H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: PREPOSTINO

 G.: Romulus divine again. M. never tires of it. M.: I do not tire of it because you boys persist in thinking it a fairy-tale, whereas it is properly constitutional. Shropshire: Constitutional? I had thought it heavenly. M.: In Rome the heavenly is often constitutional. In England too, if you are prepared to notice the obvious. G.: You mean the King. M.: I mean our Defender of the Faith, yes. A crowned monarch is not merely dressed. He is anointed. Shropshire: With oil. M.: With oil, yes, but not merely by a bottle. By rite, invocation, and a doctrine of set-apartness. G.: And that is private in the ceremony. M.: Very nearly the only truly private part. The screen is drawn. The cameras, were there any, would be useless. The moment is between the monarch and the Holy Ghost. Shropshire: Then you are saying Romulus got something of the same sort. M.: Mutatis mutandis, yes. Not chrism and gospel, but translation, apotheosis, divine paternity, public authority under heavenly cover. G.: But how, exactly. M.: You must first stop thinking that divinity in Rome is only a matter of thunderbolts. It is also pedigree, favour, and destiny. Shropshire: I had half a mind to start worshipping him. M.: Do not be ridiculous before breakfast. Shropshire: Why not. If Rome did. M.: Rome did many things from which Clifton must be spared. G.: Still, sir, if Romulus is divine, does he begin it all, or does Aeneas. M.: Aeneas begins the line in one sense, Romulus begins the city in another, and Augustus begins the polished version in a third. Shropshire: Then we are to worship three at once. M.: You are to translate three at once, which is harder and safer. G.: Aeneas, then. He is already half-divine through Venus. M.: Precisely. The Trojan line does not begin in a village registry. It begins with a goddess. Shropshire: And then someone Vestal enters later. M.: Later, yes. In the Roman line you get the Vestal mother of Romulus and Remus, which gives the foundation another sacred complication. One need not improve the pedigree when it is already implausible enough. G.: So the point is that Rome does not arise from mere settlement, but from divinely freighted descent. M.: Exactly. Virgil’s great service is to make political history look like sacred continuity. Shropshire: The Iliad did that for the Greeks. M.: Not quite in the same way, but near enough for a schoolboy comparison. G.: The Iliad gives the Greeks heroic legitimacy. The Aeneid gives the Romans a theocracy. M.: Better to say a providential history in epic form. Shropshire: That is only a longer way of saying theocracy. M.: It is a more accurate and therefore less childish way. G.: Still, Virgil clearly wants Rome to look fated. M.: Entirely. Fatum does most of the heavy lifting, with Juno trying to impede and thereby improve the drama. Shropshire: Juno is anti-Italian, then. M.: Anti-Trojan in the first instance, anti-destiny in the second, and useful to the poet in every instance. G.: So Aeneas comes as enemy of the Greeks, whose city they have destroyed, and founds Italy out of vengeance. M.: Out of survival and command rather than vengeance. Do not make him too simple. He escapes a destroyed city and carries a destiny westward. Shropshire: To fight Turnus, who was the real Italian. M.: There is the interesting point. Turnus stands for the already-there. Aeneas for the not-yet-but-destined. The poem needs both. G.: Then the Itali are there before Rome. M.: Of course they are. Italy is not founded from nothing. Virgil’s task is to make Roman supremacy look like fulfilment rather than takeover. Shropshire: That sounds like implicature. M.: It sounds like you have been listening to the wrong boy. G.: But it is, sir. Virgil does not always say “Rome is justified because fate says so.” He makes one gather it from the structure. M.: Very good. The poem works by declaration and arrangement. Jupiter states, but the narrative implies. Shropshire: And the she-wolf. M.: Ah yes. The most famous animal in constitutional mythology. G.: She gives the twins a bestial and protective beginning. M.: Yes. Wild nurture under divine tolerance. The city begins in exposure, rescue, and animal fosterage before it becomes law. Shropshire: Which makes it sound rather less dignified than Westminster. M.: Westminster also has its moments if one reads enough history. G.: So the wolf is part of the divine economy, though not herself divine. M.: Precisely. A sign, an instrument, a piece of natural marvel under providential direction. Shropshire: I still like the idea of worshipping Romulus. M.: You like it because it involves less prose than Livy. Shropshire: That too. G.: But the divinity of Romulus comes after the founding and after the fratricide. M.: Exactly. Rome begins with murder and ends the founder in heaven. That is one of the more Roman combinations. Shropshire: Light and dark. Prepostino would like that. M.: Prepostino would have had to defend it to boys already reading another sacred book with equal confidence and less tact. G.: The Vulgate. M.: Or your Authorized Version, if you insist on England. But for the Roman civic imagination, Virgil could function almost biblically. Shropshire: Nine books. M.: Twelve, you ass. Shropshire: I was economising on empire. M.: Clifton does not permit economy in epic arithmetic. G.: Still, there is a scriptural air to it. Prophecy, descent, providence, city, law, future greatness. M.: Exactly. Virgil sings Rome into moral inevitability. Shropshire: Then Romans are really Romuleans. M.: A barbarous but not wholly useless coinage. G.: Without the diminutive. M.: Certainly without the diminutive. Empires are never founded in diminutives. Shropshire: Unless by Oxonians. M.: Oxford was not founded by anyone sensible enough to write epic about it. G.: Sir, when you say Romulus is divine, do you mean by birth, by office, or by translation. M.: Excellent. By birth in the loose heroic sense, by office in the civic sense, and by translation or apotheosis in the cultic-public sense. Shropshire: Three divinities in one. M.: I shall ignore the theology of that. G.: Then it is like the English monarch in this way: not born simply as a god, but set apart by rite and office. M.: Very good. The analogy is not identity. But the English can understand sacral office better than they pretend. Shropshire: Because of the anointing. M.: Precisely. That hidden act means that public authority is not merely political. It is symbolically consecrated. G.: And Romulus is the Roman version of such consecrated founding. M.: Yes. The founder is more than mayor. He is city in person, and then city under heaven. Shropshire: Is that why Quirinus matters. M.: Exactly. Romulus does not merely die. He becomes or is assimilated to Quirinus, which lets the political founder pass into cultic permanence. G.: So Rome gives itself a founder who can remain present as god. M.: You have it. Shropshire: That is very useful. If a founder stays divine, criticism becomes awkward. M.: It usually does. Sacred politics has that advantage. G.: Which is why Virgil matters for Italians. This is living matter, as you say. M.: Very much living matter. Do not think this is a dead chapter merely because your desks are old. Shropshire: Prepostino had to defend all this among readers of the Bible. M.: Yes, and that is a serious intellectual task. To interpret pagan civic divinity under Christian textual dominance requires a good deal of exactness. G.: One has to show that “Romulus is divine” need not mean “believe this as you believe the Creed.” M.: Exactly. One may read it as civic theology, symbolic politics, Roman anthropology of power, or all three. Shropshire: But the Romans did believe it. M.: Romans believed many things at several levels simultaneously. Never underestimate the complexity of public belief. G.: That sounds like saying they believed and also managed belief. M.: Precisely. Religion is often administrative before it becomes interior. Shropshire: That is a disappointing sentence. M.: It is also a true one. G.: Then Aeneas is useful because he gives Rome an origin against the Greeks. M.: Yes, but do not reduce the poem to revenge. The Greeks destroy Troy; Aeneas carries Trojan nobility into a future that will exceed Greece. Shropshire: By defeating Turnus. M.: By defeating Turnus, marrying into Latium, and making foreignness become origin. G.: So the poem turns an outsider into rightful ancestor. M.: Exactly. That is one of Virgil’s great political tricks. Shropshire: Trick. M.: Poetic trick, constitutional service, sacred narrative. Take your pick according to your piety. G.: And Juno’s resistance improves the claim because Rome triumphs over divine opposition and thus looks more deeply chosen. M.: Very good. Opposition in epic is often proof of providence by delay. Shropshire: Like prep school. M.: I shall pretend not to have heard that. G.: Sir, does this mean that the first Rome is already presented as destined empire before it is even a city. M.: Yes. Prima Roma is imagined backward from imperium. The city is narrated under the shadow of what it will become. Shropshire: Which is unfair to the shepherds. M.: Great literature is often unfair to local populations. G.: Then what Virgil gives the Romans is not just ancestry, but theological time. M.: Splendid. Keep that. Shropshire: He always tells him to keep things. M.: Because on rare occasions he says them worth keeping. G.: Thank you, sir. M.: Do not become ornamental. Shropshire: I still want to know how the she-wolf fits with destiny. M.: As a sign that nature itself will cooperate with fate when the city is at stake. The wild nurses the civil. Rome begins by taming its own origin retroactively. G.: And the divine father, Mars, adds another layer. M.: Yes. A martial paternity for a martial city. The genealogy is never accidental. Shropshire: So the city’s habits are in the blood. M.: Or so the myth would have you think. G.: Then the point of all this for the Romans was to render office, empire, and law almost liturgical. M.: Precisely. And that is why modern boys who have only parliamentary categories in their heads misunderstand ancient political religion. Shropshire: I have only cricketing categories. M.: In your case that may be an improvement. G.: Prepostino, then, in trying to discuss the divino di Romolo, is handling something not merely historical, but still charged. M.: Entirely. For Italians, Rome is never only antiquarian. It remains civic matter, symbolic matter, confessional matter, educational matter. Shropshire: And here the Bible is Virgil. M.: In one register, yes. The Aeneid may function as a national scripture without ceasing to be poetry. G.: Which means that when Virgil says little, he still makes much understood. M.: And there you return to your inferential obsessions. Fair enough. Epic works by overt statement and by arranged inevitability. Shropshire: So if Aeneas is enemy of the Greeks, and founder of the Italians, and Romulus divine, and the wolf maternal, then what is left for history. M.: Quite a lot, unfortunately. But myth gives history its public grammar. G.: Then the king’s anointing and Romulus’s apotheosis are analogous in that both make office more than secular. M.: Exactly. Not identical, but analogous enough for English boys to understand without becoming pagans. Shropshire: A pity. M.: For you perhaps. G.: And the hiddenness of the anointing matters because sacrality is intensified by concealment. M.: Very good. What is unseen can govern the seen more thoroughly than a spectacle. Shropshire: Then perhaps Romulus ought also to have been screened off. M.: Rome preferred thunder and disappearance. It was less Anglican about mystery. G.: So the Roman founder vanishes upward, the English king kneels under a canopy, and both cases make authority descend or ascend under divine sign. M.: Splendidly put. Shropshire: Then may I worship him privately. M.: You may translate him privately. Worship is not on today’s timetable. G.: And the whole point of Virgil is to make Rome seem not merely victorious, but justified. M.: Yes. Victory alone is crude. Fate, descent, divine favour, opposition overcome, all these turn force into meaning. Shropshire: Which is what empires like best. M.: Indeed. Raw conquest is bad pedagogy. Destiny teaches better. G.: Then the Romans are not just descendants of Romulus, but readers of an interpretation of themselves. M.: Excellent. They become what the poem tells them they already are. Shropshire: That is very convenient. M.: Civilization often is. G.: So in class Roman History, what we are really reading is Roman self-authorization. M.: Quite. With animals, gods, exiles, murder, marriage, and very good hexameters. Shropshire: Better than Kings. M.: Different. Do not invite comparisons you cannot parse. G.: Still, among boys reading the Authorized Version, Virgil would have to be defended differently. M.: Yes. One must explain that civic myth and sacred scripture are not identical categories, even when both are culturally formative. Shropshire: But both are sung or read as if they mattered beyond the page. M.: Exactly. That is why this is living matter. G.: Then the final lesson is that Romulus is divine not as a childish fable, but as Rome’s way of consecrating its own beginning. M.: Precisely. Shropshire: And our king. M.: Our king is anointed, not abducted into Quirinus. Try not to confuse the service-books. G.: Dry enough, sir. M.: Sufficiently Cliftonian. Romulus may ascend; you two, for the present, may decline.