Culture: Virgil Goes Viral

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I do too. I like the fact that in our small-bore times, we can look back and see rock-jawed men (rarely women, I fear) like Caesar and Mark Antony, heroes who bestride the narrow world like colossi. There's much to be said for hero worship--a lot more, in any event, than for its opposite, which is the cynical assumption (distressingly common among journalists) that nobody but liars ever entered public life. But we can misuse the past too, especially if we look back to what we think was a time of moral clarity and of actions based upon it--and then use that supposed lesson as a way of beating up our miserable selves for lives of tentative compromise.

In truth, life has always been a shades-of-gray thing; there's something dishonest about cherry-picking the past as if it was always nobler than the present. The Greeks were indeed cultured and eloquent. They were also the most frightful pederasts, but you don't hear much of that from their conservative admirers today, nor that stoic, law-giving Romans spent 200 years figuring out really, really bad ways to kill Christians.

There's nothing especially venal about the ancients in this regard; nobody's perfect or ever was. The classical world knew crosshatching as much as bands of white and black; the Greeks and Romans had their moments of doubt. Here's Virgil's Aeneas in the underworld, catching sight of his erstwhile lover, Dido, Queen of Carthage, whom he had deserted as she climbed onto her funeral pyre: "Oh, dear god, was it I who caused your death?/ I swear by the stars, by the Powers on high ... I left your shores, my Queen, against my will ... Stay a moment. Don't withdraw from my sight." That sounds like a man distressed, confused, lost, uncertain, indecisive: a man like us and none the worse for that.