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Sarah Ruden, "Vergil: The Poet's Life" (Yale UP, 2023)
01:05:35
An interview with Sarah Ruden
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- [00:00]
Marshall Po
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Marshall Po
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Benjamin Phillips
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host today, Benjamin Phillips, and I'm being joined with Sarah Rudin, the author of the new biography of Virgil for Yale University University Press. Sarah, how are you today?
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Sarah Rudin
I'm fine. How are you?
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Benjamin Phillips
Doing well. Glad to have you in the studio. So, Sarah, you've done a number of translations so far for various publishers, including a translation of the actually 2, it was revised recently. As well as a biography of Paul. But this is the first time that you've teamed up a translation and a biography of the same person and work to. You also tell us in the introduction that you're kind of Your first recruitment into Classics was with the eclogue. So this has been a long time coming, this work of Virgil. How has it been for you?
- [02:43]
Sarah Rudin
Well, it has been 40 years of joy in the classics. I, I really love this literature. It's been the light of my life. And it was really a great privilege to be able to write a biography of Virgil after all of this time and to be thinking about the life of a real person behind one of these amazing works of literature. Yeah, great privilege.
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Benjamin Phillips
Excellent. So what, following on the heels of your well received translation of DNA and what was it to provoke you to finally jump into this biography?
- [03:25]
Sarah Rudin
Well, I, I have to admit that I, I would not have done it had I not had an opportunity. And people don't generally just have an inspiration and write a book. They need to have a contract, right. Have a marketplace, have a publisher with some experience in this thing in a particular subject. And Yale University Press has a series called the Ancient Lives series. And it's, I, I think I'm proving very, very interesting. Different, different authors are, are different. Modern authors are diving into the lives of figures who have been, oh, just plaster busts, right? People who are, you know, don't really have any humanity in our view. And these, these books are allowing us to consider commonalities that we have with the ancient world and to consider the real human personalities of, of great minds. And I think that's, that is very helpful, especially at this political moment.
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Benjamin Phillips
Can you explain that a bit?
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Sarah Rudin
Well, A lot of this political conflict turns on an argument about what our tradition actually is. And in the legal realm, for example, you have various our arguments about what, say, the Founding Fathers meant and whether we should be bound by that. And when you talk about originalism, for example, you're talking about the authority of a personality and a cultural experience over our present decision making. So that's a really momentous issue. So, you know, before we engage, you know, gung ho in that kind of a fight, I think it's, it's really helpful to, to consider the actual human parameters of people who wrote great documents. Right.
- [05:53]
Benjamin Phillips
Very good. Just something that you've done quite thoroughly in this. One of the reasons I jumped at this book, knowing Yelda's good biographies, when I saw it. Well, Tom Holland sums it well on the back cover. A detailed biography of Virgil should be impossible. But he says you have rendered the impossible possible. As you know very well, there just isn't much reliable material on Virgil, which is a big challenge in, in writing this. But I guess we'll get to that in a second. But in addition to that, have you found, were there any other common obstacles surrounding who Virgil is or who we think he is that you had to confront while writing this?
- [06:43]
Sarah Rudin
It's almost nothing but obstacles. Virgil is a literary saint, a political saint, even a religious saint. In, in some eyes he has. He leads the figure of, of Dante through the underworld in the, in the Inferno.
- [07:06]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
So we, we've got a superhuman figure to start out with, and it's quite a varied superhuman figure. So in the modern era, Virgil becomes a stand in for the modern Western imperialist and the. There's a construction of the Aeneid that is supposed to make us jump for joy about the imperialist impulses of, say, Great Britain or the United States, more Great Britain, more European countries than the U.S. but. And you have all of these strange impulses that are leaping from, from the text and completely untrammeled by any kind of realistic consideration of who this person was, who wrote the book, how did he live, what did he want, what did he dream about, what were his limitations? Yeah, So I think it's kind of healthy to have a real biography, even though a lot of it has to be a last speculative. We don't know anything much for certain about Virgil.
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Benjamin Phillips
Right, so then what was kind of your approach as you sat down to write and think about and do the sober speculation that resulted in this book?
- [08:42]
Sarah Rudin
Well, I do have a particular and limiting point of view myself. I have spent years and years of my life translating Virgin, so I am looking to his specific language, more than two other aspects of his life, so. Or aspects of his thinking, let's say. But I think that is justified and, you know, maybe if that is not the proper dominant view of Virgil, that he was a poet, he was, he was most concerned with words. I think it's healthy at least to take a look at this part of his life in itself and give it a full consideration. So we add it, you know, to other Virgils. So if we're looking at the political protege version version of Virgil, okay, we could put that in one place. If we're looking at the ideological, an ideological idea of Virgil, not just, you know, what was he commissioned to produce, but what did he actually believe politically? Okay, we could put that in another place. We can have a, you know, religious, moralistic view of, of Virgil. Put that in. In yet another place. I don't think we can make him a Christian. That just doesn't work. But we can certainly consider him as a pagan and we can consider him As a person who, you know, had a particularly Roman set of morality. Okay, so we. But then, you know, I. I think he deserves his own legacy, his own. I. I think he deserves consideration as a art, as an artist, as an artist of words. And, you know, we have lots and lots of evidence that this is a role that he filled with. With some zest. The evidence isn't direct. We don't have his statements, or hardly any of his statements about his work. But we do have, you know, contemporary opinions about what a fabulous innovator he was.
- [11:17]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
And how much time and thought and agony, really, that he put into to transforming the Latin poetic language and creating something really striking, really interesting, almost a new kind of literature, something that the world had never seen before. You know, why don't we consider this.
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Benjamin Phillips
Yeah.
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Sarah Rudin
We don't have to let it be our sole guide to reading Virgil. But, yeah, let's. Let's make this space and consider this.
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Benjamin Phillips
Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. As I was reading some of your methodical statements, I was. T.S. eliot came to mind when he says that tradition is not just something you passively inherit. It's very hard work. The mindset and the experience of the actual poet who goes about grabbing all this stock to make is so critical to understanding what he did. Yeah. And in that, one of your key theses is that personal experience is fundamental. You write at the very beginning that a work of great endurance to which a particular era gives rise is not fundamentally about that era, but more about the nature of experience. And the author's insights into that experience come in such appealing forms that many readers take him or her for a sort of companion and adherent. That was from beginning on page one, but mostly page two of the book for those following along at home. But as you're writing and as you're immersed in Virgil's poetry, how do you kind of decipher what is Virgil speaking out of his own experience and authentic heart? And what is a Persona that he's creating for this task?
- [13:15]
Sarah Rudin
Yes, that's a really, really good question. And the answer is it's impossible to speak with real confidence about that. We're always speculating when we talk about an author and whether, you know, any particular statement represents the author's point of view or an artifact, you know, perhaps the opposite of what. What the author is really thinking. But. But, you know, I had an idea which has just been trashed by the Washington examiner in a very dismissive review. And, you know, my idea is that literary genius really is the thing apart, that's an unpopular point of view nowadays. In past generations, there has been genuine worship of, of literary genius and, and often that has gotten really out of hand. You know, authors are not gods. Authors are, they're human beings, no matter how gifted they are. But I think that gift is both a very striking thing in itself, and it has a great influence on personal development. It, it has a great, It has great influence on how authors live, you know, even in parts of their lives that seem to have nothing to do with composing literature.
- [15:05]
Benjamin Phillips
Right. You say that Virgil gamed his life out to be a, to be the poet that he became.
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Sarah Rudin
Yeah, yeah. Now the Washington examiner reviewer sneers at me for thinking that, that authors are categorically different. Now, I don't think that all authors are categorically different from other people, but I think great authors are. And I have known, personally known a couple of Nobel Prize winners. And I defy anybody to contradict me when I say that people with very great talent in literature are different from you and me. And maybe we can't pin that difference down, but we can, we can describe it in certain outward manifestations. And so when you look across, you know, the whole range of Western literature, I'm sure this is true of other literatures, but I don't know them or not nearly as well. When you look across the whole range, you will see certain patterns, you know, not just in literary expression, but in ways of life. So, you know, when you consider Virgil's sickliness, it's, it's totally impossible to say, you know, whether it was real, whether it was hypochondria, whether it was conditions that he aggravated consciously or subconsciously.
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Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
That's, that's something we absolutely can't tell. But we can, you know, look across the history of literature and say, wow. Or literally literary biography and say, wow, we got a lot of sickly people here. Yeah. And we've got a lot of evidence that the sickliness didn't kill their careers, but may have actually helped them. And one example I like is Elizabeth Barrett Browning. So she's in her crucial years, she's a pre adolescent girl and then she's a girl in early adolescence. And is she going to be dragged along every morning to her mother's social visits and spend all of her time chatting with the well to do neighbors so that she is well formed for the marriage market, so that she has, she has perfect manners and she has, she is sort of on display as a good, as a potential good wife for the sons of, of the women her her mother is visiting or is she going to get a chance to study?
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Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
And she took that in hand. She, she was the one who insisted that she was debilitated. She was unable to take part in society, the normal part that a young girl would, would, would take to prepare her for the marriage market. And so by, by pretending or imagining or being convinced that she was sickly, she made herself sickly. She was, she was in a Quack Quinn clinic for many months and she ended up, she, they, they. What they did to, to young girls was just immobilized them. So that'll make you sick.
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Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
So she emerged quite sick and was sick, you know, into, well, childhood. And. But what, what she won from this was, was leisure time, time, you know, at her own disposal and the ability to study.
- [19:05]
Benjamin Phillips
Oh yeah, there you go. Nothing like solitary confinement to get you that leisure.
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Sarah Rudin
Yeah, yeah. So what, what, Virgil, we don't know anything really about the origin of his, his sickliness, but we do know that, that people who were valetudinarians or hypochondriacs or actually sick among the upper classes in Rome did get a lot of deference. They didn't even have words to say that such people were faking it.
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Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
They just very gently, you know, left them alone, coddled them. And Virgil would have certainly had this, the same treatment.
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Benjamin Phillips
No. Interesting. Were there other ways in which modern literary biographies have helped you or especially biographies of modern, modern authors?
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Sarah Rudin
Well, I think they're very helpful in thinking about patriotism or not patriotism sort patronage.
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Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
Because we have had different forms of patronage through the centuries. And Augustus or Octavian, the first emperor, was set on inventing a very high powered form of patronage. He seems to have, you know, got hold of some very talented people quite early in their careers and to some extent molded their output and their attitude and not disturbed the quality of their work. And he had a success that I think nobody else has had in the history of the world. No leader that I know of has been able to do this, this so well.
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Benjamin Phillips
Yeah.
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Sarah Rudin
So we can look at much more recent examples of literary patronage and get some idea of the psychology of it. We can get some idea of the social mechanisms. How, how does this actually work? And how does a, how does an author who is very talented, you know, who finds a very powerful patron manage, you know, psychologically, emotionally and professionally to keep up a very high quality of output when somebody who's funding him or her is, is trying to interfere with the content and maybe even with the style? So a favorite Example of mine is Azora Neale Hurston, the great African American author. She's part of the Harlem Renaissance. And several members of the Harlem Renaissance, you know, found the same rich, powerful patron who thought that she knew better than they did what authentic black culture was and how it could, how it could be represented. So Zora Neale Hurston wrote a, a fake tribute to her, her patron.
- [22:43]
Benjamin Phillips
Oh boy.
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Sarah Rudin
And really makes fun of her, makes raucous fun of her, but in a, not, not in a really blatant way. It seems blatant to us. But the, the patron was so drunk on her, her ego that she didn't really see it. The. So Zora Neale Hurston apparently got away with this.
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Benjamin Phillips
Wow.
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Sarah Rudin
And we have, I think, similar things going on with Virgil. He does not ever seem to make fun of Augustus, but he makes fun of everybody else. His depictions of them are, are just too fulsome. I think they've got to be ironic. They're, they're full of double entendre. They're not something that you would write about figures that you, you really admired. And the thing is, this is a really interesting circumstance for Virgil. Augustus had all of these lieutenants who were amateur poets who, some of them, who, who wrote very ambitious works and wanted to be taken seriously. So here we have statesmen, diplomats, generals who were poets at the same time. And they, they wanted to be equally admired as poets, but they were schlockmeisters, you know, all but one, maybe two of them were not good writers. And you have Virgil making fun of them semi covertly.
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Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
But that's at an early stage of Virgil's career. And then, you know, as the years go by, these, these people seem to have fallen away as pretenders to literary fame. One of them was actually, well, he got into political trouble. He was deposed from his, you know, powerful foreign office, you know, imperial office. He committed suicide. But so, yeah, he was off the stage because he was dead. But others, others seem to have just shut up.
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Benjamin Phillips
Yeah, yeah, no, I was reading some commentary on the 10th eclogue. It's all about Gallus the other day. And it was written before we, we discovered any of Gallus's poetry. And the commentator was like, oh, man, if only we had Gallus's poems, surely it would be so great. And then, and reading about what you said about it, I was like, man, the only thing interesting about this guy is that Virgil wrote about him.
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Sarah Rudin
Like, well, you know, Virgil seems. This is, this is the hilarious part of it to me. I was a graduate student at Harvard. This was during the 80s. So eminent classical scholars of the previous generation or people who had had been, you know, dominating the field in the previous generation, they were still around and they were still revered. You know, people like Wendell CLAUSEN for for example, Dr. Shackleton Bailey. These are people with whom I was able to study. Great, great privilege. Nobody knows Latin like these guys. But it bowls me over now to think that they were fooled by Virgil's ironic, you know, tongue in cheek praise of somebody like Alice. It's a bit mind blowing that they took these passages at face value. I just can hardly believe it now and then, you know, some of them actually stuck to their guns after the discovery of a really horrible few lines of gas. Alice.
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Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
Not, not, you know, respectable poetry at all. Not the kind of thing that Virgil himself inspired, aspired to write. So yeah, that kind of impressed me.
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Benjamin Phillips
Yeah.
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- [27:50]
Sarah Rudin
I don't think so.
- [27:51]
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- [27:53]
Marshall Po
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- [28:14]
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- [28:43]
Benjamin Phillips
So there is one partial ancient biography by Suetonius and one much later by Donatus that is less trustworthy. But thanks to attorneys, we do end up with an odd case of well, we know more about Virgil's childhood than his adult years. So what do we know about these earlier formative years and what more can we piece into that picture?
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Sarah Rudin
Well, I wouldn't say we know more about Virgil's childhood in the aggregate, but what we do have about his childhood is some really specific information. You know, we know where he was born and where he grew up, at least until he left for school. You know, we know the name of his father and we know his father's social background, and that kind of detail just doesn't. Personal detail does not emerge in the later biography. We have no idea, for example, where Virgil lived. We. We know that, you know, he headed down to. After his formal schooling was over, he headed down to the Naples area and he was. He was studying philosophy there. But we don't have. For his entire adult life, we don't have a residence for him.
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Benjamin Phillips
Mm.
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Sarah Rudin
We don't have any reference to. Well, he. We know that he was a guest. He lived in a sort of annex of Maecenas's house for a while. But. But we don't hear of him having his own residence.
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Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
And this is a bit crazy. It seems that he didn't return to his father's estate, his ancestral property, if. If, you know, the family was able to retain it. He didn't live there or didn't live for any significant amount of time. He lived with friends in Sicily, but he never had his own home. Which is a bit mind blowing because you don't have homeless Roman aristocrats.
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Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
You know, you don't have the couch surfing, eminent Roman author. But that's apparently what Virgil was quite fascinating to consider, you know, what this suggests about his lifestyle, his psychology and so on.
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Benjamin Phillips
So. So let's. Let's get into that. So what. What does it suggest about his lifestyle and psychology? Like, why would he not go after this standard Roman male career and lifestyle?
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Sarah Rudin
Well, we do read, and we believe with confidence that. That he was a gay man. This would, you know, impose certain anxieties on him. He wasn't the accepted kind of, you know, man with homosexual experience because it looks as if he had no heterosexual experience whatsoever. That. That this was. He was, you know, on the far, far end of the Kinsey scale and not a man who would, you know, be able to have, you know, functional sex with. With a woman so that he could have children, so he could have a household. And, you know, Roman men were. It was acceptable for them to play both sides of the fence as long as they were the active partner in. In you know, all the sex they had. Virgil. Virgil seems to have not been in this category. So his, you know, sexual personality had to be, I would say, well, filtered through the point of view of his friends. And we know that, you know, friends provided him with sexual outlets. They. They provided him with. With young slave or freedmen boys. And this was, this was not unacceptable in Roman ethics.
- [33:15]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
But I think you can see in his work, you know, a horrific sadness and loneliness because, you know, like all people, he would dream of a love relationship, you know, of the love of his life and of settling down. Not all people, but most people. And this was, this was the one thing that was unthinkable for Romans that you would form a household, you would have an equal domestic partnership and you would form a household, you would maybe raise children with the love of your life who happened to be of the same sex. No, can't do that. So I think it's likely that, that you know, he would have dreamed of doing the one thing that he couldn't do in his, his relationships. And so maybe that was part of what kept him moving from, you know, one house to another, from one region to another. He didn't want to be known, you know, in the desires of his heart. He, he couldn't, I think, have these intimate and confiding friendships that would allow him to be known in this way because his, his real erotic personality was just unacceptable to Romans.
- [34:47]
Benjamin Phillips
You also write that this, you know, pervading loneliness that fills particularly the Aeneid began earlier too. So tell us, what do we know about Virgil's childhood on Mantua and with the bees, you know.
- [35:05]
Sarah Rudin
Right, okay. Well, Suetonius, who had, you know, he was writing a long time after Virgil's death but he seems to have had access to a contemporary biography or biographical notes that are lost to us. So we think that the, you know, information about Virgil's childhood is pretty good, at least in outline. His, his father is said to be someone of quite humble origins who married the boss's daughter, made good acquired land and raised bees.
- [35:54]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
And yeah, because Virgil has a particularly sort of outsized. When you talk about the whole science of agriculture that he writes about in, in the Georgics, beekeeping takes up a lot of room and it produces, you know, a lot of drama and emotions because the story of, you know, how to, how to acquire a new swarm of bees leads to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice which is a, you know, heart rending tragedy about, you know, losing the only thing that makes life worth living. You know, losing your beloved, losing your own life in your grief and you know, even, even the compensation of singing. You know, Orpheus was the greatest, supposed to be the greatest musician in history as mythical singer. Singing is not a good replacement for losing the love of your life in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. In fact, singing gets you killed. Yes.
- [37:14]
Marshall Po
Yeah.
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Sarah Rudin
So just. Just imagine this. And. And the. In contrast, you know, we. We've got the myth of the beekeeper and see, the Orpheus senioritis, you know, shrieking tragedy is sort of inserted into the life of the beekeeper who has, you know, he's committed a terrible crime and he's. He's. Or sort of accidentally committed a terrible crime. And. And he's lost. His bees are cursed, so he needs to get a new swarm. So what we get, how this closes up. The. The story is that he gets his new. His new swarm and he lives. He lives completely happily, you know, all alone with his bees, you know, cultivating rural prosperity here. And so it's such. It's such an odd, you know, glob of narrative there that it really suggests to me that. That, you know, Virgil dreamed of a carefree life on the land, you know, and coming. Coming from a rural area, he knew. And the Georgics demonstrate that he knew that this is not a carefree life. No, you know, farmers have a lot of peril, they have a lot of sorrow, they have a lot of ups and downs. And Virgil seems to have thought, you know, even with that, you know, this is the happiest life imaginable. And he. He has a portrait of. In. In Georgia. It's a portrait of this old man of Tarentum, Market, Gardner, who's living the blissful life of, you know, organic agriculture. You know, this is all things that, you know, he's naturally able to grow on a marginal plot of land.
- [39:10]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
You know, delicious, beautiful things that he can grow and take to market, and he's got the ideal life there. And Virgil envies him.
- [39:21]
Benjamin Phillips
Yeah, yeah, but he's still a poet and he's got to pursue that.
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Marshall Po
So.
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Benjamin Phillips
So you kind of write like, obviously this love of the land is everywhere, whether it's in his earlier pastoral works or in the Aeneid. It's actually. This is kind of tangential, but my own research has been on kind of the influence of Virgil in literary responses to the fifth century. And kind of what I was expecting, what I do find in some of these authors, is why is this empire without end ending? Like, why is why are the high walls of Rome coming down? But in many of them, it's the landscape descriptions that they're borrowing and using. The poets of southern Gaul are watching their land be ravaged by invaders and defenders alike. That's what they turn to, which is easy to find those sentiments too. Right. You write that the eclogues which are in his first poems, show that the relationship between the countryside and singing is symbiotic, but broken. Virgil's calling was, however, painfully not here. So why, why after that he, he moves to study philosophy. But apparently he was something of a slacker in that you write.
- [40:43]
Sarah Rudin
Oh, well, how would that have, you know, I, I, I, I don't think he was an outstanding slacker.
- [40:50]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
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Sarah Rudin
Romans with an interest in philosophy. I, I think that for most Romans who, you know, claim to be philosophical adepts, you know, who retired to their villa to have philosophical conversations. Yeah, I, I think they're all dilettante. And with Cicero, the motivation is more political.
- [41:23]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
- [41:25]
Sarah Rudin
So he wants to, he's, he's in political exile. So he goes to his rural villa and he depicts himself there as, you know, a, a philosophical sage. You know, he's, he's like the, the philosophical king that you, that Plato, Plato dreamed about. So, you know, he, here he is, he, he and all his, you know, exquisitely refined friends are, you know, spouting wisdom about, about virtue, about, you know, about law, about Roman tradition. And this is all sort of fitted into Greek ideals as developed in, in Greek philosophy. And these publications were intended to, to sort of reinstate him as the first man of, of Roman politics. This, this position that he'd held quite briefly. Yeah, so, so you have the political angle there, and I think it was more social angle for Virgil. He wanted to hang out with men in a lovely and leisured setting and, you know, have these conversations. I don't think he was going gung ho with love affairs because I think he was too timid. But I think he had really a good time down in Naples, as, you know, just hanging out with other leisured youth. And on his side, he was developing himself as a poet and I think he made a lot of progress. We've got collection of work attributed to him. It is probably mostly fake, but I'm convinced that a couple of these pieces were real, you know, apprentice works of Virgil. And they show that he worked very hard to develop his talent.
- [43:43]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
- [43:44]
Sarah Rudin
And maybe even that he was not a natural poet. But he, he, this is something that he obviously really wanted to do. He wasn't a, he wasn't a wunderkind like Horus. He wasn't just bursting with talent, but he had to experiment a lot and, you know, find his way, you know, and find what his gifts were. Took him, you know, long years of experimentation, but, yeah, he certainly got there, you know, but he wrote the Eclogues. He was you know, a strikingly talented young. Young poet.
- [44:24]
Benjamin Phillips
Yeah, yeah. And revolutionize it in the process. I mean, every time I read a Latin hexameter from after him, I. I just think, like, this shouldn't have worked like this. This language and meter were. The meter was conquered by Virgil, you know, it wasn't supposed to be this way.
- [44:43]
Sarah Rudin
Beaten to death and then sort of resurrected in a godlike form. Yeah, yeah.
- [44:50]
Benjamin Phillips
This is incredible what he was able to do. So, yeah, like, he. Eventually he finds his way to that patronage, to the. I. I just love the way you put it. The fusion of reality and propaganda becomes the poet we all know, or we think we know and love. You said that this was. I mean, you mentioned this earlier in our conversation, a very unique environment in terms of patronage. What is it that sets apart the Augustan court and Maecenas and everyone that they're kind of pulling in and sponsoring?
- [45:25]
Sarah Rudin
Yeah. Now, Augustus was a political genius, and maybe at a level the world has never known otherwise at any other time, he. He could read people and he could make use of them without being so overbearing as to ruin them, or certainly not in the short term. So he was able to pick out several very talented young authors and cultivate them, not with a terribly heavy hand, and produce a concentrated group of talent. Such had almost never been manifest in the ancient world. You might talk about the Athenian tragedians, but there were only three really great ones. You can talk about the Alexandrian. The Alexandrian poets, but they certainly are not making any great impression on the modern world. They weren't really writers for all time. They were very useful writers to. To the Romans. But, you know, you. You read them and fragments of them, and you're not horribly impressed anymore. No, but, you know, these, these Horace and Virgil are. Are absolutely. And Livy, they are writers for all time. And, you know, Ovid, also amazing writer.
- [47:23]
Benjamin Phillips
Yeah.
- [47:24]
Sarah Rudin
You know, and he. He picked them out and he sustained them and, you know, he gave them. Of course, he gave Ovid too much. He would have said that he had given Ovid too much rope. Ovid ends up in exile. It doesn't always work out too well, you know, personally for these authors, but the work that he evoked from them is fabulous. And he even seems to. To have made large concessions, you know, to their personal needs, in choosing topics and choosing styles. And he wanted a certain amount of praise for himself, but he. He had a great respect for their literary ambitions. And I. I don't know of another literary patron who has really achieved this.
- [48:21]
Benjamin Phillips
Yeah.
- [48:21]
Sarah Rudin
You know, Queen Elizabeth with Shakespeare, it's, he's already Shakespeare when she comes to him, you know, she didn't, she didn't find him, she didn't invent him. Yeah, there, there are others you can talk about, but I, I don't think that anybody, anybody's achievement as a patron can compare to, to Augustus's.
- [48:43]
Benjamin Phillips
Yeah, we're all the richer for it.
- [48:50]
Sarah Rudin
We are. Yeah. Yeah.
- [48:51]
Benjamin Phillips
But we can't, we can't, I mean, we don't want to spend the whole time on this, but we can't talk about Virgil and Augustus without getting to the question, at least in part, of how to really need it in the Harvard School and questions of praise and subversion and flattery in that. So what's your take on that vexed question?
- [49:12]
Sarah Rudin
You know, I, I, I don't think I even address it seriously.
- [49:17]
Benjamin Phillips
No.
- [49:19]
Sarah Rudin
I, I don't even think, you know, people who have thought about this over the years are maybe going to be insulted, but I, I, I'm not sure that it's worth addressing, at least in the terms that it's been delivered to us.
- [49:36]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
- [49:37]
Sarah Rudin
By specialists, scholars.
- [49:42]
Benjamin Phillips
Yeah. He was not concerned, he was not concerned with the Vietnam War like that. That wasn't his contract.
- [49:47]
Sarah Rudin
No, he was not concerned about the Vietnam War. That's, that's one thing. Yeah. I think that all this fighting over his political point of view is, is not to the point because here's, here's what I think about Virgil's ideology. He did not dissent from the basic ideas that, that Augustus wanted him to deliver. And that's because it didn't make any sense to dissent. Okay. You had two political camps. You know, you had the, the aristocratic senatorial Republican camp. Okay. And these were people who continued to strive against the Augustan autocracy as it developed, you know, as it clamped down. You have them and then you have, you know, even later on in, in the empire, under other empires, you have rebellions, you have assassinations and so on. Yeah. So, so that senatorial opposition, it existed and you have really be at the actual political level where people are politicians, you know, where they are maneuvering and conniving. Yes, you have, you have struggle and you have competition there. Right. Very unequal competition, but it, it exists. But you know, as to the basics, that, that Augustus wanted Virgil to tout, there was not any dispute at all. You couldn't be a Roman without agreeing with him that Romans were meant to rule the world. Everybody agreed on this, you know, Republican senators. Right. Augustus himself and his closest Allies, everybody agreed on this. And the Paul and the Paul, the Roman populace, you know, down to the plebs, they all believe that Rome was, Rome was created to rule the world. This is not in dispute. Everybody believed that the civil wars had been atrocious. You know, people who had suffered in them, people who had only heard about their horrors. Everybody believed this. And you know, there, there are republican authors like Lucan who. Believed the same thing. So you know, Virgil, He just effortlessly, I think believed all this stuff that everybody else believed but you know, about the specifics of politics, he let me say passionately did not care.
- [52:50]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
- [52:51]
Sarah Rudin
The passion, you know, was in his devotion to literature. His passion was, was in his, you know, own emotional life and in the largely, you know, frustrating personal life that, that he had. These are the things that he actually cared about. You know, he, he did not care enough, you know, to be in rebellion against, you know, things that, political things that, that Augustine wanted him to, to express. And he may have been. I, I, I do kind of think that there were, there was some resistance, there was some irony. You can find it in certain parts of the Aeneid. For example, at the end of book 6, why is it that Aeneas goes through, he goes to the upper world through the gates of ivory that only admit false visions. Into our world, into the world of the living. So you can sort of, yeah, look at things like that and think. Yeah, no, he was, you know, just as he had made fun of, of politicos who affected to be competing authors just as he had made fun of them in the Eclogues. Possibly. He's, he's, he's poking at Augustus here and there in the Aeneid but to, to give him, you know, a whole political personality of any kind I think is completely missing the point.
- [54:45]
Benjamin Phillips
Right, right.
- [54:48]
Sarah Rudin
He'll go through the motion but you know, that, that, that's comparatively nothing. You know, his, his interest is in the landscape. It's in the dramas that he depict. So great dramas like the story of Nisus and Euryalus or Dido and Aeneas. I think they're, they're completely independent of and maybe even defiant of any political program. Right.
- [55:23]
Benjamin Phillips
No, and this is kind of just my non expert speculation but a lot of that conversation has been to, to me at least it seems too, too Aeneid centric almost. Whereas when I read the Georgics what I get is all right, he's, he's here, we've got peace again, let's get back to work. And, and that, that's, that's the focus, really. Yeah. We've got. We've got lives to live. Let's do it.
- [55:50]
Sarah Rudin
Yeah, yeah.
- [55:55]
Benjamin Phillips
Yeah. You, you make. I guess we're kind of running out of time here, but one point you make at the end that really intrigued me that I wanted to ask about the Aeneid is something that he couldn't. Top right. And he's. In this context of. He's been asked for, he's producing it very slowly and you kind of portray. There's a reluctance to finish and a kind of what would I do after this? Tell us a bit more about that kind of facing him as he. As he brings his masterpiece into being.
- [56:32]
Marshall Po
Yeah.
- [56:33]
Sarah Rudin
Now, there are certain. There are different ways to look at this. One is his perfectionism. He left another a number of half lines in the Aeneid, lines that he just couldn't bring himself to finish. He was planning to go back to them. And this speaks to me of. Of an author who was very meticulous about sound, about imagery, who, who about versification. He. He wanted, he wanted real perfectionism. We could just look at his results and.
- [57:19]
Marshall Po
Right.
- [57:20]
Sarah Rudin
Yeah, he's an exquisite author. So part of what kept him from finishing the Aeneid may have simply been his frustration at not being able to make. Not being able to create the poem that he had in his imagination, you know, something even more beautiful than the Aeneid that he left us. So there's that and then there are more personal and disturbing motivations that we can impute to him, at least speculatively. There isn't really a plausible work that he can undertake beyond the Aeneid.
- [58:10]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
- [58:13]
Sarah Rudin
This, this was touted, you know, as greater than Homer. And it's pretty clear to me that from circumstances and. And from, you know, letter quoted from Augustine, Augustus, you know, prodding him along in his composition, that Augustus would have been, you know, very happy with the 12 book. And yet even with the half lines, he. Maybe he wanted the half lines, you know, finished. Who knows? But we probably did want them finished. You know, he wanted to wrest this from Virgil's vise like grip. He wanted it declared finished and he wanted to be able to publish it and show it off.
- [59:04]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
- [59:05]
Sarah Rudin
And Virgil would not unhand it. Mm.
- [59:08]
Benjamin Phillips
It's been 12 years since Actium, for goodness sake.
- [59:11]
Sarah Rudin
Right? He. He wants, he wants this and Virgil, you know, goes off. Augustus is, you know, absent on this long, long diplomatic, distant, diplomatic journey. And while he's gone, Virgil decides he's gonna go on a big, long voyage. And yeah, and he takes the manuscript with him. And he said, yeah, I'll finish it, you know, by the time this voyage is finished. And then I'm gonna retire and study philosophy. Okay? You can just hear Augustus screaming. What? You know, I say when it's finished, or I say when you sit down and finish it.
- [59:59]
Benjamin Phillips
Right?
- [59:59]
Sarah Rudin
Okay. And at this point, I don't think it's hard to see a bitter conflict that has developed between the two of them about how Virgil's going to spend his time, how he's going to spend the rest of his life. And I could see this manuscript or there probably were a bunch of manuscripts floating around, you know, But Virgil had the latest one. And he had the power to declare this poem finished. The manuscript itself, or, you know, the Aeneid state of completion as being a bone of contention that maybe got Virgil killed. Because think about it. Once Virgil surrenders a finished manuscript and declares the. The. The poem finished, what more leverage has he got, right?
- [60:59]
Benjamin Phillips
Wow.
- [60:59]
Sarah Rudin
How does he extract subsidies? How does he get his money? How does he maintain his lifestyle? He's used to, you know, a lot of traveling. He's, you know, entertained in the very best style in wealthy households in Italy and Sicily. He's, you know, materially, he's led a very nice life. And he hasn't been dragged to Rome all that often, it look like. So what kind of life can he expect him for himself when his masterpiece is turned over? I can see this as a kind of horrifying, obsessive calculation for him. What. What does Augustus do with me when all I can write is sort of footnotes to the Indian minor subsidiary works and doesn't really need me after this?
- [61:57]
Benjamin Phillips
Wow. What a haunting thought that that must have been.
- [62:02]
Sarah Rudin
It must have been.
- [62:03]
Benjamin Phillips
Yeah, well, in the end, it pursued him. Hold on. I'm sorry. My. My wife just called in. Let me text real fast.
- [62:14]
Sarah Rudin
Okay. Yeah. No, you attend that.
- [62:18]
Benjamin Phillips
Yes, I'm just. Right. Oh, good. Five minutes before the end or so. Okay. Sorry about that.
- [62:31]
Sarah Rudin
No, that's fine. No, no, no.
- [62:32]
Benjamin Phillips
Making the note to edit there. In the end, that taunting thought pursued him to the grave, as it was, sadly. But thank you for what you've done to bring him back to life in our pages and in our bookshelves now. Really appreciate you coming in today as well. Is there anything else you're. You're working on currently that we can look forward to seeing from you?
- [62:59]
Sarah Rudin
I have. I have two books that I'm working on now.
- [63:02]
Benjamin Phillips
All right.
- [63:03]
Sarah Rudin
One is a biography of Perpetua.
- [63:07]
Benjamin Phillips
Okay.
- [63:08]
Sarah Rudin
Fascinating person who. A Christian who died in the arena in 2000.
- [63:15]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
- [63:15]
Sarah Rudin
And she leaves. She leaves a. A prison, what's called a prison diary. So we have a contemporary account of, of her, of the time leading up to her martyrdom, and we seem to have an eyewitness account of the martyrdom. And these, these are put together in, in one document. We don't have anything nearly as earthy and as intimate and as revealing about the history of early Christianity as these. Yeah, so.
- [63:50]
Benjamin Phillips
So I'm gonna have to have you back to talk about that one.
- [63:53]
Sarah Rudin
I, I will be very glad to come back and talk about that. The other book that I have in the works is a history of messaging about family planning. So it goes back to two poems that Ovid wrote about abortion and it continues up to the, you know, 21st century. And for me, this is a really fascinating topic and of course, relevant to, to issues that are very hot right now.
- [64:23]
Benjamin Phillips
Right.
- [64:25]
Sarah Rudin
So, yeah, I'm having, having a great time with that. Talking about, you know, Dickens's Dickens, Charles Dickens idea of the family, you know, other ideas. Two or three 20th century authors writing, writing about family planning. So, yeah, I hope this will be an interesting book.
- [64:50]
Benjamin Phillips
Yeah, I hope so. Well, those are those both with Yale still or with other publishers.
- [64:56]
Sarah Rudin
The book on family planning messaging is with Norton and Perpetual Biography is. Is with Yale. Yale University Press. So that's another one in the Agent Live series.
- [65:08]
Benjamin Phillips
Right?
- [65:09]
Sarah Rudin
Yeah.
- [65:10]
Benjamin Phillips
All right, well, now listeners, hopefully if you've enjoyed this talk and the book that go with it, you know where to. To find the next. Thank. Thanks again for coming. And whether you're talking or listening.