Eliot as Reader of Apollonius?

In a previous post on a different topic, I quoted the following from Part I of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

The usual source for the crowd flowing over the bridge is thought to be Dante, Inferno 3.55-57:

Behind it came so long a file of people
that I could not believe
death had undone so many.[1]

We have good grounds for thinking that is right, given that Eliot himself tell us that is the source in his notes on The Waste Land. (These lines, it should be noted, refer to the souls of the dead waiting to cross the Acheron into Hell.)

On the other hand, Eliot’s notes don’t tell us everything. What if there is more to it?

I think there may be–in a source that, while inaccessible to Dante, Eliot himself easily could have used.

I refer to the final book of the Argonautika of Apollonius of Rhodes. As the Argonauts waste away, moored in the sands of the Libyan desert, Apollonius uses a simile about–well, about the shades of the dead (he calls them “soulless images”) going or whirling about a city. It is a simile Peter Green calls “striking, structurally complex, and, to the best of my knowledge, original with Apollonius.” Here is Arg. 4.1276-88 in Greek, followed by Aaron Poochigian’s translation.

Ὧς φάτο δακρυόεις, σὺν δ’ ἔννεπον ἀσχαλόωντι
ὅσσοι ἔσαν νηῶν δεδαημένοι. ἐν δ’ ἄρα πᾶσιν
παχνώθη κραδίη, χύτο δὲ χλόος ἀμφὶ παρειάς.
οἷον δ’ ἀψύχοισιν ἐοικότες εἰδώλοισιν    (1280)
ἀνέρες εἱλίσσονται ἀνὰ πτόλιν, ἢ πολέμοιο
ἢ λοιμοῖο τέλος ποτιδέγμενοι ἠέ τιν’ ὄμβρον
ἄσπετον, ὅς τε βοῶν κατὰ μυρίος ἔκλυσεν ἔργα,
ὁππότ’ ἂν αὐτόματα ξόανα ῥέῃ ἱδρώοντα
αἵματι καὶ μυκαὶ σηκοῖς ἔνι φαντάζωνται,   (1285)
ἠὲ καὶ ἠέλιος μέσῳ ἤματι νύκτ’ ἐπάγῃσιν
ἠὲ καὶ ἠέλιος μέσῳ ἤματι νύκτ’ ἐπάγῃσιν 
οὐρανόθεν, τὰ δὲ λαμπρὰ δι’ ἠέρος ἄστρα φαείνῃ—
ὧς τότ’ ἀριστῆες δολιχοῦ πρόπαρ αἰγιαλοῖο
ἤλυον ἑρπύζοντες.

In English:

So Ancaeus spoke and broke down weeping.
The men with nautical experience 
agreed with his despair. All hearts were ice,
all cheeks surrendering to sallowness.
Just as when people wander through a city 
like breathless ghosts, awaiting their destruction
by war or plague or some relentless flood
that will erase the oxen's work afield,
and all because odd omens have been witnessed--
statues spontaneously sweating blood,
roars sounding, mouthless, from the holy groves--
and high noon only means more night in heaven,
and stars do not stop shining all day long,
so did the heroes wander without purpose 
along the endless shore.

Let us examine some of the parallels and contrasts. Note that Eliot’s action occurs at “dawn,” whereas right after this in Apollonius it is “murky evening” (ἐρεμνή/ἕσπερος, 1289-90)–an adjective that Homer uses, incidentally, to refer to the place of the dead (in Odyssey 24.106, Amphimedon has gone “into/under the dark earth”).

Next, there are perhaps transpositional echoes of color and season: Where Eliot has “brown fog” in “winter,” in Apollonius we get (outside of the simile) a greenish-yellow color (translated “sallowness” above) in the cheeks of the heroes, whose hearts are “frozen.”

In Eliot, the crowds are already dead (as in Dante), thus presumably crossing over the river into the afterlife (again, as in Dante), albeit an afterlife in this life, as it were (they are the zombie-like “walking dead”). In Apollonius, on the other hand, these two things are bifurcated. The heroes outside of the simile, preparing to die, are compared to those already dead within the simile. But consider the effect of this combination of tenor and vehicle: It makes the Argonauts, like the crowd in Eliot, the already dead, the living dead, the walking dead.

But the closest parallel is the fact that the dead are “wandering through a city.” There is no city in Dante, but there is in Eliot. And a city in a simile is nothing if not an “unreal city.”

By the way…

We may be able to just catch a glimpse of an intermediary, taking us from Apollonius’s “soulless images” to Dante’s “file” of disembodies souls to Eliot’s crowd of zombies. In Book 6 of the Aeneid, Aeneas and his guide, on their journey to the river that forms the border to the Underworld, encounter a terrifying menagerie of monsters. He contemplates stabbing them, but the Sibyl restrains him:

corripit hic subita trepidus formidine ferrum               290
Aeneas strictamque aciem venientibus offert,
et ni docta comes tenuis sine corpore vitas
admoneat volitare cava sub imagine formae,
inruat et frustra ferro diverberet umbras.

In Sarah Ruden’s translation:

Aeneas snatched his sword in sudden terror,
And held it up against the shapes approaching.
Had not his shrewd guide said these flitting things
Were flimsy forms, illusions lacking bodies,
He would have rushed to stab them, to no purpose.

If Vergil is indeed thinking of Apollonius here, there is a creative modification. He reverses Apollonius’s “without souls/life” (ἀψύχοισιν) and makes them “souls/lives without body” (sine corpore vitas), but retains the idea that they are “images” (εἰδώλοισιν/sub imagine).

An Unemphatic Conclusion

Have I proven that Eliot was thinking of Apollonius in The Waste Land? No. Are the links suggestive? They’re suggestive enough for me to speculate about it. If you’re still reading, they are apparently for you, too.