Lavinia

No doubt someone with my name, Lavinia, did exist, but she may have been so different from my own idea of myself, or my poet's idea of me, that it only confuses me to think about her. As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all.

I have recently been following a thread of personal interest, reading some books that give a voice to minor female characters from classic literature. In Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin retells the story of Vergil's The Aeneid from the point of view of the hero's third wife; a character so minor in the poet's rendering – despite apparently being the matriarch of all Romans – that her own history warranted but a few lines and no dialogue at all. I don't blame Vergil for barely mentioning Lavinia – she might well have been lost to history if he never named her; if she even was an actual historical figure – but I do appreciate Le Guin's attempt to breathe some life into her narrative. I haven't read any Le Guin before, and I do understand that historical fiction is not her usual genre, but overall, this book is just all right: I enjoyed the domestic descriptions (the everyday stuff of how people lived back then), I found the battle scenes to be exciting, and I really liked the metafiction of Livinia meeting Vergil in a dream state, but I found much of the second half of this book (the narrative that Le Guin continues after the end of The Aeneid) to be fairly dull. An uneven reading experience, but one I'm glad I had for its addition to my understanding of classical myths.

My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn’t be given, wouldn’t be taken, but chose my man and my fate.

In a nutshell: Lavinia was the only surviving child of the King of Latium (the patriarch of the Latin line), and as such, she understood that her duty would be to enter into any marriage that her father found advantageous for their people. There's no anachronistic feminism in this tale: Lavinia knew her fate and her obligations and she accepted them (she only protests when her mother tries to undermine prophecy). As she grew up, Lavinia's main duties involved pagan rituals within the home, and in this role, she sometimes accompanied her father to an oracle in the woods. While sleeping at the sacred springs one night, Lavinia is visited by the spirit of Vergil – who lay dying, centuries in the future – and he explains to her that she is fated to marry a stranger who comes from far away, and together, they will have a son who founds an empire in the mudbound village of the seven hills. Although there are several local suitors jostling for Lavinia's hand, her father eventually interprets the same prophecy about the stranger from far away, and when Aeneas and the remnants of the Trojans come sailing up the Tiber, the king's pronouncement that his daughter is fated to marry their leader starts the war that makes the prophecy come true. 

I was fated, it seems, to live among people who suffered beyond measure from grief, who were driven mad by it. Though I suffered grief, I was doomed to sanity. This was no doing of the poet's. I know that he gave me nothing but modest blushes, and no character at all. I know that he said I raved, and tore my golden tresses at my mother's death. He simply was not paying attention: I was silent then, tearless, and only intent on making her poor soiled body decent. And my hair has always been dark. In truth he gave me nothing but a name, and I have filled it with myself. And yet without him would I even have a name? I have never blamed him. Even a poet cannot get everything right.

Here's what I learned: The Trojan War was fought in the thirteenth century B.C., Rome was founded in (probably) the eighth century B.C., and Vergil died before finishing The Aeneid in nineteen B.C. (asking on his deathbed that his incomplete manuscript be destroyed). As Vergil was probably attempting to curry the favour of his emperor, Augustus, he took liberties with the history behind his epic masterpiece (although what details could really have been “known” to him from thirteen centuries before seems questionable) in order to marry the Trojans and Latins together and suggest that Augustus himself has the authority and prestige of that lineage – despite having been adopted into that lineage as Julius Caesar's heir – for the glory of Rome. Two millennia later, Ursula Le Guin was inspired to revisit the story, giving Lavinia a history of her own (although what details are really “known” from thirty-three centuries ago is improving, but still sketchy). In an afterword, Le Guin says that as she was writing, “Lavinia herself sometimes insisted that the poet was mistaken – about the color of her hair for instance”, and I found this to be the most compelling part of this book: I loved that when Vergil was dying, he might have been hallucinating his creations; that Lavinia would have been able to interact with him and learn her fate (and thus be self-consciously cursed with immortality). This idea is ratcheted up by Le Guin herself interacting with both Vergil and Lavinia, and in a way, this drew me, as the reader, further into the story. Again, I enjoyed the quotidian detail, the battles and history, but despite Vergil himself writing that Lavinia retreats to the forest to raise their son after Aeneas' death (Born in the covert of a shady wood: Him fair Lavinia, thy surviving wife, Shall breed in groves, to lead a solitary life), what Le Guin makes of these years was quite dull to me. Bottom line: Uneven, but not unenjoyable; three and a half stars if I could.

The Aeneid at Project Gutenberg is here.