In Book 12 of Vergil’s Aeneid, a couple of moments recently made me think of later literature. Its possible that these later instances are genuine receptions; but it’s also possible that they are coincidences. I’m more confident about the first than about the second.
Before his climactic contest with Aeneas, the Rutulian hero Turnus says to his sister Juturna:
usque adeone mori miserum est? vos o mihi, Manes,
este boni, quoniam superis aversa voluntas.
sancta ad vos anima atque istius inscia culpae
descendam magnorum haud umquam indignus avorum.
(Aeneid 12.646-49)
Is death so terrible? Spirits below,
Bless me! The gods above have turned away.
My soul descends untouched by cowardice.
I'm worthy of my splendid ancestors.
Aaron the Moor seems to recall this passage in Titus Andronicus. In Act 4, Scene 2, after it has become clear that Titus is onto the foul deeds of Aaron, Chiron, and Demetrius, we read the following exchange:
DEMETRIUS
Come, let us go and pray to all the gods
For our belovèd mother in her pains.
AARON, aside
Pray to the devils; the gods have given us over.
That Shakespeare might have had a classical source in mind here is not fortuitous: Titus’s knowledge of their evil has just been revealed via an explicit quotation of Horace, Odes 22.1-2. In addition, Vergil is present elsewhere in Titus. (I had a student write about this last fall.)
The second is, as I say, more speculative. Later in Book 12, Vergil describes the futility of Turnus’s efforts against Aeneas due to divine intervention by recourse to a simile about frustrated action in dreams:
tum lapis ipse viri vacuum per inane volutus
nec spatium evasit totum neque pertulit ictum.
ac velut in somnis, oculos ubi languida pressit
nocte quies, nequiquam avidos extendere cursus
velle videmur et in mediis conatibus aegri 910
succidimus; non lingua valet, non corpore notae
sufficiunt vires nec vox aut verba sequuntur:
sic Turno, quacumque viam virtute petivit,
successum dea dira negat.
(Aeneid 12.906-14)
Again, in Ruden’s version:
As, when at night our eyes are sealed with slumber,
We dream we can't run on by any effot,
And finally sink exhausted as we struggle;
The tongue is powerless, by body loses
The strength it knew, the voice and words are gone;
So the grim godddess blocked off every path
For Turnus' valor.
This made me think of a similar image in the last verse of Bob Dylan’s song “Series of Dreams,” one of many great Dylan tracks to be left off of a studio album.
In one, numbers were burning
In another, I witnessed a crime
In one, I was running, and in another
All I seemed to be doing was climb
Wasn’t looking for any special assistance
Not going to any great extremes
I’d already gone the distance
Just thinking of a series of dreams
I don’t know if Dylan was reading Vergil at the time he wrote these lyrics, and, if so, what translation he was using. The version of Fagels, Dylan’s preferred translator of Homer, didn’t exist yet. Richard Thomas has shown that Dylan used Allen Mandelbaum’s translation years later for “Lonesome Day Blues,” but his version is not close here.
Of course, that could be because Dylan is not thinking of Vergil at all (though “I wasn’t looking for any special assistance” could be an ironic allusion to the destructive intervention of Ruden’s “grim goddess,” Jupiter’s Dira, in Vergil.) If I find anything that could serve as more definitive evidence, I will plan to report back.