Book 1, lines 551-581

[Previous: lines 511-550]

Dum verò affatur genitorem divus ad aram,
mirantes socii templum per singula lustrant,
suspectu molem vasto, artificumque laborem:
cautibus excisas centum, centum aere columnas,
omnes è solido, omnes altis montibus aequas,           [555]
tignaque, et aeterna ex cedro laquearia, ahenoque
aeratas porrò stridentes cardine portas,
sectilibusque minutatim sola laevia saxis.
Tum puro ex auro postes, mensasque metallo
e simili, et fixos alta ad donaria currus,                   [56o]
distinctos ebeno, et candenti elephanto.

Quae dum cuncta legunt, perfectis ordine votis,
improvisus adest, tacitusque supervenit heros,
atque ait: “Haec moles, adeô haec immania templa,
protinus ut vento radicitus eruta pinus,                     [565]
versa repentè dabunt labem, ingentemque ruinam,
et tibi digna tuis, Solyma, instant praemia factis;
quae vates ad te missos divinitus ausa es
tot ferro petere, aut duris detrudere saxis.
Ipse tuos quoties, praesans ut vera monerem         [570]
tentavi cives incassùm cogere in unum,
ceu cristata suos dispersa examina foetus
singultu volucris vocat, et plaudentibus alis!
Ferro excisa cades: iam iam labentia regna
protinus arma ruent tua, vindexque hauriet ignis,   [575]
et passim haec largo sudabit sanguine tellus.
Nonne vides, iam ut nunc res procubet inclinata
et tibi iam votis non prosit nectere vota?
Longè alias pater omnipotens sacra transtulit oras;
longè alia vult ipse coli et placarier urbe:                [58o]
Atque adeô hic altè depactus terminus esto.”

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As the son of God prayed to his father
his followers circled through the temple, amazed,
gazing at its vastness and fine workmanship:
a hundred stone columns, a hundred columns
of bronze, all solid, all tall as mountains,              [555]
a fretted ceiling of incorruptible cedar, bronze
doors skrieking on brazen hinges, wide floors
polished and inlaid with precious gems. They
saw lintels of gold and tables of the same
metal, and chariots placed before the altar,              [56o]
distinct in ebony and shining ivory.

When they were done, him having ended his prayers,
the hero suddenly and quietly appeared,
and said: “This heap, this whole massive temple,
will, like a pine tree uprooted by the wind,               [565]
be overturned in an instant, felled and ruined
and your ‘dignity’, Jerusalem, will be served—
for your treatment of all the prophets sent
by the father that you slaughtered and stoned.
How often have you been warned of this truth!         [570]
I have tried to bring the citizens together,
a crested bird protecting its straggling chicks
sounding its sobbing song and beating its wings!
The sword will cut you down! Soon, soon your realm
and armies will collapse, your walls will burn,          [575]
and blood will flow across this whole wide land.
Can’t you see the dangers now facing you all?
Don’t you understand that prayer won’t help you?
Far away has the Omnipotent moved his sacraments;
far away, to quite another city is his worship gone.    [580]
This high end is fixed and immutable now.”

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Christ’s prediction of the imminent destruction of the temple is based on Mark 13:1-2. ‘And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto him, Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here! And Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.’ Historically this looks forward (and was presumably written after) the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, in the course of their suppression of the Jewish revolt of AD 66-73, when the Temple was indeed destroyed, leaving only a bit of wall (today’s ‘wailing wall’). Typologically, though, the reference is to Jesus’s own body, ruined on the cross and ‘rebuilt’ in three days (‘Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days? But he spake of the temple of his body’ John 2:19-21).

Vida chooses to focus not on Jesus's corporeality, but on the larger urban context. The destruction of Jerusalem, he says, is the passing away of the old covenant, in order that a new one—centred on Rome, the ‘far off city’ mentioned in lines 579-80—can begin. This, I suppose, is not an unusual view for a Roman Catholic to hold, but it is also profoundly Vergilian. The whole drift of the Aeneid is that the hero escapes a dying city, Troy as it is burnt and razed, to travel to a coming city, the future: Rome. That epic is strung out between the retrospect of Trojan past and the prolepsis of an anticipated (indeed: firmly prophesied) Roman imperial future.

There are two brief similes in this passage, and both include oblique little Latin puns. In the second (lines 572-73) Christ compares himself to a ‘cristata’, a ‘crested one’ (that is, a crested bird), which is a nice play on his own name. The first is buried deeper, but it is there, I think. So: the fall of the temple is compared to a pine being uprooted by a great wind: protinus ut vento radicitus eruta pinus [line 565]. This line is modelled upon Aeneid 5:449: [concidit] in Ida magna radicibus eruta pinus: ‘as falls on Mount Ida a great pine tree torn-up by the roots.’

Now: this Vergilian line is part of the account of the boxing match between Dares and Entellus, at the games Aeneas organises in Sicily. Dares is a regular fellow, but Entellus is a huge man: ‘throwing back the fold of his raiment from his shoulders, baring his massive joints and limbs, his huge bones and muscles, he stands up vast in the middle of the ground.’ Dares doesn't have the strength to knock him down, but closes with him anyway: ‘like one who assails with seige-works some high city’. Entellus swings a punch, Dares ducks and that's when the big man falls. Here's J W Mackail's rather fruity 1885 translation of the relevant bit:

Entellus rose and struck clean out with his right downwards; his quick opponent saw the descending blow before it came, and slid his body rapidly out of its way. Entellus hurled his strength into the air, and all his heavy mass, overreaching, fell heavily to the earth; as sometime on Erymanthus or mighty Ida a hollow pine falls torn out by the roots. Teucrians and men of Sicily rise eagerly; a cry goes up, and Acestes himself runs forward, and pityingly lifts his friend and birthmate from the ground. But the hero, not dulled nor dismayed by his mishap, rises and returns the keener to battle, growing violent in wrath, while shame and resolved valour kindle his strength. All afire, he hunts Dares headlong over the lists, and redoubles his blows now with right hand, now with left; no breath nor pause; heavy as hailstones rattle on the roof from a storm-cloud, so thickly shower the blows from both his hands as he buffets Dares to and fro. [Aeneid 5:443-60]

In the words of the song, he gets knocked down, but he gets up again, you're never going to keep him down. It tropes the fall and resurrection of the city (Troy, Rome; Jerusalem, Rome), as of the whole world (in Christ):—for the name ‘entellus’ means the world, the earth. It's a nicely chosen piece of intertextuality, this by Vida: a similar focus on the punishment the individual body receives, and a similar parallel (‘like one who assails with seige-works some high city’) between the fabric of the city and the body of the sufferer. Subtle, but a definite allusion I think.

Image at the top: unknown artist, ‘Siege and destruction of Jerusalem’, La Passion de Nostre Seigneur (c.1504)

[Next: lines 582-590]