Centurion

What Nisus Said

Nisus ait: 'dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,
Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?'


Nisus said, Do the gods add this heat to the mind,
Euryalus, or does a man's own dire desire become a god to him?

-- Virgil's Aeneid IX, 184-185
(my translation)

Louise Gluck's "The Mountain"

THE MOUNTAIN

My students look at me expectantly.
I explain to them that the life of art is a life
of endless labor. Their expressions
hardly change; they need to know
a little more about endless labor.
So I tell them the story of Sisyphus,
how he was doomed to push
a rock up a mountain, knowing nothing
would come of this effort
but that he would repeat it
indefinitely. I tell them
there is joy in this, in the artist’s life,
that one eludes
judgment, and as I speak
I am secretly pushing a rock myself,
slyly pushing it up the steep
face of a mountain. Why do I lie
to these children? They aren’t listening,
they aren’t deceived, their fingers
tapping at the wooden desks—
So I retract
the myth; I tell them it occurs
in hell, and that the artist lies
because he is obsessed with attainment,
that he perceives the summit
as that place where he will live forever,
a place about to be
transformed by his burden: with every breath,
I am standing at the top of the mountain.
Both my hands are free. And the rock has added
height to the mountain.

--Louise Gluck


Thank you, AB, for the gift.

Rough Duty in Virgil's Roman Epic: A Great Read

Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn?

I love my alma mater, warts and all.  And, to keep with that metaphor, she'll bewitch you if you give her half a chance.  Half-Circe, half-Sibyl of Cumae?

Whenever I approach that gate, I hear Virgilian echoes; I just do.

(Homeric resonances too: Holy moly, Hermes!)


Let's hear it, especially, for Latin Summer Workshop '88!
"O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem."  --Virgil, The Aeneid, from Book I.

Not That Nisus

In the ninth book of his Aeneid, the Roman poet tells the tale of two friends, Nisus and Euryalus, who volunteer to deliver a message from the besieged main camp of the Trojans to Prince Aeneas himself, exploring and seeking allies in the Italian countryside. Aeneas' son Ascanius entrusts the two friends to find his father, their commander, and attest to the peril facing the camp. Unfortunately, the two Trojans are distracted from their mission by bloodlust and the lure of glory, and they stop to slaughter some sleeping Italian warriors. The younger Euryalus is seized after the moonlight gleaming off the helmet he'd taken for a prize gives him away, though Nisus has gotten free and could continue on his mission. He does not continue, but returns, wanting to free his younger friend. Nisus throws a spear at one of the warriors holding Euryalus, killing the man, but the Italian leader kills Euryalus in retaliation. (What else was likely?) Tormented by the death of Euryalus, Nisus then rushes in suicidally. The Italians cut him down and take both Trojans' heads as trophies.

Virgil calls forth Homer's very successful night-foray by Odysseus and Diomedes, catching the spy Dolon and slaughtering Rhesus and his company in their sleep, from The Iliad, and he recasts that episode into a fairly obvious fiasco with sentimental and sentimentally ridiculous overtones. Euryalus' mother's speech about the loss of her son and the brutality of war is moving, but the men are still dead. Later readers and writers have appreciated the martyrdom of the two Trojans, casting this episode as sentimentally heroic. Others have seen this episode as Virgil's clear commentary on Homeric pride and selfishness, on Greek "glory", in contrast to the more Roman virtue of honorable duty: Nisus and Euryalus acting as stand-ins for, say, Achilles and Patroclus. Virgil, being Virgil, all is possible, at once. To me, the effect of the episode is complex, morally and emotionally, more complex than I can easily explain. (I may attempt to better this treatment in a future blog entry.)

I've always been drawn to a key question that Nisus raises, which I offer in the English translation of Robert Fitzgerald: "This urge to action, do the gods instil it, / Or is each man's desire a god to him, / Euryalus?" What is the source of motivation? Of desire? And, where does it come from? Is it an external force or purely internal, however we dress it or explain it to ourselves? "This urge to action": the older I've gotten, the more complex my sense of motivation and drive. And yet often what drives us is simple, dress it up as we like. Still, for every action, the riddle of motivation, and only each one of us can truly understand the internal or external forces involved. That's my comforting--sometimes discomforting--fiction, anyway.

For some odd reason, I've always wondered What If Nisus Had Not Died Beside His Friend? What if Nisus survived the ill-conceived, luckless night-foray? Would he be haunted by his friend? Would he be haunted by guilt and remorse?

Back in the mid-90's, I started making notes for stories involving this Nisus-who-survives, casting him as a fugitive moving through southern Italy and the Greek isles to return to Troy, an exile masquerading as a fisherman and a sponge-diver. In my imagination, he gets caught up in Odysseus' scheme to salvage Greek ships sunken in storm on the way home laden with Trojan gold and other treasures. Does Odysseus realize that Nisus is a Trojan, a blood enemy, and if he does, does he care?

Back then, I also wrote the following poem, which I recently rediscovered.

NOT THAT NISUS

"I thought you were dead,"

The old ghost said,

The familiar boy with the helm

Too great for his head.

His arms so unsteady--

Yet his voice readily refrained--

"That you'd fallen with me,

That your devotion I'd gained."

"But I'm not that Nisus,"

The clay-gray dreamer denied.

"Not that epic figure, that hero--

If I were, I'd have died.

When you fell to the foe

Like the rose to the plow,

That Nisus was striving--

Scything Fortune knows how."

"I'll return with the night,"

Swore the young warrior at dawn.

But old Nisus had known

That he'd not slumber long

Without the bronze forms of fright

Cast into shadows of shame:

Marked by the might

Still sculpting his name.

--Matt Duckworth