On Reading a Classic

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• On Reading a Classic
• Shadi Bartsch (bio)

We were in mid-conversation. "Oh!" said my student, her eyes widening. "Vergil calls him pious all the time, and Aeneas says it of himself, but the rest of the narrative just doesn't back that up. There's the sacrifice of Italians. And he dissimulates to Dido. And he never shook Latinus's right hand for the treaty. That's not pious, not even by Roman standards. But what is Vergil doing then? Aeneas is the hero of the poem!"

"Good question," I said, nodding encouragingly.

"And it's not just the word pious that's applied to him. He's virtuous and manly and in sync with the gods. But then the Italians claim he's a fop who curls his hair and wears a bonnet to war. Another contradiction," she adds. "Which side are we supposed to believe?"

"What if we think about the gap itself, rather than taking sides?" I ask.

She thinks. "Do Aeneas and Augustus share the same kind of gap? They're both described with fine words on the surface, like in the Res Gestae, that list of accomplishments Augustus put out, but in his history he used to be Octavian, who was pretty nasty and did bad things before he became the princeps. It's like the gap where on one side, the Aeneid is like official praise, on the other, we see unpious stuff that Aeneas does."

"But at the same time, Vergil doesn't seem to condemn the praise, does he?" I ask. "Is that a simple political choice, or does it mean something more?"

"I don't know," she says.

"Something to think about!" say I.

Our time was up, and off went my earnest reader of the poem.

I have modeled this conversation because it shows so nicely both how students read and how they don't. My student had just engaged in interpretation level one—reading the text closely, coming up with frameworks for interpretation that were shaped by as much as she knew of the context. And there was another factor here: the sorts of questions I posed were coming from me, professor of Classics at the University of Chicago in the year 2022, the product of Western education abroad and in the US, a woman, of middle-class origin, left of center politically, animal lover and vegetarian, translator [End Page 56] of the Aeneid, who happened to participate in a student's political meaning-making out of the Aeneid, which just happened to go down this path among the many, many possible paths it could take. An awareness of this, of the contingency of one's interpretation, is what I call interpretation level two. Notice the apparent tension between the two levels: I am both aware that the discussion models a particular type of reception, and I believe in it, and my students end up (often) believing what I believe about the text. I see that the interpretation is generated by me, and yet I feel it is a particularly accurate/ true one, so I am at peace with it.

Readers through history—of the Aeneid, of the classics, of other anointed texts in other cultures—would, I think, mostly believe in their own interpretations; standing back is hard. I call this act of interpretation, level one, affected agency. Affected agency occurs when people pick up a book and start to read and interact with the text. It cannot take place by itself, for the book cannot stand up and speak, nor does it have self-awareness. It needs someone to make meaning with. Hence the term agency. What about affected? By this I mean the way a given person's interpretation reflects, willy-nilly, the value set and interpretive framework of the readers. If the text, even if once canonical, can no longer spur the reader's affected agency because it cannot support an interpretation that seems valuable to its readers across a society, it loses its status. Statius, so huge in Dante's era that he was allowed to chat with the author in Purgatorio, seems arid to many classicists today, partially because the Thebaid doesn...