Classics in Conversation: Virgil's Map

Latin

Aug 18

Image: The Harvesters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (public domain).

At the start of June 2021 the Department’s first ‘Classics in Conversation’ event was held virtually. Poet and writer Ciarán O’Rourke interviewed Dr Charlie Kerrigan, Research Fellow in Classics, about his recent book project, Virgil's Map : Geography, Empire, and the Georgics. After the interview Ciarán and Charlie exchanged some further thoughts by email, which you can read below.

Question 1

At the start of your recent book, Virgil’s Map, you state that “this is a politically committed study”, written in the belief that “there is a way of reading the Georgics against the grain, in sympathy with the colonized rather than the colonizing power.” Would you mind expanding on why you chose this particular framing? I’d also be interested to hear more on why you decided to write a “politicising essay” now (i.e. whether present-day political trends and realities fed into your understanding of Virgil’s world, or vice versa)?

My idea was to make a case, back it up as much as I could, and then let it go out into the academic community and stand or fall on its own merits. I get a little frustrated sometimes with academic writing – in literary history, at least – that is so studiously balanced that it doesn’t seem to say (or want to say) anything at all, and in the books on the Georgics I found in the library there seemed to be a deficit of politicizing readings of the poem. More personally, the political approach came from my own self-education and experiences over the last few years: formal study, particular friendships, particular trips to different parts of the world, reading particular writers, and finding myself becoming politicized in a way I didn’t expect; this amidst the backdrop of pretty terrible times in local and global politics but also some very positive (and continuing) moments of progress and resistance. So I was letting my personal experience feed into my writing in what felt like an exciting way, the tagline in my head being Seamus Heaney’s notion of ‘weighing in’ (from his poem of the same name), which in my case I took to mean: trying to write in sympathy with historical communities across Europe who are known to history only as footnotes to the Roman empire, but who I was surprised to find in Virgil’s poem; that that would be a good use of my time and effort.

Question 2

Relatedly, you suggest that in writing the book the “challenge”, for you, was “to try to provincialize Rome, to see it not on its own inflated terms, but in proper and reduced perspective. And that seems to me to be a first step in any decolonizing approach to Latin literature.” Firstly, then, what happens when we “provincialise” Rome and the empire in this way, and are there pedagogical implications to such an approach? And secondly, could you give us an indication of some of your scholarly influences in this regard? You make reference to a wide range of authors throughout your study, from acclaimed Virgilians to perhaps less classically oriented cultural theorists (like bell hooks and Edward Said); but there’s also a freshness to your reading and contextualisation of Virgil that seems distinctive.

This is something I took from my own journey with Latin, which I’m sure echoes that of others. You start with a fossilized system of grammar, you read the classics without much historical context, and you are presented with the Romans (and the Greeks) as neat packages for study. Even with the best of intentions you can end up in quite a narrow interpretative space, one which can obscure the richness and diversity of human history (and the human present) and is often fodder for reactionary and right-wing ideas of Europe and the West. Thanks to Virgil’s own curiosity about the world I learnt a bit about the different (non-Roman) languages and peoples of ancient Italy, the Silk Routes and ancient South Asia, and soon I was able to start diversifying my images of the ancient world in transformative and helpful ways. What I try to do when teaching is to bring this experience to the students and say: you can do this too, in your own ways. The English historian E. P. Thompson was a big influence in this regard – his Making of the English Working Class is one of my favourite books – but so too were writers like Arundhati Roy and Edward Said, Adrienne Rich and bell hooks, writers who know the value of art but in ways that are always firmly connected to real life and lived experience.

Question 3

I’m not sure if you’d also characterise yourself as a historical materialist (?), but one figure whose influence seems present in your work is Walter Benjamin. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), written against a backdrop of rising fascist aggression in Europe, he warns against the “threat” of “becoming a tool of the ruling classes”, and then reaches for an image from imperial Rome as a way of clarifying his meaning. If you don’t mind, I’ll quote the passage (which your own argument, I think, directly echoes), and then ask you to respond to it. He writes:

[All] rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror…. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism…. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

Does Benjamin’s understanding of history here chime with your own?

You’re right that this text was a major influence (I stole the ‘against the grain’ metaphor for the line in my introduction which you cite above), and it’s funny how a single paragraph can sometimes be more memorable and effective than many books. I don’t claim to understand the Theses fully, but this paragraph I think is justly famous, and the text as whole has helped me a lot in thinking about Classics and about being an historian. Benjamin is saying that the past and how it’s talked about matters in the present, and that if your view of history is narrow and overly respectful towards history’s great men, then you risk giving an easy ride to their modern counterparts. Similarly, the composition of Virgil’s Aeneid, its survival and canonization as a classic, were in a very real sense dependent on the Roman Empire, its attendant inhumanities, and its later admirers. Benjamin is at a Roman triumph and is watching from the back of the crowd, aghast at those in the front row cheering on such a militaristic and inhumane (fascist?) spectacle, in which are included – here’s the imaginative leap – works of art, what he calls cultural treasures. The implicit question for the reader, the historian, and the general citizen is whether you’re in the front row (consciously or not) or with Benjamin at the back. What’s important to add is that it’s a question of perspective, not (necessarily) of having to throw away your copy of the Aeneid: that, too, can and has been read against the grain, as a work in sympathy with the dispossessed, written by a poet with his own unique personality and voice. It’s easy to paint the Theses as Marxist polemic, but they’re much too subtle for that, full of the kind of urgency and imagination you don’t always find in historical writing, and, in their capacious and humane definition of history, able to speak to many other radical concerns.

Question 4

Is there a feminist strand or context to your decolonial reading? I ask because your analysis includes a critical discussion of Virgil’s treatment (and/or omission) of women’s labour in The Georgics, as well as a candid acknowledgement that “the classical languages” have historically “served as passports to a world of elite white male privilege.”

The feminist strand on the Georgics was something that initially developed in tandem with the book project before it became obvious that it should be integrated into it. When you look into the classical archive the relative and at times total absence of women – or, in you prefer, the relative and at times absolute preponderance of men – is very striking. And it’s there in many different ways: in the patriarchal nature of Virgil’s Rome, which was (like many societies then and since) structured so as to deny women the creative independence Virginia Woolf talks about in A Room of One’s Own; in the traditions of scholarship and learning which meant that in various eras the Latin language (and indeed formal education) has been for boys and not for girls; in classical academia and writing on Virgil, which have been very male places until quite recently. I should say that there are exceptions in each case: women who wrote in ancient Rome, whose work survives, who learnt Latin in later times, who worked and published in academia, but the general imbalance is clear. So when I was reading the Georgics, I noted the way in which women on Virgil’s farm, when they appear at all, are working inside, doing what women tend to be doing in classical poems (spinning and weaving), whereas the active outdoor life is reserved for men; women are more often the goddesses than the fieldworkers. This just doesn’t square with the fact that women throughout history have, and continue to, work the land, prepare the food, often for unequal, little, or no pay. So suddenly you’ve gone from talking about a Latin poem to talking about a really fundamental theme in human history: the undervaluation or non-valuation of women’s work, be it agricultural, emotional, domestic, or otherwise. And as a teacher that’s exactly what I like and what I try to do: to use the texts to get the students thinking about these big themes in relation to their reading, themes that are relevant to their lives in the present moment.

Question 5

Could you give us an overview of some of the ways in which Virgil's poem was adapted or applied to Irish history and politics in the nineteenth century (by both British interests and Irish agitators)? I was fascinated by your reference, for example, to William Pitt’s quotation from Book 1 of The Georgics in a parliamentary debate on the abolition of the slave trade in 1792, as well as your discussion of Isaac Butt’s use of the poem in his advocacy for social justice and land reform.

It’s rooted in the educational politics I alluded to in the last answer, which meant that in the nineteenth century the men who ended up in positions of formal authority across the British empire (which at that time included Ireland) were often steeped in Latin (which meant Virgil) and Greek, owing to the intense classical education they received in places like Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge. So lines of Virgil remembered from schooldays became part of the debater’s toolkit, quoted in Latin at an appropriate moment to give an argument (in the House of Commons or elsewhere) a bit of flair and some classical authority. That’s very much the case in the Pitt example, which turns two lines of Virgil into a comment on the light of civilisation (so perceived) finally reaching the darkness of Africa: a good example of a technically excellent quotation married to a condescending and even racist point. MPs quoted the Georgics in Latin in the 1860s in debates about land reform in Ireland, with the line about unwittingly happy farmers (Georgics 2. 458) being used both straight and ironically – to plead for or against reform – depending on the speaker’s allegiance. What’s nice about the example of Isaac Butt is that he left Trinity (where he published a translation of the Georgics) a committed Tory, but saw the Famine for the avoidable disgrace which it was, and became progressively more radical in his quest for Home Rule. On one level all this is just debating, but words are important, and Virgil’s words have been used to promote, defend, and at times critique empire in a very real way.

Question 6

Virgil's Map addresses questions of empire and heritage that have since become live issues for museums and other institutions in Britain (and Ireland). You draw readers’ attention to the 1868 expedition led by Robert Napier to Abyssinia/Ethiopia, for instance, which resulted in the theft of “hundreds of precious items, including over one thousand Ge’ez and Amharic manuscripts, many of which were destined for the British Museum”, and have yet to be returned. What’s your take on the ongoing debate around cultural restitution of stolen artefacts, and how does it relate to your research, if at all?

In the book I quote the Ethiopian novelist Maaza Mengiste on the case of the Napier artefacts you mention, now at the V&A and elsewhere: keeping them (I paraphrase) is no less as act of power than stealing them was. You can dress up the theft in all the cultural and humanitarian language that you want, but it’s still a theft, one which speaks to the crimes of empire, and culture is not a realm somehow magically removed from politics. So speaking in general terms, where there is a call for restitution I think it should be honoured. The broader and thornier issue is that the discipline of Classics has been built upon these kinds of thefts, in ways which extend into the present moment, from the provenance of papyri to the Parthenon Marbles. It’s up to individual researchers and teachers if and how they wish to engage with such material, but it seems clear that the vested interests will not accede lightly to calls for restitution. It just strikes me that restitution in certain cases would send such a positive and exciting message: history in action, and for the right reasons.

Question 7

Finally, and on a more personal level, how do you feel about Virgil and his “beautiful masterpiece” now (at the end of your research)? For all its political radicalism, your analysis still rests on a clear appreciation of The Georgics as a great and complex work of literature, worthy of study and attention.

One thing which I hope comes through is that the book is not meant to paint the Georgics in exclusively political terms. I think the reading I’ve attempted is timely and useful, but it’s of necessity built upon the craft of Virgil’s poetry, and the belief that there’s a way of reading in which you can appreciate that craft and critique its politics at the same time. To do otherwise to me seems pedagogically irresponsible. Arundhati Roy has spoken about the power of fiction to ‘hold out a world of infinite complexity’, and I think a good poem can do the same. That being said, the Georgics won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and I tried to make clear that whatever authority the poem carries should come from individual readers, not academic pronouncements on its importance. So speaking in a personal capacity I’m still intrigued by the poem, still impressed by its curiosity and its love of the world, still puzzled and dismayed by its apparent celebrations of Roman power. Still reading it, in other words!