Harvard School
The Harvard School is a school of thought in the study of the Aeneid, an epic poem by the Roman poet Virgil. It challenges the view of the Aeneid as a heroic poem written to glorify the emperor Augustus. Instead, it suggests that the poem places emphasis upon the suffering caused by war and empire and presents its hero, Aeneas, as a flawed character while evoking admiration and sympathy for his antagonists. Such readings often argue that "further voices" or a "private voice" can be detected alongside the propagandistic elements of the poem, problematizing or subverting its surface-level messages.
Although the Aeneid was overwhelmingly read as a work of Augustan propaganda into the mid-twentieth century, interpretations of the poem as containing anti-Augustan elements, and of Aeneas as an imperfect hero, can be traced to antiquity. The works of Christian apologists and ancient commentators, such as Servius, preserve evidence of minority readings which criticized Aeneas and suggested that Virgil was opposed to Augustus's regime. The Augustan reading remained dominant through the early modern period, though a number of readings saw Aeneas and his actions as flawed or attempted to reinterpret the poem as anti-autocratic. Aspects of nineteenth-century Virgilian criticism foreshadowed the Harvard School in focusing on the Aeneids melancholy and sympathy for human suffering, while some early textual critics attempted to remove as spurious parts of the poem which they judged incompatible with Virgil's assumed Augustan beliefs.
The Harvard School proper developed from the New Criticism movement in the middle of the twentieth century. It was named retrospectively by W. R. Johnson in 1976, and different scholars and perspectives have been variously associated with it. Harvard School approaches to the Aeneid tend to highlight the Aeneids sympathetic portrayal of the victims of Aeneas's and Augustus's success and the poem's melancholic view of its costs, and to interpret Aeneas as a flawed, hesitant or unsatisfactory hero. The earliest work of the Harvard School is often considered to be R. A. Brooks's 1953 article "Discolor aura: Reflections on the Golden Bough"; other works commonly associated with the movement include Adam Parry's 1963 article "The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid", Wendell Clausen's 1964 article "An Interpretation of the Aeneid", and Michael Putnam's 1965 book The Poetry of the "Aeneid". Other scholars cited as members of the school include Jasper Griffin, Oliver Lyne, Charles Segal and Richard F. Thomas.
The Harvard School's "pessimistic" interpretation of the Aeneid dominated Anglophone scholarship in the later twentieth century. Its methodological approach was adopted even by scholars who disagreed with its broad conclusions, and had become largely the norm by the early twenty-first century. Critics of the Harvard School characterized it as anachronistic, as oversimplifying the Aeneid or taking isolated details out of context, and as limiting the scope of inquiry into the poem. By the end of the twentieth century, the question of whether the Aeneid should be considered Augustan or anti-Augustan was generally considered outdated, and several scholars considered the ambivalence of the poem's "optimistic" and "pessimistic" aspects to be itself part of the Aeneid
Precursors
In antiquity
The Aeneid is an epic poem, written in Latin by the Roman poet Virgil, between 29 BCE and his death in 19 BCE. It tells the story of the Trojan hero Aeneas and his journey from Troy to Italy, where he becomes the ancestor of the Roman people, and foretells the coming of the emperor Augustus as the bringer of a new Golden Age. Within a generation of Virgil's death, the Aeneid was considered a literary classic and a poem befitting Augustus's ideology – the poet Ovid referred to it as the emperor's poem in a work of 9 CE. This view remained dominant throughout antiquity. According to the traditional account of Virgil's life, he asked for his manuscripts of the Aeneid to be burned upon his death rather than published: Richard Thomas suggests that this may have been motivated by a desire to avoid having the poem used by Augustus as propaganda.Thomas suggests that readings of the Aeneid as opposed to the Augustan project may have existed from the very earliest stages of the poem's reception. A Roman biography of Virgil by Suetonius preserves a criticism raised by "Marcus Vipsanius", considered by Thomas to be Augustus's lieutenant Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, that Virgil's language was "affected... and of hidden nature".
In the fourth or fifth century CE, the commentary of Servius on Virgil's Eclogues recorded that "some readers" interpreted a line about finding another lover as a veiled indication of Virgil's wish to find a replacement for Augustus as emperor. Thomas argues that Servius's commentary on the Aeneid, although it consistently asserts the poem's compatibility with Augustan ideology, provides evidence for competing readings that must have existed alongside his. Servius frequently argues against readers who suggest that Aeneas fails to live up to the standards of a hero: these include the mid–first century CE commentary of Lucius Annaeus Cornutus, which criticizes Aeneas for using a dove, a bird sacred to his mother Venus, as a target in an archery competition. He attempts to neutralise ambivalent readings of the episode of the golden bough in Aeneid 6, which is described as cunctantem as Aeneas attempts to remove it from a tree: this follows the Sibyl's pronouncement that it would "come freely" to one favored by the gods, and therefore may imply that Aeneas is not truly favored. Thomas argues that Servius's attempts to suppress this interpretation indicate that it was already current by the time of his commentary.
The Christian author Lactantius criticizes Aeneas in his apologetic work The Divine Institutes, written in the first decade of the fourth century. In the Aeneid and its Augustan reception, Aeneas's defining virtue is his pietas ; Lactantius accuses Aeneas of acting "detestably" in killing those at his mercy and in carrying out acts of human sacrifice, and asks rhetorically whether any reader will think "that this man had any virtue in him, who burned with fury... and who, forgetting the shade of his father... could not bridle his wrath?". Around the turn of the fifth century, the Christian theologian Augustine gave a sermon in which he imagined Virgil avowing that the prophecy of Roman greatness spoken by his Jupiter – that the Romans would be given imperium sine fine, or "empire without end" – was false, since it was impossible for any earthly power to be eternal.
To the nineteenth century
, an Italian humanist of the fifteenth century, wrote an unfinished continuation of the Aeneid from the perspective of Turnus. In Decembrio's version, Turnus is described as magnanimus and his people, the Rutulians, presented positively: Sonja Eckmann and Craig Kallendorf suggest that this might have become a fully pessimistic reinterpretation of the poem had Decembrio finished it. The fifteenth-century humanist Francesco Filelfo criticized Aeneas's actions at the end of the poem for giving in to rage rather than showing pietas; his contemporary Giovanni Pontano praised Turnus as an exemplar of bravery and self-control. In a commentary on the poem published by the Spanish Jesuit scholar Juan Luis de la Cerda in 1612, both Aeneas and Turnus are interpreted as noble and worthy of emulation: Kallendorf writes that there is "a sense of tragedy and excessive loss in this interpretation that would satisfy anyone in the Harvard School".A minority of early modern readings of the Aeneid dissented from the view that it promoted Augustus and his ideology. Kallendorf argues that William Shakespeare's play The Tempest, written around 1610–1611, reinterprets the Aeneid in ways which draw out from the poem "further voices" critical of imperialism. He further argues that Shakespeare's interpretation of the Aeneid, contrary to the supposed Augustan message, emphasizes the power of passion and anger to overpower reason and civilization. Similarly, he suggests that John Milton read the Aeneid as an anti-monarchical poem whose greatest sympathies were with Turnus. In Kallendorf's reading, Milton's 1667 poem Paradise Lost uses the Aeneid to critique monarchical power and to draw links between the sins of Adam and those of Aeneas.
John Dryden published a translation of the Aeneid in 1697 which became the primary English version of the poem; he suggested in his dedication of the translation that Virgil had been a republican and a reluctant supporter of Augustus. In eighteenth-century England, it became common to present Virgil as sacrificing his "poetical conscience" to praise Augustus, and to suggest that the portrayal of Augustus in the poem as a wise peacemaker was deliberately inaccurate but an attempt to present him as he should have been, rather than according to his true nature. In 1766, Robert Andrews made a translation of the Aeneid which, according to the twentieth-century Latinist T. W. Harrison, "make Virgil a kind of fifth columnist", though Harrison considered this to be an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the poem to Andrews's own anti-autocratic politics.
File:Francesco Solimena - Venus at the Forge of Vulcan, 1704.jpg|alt=Scene in a divine space: Venus, appearing as a beautiful woman, approaches from the left; a gold, round shield is in the centre, held by Vulcan, a bearded man, who sits to the right.|thumb|Vulcan, the god of the forge, hands the Shield of Aeneas to Aeneas's mother Venus in a scene from Aeneid 8, painted by Francesco Solimena in 1704.
Nineteenth-century readers overwhelmingly viewed Virgil as an Augustan propagandist, though early textual critics sometimes judged as spurious parts of the poem which they consiered dissonant with this interpretation. The 1843 edition of Petrus Hofman Peerlkamp removed the episode of the Shield of Aeneas from Book 8, since Peerlkamp judged it to be at odds with the Augustan messages he considered central to Virgil's work, and therefore either to be spurious or an instance of "critical incompetence" from the poet. Stephen Harrison suggests that aspects of nineteenth-century Virgilian criticism foreshadowed the Harvard School, and may have influenced it. He cites Matthew Arnold's 1857 lecture "On the Modern Element in Literature", noting that Clausen uses Arnold's term "melancholic" to describe Virgil's poetry; the lectures delivered by John Keble between 1831 and 1841, in which Keble emphasized Virgil's "sorrow and sympathy for wretched and weak mortals"; and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 1882 poem "To Virgil". Tennyson characterizes Virgil as a poet unsure in his faith – "Thou majestic in thy sadness / at the doubtful doom of human kind"– and, in Richard Jenkyns's words, both the poet "of imperial power, a voice of grace and grief".