From Cave to Cave - The Vision of Er, the Sibyl, and Sustainability

It may seem jarring to transition from Plato’s Republic, written sometime before 348 BCE, and Vergil’s Aeneid, written, at the very least, three hundred years later. We have to move from a waning democracy in Athens, where the threat of Macedonian power was growing unchecked, and the dominance of King Philip was becoming a foregone conclusion, to Rome, about 650 miles westward, where in 348 BCE the city was still relatively small and angling for local superiority against its central Italian neighbors. We must cross the divide between the extensive domain of Greek culture -- all the way from Sicily to the Indus river, where it had been seeded under Alexander the Great and his generals -- to the hinterlands of Europe where illiterate nations lived a mostly nomadic existence. By Virgil’s time, Greek dominion of the East  --  Asia Minor, the Middle East, and Egypt -- had passed into Roman hands. Rome’s Republican institutions were already gutted in Vergil’s youth, and that century was an uninterrupted stretch of civil and socioeconomic warfare (Vergil himself, had he not been of such delicate health, might easily have lost his life in one of the warring armies, and if it were not for his poetic fame, he would have lost his ancestral farm to a veteran soldier fighting for a general who did not respect his family’s property rights. And lastly, we transition in genre from prose dialogue to Homeric hexameter poetry.

Yet the bridges of tradition often extend easily across ages, languages and cultures, especially when the younger author thinks himself as having an active role in carrying forward the culture of the past. Thus Vergil, besides having a thoroughly Greek education at Naples (under the Epicurean philosopher Siro), very consciously emulated and imitated Homer and many other classical authors, whose works would have been very familiar to every educated Roman. Vergil bases his Sixth Book on Odyssey 11, to be sure - the returning hero has to consult the dead before completing his journey. Odysseus has to consult, specifically, the prophet Teriesias of Thebes, who figured so prominently in the Oedipus story. Aeneas has to consult the Sibyl to be certain of the exact location where he must set the New Troy (Rome). In the Homeric underworld, Odysseus sees only men and women, and only notes the famous ones. I the Aeneid, the hero Aeneas rejoins with his father Anchises, who becomes his tutor in the wisdom of the afterlife and the structure of the universe. The souls in the Aeneid are reincarnated, as in Plato, after a thousand-year cleansing. But there is also a Roman component which is absent in the vision of Er: the Roman idea of family honor. In other words, the Roman dead coalesce around their clans, and you can see (well, Aeneas can see) the resemblance in facial features across the generations. One would think that spirits were reincarnated within the same families, but this is not specified by Vergil.

As in Homer, Vergil has the heroes forget what they have seen when they return to earth. Thus Aeneas is in awe of what he sees in Hades, without fully understanding - even before they exit - the whole scope of Roman history - from his own son Ascanius, through Romulus and Remus, the Kings, and the heroes of the Republic (the Metelli, the Scipios, and so on). But the deplorable spectacle at the end of Anchises’ tale -- the funeral of Marcellus - gives one a strong impression that Roman history will fundamentally “end” after Augustus, who has no worthy successor. If this was indeed Vergil’s intention, the tone of Book 6 is opposite to patriotic and pro-Augustan, despite his high status within Augustus’ circle.  If the perfect government, according to Plato’s Socrates in the Republic, is not sustainable (it degenerates automatically through timocracy, aristocracy, democracy and finally tyranny), then Vergil may wish to reflect something about the unsustainability of the Roman Empire here in Book 6.

Addendum: For a modern scholar on Plato's Republic and its lessons for sustainable living, see Melissa Lane, "Eco-Republic" (Ch 1 available at this link courtesy of Princeton University Press);

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9426.pdf