From rthomas@fas.harvard.edu Sun Mar 25 11:07:26 2001
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Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2001 14:07:23 -0500 (EST)
From: Richard Thomas <rthomas@fas.harvard.edu>
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: Dryden and Richard Thomas 
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On Sat, 24 Mar 2001, KOPFF E CHRISTIAN wrote:

> First on Dryden. Later on Virgil.
> A translation can get some parts of a rich and successful work across,
> but not everything. I think from my own reading and from the research
> on Dryden that he was aiming at several goals: reproducing the ethical and
> political aspects of Aeneid; recreating many of Virgil's poetic effects
> in parallel ways; using the tradition of English verse to make Virgil as
> traditional a poet in English as he is in Latin. Dryden says something
> like: I tried to give what I thought Virgil would have written if he were
> a contemporary Englishman. One aspect that he often omitted, elided or
> changed is the Romanitas with which Virgil imbues the epic tradition.

Fortuntely Dryden tells us exactly what he thought Virgil was doing with
the character of Aeneas, which conditions his treatment of characters who
come into contact with Aeneas. In the Dedication to the Aenes, he writes:


        'I have already said from Bossu, that a poet is not obliged to
make
        his hero a virtuous man; therefore neither Homer nor Tasso are to
        be blamed, for giving what predominant quality they pleased to
their
        first character. But Virgil, who designed to form a perfect
prince,
        and would insinuate that Augustus, whom he calls Aeneas in his
poem,
        was truly such, found himself obliged to make him without blemish,
        thoroughly virtuous; and a thorough virtue both begins and ends in
        piety'


If this fits your view of the poem then Dryden (who indeed makes his
Aeneas a "perfect prince") is your man. If not, go back to Virgil.
 
> He quotes Dido's curse of Aeneas in
> Dryden's magnificent verse and comments, "Heroines are not thus presented
> by poets blinded by masculine complacency."

Dryden is always out to emphasize (demonstrably more than does Virgil) the
danger Aeneas is in. That Dryden even outdoes the Virgilian curse of the
royal virago serves good purpose (and is great poetry too).

.