must inevitably be made; the only question is, how can they be made as unobtrusively as possible?27

Jupiter’s representation as a character within the narrative militates against any readings that would seek to find in him a vantage point from which the problems of evil and divine (in)justice would make sense.28 The Aeneid is not a theological treatise, and the concessions (or prevarications) Virgil makes are not always unobtrusive, though they do show sensitivity to theological issues. ‘Jupiter’s perspective is, naturally, a commanding one,’ Feeney concludes. ‘It is the perspective of Fate, of Time, of history. It cannot be unsaid, undone.’29 It is worth probing this perspective further.

‘Fate’ (fatum) is associated with the verb fari, to speak, and Fate in the Aeneid is sometimes identified with the utterance of Jupiter.30 But the ‘tactfulness’ of which Feeney speaks does indeed bring a vagueness to Virgil’s representation of Jupiter’s relationship to Fate, not least its temporal aspect. He reassures Venus that the fate of her descendants remains unchanged (manent immota tuorum/fata tibi, 1.257–58), which suggests that, even if Jupiter is speaking to the moment so as to console Venus, matters are not being decided here and now. Moreover, the succession of future tenses that have dominated his prolepsis in 1.263–77 shift through the present tense in 278 to the perfect tense in ‘I have given dominion without end’ in 279, which might just be a reminder to Venus of the ‘promise’ she referred to in 1.235–37; somewhere, some time (neither specified nor itself narrated), it is implied, information along these lines has been communicated before. This is not an originary moment, no less, we may surmise, than the earlier occasion Venus has alluded to. In another brief analepsis in 1.19–20, the narrator tells us that Juno had heard that a race was rising from the Trojan stock that would one day overthrow Carthage: sic volvere Parcas (1.22). The accusative and infinitive construction makes this part of what Juno had heard, and so reveals what she understood to be the authority for this information – this is what the Fates were ‘turning’ – though, significantly, not the source from which she has learnt it: Jupiter? Venus? We are not told. Another case of a revelation of the future ‘tailored’ or ‘packaged’ for its recipient’s consumption? Perhaps. ‘Within’ the poem’s temporality, an originary moment is never attributed to Fate, and, as Jupiter remarks, the fates remain unchanged. Fate exists outside the poem’s time; Jupiter re-presents it, as circumstances demand, within the poem’s time. But he does also say, ‘I have given dominion without end.’ He seems to be both inside and outside the poem’s time.31

Jupiter’s speech to Venus is introduced by the words dehinc talia fatur, ‘then he speaks thus’ (1.256). The verb fari is an archaic word which, in the words of Maurizio Bettini, ‘represents a way of speaking that far surpasses other normal utterances in terms of its authority, efficacy, and credibility’.32 As Bettini suggests, the verb has connotations of revelation and is associated with prophetic expression, a link that may be reflected in the way that fari is never found in the first person in the present indicative, but only in the future indicative. ‘fabor, rather than *for, is the form that Roman authors employ: in other words, if a speaker wishes to perform an act of fari, he must project the moment of his utterance into the future,’ Bettini remarks33 – precisely as Jupiter declares to Venus in 1.262–63, when reassuring her that fate remains immoveable, ‘for I shall explain at some length, since this anxiety is eating away at you’ (fabor enim, quando haec te cura remordet,/longius). It may be, as Bettini suggests, that the utterances of Jupiter have a performative aspect, that is, they bring into being the events of which he speaks.34 However, if this is the case, the temporality is thoroughly scrambled: this future-oriented ‘revelation’ (fabor) is presented as a corroboration of what has been said (fata) already. We will search for an originary moment of performative utterance, a moment of full presence, in vain. As a character and an agent, Jupiter does not stand outside the narrative’s temporality. Augustine’s God he is emphatically not. Sicut Deus falsus erat, ita mendax vates, Augustine remarks mordantly of Virgil: ‘just as his god was false, so the poet is a liar.’35 ‘Liar’ is a harsh judgement. If Virgil is elusive in his representation of Fate and its relationship with Jupiter, it is perhaps because he too was grappling with the sort of questions that exercised Augustine, a complex of theological issues comparable with those associated in the Confessions with the Word of God and how it operates within time and history. Indeed, when we examine the imagery in which Virgil seeks to gesture towards the notion of Fate, we may be reminded of the way in which reading a text was the metaphor, however inadequate, adopted by Augustine in his attempt to understand eternity.

When Jupiter announces his intention to speak of the future to Venus, he explains his action in 1.262 in a cryptic phrase that defies ready translation or interpretation: volvens fatorum arcana movebo. In his commentary on the line, R.G. Austin suggests that arcanus ‘implies what is known to initiates only’, kept away from public view, while volvens ‘is probably a metaphor from the unrolling of a book’, by which he means a papyrus scroll, though he qualifies the last statement by saying that volvens ‘might be no more than “turning over” in the mind’.36 A number of images may intersect in the word. The most intriguing gloss on these words comes in the story of the murder of Julius Caesar at the end of Book 15 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which is clearly modelled on this scene, and, like so many Ovidian allusions to Virgil, works to deconstruct the ways in which Virgil’s texts create their effects. When Venus attempts to hide her descendant Caesar in a cloud as, centuries earlier during the Trojan war, she had protected Paris from Menelaus, and Aeneas from Diomedes, Jupiter admonishes her (15.807–15):

Do you mean to disturb [movere] unconquerable Fate [insuperabile fatum] on your own, my daughter? You may go yourself into [intres licet ipsa] the abode of the three sisters [the Parcae]. There you will see the records of all that happens [rerum tabularia] on a vast structure made of bronze and solid iron, tablets which, being secure and eternal [tuta atque aeterna], fear neither the thunderings of the sky nor the wrath of the thunderbolt nor any ruinous collapse; there you will find engraved on everlasting adamant the destiny of your race. I myself have read them [legi] and noted them in my mind and shall recount them [referam], so that you may no longer be ignorant of what is to be.

Fate is given an unmistakably textual form, which is ‘eminently Roman: heroically “bureaucratic”, assuming the form of a state archive’,37 and paradoxically amusing in that this archive records the future as inexhaustibly as it does the past. It is explicitly ‘eternal’, not subject to the normal processes of destruction in time, not even by Jupiter’s own thunderbolt. Ovid’s Jupiter remarks to Venus that she has permission to enter the archives of the Parcae, implying that it is closed to others, which seems to pick up on the use of arcana by Virgil’s Jupiter. Moreover, Ovid’s Jupiter states that he has ‘read’ these records, and intends to ‘recount’ Fate (the future tense in referam picks up on fabor used by Virgil’s Jupiter in Aeneid 1.261) by reference to this prior ‘text’.

‘Jupiter says he will open yet farther the secrets that lie in the book of fate,’ Virgil’s commentator Conington explains.38 The ‘book’ that Jupiter ‘unrolls’ in the Aeneid is metaphorically fleeting,39 but Ovid’s brazen literalisation can help us to sense its entailments. In the Metamorphoses, Jupiter represents himself explicitly as a reader, and the rerum tabularia – a phrase so aptly characterised by Bettini as ‘bureaucratic’ – that he reads look like nothing so much as the ordered, linear succession of events which narratologists term the idealised story. That story, as we discussed earlier, exists only as a theoretical construct to facilitate analysis of the narrative, but is regarded as logically prior to the actual narrative discourse which is said (and here the logical priority comes through clearly) to ‘emplot’ it. Virgil’s Jupiter may be responsible for both the story (outside time) and the narratives he ‘recounts’: narrativisation is characteristically represented as a repetition of something that is, in some sense, already there, and Jupiter’s speech to Venus contains intimations, at least, of repetition, though whether this is a repetition of an earlier telling or of Fate itself is again a matter of prevarication.

As a character within the poem, Virgil’s Jupiter is the consummate rhetorician, an artful and politically astute narrator who ‘tailors’ or ‘packages’ his accounts to suit their immediate audiences, as when he configures a selective narrative of the future around Venus’s lineage. In particular, he must equip his narratives with beginnings and ends so as to endow them with the unifying form that will grant them their intelligibility. With this in mind, look again at the verb Virgil uses of his Jupiter in 1.262, movebo, which is picked up by Ovid’s Jupiter when he protests to Venus that she is preparing to alter Fate (sola insuperabile fatum,/nata, movere paras?, Metamorphoses 15.807–8). At the start of the second half of the Aeneid, the narrator calls upon the Muse Erato to guide him in telling of the battles Aeneas and his men have fought when they landed in Italy, a prayer that finds its climax in the words maius opus moveo, ‘this is a greater theme I now set in motion’ (7.45). The Muse is, as before (1.8), the guardian of the story that the poet, enmeshed in time and circumstance, can only narrate. In poetic contexts at least, movere has the status of a quasi-technical term for narrating ‘to the moment’;40 Jupiter as a character and an agent within the Aeneid can only narrate thus. But he has just reassured Venus in 1.257–58 that the ‘fates of your descendants remain unmoved’ (manent immota tuorum/fata): unaltered, of course, but also in a form that lies beyond any particular time-bound telling of them. So, to paraphrase Ovid’s Jupiter when he says to Venus in Metamorphoses 15.807–8, sola insuperabile fatum,/nata, movere paras?: ‘you want to go it alone and narrate Fate in your own way? That’s not going to overcome it, my girl.’

The image of fate as a written text, and the very phrase manent immota recur in Helenus’s description in Aeneid 3.443–52 of the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl, the prophetess who will accompany Aeneas on his journey to the Underworld. She foretells (‘sings’) the fates (fata canit, 3.444), and writes her prophecies on leaves, which she sets in order (digerit in numerum, 3.446), and keeps locked up in her cave. There they remain unmoved in their places and do not depart from their order (illa manent immota locis neque ab ordine cedunt, 3.447). Her filing system evokes the archive we saw in Ovid, and, in locking up the leaves in her cave, she tries to maintain a strict consecutive arrangement that reflects the order of Fate’s unnarrated story. However, the slightest breath of wind when the door of her cave is opened by anyone coming in to consult her is sufficient to throw the leaves into disarray, and she makes no effort to replace them in their proper positions or to reunite the verses of her prophecies (nec revocare situs aut iungere carmina curat, 3.451). As a result, people go away disappointed. The stable, ideal order, the full knowledge of past and future, is disrupted by ‘movement’ of any kind. The imagery of movement recalls Aristotle’s formulation in the Physics (4.11, 219a2–4) that time is not motion but has something to do with it (ti tēs kinēseōs estin). Any attempt to set in motion the details of the story involves the imposition of beginnings and ends, and therefore offers only partial intelligibility. Moreover, the story is never told without a motive. The images of archive and book allow the story, rather than being simply a succession of inert and self-contained incidents in a purely chronological succession, to assume a shape or form that is not subject to change. The physical text acts as a symbol of something that persists over time, notionally unchanged. But Ovid’s archive is like no archive we know. It preserves the records of past events, which is familiar enough, but the records of events yet to happen already exist in it as well. It is the same when Fate is figured as a book. Both images, it should be noted, suggest that what exists is not the events themselves but records of them, their representation in textual form.

This poses a metaphysical challenge to the standard narratological distinction between story and discourse. Whether the story is one of fiction or of fact, narratologists must make the assumption that the linear order of the story is the ‘true’ one, since it is only then that they can present the discourse as a modification of that order. Jonathan Culler puts it thus: ‘narratological analysis of a text requires one to treat the discourse as a representation of events which are conceived of as independent of any particular narrative perspective or presentation and which are thought of as having the properties of real events.’41 Two key terms are in play here, representation and real. They tend to crop up together, but their relationship can be construed in two opposing ways. The way that they are routinely deployed in narratology, as Culler formulates it, suggests that the events of the story are re-presented, and this term entails a logic that sees the story as anterior to or before the emplotment of its constituent events in any particular discourse. This is metaphysics as Plato would like it to be: the Form, eternal, unchanging, true and real, is prior to its representation, which is an imperfect replica of it. But, Culler suggests, that anteriority, assumed as a principle within narratological analysis, is in important respects misleading, as the story can be seen as an idealised extrapolation from the events in the discourse, which gives logical priority to the discourse. This can be readily grasped in the case of fictional narratives, but has purchase as well in respect of narratives like the Aeneid that could be regarded as factual or historical. This is to reverse the poles of Platonic metaphysics. Reality, rather than being seen as prior to the act of representation, is seen as its effect. Much of the language we use presumes the Platonic take on metaphysics as the ‘true’ one. Even to speak of an ‘incident’ or ‘event’ colludes with this perspective, and it requires a reversal of the poles to envisage how a continuum of action can be constituted as an ‘event’ as a result of its representation, the imposition of boundaries that mark off its beginning and its end and so represent it as a unity. This is what Aristotle strives to do in the Poetics in thinking about what constitutes a praxis. In turn, in the Physics he isolates a period of time that can be measured in the mind by imposing at either end the boundary of a ‘now’ on the continuum of time. One ‘now’ is the point that marks the beginning, the other the end. This period can be of any length, from the instantaneous to the total history of the sons of men. And the former can be incorporated as part of the latter. These metaphysical tensions are encoded in the language we use. Is a factual narrative a record of things ‘done’ (facta, perfect passive participle of facio) by the characters, or things ‘made’ (facta) by the narrator?

Both the Platonic perspective and its counterpart see the act of representation as sovereign, though their metaphysical compasses take them off in opposite directions. From the former perspective, reality can take on a providential aspect, existing above and beyond any representation of it and not subject to change; from the latter, as the product of representation, reality is provisional in the sense of awaiting further re-presentations which will reconfigure it in ways as yet unforeseen. If Fate or the total history of the sons of men is thought of as a book, it is hard to get away from the idea that it has an Author. Augustine and Virgil both adopt a metaphysical perspective that is effectively Platonic. Humankind’s role is to try, however imperfectly, to understand that Author and our role within his creation, although Augustine issues a warning not to get palmed off with shoddy gods like Jupiter, theologically undertheorised. Barthes cheerfully develops a metaphysical perspective that is the antithesis to the Platonic. For him, we encounter an exploded sprawl that writers seek to give shape to in their discourse, though if ‘the narrator reduces exploded reality to a slim and pure logos’, one effect of that success can ironically be to precipitate precisely the Platonic perspective and its sense that the discourse appears to be the imperfect representation of a pre-ordained reality. In Barthes’s view, the writer deploys his discursive resources ‘to reduce reality to a point in time, and to abstract from the depth of a multiplicity of experiences a pure verbal act, freed from the existential roots of knowledge, and directed towards a logical link with other acts, processes, a general movement of the world: it aims at maintaining a hierarchy in the realm of facts.’42 In seeking to understand history, which in narrative terms is not simply the past, but the past-in-relation-to-the-present-in-relation-to-the-future, Virgil’s narrator imposes his boundaries on the continuum of time and action to take us back to a point in time when Aeneas is shipwrecked on the shores of Carthage, a point when the future is already (to the narrator) and not yet (to Aeneas) known. From Aeneas’s point of view, the narrator’s knowledge would sound prophetic: what (for the narrator) happened was-to-happen. The effect is to make Aeneas’s future feel determined. No human narrative is total, in its scope or in the intelligibility it offers. The passage of time obliges us to re-narrativise, but so does the limited intelligibility offered by existing narratives. Later circumstances and later texts oblige us to reexamine earlier ones, seeing them as fashioned of and for their moment, however right they may have seemed at the time. Virgil’s masterstroke is to take this narrative logic and place the narrator of the poem and the readers within it, such that the future and what is-to-happen is, in some sense, already known. The following section will explore that qualification ‘in some sense’.

LOOKING TOWARDS THE UNIVERSAL

Virgil’s strategy of making Jupiter an internal narrator within the Aeneid allows the poem’s story, Rome’s rise to imperial dominion, to be equated with Fate or History. Howsoever this is emplotted or narrativised in particular circumstances to particular ends by particular historical actors ‘within’ the narrative, the story itself is assumed to remain unmoved and unchanged: for the Romans, there are ‘no boundaries of space or time’ (nec metas rerum nec tempora, 1.278) and ‘dominion without end’ (imperium sine fine, 1.279). Emplotment involves trajectory, and the teleological movement associated with the narrative of the Aeneid intersects in Jupiter’s prophecy with the narrator’s present in the Augustan age on its way into a future which is, strictly speaking, infinite in space and time. If the past and present of the poet’s narrative are replete with specific historical detail, the future is not. You will search in vain for explicit references to, let us say, the successors of Augustus, the discovery of the New World, or the landing on the moon. The Aeneid sets itself up as the record of a prophecy that looks towards the end, but not in the sense of a specific content. ‘Teleology,’ Jacques Derrida has remarked, ‘is, at bottom...a way of knowing beforehand the form that will have to be taken by what is still to come’.43 In the ellipsis of the quotation, Derrida says that teleology is ‘a negation of the future’. His take on teleology encourages us to think about what we mean by ‘the future’. The Latinate future, from the future participle of the verb ‘to be’, suggests what ‘is about to be’, that is, it sees the future as a modality of the present, and, in a way, as already existing (is about-to-be). It thus reflects a metaphysics of presence. While we regularly anticipate (‘capture in advance’), predict (‘say in advance’) or expect (‘look out for’) something, this, from Derrida’s perspective, is not the future but (to use the metaphor of the scroll once more) the unfolding of what is anticipated, predicted or expected from the point of view of the present. Against this, Derrida frequently emphasises the etymological associations of the French l’avenir, what is to come (the à-venir). What is to come is in this sense unknowable in advance: who knows what may arrive in times to come?44 For Derrida, teleology and the metaphysics of presence find their fullest expression in apocalyptic discourse – discourse itself and with it everything that speculates on vision, the imminence of the end, theophany, parousia, the last judgement’ – without assuming that this gives you access to the truth.45

The narrator of the Aeneid does not know what will happen historically subsequent to its composition, but anticipates that whatever happens – good or bad, expected or unexpected – can be accommodated to the form it expresses; and in part, as we shall see in this section, that is reflected in the poem’s reception. David Quint has suggested that there is a particularly strong collusion between narrative and power at work in epic discourse, not least in the Aeneid, where the narrative of history is associated with the acquisition of imperium:

Epic takes particularly literally the axiom that history belongs to the winners. Imperial conquest of geopolitical space – the imposition of a single identifiable order upon different regions and peoples – becomes a process of history making. The Aeneid appears to identify history itself with a new idea of universal world history.46

The idea of a universal world history has been elegantly defined by one of its most recent practitioners, Francis Fukuyama: ‘A Universal History of mankind is not the same thing as a history of the universe. That is, it is not an encyclopaedic catalogue of everything that is known about humanity, but rather an attempt to find a meaningful pattern in the overall development of human societies generally.’47 Quint suggests that the narrative of this triumphal version of history takes on the shape of the well-made literary plot as defined by Aristotle in the Poetics in terms of a unity of action, with beginning, middle and end, and was so developed by the second-century BC Greek historian Polybius.48 Polybius begins his history with the outbreak of the Second Punic War between Rome and Hannibal in 221 BC, and offers the following rationale for making this point in time the beginning of his narrative (1.3.3–4, my emphasis):

Now up to this time the transactions [praxeis] of the world had been, so to speak, scattered, being as widely separated in their impulses and results as in their localities. But from this time, History becomes an organic whole [hoionei sōmatoeidē]: the affairs [praxeis] of Italy and Libya are interconnected with those of Asia and Greece, and all lead up to one end [pros hen ginesthai telos].

Previously history had been characterised by multiple, disconnected ‘actions’ (he shares the term praxis with Aristotle) or episodes, but now they are gathered up into a single coherent whole which leads up to one end (telos). That his notion of universal history is shaped by Aristotle’s thinking is suggested also by his use of the adjective sōmatoeidēs, ‘body-shaped’, which recalls Aristotle’s description of the unity of the well-made epic plot, a single and complete action (mian praxin holēn kai teleian) with beginning, middle and end, as ‘like a single, whole living thing’ (hōsper zōon hen holon, Poetics 1459a18–20).49 Aristotle had claimed that poetry was more philosophical and more serious than history, because history speaks of particulars, events that have occurred (ta genomena, e.g. what Alcibíades did), whereas the job of the poet is to speak of universais (ta katholou), the sort of things that could occur (hoia an genoito, Poetics 1451a36–1451b11). Polybius’s application of Aristotelian form to the past has the effect of suggesting that events themselves are invested with the kind of emplotment they would have in a work of literature, and have a teleological character, irrespective of any narrativisation of them.

The notion that History in this sense (capital H) has an end or goal is picked up in the title of Fukuyama’s account of the triumph of Western liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War, The End of History and the Last Man. In an essay of 1989 from which his book was to emerge, Fukuyama makes clear his commitment to the notion of the directionality of history as manifested in (my emphasis) ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ in the context of the breach of the Berlin Wall:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’ yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.50

The ‘End of History’ does not crudely imply that events stop happening, nor that time stands still (though there are intimations of this to which we shall return), but that there seems to be a clear and indisputable winner, even if the process that leads to ultimate fulfilment is, for Fukuyama as it was for Polybius and for Virgil, as yet incomplete.

The End of History is, curiously, both already and not yet at hand, and the cessation of the ideological conflicts that marks ‘the passing of a particular period of postwar history’ ushers in, he maintains, the reign of peace. There will be setbacks along the way, he concedes, but the outcome is beyond doubt: to echo Derrida on teleology, we know already the form that will have to be taken by what is still to come. Events since 1989 may seem to have rendered Fukuyama’s triumphalist tone somewhat hollow, but the logic of universal history allows those events to be seen, from a projected future retrospective point of fulfilment, as a temporary setback. The ‘already but not yet’ structure characteristic of teleological universalising narratives (whether of Empire or Western liberal democracy) asks us to accept that the phenomena that characterise ‘the End of History’ are present, albeit imperfectly (i.e. incompletely). Those phenomena are imperfectly present since, as Fukuyama puts it, ‘victory...has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world.’ Polybius significantly suggests that the idea that History has a shape and a direction can become internalised and itself play a part in the motivation of historical agents (1.3.6):

For it was their victory over the Carthaginians in the war I have mentioned, and their belief that thereby the most important and greatest step towards universal dominion had been taken, which encouraged the Romans for the first time to stretch out their hands (stas cheiras ekteinein) towards the rest, and to cross with an army into Greece and Asia.

The image of stretching out their hands signifies the intentionality of the Romans, not simply to subjugate these lands but by their gesture to point to the overarching meaning of that particular act of subjugation.

What temporal experience is associated with this narrative of Universal History? The Aeneid, primarily through the figures of Aeneas and of the epic narrator himself, offers a dramatisation of what it means to enter that consciousness of being within History. Caught in the storm in the first book, Aeneas anticipates that he is very close to the ‘end’ of a particular story, one that is coterminous with his life, and evaluates his experience in that light. He believes he has nothing to look forward to, and he experiences his presumed end as demise. His despair leads him to wish that that demise had come earlier, an end from which, in his present circumstances, he believes he would have been able to perceive a (marginally) more satisfactory order or meaning to his life. This turns out not to be the end, of course, which recedes into the future, with Aeneas once more in the midst of things, and he can now anticipate a future for him and his men, one from which, as he tells them, they may be able to look back on the present hardships with some degree of pleasure: ‘perhaps even these things at some stage it will be a pleasure to recall’ (forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, 1.203). ‘These things’ include encountering Scylla, Charybdis and the Cyclops (1.200–2), untoward episodes that would fall under the rubric of Derrida’s arrivant:

the future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared...is heralded by species of monsters. A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future: it would already be a predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant.51

For Derrida, being ‘open to the future’ involves welcoming the untoward when it happens, but Aeneas’s strategy is rather different. He is keen to relegate the untoward to the past as part of a narrative that looks to a predictable, or, as Derrida puts it, a ‘programmable tomorrow’: ‘through various disasters, through so many dangers, we are directing our course [tendimus, ‘stretching’] to Latium, where the fates show [ostendunt] us a place to settle in peace’ (1.204–6).52 The monstrous is accommodated to a narrative that finds its end, grammatically as well as thematically, in the future perfect (meminisse iuvabit, 1.203). The arrival of Polybius’s Romans may well be ‘monstrous’ and dubiously welcome to the inhabitants of Greece and Asia, but the Romans themselves are prepared for whatever hardship and sacrifice to achieve what they have ‘stretched out their hands’ towards.

In the shift of outlook in these two speeches of Aeneas we can feel the ‘movement’ of history, of time and circumstance, but it is also the movement of narrational perspective, for Aeneas is implicitly the narrator of his story at this point, and he imagines a future ‘present’ from which he will look back and view the events of the current present in a different, and more positive, way. This enacts the temporal distinction we explored in Chapter 1 between the narrated self and the narrating self, each with his own ‘present’, the division of temporal perspective which we saw to be constitutive of the understanding associated with narrative. Immediately following this scene, another narrator is introduced, Jupiter, a third- rather than first-person narrator, but one whose narration similarly imposes a division of temporal perspective, here a vast one: things may look bad now, his message is to Venus, but from a future ‘present’, they will look much more positive, as if to echo Aeneas’s sentiment: forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Through signs and prophecies, through visiting another privileged narrator with precise and detailed knowledge of the ‘future’, his father Anchises in the Underworld, through gazing in puzzlement at the depiction of Roman history yet-to-happen on the shield his mother has had fashioned supernaturally for him, Aeneas (or, more precisely perhaps, the reader of this narrative) learns to adopt a perspective that transcends the limits of his own existence and to sense a significance in what has happened to him that seems lacking when viewed only within those narrow limits.

For the reader of the Aeneid to undergo that experience, the role of the poem’s narrator is crucial. As we have seen, he represents himself and his readers as ‘within’ rather than ‘outside’ the (hi)story he narrates, and so without privileged knowledge of the details of the future beyond the historical moment of narration in the Augustan age or beyond the moment of reading, whenever that takes place. How does he negotiate this problem? In the description in Book 8 of the Aeneid of Aeneas’s originary visit (as an uninvited but welcome guest)53 to the settlement of Pallanteum, where the city of Rome will one day stand, Aeneas is guided across a site described to him by its present inhabitant, Evander, in terms of its past history. However, the epic narrator’s voice superimposes on the site terms of description and names which cannot have been known to Evander or Aeneas, but which are familiar to the narrator and his audience: ‘from here, Evander leads Aeneas to the Tarpeian seat and the Capitol, golden now, but in other times bristling with forest thickets’ (hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit/aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis, 8.347–48). The juxtaposition of the deictic adverbs nunc, ‘now’, and olim, ‘in other times’, draws attention to the way in which two temporalities, that of Aeneas and that of the epic’s narrator, are being brought together to provide a historical perspective that stretches across the centuries that divide them. Similarly a few lines later, ‘conversing thus amongst themselves, they were approaching the dwelling of the humble Evander, and all around they could see the cattle lowing in the Forum of Rome and the chic Carinae’ (talibus inter se dictis ad tecta subibant/pauperis Evandri, passimque armenta videbant/Romanoque foro et lautis mugire Carinis, 8.359–61). The narrative’s ‘present’ is the time of Aeneas, centuries before the foundation of Rome and the building of its landmarks and districts, but these passages offer a view ‘forwards’ to a ‘future’, which also happens to be the narrator’s ‘present’, when these features stand out in all their splendour.

One moment we can designate a ‘present’ is superimposed upon another such, but neither in itself offers a plenitude, and each is a complex temporality involving recollection of the past and anticipation of the future. Aeneas’s experience of Pallanteum is moulded by Evander’s historical description of it as experiencing a ‘golden age’ (aurea.../saecula, 8.324–25) of peace for its primeval indigenous inhabitants before a decline characterised by war and a migration of peoples that has brought Evander (and Aeneas) here (8.326–36). The immense passage of time and a trajectory of decline are further emphasised as Evander points out to Aeneas the ruins of two towns, Ianiculum and Saturnia, on the site (8.355–57). In turn, the narrator’s ‘present’ looks back to a time when the site was ‘bristling with forest thickets’, but plots a trajectory of progress to the ‘Capitol, golden now’ (8.347–48): the trajectories of decline and rise have completed a cycle in returning the site to a golden age – an age characterised by the Augustan peace. That this may be an ongoing cycle is intimated in the ambiguous temporal adverb olim, which can refer to the past or the future: the Capitol, golden now, may one day be, as it had been in the past, bristling with forest thickets, no less a ruin than the settlements of Ianiculum and Saturnia.54 However, that need not be a definitive end, for if such cycles or eddies are thought to exist within the movement of history, there will be a succession of rises and declines, advances and setbacks – some of which may well seem monstrous, in Derrida’s sense, to those involved. David Wood remarks that History in this metaphysical sense ‘is the unbroken transmission and development of meaning. Contingency, plurality, death, breaks, circles, regressions are all to be appropriated within a wider continuity.’55

A phenomenon gains historical shape, order and meaning only when the events it embraces can be viewed from the vantage point of the moment deemed (retrospectively, currently or prospectively) to be its end, and that end can be troped as fulfilment as well as demise. Both Aeneas, whether despairingly caught in the storm sent by Juno or wandering around Pallanteum suffused with hope, and the epic narrator of the Aeneid are, as we have seen, located within the movement of history. They are historicising as they go along, in the midst of time and circumstance, anticipating a moment, which they may believe to be proximate or very distant, that will mark a moment of ending or closure. For those historicising as they go along, the moment of closure on the significance of a chain of events lies at the point when a seemingly conclusive evaluation or judgement, seen in terms of fulfilment or demise, will have been made. Even the arch-rhetorician Jupiter in his prophecy to Venus asks her to look forward from that point to a moment at which she will be convinced that everything has come about as foretold: ‘you will see the city and the promised walls of Lavinium, and...’ (1.258ff.). For Aeneas in the storm, the moment that will establish that his travails have not been worthwhile seems imminent indeed. The tense I have been using, the future perfect (the ‘completed’ future), is emblematic of the closure anticipated by those historicising as they go along, but the closure is one contingent on events yet to happen: a historicisation made as one goes along anxiously awaits the moment of its historicisation. At some point in the future, will the Capitol, golden now, still be golden? The closure that any subsequent historicisation imposes is contingent on the moment, and the perception of circumstances, when it happens to arrive, and the closure so imposed determines the degree to which the earlier anticipated judgement is seen as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. So, Aeneas’s evaluation of his life in the storm is seen, in the light of what subsequently happens, as wrong, his hopes as he walked around Pallanteum as perhaps well short of what was to transpire. The narrator of the Aeneid signals his awareness, in the cyclical pattern he attributes to history in its movement, of the historical situatedness of his own judgement and its contingency upon what will subsequently come to pass. This virtual invitation to look back on the Virgilian narrator was accepted by the humanist scholar Poggio Bracciolini, who in his On the Vicissitudes of Fortune (De varietate fortunae) of 1448 depicted himself and a companion climbing the Capitoline hill in a self-conscious reprise of the tour of Evander and Aeneas. In Edward Gibbon’s account of the passage in the very final chapter of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, they ‘reposed themselves among the ruins of columns and temples and viewed from that commanding spot the wide and various prospect of desolation’. In Gibbon’s wonderful translation of Poggio, ‘The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates, is now enclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes.’56

For those historicising as they go along, the ‘present’ moment and the judgement it encourages may be characterised by a sense of provisional fulfilment, as it does for the narrator of the Aeneid in the Augustan age, or, as for Poggio, demise; but at some point in the future, these ‘same’ things may very well look different. However, if the ‘present’ is regarded not as one of an ongoing or moving series of vantage points, but as the final one – which it will insofar as the ‘present’ is endowed with a sense of certainty and feels capable of passing a definitive judgement of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – that is to put an end to history and to adopt a God’s-eye view, which is to see in the phenomena under review their direction and final meaning all along, as Jupiter does. However, such a providential view is not restricted to the gods. As the Aeneid demonstrates, narrative can be so orchestrated as to make that view available to any mere mortal, and that view can be internalised so as to become a modality of experience – as it is for Fukuyama (in 1989, at any rate).

To inhabit History as a concept or modality of experience is to have enormous self-belief. In the Aeneid, History is mapped on to imperium, and the plot of History is Rome’s progress towards ‘dominion without end’ (imperium sine fine, 1.279). In his recent study of the meaning of the term imperium, John Richardson suggests that its primary association in the Augustan period was ‘power’, but it was coming to be associated with ‘territorial extension as such’, and ‘in nine cases at least, this power is represented as of immense or even infinite extent.’57 So, at the time of composition of the Aeneid (and, as the passages cited by Richardson suggest, the poem was crucial in this respect), imperium is coming to take on its now familiar connotations of ‘empire’. Empire is characterised by transgression, the crossing of boundaries; it reacts to ‘outside’ by the desire to make it ‘inside’, until, in the Virgilian formulation, that boundary is rendered meaningless as empire becomes universal. From a temporal perspective, universal Empire (capital E) has an orientation towards a future that is conceived of as fully completed, a future that will have been achieved in its entirety: the future perfect, the completed future, is both its tense and its modality. This future, confidently anticipated (even if, conceptually, infinitely deferred), gets refracted back onto the present, as simultaneously already, but not yet, completed. On the shores of Carthage, Aeneas troped fulfilment as ‘a place the fates show us to settle in peace’ (1.204–5). Thus the Augustan peace described in Jupiter’s speech to Venus in 1.291–96 can already, but not yet, be the ‘end of history’. The reign of peace does not preclude wars, but they are subsumed to its logic, as Anchises in the Underworld suggests. Beyond death, Anchises has access to the future as well as the past, as his description to Aeneas of the heroes of Rome yet to be born makes clear. In 6.851–53 Anchises speaks these words:

tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento

(hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem,

parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

Make it your business and don’t you forget, Roman, to rule the nations with your dominion (this will be your science), and to impose civilized behaviour upon peace, to show mercy to those who submit and to crush the arrogant in war.

His apostrophe is notionally spoken to Aeneas, but it summons up an eternal present, the discursive present of reading we explored in Chapter 1. To everyone – no matter where, no matter when – who feels addressed by the vocative Romane, ethical confidence is married to the confidence of historical judgement, and the means, war, is justified by the end, peace. Such a Roman feels sure that he is, ultimately, right – historically, morally, politically, epistemologically.

The God’s-eye view associated with this modality of experience, for all that it believes it has transcended history and circumstance, remains a view from within history, and subject to the pressures of re-narrativisation. The view of a god like Jupiter, as he appears in the Aeneid foretelling for the Romans dominion without end, has the capacity to be overtaken by events that seem to those involved to be so conclusive as to challenge the modality of experience it represents, and to compel re-historicisation. Such was the conclusion of Augustine, as he wrote City of God in the wake of the sack of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths in August 410AD. The idea that Rome was ‘the Eternal City’, which had become current in the Augustan period,58 was not restricted to pagans, but was held by some Christians as well, ‘who thought of the Roman Empire as the instrument of divine providence, and therefore, potentially, as an empire without end’.59 The Christian writer Prudentius in his poem Against Symmachus, written after an earlier incursion by Alaric had been averted at Pollentia, south of Turin, in 402, clearly had no difficulty in appropriating the language of the Virgilian Jupiter when proclaiming of the emperor Theodosius that ‘in short he sets limits neither of space nor of time, he points to empire without end’ (denique nec metas statuit nec tempora ponit/imperium sine fine docet, 2.541–42).60 The outcome at this juncture, defeat for Alaric, confirmed the logic, but the events of 410 showed Alaric’s sack of the Eternal City as a monstrous arrivant that resisted attempts to accommodate it.

So, for many who inhabited the idea of Universal Empire as a modality of experience, the sack of the city was of traumatic psychological significance, an existential crisis. St Jerome wrote, ‘I was so distressed that it was like the old proverb: I didn’t even know my own name.’61 For Augustine, the conclusion to be drawn was clear: ‘all earthly kingdoms will have their end’ (finis erit terrenis omnibus regnis, Sermon 105.8.11), and the sack of Rome definitively gives the lie to Jupiter’s prediction of Rome as an ‘empire without end’. He is inclined to forgive Virgil for his part in all this, but condemns Jupiter as a false god and a deceptive prophet (Sermon 105.7.10):

Those who have promised eternity to earthly kingdoms...have lied in order to flatter. A certain poet of theirs brought on Jupiter to speak and he said of the Romans, ‘For them I place boundaries of neither space nor time: I have granted empire without end.’ Clearly this is not true...If we wished to reproach and mock Virgil because he said this... he would say to us: ‘Yes, I know. But what could I do, as a peddler of words to the Romans, but flatter them by promising something that was false? Still even in this I was careful: when I said, “I have granted empire without end,” I brought on their own Jupiter to say it. I did not say this false thing in my own persona, but imposed the lying persona of Jupiter: as the god was false, so too was he a deceptive prophet.’62

From the vantage point of his present moment, Augustine feels certain enough to pass judgement upon Jupiter as wrong, but although he rejects Jupiter as a false god, and believes that no historical regime can fulfil the Virgilian prediction of ‘empire without end’, he nonetheless retains a commitment to it as an idea or concept: ‘Terrestrial kingdoms undergo change; but he shall come of whom it is said, “And of his kingdom there shall be no end”’ (Sermon 105.7.9). The power of Virgil’s conceptualisation impressed itself upon Augustine also from the speech of Anchises. He quotes it in the preface to City of God to sum up the earthly city’s desire to dominate others, in contrast to the divine law, which states that ‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’63 In the terrestrial city of lived experience, we all crave peace (even, Augustine suggests, a monster like Virgil’s Cacus [City of God 19.12]), and we fight wars to achieve it. The imperial prospect of universal peace becomes mapped into his scheme as the ultimate good, the perfect peace of eternal life, ‘of such a kind and so great that nothing can be better or greater than it’ (City of God 19.10). This peace is not only physical but intellectual. History as narrative, we have seen, is associated with the language of movement and disturbance. At the ‘end of history’ lies perfect peace, the peace that passes all understanding.64

Alongside the earthly city subject to the flux of history and associated with the flawed vision of a false god, Augustine proposes an equivalent under the providential guidance of the one true God,65 revealed in a more secure form than Virgil’s narrative, brilliant though that may be (City of God 11.1):

The City of God of which we are treating is vouched for by those Scriptures whose supremacy over every product of human genius does not depend on the chance impulses of the minds of men, but is manifestly due to the guiding power of God’s supreme providence, and exercises sovereign authority over the literature of all mankind.

‘The chance impulses of the minds of men’ translates Augustine’s phrase fortuitis motibus animorum, where the word motus (‘movement’) seems to connote the human being’s entanglement in time, in language and in the necessity to narrate (movere). Augustine conceives of God as existing outside those constraints, and not needing to narrate. An acute awareness of the limitations of the human viewpoint within history was no disincentive to Augustine producing in the City of God a work of Universal History on the grandest scale.66 As Donald J. Wilcox has put it, ‘The City of God is not a historical narrative, but an essay on the meaning of history, and in it Augustine used historical events only as examples of his theory.’67 Within human history, Augustine singled out two particularly famous examples of empires that were transient, Babylon and, following its sack, Rome (City of God 18.2), which he saw as the two most prominent episodes in the human will to power. He thus acknowledges the human capacity to see unity within time:

his connection of Babylonian and Roman history indicated his commitment to a unified time whose significance could be seen by the human mind. He considered the two empires not as the greatest in fact but as the most important in fame. It was in the consciousness of those looking at the past that the empires of the world took on a unity, just as in the Confessions he showed that the unity of time itself depended on the creative activity of the human soul.68

This mammoth work falls into two parts. The first, a rebuttal of pagan accusations that the sack of Rome was the result of Christian neglect of the pagan gods, treats the City of God ‘both as it exists in this world of time, a stranger among the ungodly, living by faith, and as it stands in the security of its everlasting seat’ (City of God 1, Preface). In the second, he says, ‘My task is to discuss, to the best of my power, the rise, the development and the destined ends of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, the cities which we find, as I have said, interwoven, as it were, in this present transitory world, and mingled with one another’ (City of God 11.1).69

In a work with its own totalising pretensions, Augustine thus sets out to supplant the pagan Roman tradition and to make History and Empire synonymous with Christian providence. It is clear to Augustine that Jupiter’s prospective narrative of Roman history in the Aeneid as an empire without end has been shown to be conclusively wrong in the light of what he views as a closural event, the sack of Rome, and that this also strikes a fatal blow at pagan theological concepts. In his discussion of historical revisionism, Reinhart Koselleck suggests that, though history may be written by the victors in the short run, ‘historical gains in knowledge stem in the long run from the vanquished...The experience of being vanquished contains an epistemological potential that transcends its cause, especially when the vanquished are required to rewrite general history in conjunction with their own.’70 In particular, concepts assumed to be universal are shown to be specific to their historical moment and in need of rigorous re-theorisation if they are to be re-stabilised.

Nonetheless, it is also the case, in Augustine’s exhortation to the people of Rome in City of God 2.29 to abandon their worship of pagan gods, that Virgil’s conceptualisation of Empire as precipitated in the narrative of the Aeneid survives as a structure or shell for his own ideas:

Take possession now of the heavenly country for which you will endure but the smallest hardship, and there you will reign in truth and forever. There you will find no hearth of Vesta, no Capitoline stone [i.e. statue of Jupiter], but the one true God who places no bounds of space or time but will grant an empire without end.71

Only such a God can know ‘the total history of “the sons of men”’; in contrast, as he had argued in Confessions 11, the internal human experience of temporality renders all human historical judgements relative. In his work On Christian Teaching (2.28.44), he argues:

Historical narrative also describes human institutions of the past, but it should not for that reason itself be counted among human institutions. For whatever has already gone into the past and cannot be undone must be considered part of the history of time, whose creator and controller is God.72

He seeks to open out a distinction between history in the sense of historical narratives, written by humans about human institutions within the human experience of temporality, and History, which he describes as an order of time, that is created by God, guided by his providence, and ‘cannot be undone’. This he maps on to the doctrine of two empires, allowing him to relativise any human account of a human institution, such as the Roman empire. In accommodating their eschatological faith to pagan myth, many Christians like Prudentius had coupled the rule of Christ to the persistence of Rome. When the sack of Rome failed to coincide with the Last Judgement, the shock was theological as well as cultural. In separating out histories (plural) and History, empires (plural) and Empire, Augustine could argue that historical phenomena, on a scale from the smallest human action to the greatest empires, come and go, and, as Koselleck puts it, ‘whatever might happen on this earth was thereby structurally iterable and in itself unimportant, while being, with respect to the Hereafter and the Last Judgement, unique and of the greatest importance.’73

Augustine’s appropriation of the concept of Empire arises out of a sense that he is correct in seeing the sack of Rome as the ‘end’ of the Roman empire. But what if, in the passage of time, the sack of the city is viewed not as a definitive demise (imposing the boundary of a narrative end and so making Rome’s empire into a historical episode) but as a temporary setback, a blip, that can be accommodated within Rome’s destiny – as, Virgil’s poem could suggest, were Aeneas’s shipwreck, or, on a larger scale, the civil wars that had dominated the century before Virgil wrote? The fall of Troy, indeed, could be seen in terms not of rupture but of continuity, facilitated by a politically expedient change of name from ‘Trojan’ to ‘Roman’ (Aeneid 12.828). Such a re-narrativisation takes us back ‘into’ the story, and has appealed to those, from Charlemagne to Napoleon or Mussolini, from the Holy Roman empire to the European Union, who have laid claim to the historical heritage of the Roman empire, and it underlies the remarkably flexible doctrine of translatio imperii, the ‘transfer’ or ‘carrying across’ of Empire from one historical time and place to another.74 Such an attitude accords with Augustine’s notion of the structural iterability of historical phenomena, though it can accommodate or downplay as it wishes the theological imperative that drove his argument of the two cities. The sense that one is a part of that Empire is a recurrent trope in Western literature,75 and is perhaps most memorably described by Henry James on the opening page of The Golden Bowl:

The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him: he was one of the Modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber. Brought up on the legend of the City to which the world paid tribute, he recognized in the present London much more than in contemporary Rome the real dimensions of such a case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little of the sense of that, the place to do it was on London Bridge, or even, on a fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner.

The passage well illustrates the ideology of translatio imperii: for the Prince, Empire has been moved across boundaries of space (Rome to London) and time (the ancient state to present London), but he has no difficulty in seeing himself, if he so wished, ‘as a Roman’, and as such, open to address in terms of Anchises’s apostrophe in Aeneid 6.851. Across apparent historical rupture and change, Empire persists as a modality to be inhabited.

However, imperium may also be translated as ‘power’, allowing for a less immediately obvious but more sinister translatio imperii, and a less savoury image of what it is to inhabit that modality. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien interrogates Winston Smith under torture in the Ministry of Love:

‘There is a party slogan dealing with the control of the past,’ he said. ‘Repeat it, if you please.’

‘“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,”’ repeated Winston obediently.

‘“Who controls the present controls the past,”’ said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. ‘Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?’

Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.

O’Brien smiled faintly. ‘You are no metaphysician, Winston,’ he said. Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist, concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?’

‘No.’

‘Then where does the past exist, if at all?’

‘In records. It is written down.’

‘In records. And – –?’

‘In the mind. In human memories.’

‘In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’

‘But how can you stop people remembering things?’ cried Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. ‘It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!’

O’Brien’s manner grew stern. He laid his hand on the dial.

‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here...’76

Orwell tracks the disintegration of Winston’s personality and individuality under the pressure of a torture that is mental as much as physical. ‘Power is not a means, it is an end,’ O’Brien tells him. ‘The object of power is power.’77 The role of the individual is, of himself, to subsume himself in the collective. O’Brien continues,

God is power. But at present power is only a word as far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: ‘Freedom is Slavery’. Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone – free – the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all human failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party, so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.78

Mutatis mutandis (for this is at the heart of translation, a point to which we shall return), Winston must make like Aeneas: ‘if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party, so that he is the Party’, and not see himself in terms of his own life, but subsume his individual hopes, desires and memories to the cause so that he can truly recognise himself in the collective apostrophe (Anchises’s Romane): Big Brother is watching you. And, in Winston’s case, respond of himself to the Party’s slogans ‘Freedom is Slavery’ – and ‘War is Peace’. If it is ‘a question of an Imperium’, one says to oneself, Orwell, no less than Virgil, Augustine and Henry James, can be part of the response. Winston’s earlier attempts to re-write the past at the Party’s behest in his job at the Ministry of Truth, although effective and bringing him some job satisfaction, were crude (certainly in comparison with Virgil’s).79 This is not solely the province of (re-)narrativisation. Bringing another text into the argument, like Orwell’s, can reconfigure the past without changing a word – formally, though the interpretative content of course changes over time. To conclude this chapter, I want to see what another theoretical appropriation of the concept of imperium can bring to this discussion.

Narrative is central to the development of nations and a sense of national identity,80 and the Aeneid can certainly be seen as a national epic. Borders, which distinguish between inside and outside, are fundamental to the nation. As Ika Willis puts it, ‘The nation – that is, the spatial extension of sovereignty, its inscription in terrestrial space – constitutes itself through the practices by which it determines its edges.’81 However, the prospect held out to the Romans by Jupiter is of imperium without limits of space or time. In pondering the decline of the sovereignty of nation states in the face of the forces of globalisation, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri appeal to Empire in this metaphysical sense:

The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule has no limits. First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire ‘civilized’ world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign. Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is the way things will always be and the way they were always meant to be. In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history.

Although Hardt and Negri do not invoke Virgil here, this might almost be a commentary on Fate and History in Jupiter’s speech. They continue,

Third, the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world. Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower. Finally, although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace – a perpetual and universal peace outside of history.82

In turn, this could be a paraphrase of the other key passage in which Empire is characterised, the climax of the speech of Anchises in the Underworld, where the Roman is enjoined to remember ‘to rule peoples with your do minion...to impose civilized behaviour upon peace, to show mercy to those who submit and to crush the arrogant in war’ (6.851–53). In offering what they term a ‘genealogy of the concept’ (and thus a historicisation of it), Hardt and Negri do trace it back to Rome and remark, ‘Empire exhausts historical time, suspends history, and summons past and future within its own ethical order. In other words, Empire presents its order as permanent, eternal and necessary.’83 Specifically, as they said earlier, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history. Empire, in seeking to erase ‘borders’ wherever it finds them, gestures towards a totality that also abolishes the temporal limits of beginnings and ends – the limits of nation and narration alike.

Hardt and Negri prefix the four-fold characterisation of Empire quoted above with this theoretical reflection: ‘We should emphasize that we use “Empire” here not as a metaphor, which would require demonstration of the resemblance between today’s world order and the Empires of Rome, China, the Americas, and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach.’84 Recall the Prince in The Golden Bowl, who is a classic instantiation of the doctrine of translatio imperii. He experiences Empire both as metaphor, in Hardt and Negri’s sense, as he contemplates the movement of history (‘he was one of the Modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber’) and as a concept, as he considers the ‘truth’ of the ancient state. Thinking metaphorically involves thinking hypothetically, as if London were Rome (and vice versa), or interrogatively, what if London were Rome (or vice versa)? So, the Prince thinks metaphorically to himself ‘If it were a question of an Imperium...and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little of the sense of that’, and, in response to the hypothetical deictic ‘that’, points to where and when the transcendent concept may be experienced in the here-and-now: ‘the place to do it was on London Bridge, or even, on a fine afternoon, in May, at Hyde Park Corner.’ He adopts both the human and the God’s-eye viewpoint, but only inhabits the concept fleetingly (‘a little of the sense of that’), whereas in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four or of aspirant globalisation, the hypothetical and the interrogative are to be abolished, difference is to be effaced, and the indicative is to reign unchallenged, linking terms that are interchangeable because identical: freedom is slavery, war is peace, the market is always right. The concept of Empire is to be inhabited not fleetingly, but permanently.

Empire deployed as a metaphor ‘would require demonstration of the resemblance between today’s world order and the Empires of Rome, China, the Americas, and so forth’. Empire is a metaphor, in Hardt and Negri’s parlance, when it involves thinking about Empire within the continuing processes (the ‘movement’) of history as a series of discrete historical phenomena: empires rise and fall – that is, have beginnings, middles and, if one believes that one’s historical judgement is right, ends that make of them narrative episodes. The concept, however, has a different temporal character: like the Prince, one can continue to see oneself, ‘if one wished’, as still a Roman, or to think, as Ika Willis has put it, ‘the Empire never ended’;85 one can inhabit this concept in all its totalising reach, in which all boundaries of time and space are transcended. As the example of the Prince indicates, both are in play in the experience of translatio imperii. Treating Empire as metaphor can offer a genealogy, a history, of the concept that leads from imperium in Virgil’s Aeneid to the City of God in Augustine, through O’Brien’s chilling disquisition to Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Hardt and Negri’s own critique of capitalism and globalisation. But if this is to happen, any distinction between ‘imperium’, ‘God’, ‘power’ and ‘globalisation’ must be fleetingly (one hopes) abolished. What are perceived as boundaries, whether of geography, historical period, culture or language, must be both acknowledged and – in the end – elided. The concept of concept and the concept of Empire, in the totalising sense that the narrative of the Aeneid presents us, are isomorphic.

This can lead to confusion. As Willis remarks, ‘The question of the survival of Empire is complicated by the fact that ‘“Empire” is – implicitly or explicitly – one of our primary conceptual tools for thinking survival in the first place’.86 In the temporality of discourse, concepts (and not simply the concept of Empire) can be configured as principles or terms of analysis in such a way as to suggest that they transcend the occasion of their invocation, that they have a universal application not constrained by boundaries of space or time. If investment in a concept is total, if it is taken, in the end, to be true (albeit imperfectly understood or realised in the here-and-now), it takes on the aspect of Universal Empire, its dominion reaching over all time, past, present and future, the utopian temporality that satisfies the craving for certainty. Discourse on ideas is not an exercise of pure thought. If Virgil invokes imperium and O’Brien ‘power’ with this totalising investment, they also mobilise these concepts ‘within’ History to the end of conferring, precisely, ideological legitimacy in the here-and-now. Reconfiguring such concepts as metaphors opens them up to being seen as historically specific and conceptually imperfect, as Hardt and Negri seek to do in their critique of globalisation. Concepts can thus be seen to have their histories. They come into being, metamorphose and pass away as matters of concern, preferred terms of analysis and modalities of lived experience.87

One further question that translatio imperii poses is that of translation in its linguistic aspect. Imperial thinking aspires to the stability not only of concepts, but to the stability of their expression as well. It aspires, therefore, to transcend the limitations of human language that Augustine felt so keenly. Virgil’s Aeneid holds out the prospect of the universality of Latin culture88 and of Latin as a universal language,89 and the status of Latin over the succeeding centuries is an important aspect of the poem’s reception, as Latin becomes the established language of the Church, the law and the academy.90 It is a telling detail in The Golden Bowl that when the Prince thinks conceptually of Empire, it is ‘the question of an Imperium’ that goes through his mind: for him, the Latin term continues best to capture the concept he fleetingly inhabits. The totalitarian world of Nineteen Eighty-Four looks forward, if that is the phrase, to the ‘final adoption’ by the year 2050 of Newspeak, a language in which, ‘so far as it could be achieved’, a word was ‘simply a staccato sound expressing one clearly understood concept’, stripped of any associations and so ‘impossible to use...for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.’91 Newspeak aspires to the status of the language of Adam before the Fall, or what the philosopher Richard Rorty terms a ‘final vocabulary’92 – when words are not seen as performing any mediating function at all, when they simply ‘say what they mean’ without any ambiguity, or any alteration of meaning in their reception across time and place. Such words would be pure concepts, incapable of being metaphorically ‘carried across’ (the image encoded in the Greek term metaphora) the limits of their ‘proper’ reference, so as to generate new meanings through the assertion of resemblance and difference.

So, when Hardt and Negri seek to think metaphorically about Empire, what this involves is the ‘demonstration of the resemblance between today’s world order and the Empires of Rome, China, the Americas, and so forth’, and they want to take Empire within history, and mobilise it towards a new argumentative end. This also involves the assertion of resemblances and equivalences on the linguistic level: how is imperium to be translated, to be ‘carried across’ (as the imagery of the Latin term suggests)93 perceived boundaries of language and culture, time and place? As ‘power’? As ‘empire’? As ‘globalisation’? As ‘God’? The process, moreover, operates not simply at the level of the single word, but discursively and dynamically at the level of form and intention. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the goal of the Party is the final adoption of Newspeak, and to this end old documents are translated into Newspeak. Of the Declaration of Independence (‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it...’) it is said,

It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson’s words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.94

Translation involves processes of compression, expansion and reconfiguration towards new ideological ends, as the history of a text like the Aeneid can suggest. The ‘true’ or ‘proper’ meaning of a word like imperium or of a text like the Aeneid is, within time, a process of endless contestation, and to grasp it we would need to be immortal. But to hold a truth to be self-evident, here, now – there’s a mighty notion. What concepts would one inhabit, if one wished, more than fleetingly?