Βιργιλίου «Αινειάδα», εισαγωγικό δοκίμιο

Is it possible for someone who has not successfully graduated from the Homeric epics to be a discerning reader of the “Aeneid”?  It is hard to give a prompt, all-inclusive, unqualified answer.  Here one has to bear in mind that the European Middle Ages enjoyed and admired the “Aeneid” at a time when those who were proficient in Greek were few and far between;  and it should also be remembered that unchaperoned by Homer the “Aeneid” kept fascinating hosts of readers before the Romantic outburst of the late  eighteenth century in Germany woke up the literary world  to ‘the first spring-like freshness’ of Homer’s poetry.  There is also no doubt that Dante’s  “Divina Commedia”  captivated quite a few readers who had no thorough knowledge of the “Aeneid” and even less or none at all of Homer.  Did Shakespeare’s ‘small Latine and lesse Greeke’ really detract from the pleasure of reading the “Aeneid”?  And does one really need to be familiar with the whole of literature that went into their making in order to enjoy T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” or Umberto Eco’s “The name of the rose”?

Still the question remains, especially for those who firmly believe in the value of Aristotle’s ‘anagnorisis’.  Is it not the case that readers of the “Waste Land”’s intertextual crucible are afforded greater pleasure when they spot material from Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Saint Augustine, Dante,  further afield from Aldous Huxley and Paul Verlaine and, even further, from the Bible, the scriptures of Hinduism and much else?

Από το κεφάλαιο  ‘Ο θείος Μαρκήσιος και ο master chef’΄ της εισαγωγικής μονογραφίας του «Λουκρητίου ‘Περί Φύσεως’.  Η κληρονομιά ενός επίμονου κηπουρού».

A scourge for de Polignac and an ally for the Encyclopedists, Lucretius was promptly admitted into the salon of the arch libertine Marquis de Sade who predictably took a keen interest in the diatribe ‘On Love’ and more particularly in the ‘soft porn’ of Book 4.  In the context of his criticisms on what he describes as a trend of maudlin sentimentalism in the fiction of his contemporaries, de Sade concurs with Lucretius’ condemnation of love as romantic passion:  neither a ritual of angelic intercourse nor a chamber of monogamous fusion;  on the contrary, cultivation of voluptuous imagination in starkly physical terms and with zero degree emotion.  In fact, the Marquis went far beyond Lucretius, yet despite the peculiarly morbid proclivities that sent him to the Bastille cells and the madhouse for several years, his hedonism is closely related with the individualistic, libertine and unconventional instincts that thrived on the outskirts of the Enlightenment and especially with the burgeoning of a hedonist culture which in turn was perceived to have affinities with Epicurus’ and Lucretius’ materialistic conception of erotic passion.

Από το κεφάλαιο ‘Ο μύθος’ του εισαγωγικού δοκιμίου του «Οβιδίου Μεταμορφώσεις».

A considerable number of stories in the “Metamorphoses” figure young maidens who give in to force majeure exercised by lascivious gods, conceal their pregnancy out of embarrassment and fear yet eventually give birth to sons destined for a variety of distinguished careers.  In scenarios of this type some scholars have caught echoes of an archetypal ‘biological and cultural pattern’ according to which women are programmed for a sequence of puberty, defloration, pregnancy and childbirth.  Even greater is the number of myths in which the principal figures lose their human form and morph into animals in atonement for crimes committed by themselves or by others .  In such cases scholarly interpretation reveals myth as reflection of rituals in which the participants wore animal skins.

Readings of this kind are quite interesting, even fascinating, but they would have been more meaningful had Ovid taken care  to leave on the surface buoys pointing to what lies in the depths underneath.  In fact, he does not seem to have bothered to do so, and there is a good reason for this:  Ovid writes in an age where myths have lost their former function as narratives that structure the community and its values thereby becoming literary and artistic fodder;  he writes when myth had already and to a great extent undergone this kind of mutation in the Hellenistic period;  and he writes as someone who sees myths as mythology, in much the same way as myth is seen by Stephen Fry and ourselves. 

And it is in this spirit that he recounts the story of the handsome youth who, transfixed by his reflection on the waters of the lake,  is gradually consumed by unrequited passion for the ‘other’ who only happens to be his own self.  Ovid narrates without looking back to old wives’ tales about mirroring on water being a premonition of death but also without ‘clinically’ foreshadowing anything so portentous as the Freudian pathology of narcissism.  Most of his tales are already known or narrated, however, much like Nabokov in “Laughter in the Dark”, he states: ‘The story is well-known and it would not make much sense to recount it once again were it not that we stand to derive pleasure from sheer narration’.