The Decline and Fall of Virgil in Eighteenth-Century Germany: The Repressed Muse (review)

Abstract

Geoffrey Atherton, The Decline and Fall of Virgil in Eighteenth-Century Germany: The Repressed Muse. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006. xx + 312 pp. The reception of the Roman poet Virgil underwent profound changes in the eighteenth-century, especially in the German-speaking world.At the beginning of this period Virgil exemplified the aesthetic ideal for poetry, the Aeneid standing as the archetype of the epic. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, many concurred with Schlegel in dismissing the Aeneid as derivative, claiming that Virgil's work did not even qualify as poetry, that he was unable to comprehend beauty. To some degree this view held until Richard Heinze's Virgils epische Technik (1903) helped to establish modern Virgilian scholarship, refocusing on the epic style. Part of the decline in Virgil's fortunes can be attributed to the recovery of Homer and the assertion that the Greeks articulated a more authentic form of art, a view that helped to underwrite the claim of a strong spiritual affinity between ancient Greek and German culture. Also at play was an Enlightenment discomfort with the Aeneid's role in supporting the political authority of Augustus and the empire. In turn, part of the decline of Virgil's popularity can also be attributed to the receding influence of Latin culture and the epic as the highest expression of art, especially as German culture labored to establish an identity distinct from French (and by extension Roman) hegemony. That said, Virgil remained a profound, if unacknowledged presence in the writings of Klopstock.Wieland, Goethe, and Novalis, among many others. Geoffrey Atherton proposes to elaborate on this paradoxical state of affairs. He offers close analyses of the early critical and poetic reception of Virgil in the eighteenth century in order to set it in sharper relief, and to trace the persistence of Virgil's (submerged) influence on the German epic and the idyll. Atherton writes with clarity, his readings both nuanced and illuminating. The case of Winckelmann illustrates the paradoxes. On one hand, he played a central role in German philhellenism. Underlying this was the Enlightenment conception of nature found in Rousseau, and the corresponding notion that civilization distanced humans from their ideal condition. For Winckelmann the Greeks seemed to possess a closer, more authentic sympathy with nature, while the Romans merely copied them. Thus the famous statue Laocoon exemplified Greek naturalness, with its expression of stoic sublimity, while Virgil's account in the Aeneid exemplified Roman falseness. For Winckelmann and other German critics, Virgil was simply indulging in a rhetorical display rather than expressing deeply felt emotions. …