Thursday
My Dante discussion group, now a Virgil discussion group, made a Covid connection when discussing how a fury from hell upsets a sensible political settlement in The Aeneid. It’s a reminder that, no matter how rational a certain course of action may be, human perversity is always lurking to undermine it.
King Latinus of the Latins has received a prophetic dream that he should marry his daughter Lavinia to a stranger who has just shown up on Italy’s shores—which is to say, to Aeneas. The ultimate result will be an empire unlike any the world has ever known.
So far, so good. Indeed, if this were to play out, the Aeneid would have to end at Book VII. Instead, we get another five books of bloody warfare between the Latins and the Trojans. That’s because Juno, ever determined to thwart Aeneas, enlists the fury Allecto to disrupt Latinus’s plans:
From the dark underworld
Home of the Furies, she aroused Allecto,
Grief’s drear mistress, with her lust for war,
For angers, ambushes, and crippling crimes.
Even her father Pluto hates this figure,
Even her hellish sisters, for her myriad
Faces, for her savage looks, her head
Alive and black with snakes.
Allecto immediately goes into action, working first on Amata, Latinus’s queen. In the scene, I think of those fury-possessed parents who, after a Tennessee school board meeting where health care professionals advocated a school mask mandate, went after them, shouting, “We know who you are,” “We will find you,” and “There is a place in hell for you guys. There is a bad place in hell and everybody’s taking notes.”
Here’s how Allecto enters their hearts of such people:
Now the goddess
Plucked one of the snakes, her gloomy tresses,
And tossed it at the woman, sent it down
Her bosom to her midriff and her heart,
So that by this black reptile driven wild
She might disrupt her whole house. And the serpent
Slipping between her gown and her smooth breasts
Went writhing on, though imperceptible
To the fevered woman’s touch or sight, and breathed
Viper’s breath into her.
After Latinus refuses to abandon his plan, the infected queen becomes a raging Karen:
Finding Latinus proof against this plea
And holding firm, while in her viscera
The serpent’s evil madness circulated,
Suffusing her, the poor queen, now enflamed
By prodigies of hell, went wild indeed
And with insane abandon roamed the city.
To this point, Turnus doesn’t seem to care that Lavinia will be marrying Aeneas, not him. That’s because he hasn’t been riled up yet by inflammatory Facebook posts. In fact, when Allecto shows up in his dream, taking the form of an old woman (her Facebook avatar?), he initially dismisses her:
But old age, mother,
Sunk in decay and too far gone for truth,
Is giving you this useless agitation,
Mocking your prophet’s mind with dreams of fear
And battles between kings.
Being a reasonable Republican lasts only so long, however. It doesn’t take much for Allecto to infect Turnus as she has infected Queen Amata:
“I come to you from the Black Sisters’ home
And bring war and extinction in my hand.”
With this she hurled a torch and planted it
Below the man’s chest, smoking with hellish light.
Enormous terror woke him, a cold sweat
Broke out all over him and soaked his body.
Next thing we know, he’s storming a school board meeting. Or a state capitol. Or the U.S. Capitol. Virgil goes wild with his epic simile:
Then driven wild, shouting for arms, for arms
He ransacked house and chamber. Lust of steel
Rage in him, brute insanity of war,
And wrath above all, as when fiery sticks
Are piled with a loud crackling by the side
Of a caldron boiling, and the water heaves
And seethes inside the vessel, steaming up
With foam, and bubbling higher, till the surface
Holds no more, and vapor mounts to heaven.
So, then, in violation of the peace,
He told the captains of his troops to march
On King Latinus…
As for Latinus, he reacts the way that Trump reacts when his supporters go insane. He retreats into self-pity and inaction–which is to say, into his own Mar-a-Lago:
”For me, I’ve earned my rest, though entering haven
I am deprived of happiness in death.”
He said no more, but shut himself away
And dropped the reins of rule over the state.
Meanwhile, the death count rises.
After refusing to stand tall against Covid during his presidency, Trump tried momentarily to advocate vaccines at a recent Alabama rally, only to reverse himself quickly following boos. Real leaders make tough and principled decisions. Fake leaders fold when Allecto seizes their followers.