Book 2, lines 1-21

[Previously: Book 1 lines 872-963].

Book 2 begins.

At Solymi trepidi rerum, et formidine caeci,
noctem illam patrum primi, templique ministri
insomnem duxere; animis adeò addita cura
incubat, ac nullam attonitis dat dira quietem.
Omnibus ante oculos urbem ingredientis imago          [5]
laeta dei, festique manûs impubis honores;
illiusque vident latè increbrescere nomen.
Fama volat, passimque canit miracula rerum.
Quid faciant? magis atque magis iam vera pateseunt,
quae quondam prisci vates cecinere futura,                 [10]
terras cœlesti regem de stirpe manere,
cuius in adventu templum, Judaeaque tandem
regna ruant; Solymeque eversis desinat aris
antiquo de more sacros imponere honores.
Ergo infracti animis omnes, terrore subacti,                [15]
tectis, quisque suo, septi clausique manebant.
Quales quae solitae florentia rura volantes
carpere apes, ubi saevit hyems, cœlumque profusos
solvitur in nimbos, et aquosus regnat Orion,
ocia lenta terunt, clausisque alvearibus aegrae            [20]
cunctantur, circumque fores ac limina mussant.

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At Jerusalem, frightened by events, blind
with foreboding, unsleeping, the temple priests
passed a troubled night; care weighing their souls
and minds, and all their quietude smitten.
With their own eyes they’d seen the glad spectacle          [5]
of God entering a festive city, widely honoured;
and they saw how his fame was spreading widely.
Rumour flew, passing news of his miracles
What to do? More and more the truth of ancient
prophecy was revealed, that now was coming               [10]
a king of heavenly lineage to the earth
at whose advent Judea and its temples
would be broken, Jerusalem would cease
to observe its ancient and once-sacred rites.
So, broken-spirited all, fear-prostrated,                          [15]
they hid, each of them locked up in their houses.
They were like those fliers over flowery fields
pollinating bees, when harsh winter throngs skies
with stormclouds, and watery Orion reigns
grinding down rain, they stay in their hives, sick,         [20]
dawdling, buzzing anxiously near the doorways.

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And so we're into Book 2. The scene returns to Jerusalem, and the first third of this second stage in the epic deals with swarms of devils, flying up from hell and into Jerusalem to tempt the priests to persecute Jesus. They also tempt the disciples to betray their master, although of this group only Judas succumbs.

Before we get to that, though, we have this little pen-portrait of the sick and anxious priests of the old religion. The interesting thing in this opening 21-line section, it seems to me, is the bee-y epic simile of lines 17-21. This ‘Jews as bees’ image does two things, both of them more than a little anti-Semitic. One is it reminds the reader of Vida’s earlier bee simile, back when Hell is first described in Book 1, and Satans minions swarm away at the end of his speech:

Striding through air they beat their hairy wings
through the black void until they reached upper land.
No cloud as dense was ever formed, not even when
bees swarm hungrily upon the summer flowers
when cloudbusting Boreas and rainy Auster grow calm,
and the warlike kings of the hives charge out
hurrying to battle under their opposing flags. [Christiad 1:227-33]

And second thing it does is to transition the narrative into a related image: as demons swarm into the city. In both cases bees figure not as the home-and-honey-making representatives of social order, hierarchy and harmony that Shakespeare’s Ulysses praises, but as something monstrous, diseased (‘aeger’ in line 20 means ‘sick, ill’ and only secondarily ‘anxious, worried’) diabolical. Milton takes-up this notion wholesale for Paradise Lost, when describing his swarming demons:

Thick swarm'd, both on the ground and in the air,
Brusht with the hiss of russling wings. As Bees
In spring time, when the Sun with Taurus rides,
Pour forth thir populous youth about the Hive
In clusters; they among fresh dews and flowers
Flie to and fro, or on the smoothed Plank,
The suburb of thir Straw-built Cittadel,
New rub'd with Baum, expatiate and confer
Thir State affairs. So thick the aerie crowd
Swarm'd [Paradise Lost 1: 759-76]

It interests me that bees can figure in two so widely divergent ways.

One translation note: my ‘pollinating bees’ of line 18 is a touch problematic: the original is, carpere apes and carpo means: ‘I pluck, pick, harvest’. The ancients knew bees harvested pollen, and turned it into honey, but were (so far as I understand it) unaware the role this played in cross-pollination of plants as such—and since this latter is now very much what the semantic field of ‘pollinating’ entails nowadays, it seems to me a little anachronistic to translate as I have here. But ‘harvesting bees’ looked too weird to me, so I’ve gone with ‘pollinating’.

The image at the top is the title page of Francesco Stelluti's Melissographia (1625). Stelluti (1577-1652) wrote and illustrated this book, after years of close observations of the insects, including the use of an early microscope. The book itself is dedicated to Pope Urban VIII; bees were the heraldic emblem of the Urban's family, the Barberini.

[Next: lines 22-72]