My desire was to follow Vergil, not to improve or reprove him. But Lavinia herself sometimes insisted that the poet was mistaken—about the color of her hair, for instance. And being a novelist and wordy, I enlarged upon and interpreted and filled in many corners of his spare, splendid story. But I left out a good deal, too. The palaces and tiaras, the hecatomb sacrifices, the Augustan magnificence he gave to his setting, I reduced to a more plausible poverty. The Homeric use of quarrelsome deities to motivate, illuminate, and interfere with human choices and emotions doesn't work well in a novel, so the Greco-Roman gods, an intrinsic element of the poem, are no part of my story.
Free of the borrowed literary machinery of the pantheon, and authorised by some respectable scholars of religion, I found my characters following the sacred domestic practices of that profoundly religious people the Romans. Such ways of worship were centuries old in Vergil's day, and continued to exist in country places all through the Republic and the Empire, until the multiplication of imported deities and Christian intolerance finally suppressed them. "Pagan," meaning a worshipper of the gods, is a Christian usage; originally, pagans were simply the people who lived on the pagus, the Roman farm: hayseeds. Such country folk clung longest to the old, local, earth-deep religion. The song sung at Ambarvalia in my story is probably the oldest Latin poem known, yet it was written down as late as AD 218, by which time it was immemorially ancient and perhaps almost as strange to those who sang it as it is to us.
Enos Lases iuvate
neve luae rue Marmar sins incurrere in pleores
satur furere Mars limen sali sta berber
semunis alternei advocapit conctos
enos Marmor iuvato
triumpe triumpe triumpe triumpe triumpe
Who were the people in the foothills and lowlands of Latium in the eighth century bc—the Latins, the ancestral Romans? More knowledge than we used to have about them is coming to light, but still, I'm glad that my story is set in Vergil's semi-mythological, nonhistorical landscape, defined by a poet, not by the patient uncertainties of archaeologists. As for the historians, this early period is almost entirely frustrating to them. There is no reliable history of the Latins or of Rome itself until surprisingly late, well into the second century BC. The Roman historian Livy (who lived at about the same time as Vergil) is wonderful reading, but what he had to work with was almost entirely legend, myth, guesswork, tradition, contradiction, lists of festivals, names of consuls, fragments of enigmas; and we have less than he did, though our archaeology is more reliable.
Rome itself was probably a Latin settlement, almost certainly taken over for a while by the Etruscans and much influenced by them. But nobody is perfectly certain who the Etruscans were, though they left treasures of art and architecture wherever they settled, and we can decipher a certain amount—not all—of their language. They mostly lived north of the Tiber, in a league of twelve city-states that may have been considerably in advance of the Latins, culturally and economically.
The Latins and their neighboring peoples such as the Sabines, Aequians, Hernici, Volscians, all speakers of related Indo-European languages, had been migrating down from the north since before 1000 BC.
There was room for them. A great deal of Italy, back then, was forest. Where man goes, trees die; or, to paraphrase Tacitus, we make a desert and call it progress. By 800 BC the Latin-speaking people had moved into Latium, cutting trees and clearing their farm and pasture lands; and they may have been, as in my story, settled farmers and villagers (pagans), grouped by tribe or people under chiefs or kings. They probably weren't anywhere near as comfortable and civilised as I portray them. What is certain is that they were farmer-warriors, who spent a lot of time fighting each other. The Latins went on doing so with increasing success, for centuries, till they ruled all western Europe and quite a lot of Africa and Asia.
Like Vergil, I call the towns of the Bronze Age cities, and their people probably saw them as cities, but to us they might look like a walled or stockaded huddle of huts around a fort. Their people went out into the fields to herd sheep, goats, and cattle, and plant and tend barley and emmer wheat and vegetables, fruit and nut trees. They probably had no cotton or linen yet; the women carded, spun, and wove wool into the togas and pallas they wore (not all that different from a sari). It's possible that they knew only wild vines and the inedible wild olive, and couldn't afford to buy wine or olive oil from the Etruscans, who by then may have had them. But I couldn't imagine Italians without wine and olive oil. If it's any excuse, neither could Vergil.
I tried to give a glimpse of the countryside as it probably was then: a vast forest of oak and pine cut by steep river gullies running down to swampy grasslands and dune marshes near the coast. Settlements were mostly on rocky outcrops of the great volcanic complex of Mount Alba. The towns and their pastures and pagus fields were a small part of that wilderness. Each was a long way from the others. It would be a long time yet before they drew together to become Rome. People lived then in a wild world, a lonely one.
Vergil exaggerates the sophistication of that world, I play down its primitiveness: both of us, I think, because we want these people to be Romans—at least Romans in the making.
Ever since I first read about it I've been drawn to Rome, not the sick, luxurious Empire of the TV sagas, but early Rome: the dark, plain Republic, a forum not of marble but of wood and brick, an austere people with a strong sense of duty, order, and justice: farmers who spent half the year in the army, women who ran the farm meanwhile, extended families whose worship was of the fire in their hearth, the food in their granary, the local spring, the spirits of place and earth. Women were not set apart as chattel, and if only for that reason my imagination can be at home in an ancient Roman household as it cannot be in an ancient Greek one. They had slaves, as every people did then, but the slaves of the household, the familia, sat at table with the free. They were coarse, they were brutal, and they were tremendously different from us, but it is hard to feel them as essentially foreign when so much of our cultural heritage comes directly from them, half our language, most of our concept of law ... and perhaps also certain homely but delicate values, such as the loyalty, modesty, and responsibility implicit in Vergil's idea of a hero.
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I am grateful to W. Warde Fowler, author of The Religious Experience of the Roman People, and to H. J. Rose, author of Ancient Roman Religion, whose works, full of information and understanding, exemplify the nobility of scholarship. Bertha Tilly, in Vergil's Latium, and Alexander G. McKay, in Vergil's Italy, were invaluable guides. Karen Carr of the Portland State University Department of History shook some of the errors out of my Afterword and is not to blame for any that remain. My brother Karl Kroeber encouraged my reading of the Aeneid as a tragedy, but will probably rightly disown it. I am grateful to my editors Andrea Schulz and Michael Kandel and, as always, to the many people at Harcourt who work with me in so many ways to make a book what it ought to be.
—URSULA K. LE GUIN
2008
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Lavinia Page 27
