Virgil left to the Latin West three influential texts, each providing a unique allegorical
matrix and unique perspective on life’s stages: the Eclogues, the Georgics, the Aeneid.
The youthful, nostalgic, and pastoral mood of the Eclogues gives way to an adult
husbandsman’s deep concern for nature in the Georgics.
In his mature years, Virgil composed a national epic in imitation of Homer, among
other sources. The work was in many ways a perfect vehicle to be taken up by the
medieval mind. Half allegory, half history and legend, Virgil tells of Aeneas’s flight from
the burning citadel of Troy, wanderings in the Mediterranean, and struggles in Italy to
found a new home. From the horrendous storm in Book 1 to the plangent melancholy of
the Dido episode; from the marvelous underworld visit in Book 6 to the martyrdom of the
young prince Pallas in Book 11—the poem became in the hands of interpreters a kind of
three-part invention that fused the mythic past and mythic present to an imagined future.
Bitter political irony often intrudes as well, because Caesar Augustus’s poet at once
ambiguously reifies and decries the unspeakably violent and unscrupulous power games
necessary to create and control a world empire.
Once the magic and prestige of this material was absorbed by visionary rulers like
Charlemagne or William the Conqueror, there was no end to attempts to link up one’s
royal dynasty with the lineage of the Trojans. With Julius Caesar and other grand
emperors as your ancestors (and King Priam of the fifty sons behind them), any upstart
baron could convince his liege or perhaps even the papacy of his imperial pretensions.
Studying Virgil’s Latin, like reading the Bible and savoring Ovid’s rhetorical
trivialities, is what educated people have done for nearly 2,000 years. Throughout the
Middle Ages, for church fathers like Jerome and Augustine, or for Christian poets like
Prudentius, grammar study meant reading the Aeneid. Geoffrey of Monmouth used Virgil
extensively.
Of the 1,500 or so surviving Virgil manuscripts—of which perhaps two-thirds were
copied in France—many date from the crucial aetas Virgiliana, the 9th-11th centuries. Of
those, some 170 carry ancient commentary from Servius, Fulgentius, and others, which
were absorbed en passant by the mid-12th-century anonymous Énéas poet, who freely
adapted Virgil’s Aeneid into the vernacular Norman French for a noble audience. This
fascinating early romance combines many diverse elements that were used by subsequent
French authors, such as Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de
Machaut, and Jean Froissart. The Énéas features rich descriptions of scientific marvels as
well as a strong Ovidian intertextuality. The protracted love story of Lavine and Énéas
provides interlaced counterpoint for the violent feudal battles. Little Virgilian texture
remains, but much adventure and romance charmed both medieval listeners and future
imitators.
Another thinker residing in France at this time, Bernard Silvestris, composed a keen
allegorical interpretation of the first six books of the Aeneid. His commentary, a kind of
Virgile moralisé replaced the older treatise by Fulgentius and remained a standard
reference work throughout the Middle Ages.
Stylistically and axiologically, the works of Virgil exerted a profound influence upon
much of the new vernacular literature of medieval France as well as in the intellectual
and latinate culture of monastic scriptoria and cathedral schools.
Raymond J.Cormier
The Encyclopedia 1821