[Previous: lines 739-778]
Joseph narrates. The Magi, come from the East to adore Jesus, have stopped at Jerusalem, where Herod tries to trick them into revealing where his new rival might be found. Now read on!
“Ergo iter instaurant conspecto sidere laeti.------------
Iamque propinquabant magna stipante caterva; [780]
cùm subitô supra tectum ingens substitit astrum
irradians, largoque mapalia lumine complens.
Quales, cùm belli motus, aut funera regum
portendunt, crinem irato sparsere minacem
aethere, ni diri rubeant lugubre, cometae. [785]
Tres adeô angusti subter fastigia tecti
pauper ego excepi reges in rebus egenis.
Vidi illos auro illustres, ostroque decoros
ante pedes pueri sese demittere pronos
suppliciter, genibusque piae procumbere matris; [790]
dum sua quisque facit sortiti ex ordine dona.
Barbarici ante fores expectabant comitatus.
interea, Tyrioque instratus murice terga
stans sonipes teres exercebat dentibus aurum.
His dehinc perfectis, abeunt, laetique sequuntur, [795]
quod longo irradians aperitur tramite sidus.
Sed non inde via moniti referuntur eadem,
regia linquentes à laeva mœnia longè,
rursus Idumaei sedem ne regis adirent.”
“They gladly resumed their star-guided journey.------------
They were near, followed by their retinue, [780]
when suddenly the great star stood above the roof
irradiant, filling the hut with huge light.
It was like those war-heralding portents—
the ones that appear when kings die, trailing
tails in angry skies, burning ruby-red: comets. [785]
So it was I welcomed three kings under
my humble roof, poor though I am. I watched
them, in splendid robes of purple and gold, kneel
as suppliants at the feet of the child
balanced on his holy mother’s knee; then [790]
each in turn gave the child the gift he’d brought.
Outside, the crowd of their Barbarian servants
waited, their horses decked in Tyrian purple
stamped their feet and chewed their golden bits.
Once they’d finished they left in joy, following [795]
the same star that had shone their way here.
Yet they did not travel the same route back,
forewarned, they kept far from the royal palace,
not wished to meet again the Idumaean king.”
Matthew is the only Gospel to mention these Magi: ‘on entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another path’ [Matthew 2:11]. This scene has become very famous, of course; a cornerstone of Christmas iconography. Still, the positioning of this episode, by Vida, is a little odd. He has previously described the birth of Jesus and the visit of the shepherds; then he's given us Joseph and Mary bringing the baby to the Temple at Jerusalem. Now Joseph and Mary are back in the stable in Bethlehem (why? wouldn't they go on from Jerusalem to their home in Nazareth?). Maybe this is supposed to be a flashback, but it's a bit wrongfooting either way.
The horses in lines 793-794 are Vergilian. Early in Aeneid 4, Carthaginian nobles go hunting. Dido, though, stays in her palace while her horses stamp impatiently outside:
Reginam thalamo cunctantem ad limina primi‘As the queen lingers in her bedroom, just outside her threshold Carthaginian princes await her, and her prancing horse stands, brilliant in purple and gold and proudly champs its foaming bit.’ Vergil's word for purple, ostrum, refers to a dye extracted from ‘the sea snail’; Vida actually names the aquatic mollusc in question, the murex. Wikipedia is its usual informative self with respect to this latter:
poenorum exspectant, ostroque insignis et auro
stat sonipes, ac frena ferox spumantia mandit. [Aeneid 4:133-135]
Costly and labor-intensive dyes Tyrian purple (or royal purple) and Tekhelet were historically made by the ancient Phoenicians using mucus from the hypobranchial gland of two species commonly referred to as "murex", Murex brandaris and Murex trunculus ... This dye was used in royal robes, other kinds of special ceremonial or ritual garments, or garments indicating high rank. It is hypothesised that the dye was the same dye as that which featured prominently in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, the clothing of the High Priest (or Kohen Gadol) officiating there; it is sometimes still used by Jews today in the ritual fringes (tzitzit) on four-cornered garments.There are more medieval and renaissance paintings of the adoration of the Magi than of any other topic, save only the Madonna and Child and Crucifixion. One sense of why this might be is pinpointed by Doina Elena Craciun:
A little after his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in 1355, the king of Bohemia and of the Romans, Charles IV, was depicted as the middle-aged Magus on the left wing of the so-called “Morgan Diptych.” A similar crypto-portrait is also found on an altarpiece finished in 1464–1465 for the chapel of St. Agatha of the royal palace of Barcelona. In this painting, the youngest Magus bears the physical traits of Peter, Constable of Portugal and pretended king of Aragon (1463–1466). Kings also pursued identification with the Magi by offering gold, frankincense, and myrrh on January 6, as registered in documents for the kings of England, Edward III (1327–1377), and Richard II (1377–1399), for the king of France, Charles V (1364–1380), for the king of Aragon, Pedro IV (1336–1387), and for Felipe II of Spain (1556–1598). Other types of written sources also mention the similitude between medieval kings and the Magi in different contexts. For example, a sermon given in 1273 by Gilles of Orleans at the Saint-Chapel in Paris, in the presence of king Philippe III (1270–1285): “Indeed, I dare say that he is not a real king on Earth the one who did not make this pilgrimage; I mean the one at the place where the King of kings was born, either on the strength of devotion or to bring military help.” [Craciun, ‘Adoration of the Magi and Authority of the Medieval King: an Ambiguous Correlation’, in Flocel Sabate (ed) Ideology in the Middle Ages (Arc Humanities Press 2019), 243]Medieval and Renaissance royalty who wanted to insert themselves into devotional art weren't going to settle for minor characters or commoners, of course; but neither would they want to be virtuous Jews or even Romans. These Gentile kings, suitably adoring of Christ but not, exactly, beholden to him hit the spot.
Political embassies of this kind were common in the ancient world; eminent men from one kingdom would come to another, usually more powerful kingdom to offer a tribute of valuable gifts on either the accession of a new ruler or the birth of a new royal heir. For example: King Tiridates I of Armenia travelled to Rome with a retinue (including his court astrologers, or magi) to pay homage to the Emperor Nero in AD 66. Since this is only a few years before the date scholars sometimes hypothesise for the composition of the Gospel of Matthew, this diplomatic overture is sometimes posited as a model for the homage of the Magi before Christ. Tiridates' embassy involved quid pro quo; he gave Nero gifts and acknowledged his authority; in return Nero declared Tiridates monarch of Armenia, presumably as a client king. It's hard to see how this could translate into the Biblical situation. Did the three kings return to the East as, in effect, Christ-endorsed secular rulers? Seems unlikely.
The sheer ubiquity of the ‘three wise men’ in art and culture rather puzzles me, actually. After all, what is the moral here? Are we to believe that, having offered gifts to Jesus, these three Eastern potentates returned to their homes and ... what? Became Christians? What (since the crucifixion is three decades and more away) would that even entail?
My friend Alan Jacobs reminds me that this is burden of Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” — “No longer at ease in the old dispensation,” knowing that their forms of religion have been superseded but not yet knowing what will replace them. ‘They’d have to wait 30 years before Jesus even began his public ministry,’ Alan notes. ‘What are they supposed to do in the meantime?’
A more pessimistic view might note that these kings are Eastern where Christianity spread, mostly, westward: to Greece, then Rome and so through Europe and to the new world. It means that a king of Persia, India or China would have to wait not 30 years but many centuries before news of the new faith even got back to him; and that even today these realms have only the smallest percentage of Christians by population. That's more like the famous Gramsci quotation: ‘the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ (a line John Fowles used as the epigraph to his under-rated Daniel Martin). I've always wondered if Antonio G didn't nick the sentiment from Matthew Arnold:
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,The image at the head is, for once, roughly contemporaneous with Vida: Gerard David's Adoration of the Kings (1515–1523) in the National Gallery, London.
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
[Next: lines 800-828]
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