I wrote previously about an allusion to Vergil’s imperium sine fine dedi (“I have given them empire without end”) in Ovid’s Heroides. Here’s another.

In the opening paragraph of “How to Reconcile Greeks and Trojans,” Arnoldo Momigliano refers to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline, due to its line “bearing a nation with all its household into exile,” as a New World continuation of the Aeneas-theme.

The line comes from the first Canto of Part the Second. (Incidentally, Longfellow wrote his epic in English dactylic hexameters–an uncommon choice, but one that Frederick Ahl also made for his translation of the Aeneid.)

But what if we look at the line in its Sitz im Leben?

Here are the first four lines of that Canto:

Many a weary year had passed since the burning of Grand-Pré,
When on the falling tide the freighted vessels departed,
Bearing a nation, with all its household gods, into exile.
Exile without an end, and without an example in story.

Line 4 makes the connection to the Aeneid even more unmistakable. For “Exile without an end” is obviously an allusion to Vergil’s “empire without end.” However, imperium has been replaced with “exile.” (This could easily be rendered in metrically-equivalent Latin, viz., exsilium sine fine.) It is almost as if Longfellow has read the Vergilian line through an Ovidian lens (lacrimas sine fine dedi, “I gave tears without end”).

Excursus Ovidianus

It is perhaps worth pausing here to note, in possible corroboration of what I just said, that the phrase “without end” (sine fine) occurs more than once in Ovid’s exile poetry. In Tristia 1.2.75-80, we find:^[1]

non ego diuitias auidus sine fine parandi
     latum mutandis mercibus aequor aro,
nec peto, quas quondam petii studiosus, Athenas,
     oppida non Asiae, non loca uisa prius;
non ut Alexandri claram delatus in urbem
     delicias uideam, Nile iocose, tuas.
quod faciles opto uentos (quis credere possit?)
     Sarmatis est tellus, quam mea uela petunt.

Peter Green translates this lamentation for exile as:

It’s not with goods to trade, and in avid pursuit of unbounded

wealth that I plough the vasty deep;

nor am I now, as once, a student bound for Athens

or the cities of Asia, sites I saw long ago,

or travelling to far-famed Alexandria to sample

the fleshpots of wanton Nile;

The reason I’m begging a wind is–oh, who’d believe it?–

to sail for Sarmatia: that’s the land I seek!

The phrase recurs in a later poem from the same collection, Tristia 4.6. Here are lines 41-44:

nam neque sunt vires, nec qui color esse solebat:
     vix habeo tenuem, quae tegat ossa, cutem.
corpore sed mens est aegro magis aegra, malique
     in circumspectu stat sine fine sui.

Again, the version of Peter Green:^[2]

I lack my old strength and colour,

there’s barely enough skin to cover my bones;

yet sick though my body is, my mind is sicker

from endless contemplation of its woes.

There are also a couple of relevant passages from Ovid’s other exile collection, the Epistulae ex Ponto.^[3] First, consider 1.10.21-24:

Is quoque qui gracili cibus est in corpore somnus
       non alit officio corpus inane suo,
sed uigilo uigilantque mei sine fine dolores,
       quorum materiam dat locus ipse mihi.

In English:

Sleep, too, essential sustenance for a meagre body,

denies its balm to my unnurtured frame;

instead, I keep vigil: vigilant, too, my unending

sufferings–and this place keeps them well supplied.

Next, 2.8.61-68:

Sic homines nouere deos, quos arduus aether
     occulit, et colitur pro Ioue forma Iouis.
Denique, quae mecum est et erit sine fine, cauete
     ne sit in inuiso uestra figura loco.
Nam caput e nostra citius ceruice recedet                65
     et patiar fossis lumen abire genis
quam caream raptis, o publica numina, uobis:
     uos eritis nostrae portus et ara fugae.

Thus men experience gods remote in the empyrean:

they worship, not Jove himself, but the form of Jove.

So take care that these figures of yours, which, now and always,

stay by my side, aren’t stuck in a hateful spot–

for sooner will my head be struck from my shoulders, sooner

will I suffer my eyes to be gouged out,

than let you, gods of the State, be taken from me:

haven and altar of my exile you’ll be…

Finally, 3.6.21-24:

Crede mihi, miseris caelestia numina parcunt
       nec semper laesos et sine fine premunt.
Principe nec nostro deus est moderatior ullus:
       iustitia uires temperat ille suas…

Believe me, heaven’s divinities spare the wretched, don’t always

and for ever oppress those they’ve struck down:

no god’s more moderate than our Prince, who tempers

his strength with justice.

It is difficult to know whether Longfellow was thinking of any of these passages in particular, or even their general “vibe,” when writing the Canto quoted above. But an Ovidian coloring is certainly apposite from the reader’s point of view, even if it is just a happy accident.

Ok, Back to Longfellow

In any event, we have Vergil in Longfellow, even if we can’t be certain about Ovid (or at least about all of Ovid). Here, for your convenience, is the passage again:

Many a weary year had passed since the burning of Grand-Pré,
When on the falling tide the freighted vessels departed,
Bearing a nation, with all its household gods, into exile.
Exile without an end, and without an example in story.

The fact that Longfellow’s Vergilianism is unmistakable alerts us to a nice little allusive joke. Longfellow writes that his tale is “without an example in story.” But he does so right after making the reader think of his tale’s chief “example in story,” viz., that of Vergil leaving Troy as “fate’s refugee” (Ahl’s rendering of fato profugus). This is, on the one hand, ironically funny; on the other hand, it is perhaps also marks a bid that the tragedy of exile in Evangeline somehow trumps the one found in the Aeneid.

Both are moves that ancient poets would have instantly recognized, and they mark the American Longfellow as simultaneously a classical Longfellow. Through Evangeline, Aeneas is once again rescued from the ruins of Troy.^[4]