[Previous: lines 253-272]
It is almost Passover in Jerusalem. Now read on!
Forte propinquabat genti solennis et orae------------
festa dies, veterum cum relligione parentum
immunes operum ducunt septem otia soles; [275]
perque domos ovium fœtus epulantur, et acri
fermento parcunt jussi; properataque liba
expediunt, mensasque onerant agrestibus herbis,
laetitiae veteris memores. Hac luce ferebant,
Aegyptum priscos olim, cœlestibus actos [280]
prodigiis, magna cum praeda exîsse, parentes,
ingressos pede iter salsas impune per undas.
Ergo ingens tum sceptrigeram concursus ad urbem
undique erat, populique omnes ad sacra fluebant.
Non effusa tamen turba huc sine more ruebat; [285]
verùm quisque ducemque suum, gentemque, tribumque
unà ibant comitati: etenim licèt omnibus idem
sanguis, cognataque orti sint stirpe nepotes
omnes Isacidae, paribus sub legibus omnes;
scindit se tamen in bis senas una tribus gens, [290]
atque Palaestinam latè est diducta per omnem;
Libera gens olim multa munita virûm vi,
florentesque urbes populis, opibusque vigentes.
Tunc autem patriis de finibus exturbati
penè omnes aberant, et Caspia saxa colebant. [295]
Vix de bis senis tribus una intacta manebat,
alteraque, et patria sese tellure tenebant,
Benjamidum gens, atque ipso domus inclyta Iüda,
ambae tunc etiam populis opibusque vigentes.
Tantum autem imperio adjectam, ceu caetera passim [300]
contuderat bello, et victricibus hauserat armis,
hanc quoque servitio partem Roma alta premebat:
sceptra urbi tantùm sublataque ademerat arma,
linquens sacra viris, ac leges victor avitas.
Nunc tellus deserta iacet: tot clara fuere [305]
mœnia, tot populis pariter cum fortibus urbes,
hae bello, hae validis quassata viribus aevi.
Usque adeô saevas superûm Pater arsit in iras
nimbipotens, natique necem non passus inultam est.
Non tamen indecorem tantae solatia cladis [310]
ipse sinam antiquam (superent modò carmina) terram,
ne penitus seclis obliviscentibus aetas
deleat extinctam pariter cum nomine gentem.
Regem illis superûm prosit regionibus ortum
vagîsse, et cœlo primùm reptâsse sub illo. [315]
It happened now a solemn festival------------
was approaching, when ancestral religion
decreed seven days of leisure and rest; [275]
in every home lamb was eaten, and only
unleavened bread allowed; hastily-made cakes
were laid out, and the meal garnished with bitter herbs,
in memory of ancestral joy—the day
when with heaven’s help, escaping Egypt [280]
taking their precious things with them, the ancestors,
walked, unscathed, across the waves of the salt sea.
So it was people flocked to the sceptred city
everyone seeking out its sacred altars.
Nor was this in any way disorderly: [285]
each man followed the leader of his tribe
and all were comrades, brothers of the same
bloodline, all could trace ancestral roots to
Isaac, such that each was legally equal—
even though their race had split into twelve, [290]
tribes and spread out across all Palestine.
They had once been a free people, valiant,
whose growing cities were rich in men and wealth.
But then they were exiled from their fatherland
scattered, exiled to rocky Caspius. [295]
From twelve tribes barely two remained intact
(and those were changed) still living in their homeland:
Benjamin’s people and the famous house of
Judah, conspicuous for their wealth and numbers.
Then like so many other nations they were [300]
seized by empire, taken in war, overwhelmed
by arms and enslaved—this land became Rome’s.
They deprived the city of sovereignty, and
disarmed them, leaving only their laws and faith.
Now the land is a desert: so many fine walled [305]
forts and cities wasted, so many killed,
destroyed by war and the ravages of time.
Such the thunderous fury of the Father
who would not leave his child’s death unavenged!
Though I'll condole the disaster; I will not [310]
permit (if my song lives!) this antique land
to be altogether forgotten through the ages
or its people’s name to be blotted out.
For it was in this place that Heaven’s King was
born, under these skies he took his baby steps. [315]
‘Caspius’ (line 295), as you can probably guess, is the Roman name for the territory abutting the Caspian Sea. Vida appears to be making reference to the Mountain Jews of modern-day Azerbaijan (which is quite interesting, if so). One textual note: line 283 has ‘septiferam’ in the original; I read ‘septigeram’.
This potted history of the Jewish people brings the episode of the meeting of the priests in the temple to a close, and bridges to a lengthy (more than 200 lines!) ‘catalogue of the ships’: that epic convention by which (in the Iliad) the Achaean army is described in terms of its myriad nations and city-states. Vida’s ‘catalogue of the ships’ is all Jews: representatives of each of the twelve tribes, all arriving in Jerusalem for Passover. That's to come.
One detail from this passage that leaps out at me is its cavalier (deliberately, I suppose) approach to chronology as such. So: certain books of the Old Testament—the books of Joshua and Kings, most notably—portray the Jews as a proud, warlike, conquering nation, a place of splendour and prosperity under Solomon. By the first century AD that had changed: Israel fell first under Babylonian, then Egyptian and finally Roman servitude. How did this happen? The Old Testament says repeatedly that God took his favour away from the Jews because of various popular religious delinquencies. Vida takes this one step further: God was angry with the Jews not (as the OT says) for what they had done, but for what they were going to do—murdering Christ: ‘Such the thunderous fury of the Father/who would not leave his child’s death unavenged!’ This strikes me as not just a queerly anachronistic thing to claim, it runs the risk of decoupling action and consequence, crime and punishment altogether. In one sense, sub specie aeternitatis, of course God knows everything that has happened, is happening and will happen. But it’s very odd to find a Catholic bishop, in effect, advancing a view more usually associated with extreme Calvanism.
The couplet asks us to believe that God, knowing in advance that the Jews would kill Christ, first allowed them to prosper and then used others as his tools to break and enslave them and desertify their land—six hundred years before the actual crime. Why six hundred years? It seems an arbitrary length of time. But perhaps there have been theologians who've argued that Adam, as the ancestral Jew, was expelled from Paradise not for eating the fruit of the tree, but as a retroactive pre-punishment for the fact that his descendants would kill Christ (a punishment that, paradoxically, included in it its own delayed redemption). But it's hard to rationalise an ethics that says: you are liable for your own actions, but also for the actions of anybody in any way connected with you at any point in the future, reaching six centuries down the line. Odd, really.
Or perhaps not. There is a poetic (I think, specifically poetic) apprehension of anger—the Ancient Mariner for instance—that is predicated on the achronic intensities of the affect, quite uncoupled from proportion or cause-and-effect. The most trivial thing can provoke the most prodigious, cosmic of wrathful responses. This poetic apprehension is especially associated with epic as a mode, I suppose: why does Juno hate Aeneas so doggedly? Not for anything that pius gentleman has done. What powers the enormous anger of Achilles, and the catastrophic destruction he trails in his path? Wrath is often larger than reason, and that holds doubly true for gods. W H Auden in Forewords and Afterwords says ‘the wrath of God is not a description of God in a certain state of feeling, but of the way in which I experience God if I distort or deny my relation to him.’ Barth says something similar, on a more deterministic scale: ‘the forgetting of the true God is already itself the breaking loose of His wrath against those who forget Him … Our conduct becomes governed precisely by what we desire. By a strict inevitability we reach the goal we have set before us.’ Perhaps Vida means something along those lines, here.
Then again, there's something really quite special in the chutzpah of Vida claiming, in the last lines here, that it will be through his epic poem, if at all, that Israel-Palestine will be remembered by posterity. Whatever, dude!
[Next: lines 316-384]
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