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His animadversis, portis bipatentibus ibat [725]------------
multa putans, necdum gradibus descenderat heros
omnibus: et, magno iam longè urgente tumultu,
ecce trahebatur, passis per terga capillis,
pallida longaevi conjux Susanna Manassei;
quoi pater egregiam forma, et florentibus annis, [730]
haud placitis taedis invitam aegramque jugârat.
Namque fidem ob thalami fœdatam adjusta vocabant
supplicia, ingenti juvenum sectante caterva.
Et iam saxa manu pueri vulgusque tenebant.
Ipse sed antevolans prohibebat tela sacerdos, [735]
donec porticibus Christum conspexit in amplis;
ad quem ubi concessit, miseramque ad limina traxit,
Ingressus versare dolos: “Haec prodidit, inquit,
conjugium, thalamique fidem deprensa fefellit.
Sontem jura neci tali pro crimine dedi [740]
nostra iubent duris (sed quae inclementia!) saxis.
Teque ideo, vatum interpres mitissime, adimus,
et tua quaenam sit sententia quaerimus omnes.”
Dixerat, atque animo iam spes pascebat inanes,
his captum implicitumque putans sermonibus hostem, [745]
praeclusos abitus, non effugia ulla relicta:
illam quippe neci si solveret interceptam
miti animo miseratus, eum turba omnis in ipsum
saxaque et ultrices raptim converteret iras,
quòd sanctas gentis leges everteret illex; [750]
si verò ad pœnam jusset pro crimine duci,
sese odiis vulgi objiceret crudelis acerbis.
Haec agitans iam victorem se mente ferebat,
pectora laetitia multùm tumefactus inani.
Ac veluti in somnis olim sibi visus arator, [755]
dum terrae attrito suspendit vomere terga,
auri ingens pondus campo effodisse subacto,
gaudia vana fovet : cernet somno ille relictus
pauperiem, duros et adhuc sibi adesse labores,
somnia fortunamque animo execratus inanem. [760]
Ipse viam Deus invenit (fallacia numen
nulla humana valet contra) qua legibus illi
parceret illaesis : nempe, ut defixa tenebat
ora solo, tandem attollens, turbamque paratam
aspectans, ait: “Haud dubium, quin crimine letum [765]
sit merita; id prisci quondam sanxêre parentes.
Ergo agite ô vestrûm quicunque est criminis expers,
saxa manu primus rapiat, feriatque merentem.
Ecquis erit tanto è numero, qui vulnera prima
dirigat, et sceleris purum se proferat ultro?” [770]
Sic memorans omnes servabat lumine pronus
obliquo, horrendumque tuens, illumque paratus
inscripsisse solo, cui mens interrita nullum
esset ob admissum fœdè, securaque culpae.
Stabat conspectu in medio tremebunda puella, [775]
iam suffusa oculos mortis nigrore propinquae,
et positis terram genibus submissa petebat;
non minùs exanimata metu, quàm in retia cerva
acta canum latratu et longo exercita cursu,
cùm iam consumptae vires, cùm se undique cinctam [780]
hoste videt, mortemque instantem certa moratur.
His autem auditis responsis, omnibus ingens
confestim cecidit furor, et vis fracta quievit.
Quisque suam tacito versant in pectore vitam,
inque vicem spectant sese, atque adversa tuentur; [785]
nec quisquam turba in tanta se prodidit ultro.
Saxa cadunt manibus furtim labentia, et omnes
quisque sui memores abeunt, templumque relinquunt.
Ut verò Deus aspexit vacua atria circùm,
linea detraxit pavitanti vincla puellae, [790]
atque illam verbis monitam dimittit amicis:
“I melior, veterum famam iam extingue malorum.”
Having inspected all this, the hero left [725]------------
down through the double doors, thinking of all
he'd seen. Here he encountered a great tumult,
a mob dragging someone, her hair dishevelled,
her skin pale, old Manasseh’s wife—Susanna;
she’d been given to him, young, by her father, [730]
unwilling, a joyless union, she sick at heart.
The mob was demanding her punishment for
defiling the marriage bed, young men swarming.
Already these youths had stones in their hands.
A priest had come out to try and stop them [735]
when he saw Christ in the spacious portico;
and brought the woman over to him and said
thinking to trick him: “here, taken in adultery,
a wife who betrayed her own marriage bed.
By our laws the punishment for this is [740]
a hard death (but not unfair!) by stoning.
You are the gentlest of readers of scripture,
and so we come to you seeking your opinion.”
He spoke, and filled his soul with empty hope,
imagining his words had snared his enemy, [745]
had shut off all exits: for if he defended her
from the charge by which she had been arrested
his gentleness would turn all against him
and the mob, in their rage, would stone him instead,
for trying to overturn their sacred laws; [750]
where if he upheld this hard justice, the people
would see him as cruel and abandon him.
So, believing in his mind he had won a victory,
the priest puffed-up his breast with vain dreaming.
As when a sleeping farmer dreams he’s ploughing [755]
the land with his well-worn plough, and uncovers
a great mass of gold in the field, becoming
giddy with vain joy: but when he wakes up
he is still poor, his life still hardship and work,
and in his heart he’ll curse his stupid dreaming. [760]
The god found a way (divinity cannot
be fooled by human deceit) to uphold law
and spare innocence. At first he glanced down at
the soil; then he raised his eyes, looked at the crowd
and said: “no doubt, she has merited death [765]
for her crime; this is the law of our forefathers.
So let the one who's entirely without sin
cast the first stone, strike her as she merits it.
Who from this number will be the first to throw
their rock, to claim that they are pure of all sin?” [770]
Having recalled them to this, he watched them all
sidelong, severely, bending ready to write
in the dirt the name of anyone who claimed
he'd done nothing foul and was free from all sin.
Stood in the middle was the terrified girl, [775]
her eyes darkened by death's proximity,
and she knelt down, and meekly implored them all;
no less exhausted than a hunted roe-deer, chased
a long way by baying hounds, driven at last
when all her strength is used up, into the nets [780]
of her enemy, hard death pressing her.
But when the crowd heard his words, all their huge
rage fell away, its force broken and quieted.
Each man there looked into his own heart in silence,
and considered how their lives had been spent; [785]
looking around; no-one was ready to come forward.
The stones slipped from their furtive hands. Everyone,
mindful of themselves, slunk away from the temple.
And the god looked around at the empty court,
untied the hemp rope binding the frightened girl, [790]
and sent her on her way with gentle words:
“Go: do better. Your old sins are extinguished.”
The famous episode of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery (sometimes called the pericope adulterae) is from John 7:53–8:11. Vida gives it a degree of prominence in this, his first book: after various events, and the long ekphrasis, this is the last but one episode in the book, and is followed by Jesus’s transfiguration, alone on Mount Tabor. Which is to say; this is the last major act Christ performs among men and women in Book 1.
I stress this, because the pericope adulterae itself is controversial. Not in terms of its subject (so much), but because of its canonicity. Many manuscripts of John’s gospels include it, but many don’t, and among this latter category are some of the earliest MSS. This, say theologians, suggests the episode is a later interpolation. My understanding is that theologians are still arguing the toss on this matter, but my point here is that this was very much a live issue in the church in Vida’s own day. Churchmen argued both sides of the matter, and eventually the Council of Trent (1545, so not long after Vida published his epic) decided to intereve, to put an end to the argufying by declaring the episode canon.
Augustine (whom Vida follows in several key ways in the Christiad) believed the pericope was genuine, and explained its absence from some early MSS of John with a theory that some men had removed the passage due to a concern that it would be used by their wives as a pretence to commit adultery. That's Augustine for you: the always-practically-minded attitude of a man who devotes a lot of thought and energy to questions of sexual transgression.
Anyway: Vida, by including this pericope at this point in his narrative, is not only weighing in on the validity of the episode itself, he is embellishing and fleshing it out. John’s account doesn’t name the woman; Vida calls her Susanna (presumably, in reference to the story of Susanna and the Elders) and posits an elderly husband called Manasseh—giving, in effect, the adulteress a believable and even sympathisable reason for her unchastity. In John the Pharisees say to Jesus: ‘Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?’ With a lovely bit of quasi-novelistic detail, John goes on:
But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.Vida omits the first writing-on-the-ground, and suggests that in the second Jesus is readying himself to write the name of any who stepped forward claiming to be without sin. Why? Obviously a name written in the dust is no sort of permanent record. Biblical commentary sees the reference as, inter alia, a midrash on Jeremiah 17:1, “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond; it is graven upon the table of their heart;—they that depart from Me, shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the Lord.” But that's a little hard to apply to this case, it seems to me.
If this is a novelistic detail (as I think it is) it might lead us down Tanner-esque Adultery and the Novel style reflections on contracts, sexual and readerly, being remade in a new age: but this strikes me as a wrong step. Adultery, in this pericope, is a collective, not an individual, transgression. What I mean by that is: there is no furious, jealous and humiliated husband railing at his faithless wife here, but instead a group of Pharisees who, the passage tells us directly, are less interested in the delinquency of the woman than in the pretext she provides to catch Jesus out. It's politics, not sex; and Jesus bending down (as in the gorgeous image at the head of the post, William Blake's ‘The Woman Taken in Adultery’ 1805) to write in the dust emblematizes both his clever flexibility in evading the pharisaical snares laid for him, and his reconfiguring of writing as such. Moses's Law, written on stone, is petrifically inflexible; Jesus's rifacimento of the Law is written in dust, because we are dust, and so it is more in tune with our sinful selves. He makes words, but he is word.
After the rather splendid poetical elevation of the preceding ekphrasis, the Latin here is duller: it's still full of dignified Vergillianisms, but to more pompous and less imaginatively exciting effect. Vida's adulteress dragged through by crowd with her hair all dishevelled ecce trahebatur, passis per terga capillis,/pallida longaevi [lines 728-29] owes something to Vergil's description of Cassandra being seized by the Achaeans during the sack of Troy: ecce trahebatur passis Priameia virgo Crinibus à templo Cassandra adytisque Minervae [Aeneid 2:403-04]; ‘see! Priam's virgin daughter, being dragged, her hair dishevelled, from the temple and shrine of Minerva.’ And ipse viam Deus invenit [line 761] ‘then God found a way’ is a phrase that occurs several times in the Aeneid: 3:395, where the god is Apollo, and 10:113, where it's Jupiter. There's a much longer essay to be written (not that I'm proposing to do it, just yet) about the ways in which Vida recasts the Latin of the Vulgate into a more Vergillian idiom. Take the very famous phrase on which this episode ends: John 8:11's ‘go, and sin no more.’ The Vulgate gives us vade et amplius iam noli peccare. Vida is much more compact: i melior.
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