Donatus in melius ? A Vergilian Life by Philargyrius (original) (raw)

THE VIRGIL COMMENTARY OF AELIUS DONATUS -BLACK HOLE OR 'EMINENCE GRISE'? (1

, in her charming 'Medieval Latin Lyrics', surely a book which inspired many a young person, trained in the classics, to become a 'convert' to the middle ages, described the collection of poems known as the 'Appendix Virgiliana', as coming 'down through the Middle Ages bobbing at a painter's end in the mighty wash of the Aeneid'. (2) This same description can, I think, be prettily applied to the Virgil scholia, the humble and often nameless attempts of innumerable scholars to elucidate the master's poems; notes and glosses sometimes wise and often banal, which exist, not like other literature as an end in themselves, but solely as a means towards a better understanding of Virgil. Their interest for modern scholarship is twofold, which brings us, as we shall see, to the crux of the present paper. For the classicist their sole value is for the jewels of ancient knowledge that lie imbedded in them, while for the medievalist, I think, their chief importance resides in the insight they offer into the nature of medieval culture and education, and the place of Virgil (and other ancient authors) in that milieu. This is not, you will gather, a field in which there has been extensive and productive collaboration between scholars of both disciplines, at least not in the English-speaking world. There are still medievalists who never read Virgil, and there are classicists who hold that the only good scribe was the man who copied unthinkingly everything that was set before him, while at the same time despising him for the very stupidity thus made manifest. And where interdisciplinary work has been undertaken, as for example by such scholars as Rand and Savage (whom we shall speak of later in this paper), it all too often bears a partisan stamp. Somehow, perhaps as a carry-over, after all this time, from the attitudes of the renaissance or even of the reformation, the classics and the middle ages still do not sit well together; sometimes there is strife, and the tension of divided loyalties, but more often each side simply thinks that it has the field to itself. (3) In any study of the scholia on Virgil it is impossible to go far without encountering the name of Aelius Donatus, whose comprehensive 'variorum' commentary on the three poems of Virgil, though now lost, is said to loom behind such commentaries as have come down to us, and even to have survived itself, in part, through the plagiarism of later authors. Personally, I find two images come to mind when I start to think about Donatus. The first comes from astronomy; it is the image of the 'black hole', the old star collapsed upon itself, so massive that not even light can escape its gravitational field. We know that it is there, we can discern its powerful influence, but we cannot see it, and we have to accept that we never shall. And secondly, there is the image of PŠre Joseph, Cardinal Richelieu's chaplain, an 'eminence grise', without formal authority, yet ever-present and immensely powerful. Which of these pictures best describes the legendary commentary of Aelius Donatus? Perhaps neither of them does. But the fact remains that for a hundred years nobody has been able to talk or write about any of the surviving ancient and medieval commentaries on Virgil without paying due regard to Donatus. Has a lost book ever been so influential? My intention in this paper is to try to do two things, which are really complementary. Firstly, I would like to lay the ghost of Aelius Donatus; not, I hasten to add, by consigning his bones to an unmarked grave (for his grave is indeed well sign-posted) and certainly not to a dishonoured one, but by putting

The Influence of Contemporary Events and Circumstances on Virgil's Characterization of Aeneas

2008

ion pietas, have, in implication, little to do with their derivatives “pious” and “piety,” and that the words in the literature of the late Republic and early Empire refer more often to a code of behaviour between human beings than to an attitude towards the gods” (1997:405). Outside of the Aeneid the implications of Roman pietas are described in many of the historical manuscripts of Roman antiquity. Saller uses these texts to further illuminate the multidimensional nature of pietas. In his book Patriarchy, property and death in the Roman family (1994:106) Saller explains that Roman pietas was associated with the notion of submission and obedience to a higher power. He further shows that this notion does not fully explain the underlying attitude of compassion and devotion that underpinned the essence of pietas. Saller illustrates this with examples taken from the texts of the Elder Pliny who recorded occurrences of pietas that fall outside of the scope of the Oxford Classical Dictio...