Friday, February 6, 2015

My hero / Virgil by Richard Jenkys


My hero: Virgil 
by Richard Jenkyns

Virgil is a hero for our times because he thought deeply about nation, community and identity – issues that puzzle us today

Richard Jenkyns
Friday 6 February 2015 16.30 GMT

TS Eliot called Virgil’s Aeneid the classic of all Europe, and maybe that accolade is now off-putting, as if the poem were a very large white monument blocking the view, like the Victor Emmanuel excrescence in Rome. But I love Virgil for his doubleness, for being paradoxical. Ingres’s painting shows him reading a passage to the emperor Augustus and his sister Octavia. The emperor wants to hear a panegyric of Rome and himself, but Octavia is breaking down as Virgil ends his parade of Roman heroes with a poignant coda about her young son Marcellus, dead before his time.
There’s the paradox: yes, Virgil endorses Rome’s imperial mission and has a whiggish hope for progress in history, but his poem is also suffused with the world’s sorrows. He is often seen as a “civilised”, literary, self-conscious author, but he is also intuitive and instinctive; he finds wonderful and mysterious places and penetrates the dark mysteries of the human spirit. His work wears that classic authority that Eliot admired, and yet no epic poem seems so personal. It conveys both a sense of struggle and a sense of sovereign mastery.
He is a hero for our times, too, because he thought deeply about nation, community and identity, those issues that puzzle us today. In his poem on agriculture, The Georgics, he studied overlapping loyalties: of Mantua in Cisalpine Gaul, where he was born, of Italy and of Rome. “We Italians,” says Evander in The Aeneid – but he is a Greek, an immigrant. Aeneas, the hero, is an immigrant, too, a Trojan who will eventually become a god of the Italian land. He is introduced as a man fated to exile “until he should found a city”. The poem is a quest for a secular salvation, which it finds through being rooted in habits and customs, land, buildings, shared experience. We can still learn from that.
• Richard Jenkyns’s Classical Literature is just out from Pelican.





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016




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