Heredity

The past and what comes after

Aeneid Book VI by Seamus Heaney and A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman

There’s a part the Iliad that many people skip, and that is the catalogue of all the ships. To new readers, to the uninitiated, it seems a waste of time. Why do we need to know where all the ships and their crews had hailed from? Why do we need to know who sailed to Troy?

If there are any sections of the Bible which are often skimmed, they are the genealogies. Why do we need to know, precisely, who begat whom and at what age? Why does it matter to us, modern readers? (For the reader always is prone to see himself at history’s summit, rather than being part of it.) Why does it matter to us the order in which men were born?

Virgil’s work is well known enough that I can skate by much of its detail and form. It’s an epic, purporting to be a story of the foundation of Rome. Aeneas was a Trojan, and he fled the fall of his city. The Trojans settled, after much trial and tribulation – after an almost Homeric odyssey – in Italy.

The Aeneid was written during the glory days of the Roman emperor Augustus, when the state was being established anew. Augustus made a new social compact with the city’s elites. If they kept their public morals a little bit better in check, they could keep their wealth, keep what political power they had. If they gave up to him the supreme guidance of the state, him as princeps, first citizen, in theory first among equals.

And this new foundation of Rome was a cultural reformation. It meant lavish public works at the hands of Augustus and his colleague Agrippa; it meant art and culture and the making of things. It was a renaissance one-and-a-half thousand years early. Thus the need to revivify the past, the distant past, the past from which the essence of all of this new work was meant to have come. That was Virgil’s task.

And there’s one part in this one single book of Virgil’s poem, translated by Heaney, that might have confused a casual reader. The section itself, Book VI, is that in which Aeneas travels to the underworld to converse with the spirit of his father. And the part which might mystify is the moment where Anchises, father of Aeneas, takes his son to the place where they might view the oncoming line of descendents, so he can announce who they are by name and tell of their great deeds. Trojans who will establish themselves in Italy, men who will take their place in life. ‘Look at them! Marvellous, strong / Young men, wearing their civil honours, oak wreathes / Like shadowy crowns.’ And it culminates, a page or two later, hundreds of years later, with Caesar – Julius Caesar – adoptive father of Augustus. It was all worth it! That is what Aeneas’s father tells him. It was all worth it.

It is what Macbeth and Banquo saw when they were met by the weird sisters. Hail Macbeth, who shall be king thereafter. And hail Banquo: ‘Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none’. It is the line of kings to come that transfixed Macbeth, that made him think he could by violent activity alone overcome fate. That led him to his tragedy.

It is what Carton sees at the conclusion of A Tale of Two Cities: not his own descendents, but the descendents made possible by his great act, his sacrifice. ‘I see the lives for which I lay down my life … I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. … I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. … I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. … I see him, fore-most of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place – then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement – and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.’

It is what good men live for. What men who wish to be good hope to live and die for. A. E. Housman’s view is that all good deeds do not last, that transience is the iron rule of life. And yet, Virgil says, there is some hope. There is some hope. Do we believe him?