Shadi Bartsch: belief

Transcript context

…Now, when I read Virgil, I see so many visual representations of history. There’s the temple of Juno, there’s Pallas’s belt, the ivory gates of the underworld, the Daedalus relief, the shields. In The Aeneid, how do visual representations differ from literary representations of history? That’s an excellent question. Before I try to answer it, I’ll just quickly say that the usual pronunciation is A-nee-id rather than Ā-a-nid. One of the interesting things about all the visual representations of history that are described in the poem is that they all have viewers, and the viewers consistently misunderstand what’s going on in the picture that they see. There is a tension between the forward-driving, apparently pro-empire vision of The Aeneid — although my own perspective is that it’s not what it has been taken to be — there’s a tension between that and the confoundment of its protagonists as they look at the history in front of them. I’ll give you a few examples. When Aeneas lands in Carthage, which is an area hostile to the Trojans, he sees on the walls of Juno’s temple a big frieze of the Trojan War, and he sees the Trojans getting whacked as they did during the Trojan War. Instead of saying, “Oh my God, here we are getting defeated. This is terrible. What kind of a person would put this on their temple?” He turns to his companion, and he says, “Look, they love us. We’re here already. I think we found safety.” Whereas, the correct response would be to say, “I think we have a little problem here.” Another example is when Aeneas himself picks up the ginormous shield that has been made for him by his stepfather, Vulcan, that contains the whole history of Rome, past and present and future. Virgil tells us that he looks at it and picks it up, but he has no idea what it means. In other parts of the poem, where we’re shown historical events — for example, in the conversation Aeneas has in the underworld with his father — we’re given a very particular view of Roman history, one that, for example, leaves out such important events as the fratricide that started the city of Rome. Romulus killed Remus when Remus tried to jump over his city boundaries and mock them. Either folks don’t understand, or they’re seeing something that’s very altered from historical reality. This all goes back, I think, to show us that poetry itself, as a form of art, is not to be taken as reflecting history or trying to say something true about the political situation of the day. Is the ultimate vision of the work one of a forward-moving history or that we’re doomed to a kind of cyclical repetition?…

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