The Vergilian Century

Let me begin by explaining the title – "The Vergilian Century." Journalists and some historians frequently speak of "The American Century," and I hope the two phrases will be understood as being in dialogue. The paper that I intend to give (no title as yet) will make the case for a parallelism extending throughout the 20th c. on three planes:

  1. the rise in prestige of Vergilian studies throughout the century to a position of leadership in Latin studies as a whole;
  2. the growth in influence of American latinists, especially Vergilians, over this period;
  3. the waxing of American political power in the world during the same time.

I believe that the argument in favor of this parallelism can be sustained in some detail until we reach the last 20 years of the century. At this point, American political power becomes not only preeminent, but virtually unchallenged; but at the same time, Vergilian studies, while remaining a prestigious field, does find a challenger for hegemony over Latin literary studies, specifically in Ovid, and American scholars, while remaining active participants in the international discussion of Latin literature, begin to relinquish what had been a position of leadership to, especially, Italian and British scholars. Looking a bit closer at the period just before this reversal of fortune, one notices that Vergilian studies in America began to be out of phase with the trajectory of American political power when the latinists' power was at its height -- during the years of the New Criticism, which coincided with a period of great political anxiety (Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis, Viet Nam, the oil crises of the seventies, the Iran hostage episode). It is the fact of this somewhat paradoxical divergence at the end from what looks, for the most part, like a straightforward parallelism on three planes, that I find so intriguing.

Part of what I want to do is to tease out the corollaries of this argument. For instance, it now appears to me that the pro/anti-Augustan arguments of the sixties and seventies especially are very little more than artifacts of a cold war mentality that could conceive of power relations only in Manichean terms. I would also suggest that the new interest in Ovid and the most appealing ways of reading him have a lot to do with the fact that we had got used to, and tired of, the Vergilian hegemony, particularly in its bifurcated form, just as we had rid ourselves of the binary politics of the cold war and had to accustom ourselves to a world in which there is only one superpower, for better or worse. Ovid certainly seems to speak to this condition more convincingly than Vergil. Vergil, it seems to me, is about dilemmas, Ovid about accommodations.

Anyway, that -- *very* baldly put -- is more or less what I want to say. I am very happy to have other speakers who will disagree or talk about other things entirely, if they will only relate what they have to say to the general theme of "The Vergilian Century."