Wednesday
It’s unsettling to reread The Aeneid in the months following Donald Trump’s January 6 attempted coup. In Book II we see the Trojans celebrating victory after a ten-year war (the 2020 election campaign felt like it was ten years). After twelve or so hours of euphoria, however, their walls are breached and their city and themselves destroyed.
We who thought democracy had been saved by Joe Biden’s victory have been greeted with a rude shock—first by the January 6 insurrection, then by the 147 Republican Congress members who voted to overturn the election, then by the incessant calls for vote recounts (leading to shady business in Arizona), then by a wave of voter suppression laws, then by the refusal of Republican Congress members to investigate the Capitol attack. In the latest developments, we have Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn calling for a Myanmar-type coup and Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz gesturing towards armed insurrection (this latter at a fascist “America First” rally).
While Flynn and Gaetz—one out of jail only because he was pardoned by Trump and one possibly facing indictment—may seem fringe figures, time and again we have seen the fringe move to the center in today’s Republican Party. Who could have foreseen, for instance, that Congress members who experience the Capitol attack first hand would now be describing it as “a largely peaceful protest” (Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson) and “a normal tourist visit” (Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde). No mention of all those killed and injured and all the property damage.
Recounting the fall of Troy to Dido, Aeneas talks about the amazing moment when Trojans discover that the Greeks have (apparently) left:
We thought they’d gone,
Sailing home to Mycenae before the wind,
So Teucer’s town is freed of her long anguish,
Gates thrown wide! And out we go in joy
To see the Dorian campsites, all deserted,
The beach they left behind.
(trans. Robert Fitzgerald)
They also see an immense wooden horse, and debates break out about what to do with it. Some see no danger. Thymoetes, for instance, “shouts/ It should be hauled inside the walls and moored/High on the citadel.” Think of him as West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, who apparently believes that the Senate Republicans can be reasoned with. For instance, he sees no reason to abolish the filibuster, even though doing so would allow Democrats to pass legislation protecting future elections.
Others warn that the GOP has become a de facto authoritarian party, prepared to trash democracy and establish minority rule. Might these be Virgil’s “wiser heads” who want to do away with the horse?
“Into the sea with it,” they said, “or burn it,”
Build up a bonfire under it,
This trick of the Greeks, a gift no one can trust,
Or cut it open, search the hollow belly!”
One of these, the priest Laocoon, cries out,
Men of Troy, what madness has come over you?
Can you believe the enemy truly gone?
A gift from the Danaans, and no ruse?
Is that Ulysses’ way, as you have known him?
…Some crookedness
Is in this thing. Have no faith in the horse!
Whatever it is, even when Greeks bring gifts
I fear them, gifts and all.
Had we only listened to him, Aeneas says, “Troy would stand today—O citadel of Priam, towering still!”
The Trojan optimists breach the city walls so the horse can be dragged in, and they ignore the sound of weapons clanging inside the horse’s belly. They also ignore Cassandra, the seer who is cursed never to have her accurate prophecies believed:
There on the very threshold of the breach
It jarred to a halt four times, four times the arms
In the belly thrown together made a sound—
Yet on we strove unmindful, deaf and blind,
To place the monster on our blessed height.
Then, even then, Cassandra’s lips unsealed
The doom to come: lips by a god’s command
Neer believed or heeded by the Trojans.
Adding credence to the deception is a liar so skillful that he would put Donald Trump to shame. Sinon, who pretends to have escaped his fellow Greeks after they intended to sacrifice him, vouches that the horse is not a trick. Think of him as those Republicans who assure us that they are not actually suppressing the vote but rather working to insure its integrity.
Here’s a taste of what happens next. I choose the scene where Achilles’s son Pyrrhus storms Priam’s palace because it reminds me of the attack on our Capitol. Unlike the Trump insurrectionists, however, Pyrrhus actually “hang[s] Mike Pence”:
Pyrrhus shouldering forward with an axe
Broke down the stony threshold, forced apart
Hinges and brazen door-jambs, and chopped through
One panel of the door, splitting the oak,
To make a window, a great breach. And there
Before their eyes the inner halls lay open,
The courts of Priam and the ancient kings,
With men-at-arms ranked in the vestibule.
From the interior came sounds of weeping,
Pitiful commotion, wails of women
High-pitched, rising in the formal chambers
To ring against the silent golden stars;
And, through the palace, mothers wild with fright
Ran to and fro or clung to doors and kissed them.
Pyrrhus with his father’s brawn stormed on,
No bolts or bars or men availed to stop him:
Under his battering the double doors
Were torn out of their sockets and fell inward.
Sheer force cleared the way: the Greeks broke through
Into the vestibule, cut down the guards,
And made the wide hall seethe with men-at-arms—
Virgil then turns to an epic simile to capture the power of the moment. It brings to the mind Trump supporters swarming up the Capitol walls and pouring into the halls:
A tumult greater than when dykes are burst
And a foaming river, swirling out in flood,
Whelms every parapet and races on
Through fields and over all the lowland plains,
Bearing off pens and cattle.
Our Cassandras are telling us that January 6 is just a dress rehearsal for what is to come.
