The Aeneid 2023

This blog turned 4 years old on August 6. Tradition dictates that I devote the annual anniversary post to the Virgilian lottery, a form of soothsaying where you open Virgil’s works at random and whatever passage you land on tells your fortune.

I consulted the lottery, using my copy of Robert Fagles’s 2006 translation of The Aeneid, for the very first Indirect Objects post in 2019. I have repeated the exercise, with admittedly diminishing returns, at some point during each of the Augusts that have followed.

Looking back at last year’s randomly chosen passage, I’m reminded that it centered on a description of the terrible punishments awaiting the wicked in the Underworld. That would seem to suggest a pretty dire prophecy. And, come to think of it, the period from August 2022 to the present did include my bout with testicular torsion and the death of my dog, so score one for Virgil.

Moments ago, I chose this year’s Aeneid passage by closing my eyes, opening the book, and pointing. I landed on a battle scene in Book 10, when the invading Trojans, led by Aeneas, are trying to take over Italy so that their descendants can eventually found Rome.

Among the warriors resistant to that plan are a father-and-son duo named Mezentius and Lausus. In the lines just above the part I pointed to, Lausus holds off Aeneas from attacking Mezentius, the son protecting the father with a shield while other combatants throw stuff at Aeneas, forcing our hero to huddle under his own shield for protection.

Fortunately for Aeneas—and for anyone invested in the eventual founding of Rome—his shield was forged by the god Vulcan, so the Trojan will be just fine. As the part of the poem under my finger puts it,

Think of a cloudburst bearing down with gusts of hail
and every plowman, every farmhand quits the fields
and the traveler keeps safe in a welcome refuge 
under some river’s banks or cavern’s rocky arch
while rain pelts the earth, so when the sun returns
they can all get on with the day’s work. So Aeneas,
overpowered by missiles left and right, braves out
the cloudburst of war till its thunder dies away

Taken as a prediction of my own future, this passage strikes me as fairly comforting. It doesn’t promise sunny skies by any means, but does foretell a refuge from the storm. Maybe that’s the most we can hope for, given the unending barrage of threats life throws at us.

A similar point is made by the song my mom would sing to me at bedtime when I was little.

Little cabin in a wood
Little man by the window stood
Saw a rabbit hopping by, 
Frightened as can be

“Help me! Help me! Help!” he cried,
“Lest the hunter shoot me dead.”

“Little rabbit, come inside,
Safely to abide”

Actually, I think those lyrics improve on Virgil in one regard: They evoke compassion.

When Mom and I sang the cabin song, there were hand motions that went with every line. At the end I’d pretend to pet an invisible bunny and my mom would always go, “Aww!” like I was the world’s sweetest boy who’d always go to church and would never cuss and would rather drop dead than disappoint his mother.

Talk about a future being forged.