Oldenburg, “Aeneas Escaping from Troy”
Monday
So much is going on in the United States these days that, unless you’re from California or Oregon, you may not be aware that fires continue to rage there. Add the Delta Fire to the Carr Fire and the fires that decimated the Mendocino area. It’s terribly depressing.
I thought of the devastation recently while rereading Virgil’s account of the Greeks sacking Troy, the first time I have looked at the Aeneid since I was a teenager.
Many Californians have a sense of what it was like for Aeneas to awaken to the Greeks sacking his city. The passage may lead us to recall California’s mudslides as well as its fires:
Meanwhile the city is confused with grief, on every side,
and though my father Anchises’s house is remote, secluded
and hidden by trees, the sounds grow clearer and clearer,
and the terror of war sweeps upon it.
I shake off sleep, and climb to the highest roof-top,
and stand there with ears strained:
as when fire attacks a wheat-field when the south-wind rages,
or the rushing torrent from a mountain stream covers the fields,
drowns the ripe crops, the labor of oxen,
and brings down the trees headlong, and the dazed shepherd,
unaware, hears the echo from a high rocky peak.
Now the truth is obvious, and the Greek plot revealed.
Now the vast hall of Deiphobus is given to ruin
the fire over it: now Ucalegon’s nearby blazes:
the wide Sigean Straits throw back the glare.
Then the clamor of men and the blare of trumpets rise.
Especially vivid is the reflection of devastation in the Sigean Straits (the Dardanelles). Aeneas escapes with his family (except for his wife), but most of the Trojans do not. California is paying its own price.
Another great quotation: This from a fabulous Russian novel that a friend introduced me to. It was submitted for publication in 1960 but confiscated and only appeared decades later. The scene involves the Battle of Stalingrad:
It seemed impossible to escape from the liquid fire. It leaped up, hummng and crackling, from the streams of oil that were filling the hollows and craters and rushing down the communication trenches. Saturated with oil, even the clay and stone were beginning to smoke. The oil itself was gushing out in black glossy streams from tanks that had been riddled by incendiary bullets; it was as though sheets of flame and smoke had been sealed inside these tanks and were now slowly unrolling.
The life that had reigned hundreds of millions of years before, the terrible life of the primeval monsters, had broken out of its deep tombs; howling and roaring, stamping its huge feet, it was devouring everything round about. The fire rose thousands of feet, carrying with it clouds of vaporized oil that exploded into flame only high in the sky. The mass of flame was so vast that the surrounding whirlwind was unable to bring enough oxygen to the burning molecules of hydrocarbon; a black, swaying vault separated the starry sky of autumn from the burning earth. It was terrible to look up and see a black firmament streaming with oil.
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (1960)