Lavinia

I sing of arms and the man, he who, exiled by fate,
first came from the coast of Troy to Italy,
and to Lavinian shores –
hurled about endlessly by land and sea,
by the will of the gods,
by cruel Juno’s remorseless anger,
long suffering also in war, until he founded a city
and brought his gods to Latium:
from that the Latin people came,
the lords of Alba Longa, the walls of noble Rome.

Anyone who has taken high school Latin -- as many of us once did -- has probably read at least some portion of Virgil's Aeneid, of which the above are the opening lines.   The Aeneid was Rome's answer to the Greeks' Iliad and Odyssey -- an epic which many, then and much later, treated as history, as its founding story.  Although Homer's life and character are much in controversy, Virgil was very much a real poet, and he is said to have written the Aeneid at the behest of Caesar Augustus.

As the opening lines suggest, the Aeneid recounts the Odyssey-like voyage of Aeneas -- a Trojan hero who escapes defeated Troy with his father and his son Ascanius by ship.  He sailed about the Mediterranean, and eventually made land in Carthage where he had an affair with the married Queen Dido.  As I recall, the only lines we translated in high school were from the time he spent in Carthage.  Aeneas, whose mother was the goddess Aphrodite (Venus), had been told by the gods to establish a new country in Latium, on the Italian west coast -- which he did, after first visiting the Underworld.

Ursula K. Le Guin, that author of fantasy novels, has written something rather different in her novel Lavinia (2008).  Lavinia, the fully realized narrator of Le Guin's novel, is a barely mentioned character in the Aeneid.  She was the daughter of Latinus, the king of Laurentum, a city near the spot where Aeneas and his ships landed.  She married Aeneas, and bore him a son.  Their son, Silvius, according to Roman myth, was the distant ancestor of the twins Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome.

In the novel, Virgil appears to Lavinia, then 18, on several occasions as a "wraith" -- the embodiment of the poet's soul while his body is slowly dying on a ship, many centuries later.   Lavinia and Virgil impress each other, for differing reasons.  Virgil realizes that he had taken none of the females in his epic seriously -- absorbed only in the lives and conflicts of the men.  He wishes he had "known" Lavinia better -- or rather, he wishes he had invented Lavinia more fully.

Lavinia comes to realize, or believe, that she exists only because Virgil had, a millennium later, mentioned her in an epic poem.  She is caught up in the story that Virgil tells her; she awaits the arrival of Aeneas, whose virtues Virgil commends to her.  She eventually realizes that because the poet had described her so briefly, she has more room for exercising her free will, choosing between paths apart from the poem, than did characters like Aeneas and her father.

She will marry Aeneas, Virgil tells her.  Eventually, she does.  You will have only three years together, Virgil tells her.  Aeneas is killed exactly three years after they marry.  What would happen next Virgil had not written.  Her decisions were to be her own.

Le Guin's novel brings to mind the Theseus novels of Mary Renault, The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea.  Both Renault and Le Guin bring ancient legends to life, helping us to realize that, if the stories were actual history, they would have taken place on the same Earth on which we live now -- the birds sang as they do today, the flowers bloomed, the same sun rose and set.  In the same way, however different from ours the societies of myth and legend might have been, however different their religious beliefs and their ideals, human beings -- both heroes and ordinary folks -- were nevertheless like us in fundamentals. They loved, they feared death, some sought fame and glory, others sought comfort and obscurity.  They lived lives we can relate to.

But Renault always tells her stories as the Greeks themselves would have done -- from the perspective of the men, the warriors, the heroes.  Although Le Guin's novels have many male protagonists, she also has strong female heroes who sometimes find themselves smothered by the male society in which they live.  But sometimes not.  And even her male heroes are far more introspective than the Greek ideal Renault presents.  (Although Renault had Theseus's son -- a highly spiritual teenager -- ask his father about the purpose of life, a question that appalled Theseus.  "If a man began asking such things, where would be the end of it?")

The Greek hero, the heroes both Greek and Trojan who died at Troy, were all tough and aggressive, rarely doubting their duty to kill indiscriminately in support of their comrades and their king.  On the other hand, Lavinia recalls her husband Aeneas after his death:

In emergency, at the moment of choice, Aeneas might hesitate, confused, looking to the outcome, torn between conflicting claims and possibilities: in a torment of indecision he groped for his purpose, his fate, till he found it.  Then his choice was made and he acted on it.  And while he acted, his purpose was unwavering.  Afterwards, he might agonise over it all again, question his conscience endlessly, never fully satisfied that he had done the right thing.

In this Le Guin novel, as in others I have read, the primary battle that a man (or woman) must win is rarely a battle by force of arms, although such battles may also occur of necessity.  To quote myself (always a reliable source):

The battle isn't against an evil-doer, although some characters do evil, but against hostile environments and against the impersonal forces of fate and necessity. And, often, against the protagonists' own undiscovered emotions and fears.  Le Guin's heroes seek -- like the wizards in the Earthsea series -- to maintain the proper balance in the universe, always aware that every act -- good or bad -- has unforeseeable consequences. As does every failure to act.

Le Guin's Aeneas is such a hero: fierce and bloodthirsty in battle, worried and thoughtful in reflection.  And unlike the Greek hero for whom a woman was a possession, legally a chattel, however loved she might be, Aeneas was a man who perhaps resembled many men in the 21st century, but not the true man, the heroic man, of the Greek ideal:

We talked in the summer mornings before we got to work; we talked in darkness in our marriage bed, in the lengthening autumn nights.  He learned that he could talk to me as I think he had never talked to anyone, unless perhaps Creusa long ago, in the dark years of the siege of Troy, when he was young.  He was a man who thought hard and constantly about what he had done and what he ought to do, and his active conscience welcomed my listening, my silence, and my attempts to answer, as it struggled for clarity.

Lavinia praised him not as a Greek legend would have praised him, not as his fellow warriors would have regarded him, but as a woman:

He honored my ignorance, but I was impatient with it and ready to learn from him, as he soon learned.  As often as we made love I remembered what my poet [Virgil's wraith] told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.

In an informative "Afterword," the author tells us her love of Virgil's poetry -- Latin poetry with a beauty that defies translation by even the gifted poets who have attempted translation.  The places described in the epic can still be found, although given different names today.  Distances between towns and rivers and springs that seem large in the epic, and in Le Guin's novel, seem small in our automotive age.  An Italy that was forested is now largely devoid of trees.

And the people of what is now the region of Lazio (Latium), near today's Rome, would have been far more barbarous and primitive than either Virgil or Le Guin describes them, their cities more poverty-stricken and squalid.

Vergil [sic] exaggerates the sophistication of that world, I play down its primitiveness: both of us, I think, because we want these people to be Romans -- at least Romans in the making.

Some readers have complained that the novel is too slow, too descriptive.  Maybe.  It's not a detective novel.  If you know the outlines of Virgil's story, there will be no real surprises.  Except perhaps the very ending, when the consequence of Lavinia's "fictional" existence is made known. 

No, you read this novel for those very descriptions, descriptions of people and places and an ancient way of life.  You live in that world as Virgil, twenty centuries ago would have wanted you to live it, but as interpreted from the perspective of a quiet but intelligent woman, a woman overlooked by Virgil, a woman who just happened to be married to Aeneas.