Book 1, lines 15-31

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Iam prope mortis erant meae, finisque laborum         [15]
Christo aderat; Solymumque ideo haud ignarus ad urbem
Phœnicum extremis remeans de finibus ibat.
Illum ingens comitum numerus, iuvenesque senesque
sponte sequebantur, rerum quos farna trahebat
undique collectos. Nam magnas sive per urbes         [20]
ferret iter, seu desertis in montibus iret,
olli se innumeri iungebant, usque parati
iussa sequi, vellet quascunque abducere in oras;
atque novos erat hic semper fas cernere coetus,
pinifero veluti Vesuli de vertice primum                   [25]
it Padus, exiguo sulcans fata pinguia rivo;
hinc magis atque magis labendo viribus auctus
surgit, latifluoque sonans se gurgite pandit
victor; opes amnes varii auxiliaribus undis
hinc addunt, atque inde; suo nec se capit alveo          [30]
turbidus, haud uno dum rumpat in æquora cornu.

So now the end of Christ’s life and of his labours               [15]
was coming; and, knowing this doom, he travelled
from far Phoenicia to Jerusalem's city gates.
With him were crowds of people, young and old alike
following him for the marvels he had performed
hurying from all directions. For whether in a great city     [20]
or travelling through mountainous deserts
innumerable multitudes joined him, all resolved
to follow his lead, no matter where he took them.
And their numbers were always growing: just as
on Viso's pine-dense slopes a dainty stream                     [25]
swells into the River Po, cutting through rich fields
larger and larger, strengthening his flow and
surging, widening with a crescendo of noise
in triumph, taking a tribute of waves from other streams
adding them to his, until land cannot contain             [30]
his turbid force and he bursts into the wide sea.

Christ enters Jerusalem in triumph [Matthew 21:1–11, Mark 11:1–11, Luke 19:28–44, John 12:12–19] and Vida compares the crowds he brings with him to the river Po (the 18thC map of that river at the head of this post is for sale on eBay, and could be yours for £199) which, as you know I'm sure, flows 400 miles from west to east across Northern Italy, rising in ‘Vesuli’ (modern-day Monte Viso) and debouching into the Adriatic near Venice. This simile is not original to Vida. Gardner thinks he took it from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso where Ruggiero's swelling rage is compared to the Po:

Come il gran fiume che di Vesulo esce,
quanto più inanzi e verso il mar discende,
e che con lui Lambra e Ticin si mesce,
ed Ada e gli altri onde tributo prende,
tanto più altiero e impetuoso cresce;
così Ruggier ... [Orlando Furioso 37:92.1-5]

As the flood, swoln with Vesulo's thick snows,
The farther that it foams upon its way,
And, with Ticino and Lambra, seaward goes,
Ada, and other streams that tribute pay,
So much more haughty and impetuous flows;
So Rogero &c [this is William Stewart Rose's 1820s translation]

But the simile predates this: Dante uses it in Inferno 16; and Petrarch's Latin ‘Tale of Griselda’ uses it too. Chaucer adapted this latter into his Clerk's Tale, simile and all:

A prohemie, in which discryveth he,
Pemond, and of Saluces the contree,
And speketh of Appenyn, the hilles hye,
That been the boundes of West Lumbardye,
And of Mount Vesulus in special,
Wher as the Po out of a welle smal,
Taketh his first spryngyng and his cours
That eastward ay encresseth in his cours
To Emele-ward, to Ferare and Venyse;
The which a long thyng were to devyse. [Clerk's Tale, 43-52]

So really, when we encounter it in Vida, it's an old friend.

It raises the question, I suppose, of anachronism: why use a river famous across 16th-century Europe in order to talk about an event in 1st-century Judea? Why not, say, the River Jordan? We might retort that the Po was also around in the 1st-century, so mentioning it here isn't strictly speaking anachronistic. But this would be disingenuous of us. Vida compares Christ and his followers to the Po in order to tie the sacred drama to Italy and so to Rome (as Vida, a good Catholic, has motive to do). This is the Christiad's first epic simile. Vida is setting out his shop window.

It's a large question, actually, more usually discussed in the visual arts (Renaissance paintings of Christ and his saints are packed with anachronisms and contemporaneities, of course) than poetry, but relevant here too. One group of critics, following Aby Warburg, thinks the point of painting antique figures in Renaissance style was to emphasis the aliveness of the subject matter, its vitality: clothing the ancient in the habilments of the now-living to stress the nowness and the livingness of the gospel message.

For Warburg, the figures of the past appeared “not as plaster casts but in person, as figures full of life and color,... the embodiment of antiquity as the early Renaissance saw it.” He offered as a prime example Baccio Baldini's engraving of Bacchus and Ariadne, in which the deities appear just as Florentines had actually witnessed them being enacted in the carnival festivities of 1490, for which Lorenzo de' Medici himself composed the immortal canto di carro. [Charles Dempsey, ‘“Historia” and Anachronism in Renaissance Art’, The Art Bulletin 87 (2005) 416; Dempsey is quoting Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Getty 1999), 89]

But another school argues something the opposite, that the function of these anachronistic touches is precisely to orchestrate what Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood call ‘a clash of temporalities’. Rather than bring the ancient story up-to-date, what such anachronism does is to pull up-to-dateness back into the past, to revert contemporaneity into the holy aura of the epoch of Christ and his saints.

To perceive an artifact in substitutional terms was to understand it as belonging to more than one historical moment simultaneously. The artifact was connected to its unknowable point of origin by an unreconstructible chain of replicas. That chain could not be perceived; its links did not diminish in stature as they receded into the depths of time. Rather, the chain created an instant and ideally effective link to an authoritative source and an instant identity for the artifact. [Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, ‘Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism’, Art Bulletin, 87 (2005), 407]

This argument intrigues me. I wonder if it's right, and more to the point I wonder how we might apply it to Vida. Nagel and Wood hang their dicussion on a 1503 painting by Vittore Carpaccio picturing Saint Augustine seated at a table in a very sixteenth-century-looking study ‘pausing, his pen raised from the paper’. But saints are one thing; Christ is another. We might want to argue that the anachronism here figures the way Christ in a sense, broke history, and remade it: it registers, in other words, a shift from chronos to kairos, from a blank succession of hopeless years into a calendar structured by grace. But there's an added wrinkle. Because Vida is not simply reaching back to first-century AD Judea, he's also reaching back to first-century BC Rome, and Vergil. So the anachronism splits, as it were, three ways: pagan, Christian and modern.

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