
If we can trust the Roman epic poet Virgil, Queen Lavinia ought to be honored as the
mother of the Western world. As wife to Aeneas, she gave birth to Silvius, whose
descendants include Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome. But her existence is
neither validated by historical accounts—which give some credence to Romulus, but
hardly any to Lavinia—nor elaborated by mythology. Our knowledge of her is restricted
to her appearance in Virgil’s Aeneid, where she plays a modest role in the background
of the larger narrative.
Here’s what Virgil tells us: Lavinia turns down her
suitors, including the formidable warrior Turnus,
because an oracle declares that this princess of
Latium is destined to marry a foreigner. When
Aeneas, an exile from his native Troy, arrives on
the scene, he is greeted as the prophesied suitor,
and his rival in romance, the scorned Turnus, turns
into an adversary on the battlefield. Virgil focuses
his attention on warfare, the time-honored subject
of epic poets, and Lavinia disappears from the story.
This seems odd, especially when compared with
the love affair of Aeneas and Dido, a much shorter
fling in Carthage before the Trojan’s arrival in Italy.
That precursor romance has been celebrated in
more than a dozen operas, and the Queen of
Carthage’s presence can be detected everywhere
from Shakespeare plays (the Bard mentions Dido
almost a dozen times) to the Civilization series of
video games. Meanwhile Lavinia lingered on in semi-obscurity. She makes a brief
appearance in Dante’s Inferno, introduced and dealt with in a scant two lines. You can
find her in a few paintings, for example in Tiepolo's Latinus Offering his Daughter
Lavinia to Aeneas in Matrimony from 1754. The sixteenth century Italian painter
Mirabello Cavalori (1535–1572) has left us an image of the most famous incident in
Lavinia’s obscure life: when her hair is crowned with supernatural flames, an omen of
her special status in the prehistory of Rome.
Speculative authors of the current day have aimed to fill in the gaps in Lavinia’s
biography. Poet Claudio R. Salvucci has written an entire alternative epic in her honor,
the Lavinium, published in 1994. But no one has done more for our neglected Latin
princess than Ursula K. Le Guin who provided her with a complete biography and rich
inner life in the 2008 novel Lavinia. This book was awarded the Locus Award as best
fantasy novel of the year, and was Le Guin’s last full-length work of fiction, a fitting swan
song to an illustrious career that began even before her teens, when she submitted a
story as an eleven-year-old to Astounding Science Fiction.
Related Reading (essays by Ted Gioia)
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin makes clear that her intention isn't to replace Virgil’s Aeneid. In her afterword
to Lavinia, she even laments the disappearance of Latin literacy over the last several
decades, a shift that ensures future generations will rarely experience the great Roman
epic in the original language. Virgil’s poetry, Le Guin declares, "is so profoundly
musical, its beauty so intrinsic to the sound and the order of the words, that it is
essentially untranslatable.” She describes her novel about Lavinia as “an act of
gratitude to the poet, a love offering."
But Le Guin is too modest here. She has gone far beyond the hints and allusions in the
Aeneid, and even when Virgil has offered a telling detail, Le Guin doesn’t hesitate to
change it to meet her own very different needs. As a result, Virgil’s fair and blonde
Lavinia becomes a dark-haired Mediterranean woman. A passive participant in the
destiny imposed by the deities in the original Latin, Lavinia turns into a self-willing
protagonist in the modern mold under Le Guin’s tutelage. In fact, the Roman gods take
a back seat throughout this entire novel, with even oracles coming from ancestors
rather than deities, and divine intervention relying on human intermediaries. These are
all wise authorial decisions, and enhance the novel.
But Lavinia herself also gets a chance to challenge Virgil. At several junctures in the
novel, the spirit of the Roman poet appears to the young princess of Latium, a quasi-
ghost who serves as a soothsayer and oracle—and who could be better positioned to
predict the future than the same author who composed the epic tale of Aeneas and
Lavinia. By the time our protagonist has finished with him, Virgil is even apologizing for
not giving Lavinia a bigger role in his famous work.
At first this seems like a familiar postmodern trope: an author shows up as a character
in a story. But Le Guin is doing something far cleverer here. She is building on Virgil’s
peculiar reputation as a seer, a strange legacy that found the author of the Aeneid
treated by later centuries as a kind of wizard or mystic. Virgil’s writings were used as a
tool for divination; applying a technique known as Sortes Vergilianae, randomly
selected passages of the Aeneid are interpreted
as a guide to future events. This aspect
of Virgil’s legacy served as the spring-
board for his appearance as a guide to
the Inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy
and as a channel for Christian revelation
in Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil.
When Lavinia goes to consult her ancestors,
at a key juncture in Le Guin’s novel, her
encounter with Virgil both resonates with
this history of oracular pronouncements and adapts it to the narrative techniques of the
current day.
In the current instance, Lavinia gets more prognosticating than she wants. Virgil
promises her Aeneas as a husband, but also provides a long litany of the victims and
assailants whose bloody conflicts will pave the way for her to become Queen. She also
gets advance warning of her husband’s death. Perhaps worst of all, she begins to
suspect that she is just a literary invention of the poet—a hypothesis so troubling she
prefers not to dwell on its full implications.
We are now far afield from the starting point of this novel as a kind of feminized
alternative to a classic text. Le Guin calls into question a wide range of issues that
Virgil merely took for granted, ranging from metanarrative concerns about character
motivation to richer philosophical questions dealing with free will and just wars. By
removing the pagan deities from the center of the story of Rome’s founding, our author
leaves us with a tale burdened with too much guilt and responsibility even for a founder
of a great civilization.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of ten books.
His most recent book is How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books).
Publication date: April 24, 2018
Lavinia
by Ursula K. Le Guin
|
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By the time our protagonist has
finished with him, Virgil is even
apologizing for not giving Lavinia
a bigger role in his famous work.