Book 5, lines 13-81

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Judas, having betrayed Jesus, now regrets what he has done.

Parte alia, regem qui foede prodidit hosti,
mutatus scelus agnoscit periurus Iudas.
Ah miser, infectum quam vellet posse reverti!                 [15]
Nul la quies animo; saevire in pectore dirae
ultrices, caecasque ob noxam sumere poenas,
nec capit insanos curarum pectore fluctus.
Hinc secum aera manu sceleris caussam attulit amens,
quae Solymi magno dederant in munere pacta,               [20]
atque sacerdotum sacrata ad limina venit
vociferans: ‘Vestruia hoc argentum, haec munera vestra:
accipite! En scelerum pretium exitiale repono.
Heu heu quid demens volui mihi? quo scelus ingens
inductus pretio admisi? vera dei ille                                [25]
progenies, ver usque deus: nunc denique cerno,
discussaeque abeunt tenebrae, et mihi reddita mens est.’
Sic fatus, simul argentum coniecit in ipsos.
Olli autem flentem risere, ac sera videntem.
Infelix abit. Hinc amens, caecusque furore                      [30]
multa putat: curae ingeminant, saevitque sub imo
corde dolor, caelique piget convexa tueri.
Tum secum, huc illuc flammantia lumina torquens:
‘Hem quid agam infelix? Quaenam quae secula porro
sera adeo tantum scelus umquam oblita silebunt?            [35]
Accedamne iterum supplex, crimenque fatebor,
atque ausim veniam sceleri sperare nefando?
Quo vero aspiciam vultu, quove alloquar ore
quem semel indignum decepimus, inque merentem?
Hinc igitur longe fugiam, quantum ire licebit,                  [40]
ignotusque aliis agitabo in finibus aevum?
Hinc me praecipites, me me hinc anferte, procellae,
quo fugit usque dies a nobis luce peracta!
At quis erit tutus tandem locus? omnia praesens
aspicit, ac terras deus undique fulmine terret.                   [45]
Et me conscia mens, atque addita cura sequetur,
sive iter arripiam pedibus, sen puppe per undas.
Quos? quibus? at moror, et ludunt insomnia mentem.
Vos precor o mibi vos magnae nunc hiscite terrae.
Quid dubito? nunc te tangunt scelera impia, Iuda             [50]
Infelix! Tunc debueras, tunc ista decebant,
cum revocare pedem, quam fas occurrere pesti.
Nunc morere, atque nefas tu tantum ulciscere dextra
sponte tua, lucemque volens, hominesque relinque!’
Talia iactabat certus iam abrumpere vitam                        [55]
invisam, et saevum leto finire dolorem,
curarum hanc unam metam ratus, atque laborum.
Fluctuat, atque sibi semper tellure videtuu
absumi, aut rapido de caelo afflarier igni.
Usque adeo ante oculos capti obversatur imago.                [60]
Pallor in ore, acies circumlita sanguine, et artus
algentes tremit, instantis vestigia leti,
et nox multa cava faciem circumvolat umbra.
Omnia nigrescunt tenebris caliginis atrae.
Demens, qui potius veniam sperare fatendo                        [65]
non ausus; neque enim precibus non flectitur utlis
rex superum, et iustae bonus obliviscitur irae.
Ergo ille inceptis perstans, et sedibus haerens
isdem abiit, silvaeque tremens successit opacae,
regia quae propter frondebat plurima tecta.                       [70]
atque ibi dum trepidat, qua tandem morte quiescat
incertus, latebras ne animae serutetur acuto
fortiter, et pectus procumbens induat ense,
an se praecipiti iaciat de culmine saltu;
ipsae, quae attonitum, mortisque cupidine captum             [75]
ducebant semper, furiae, infensaeque praeibant,
informem prona nectentes arbore nodum
ostendere viam. Collo namque inde pependit,
ut meritus, laqueoque infami extrema sequutus
spiramenta animae eliso gutture rupit,                               [80]
et totos subito pendens extabuit artus.

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Elsewhere, having sold his king to the enemy,
faithless Judas now recognized his crime.
Unhappy man! how he wished to go back.                         [15]
No peace of mind, his soul was torn by furies
savagely eager to punish his crimes.
Unbearable anguish grasped at his heart!
Clutching the coin that had tempted him to sin,
his reward from Jerusalem’s people,                                   [20]
he stood at the threshold of the sacred temple
and screamed: ‘here’s your silver! Here is your reward!
Take it! I repay these dead wages of sin!
Oh! Oh! Why was I such a madman? huge crime—
what price could be worth it? Truly he is                            [25]
the true offspring of God—at last I see it.
Darkness disperses and sanity returns.’
So he spoke and hurled the silver at them.
But they only laughed at his tears of regret.
The unhappy man left, blinded by mad rage,                      [30]
cares redoubling, sorrows raging deep in his
dark heart; unable to look at the sky.
He looked around with flaming eyes, and said:
‘So: unhappy, am I? What far future age
could ever, unspeaking, forget so great a crime?                 [35]
Should I go back, humbly confess my sin
ask pardon for my huge guilt? could I dare to?
How could I look at, how speak to, this man?
Who I deceived, who so little deserved it?
Should I flee this land, go as far as I can                             [40]
living in obscurity abroad somewhere?
Carry me far from here, take me away you winds,
fly me to where the sun flees at day’s end!
But where could be safe? Everywhere is present
to God, within range of his lightning.                                  [45]
Guilt and my conscience will follow wherever
I go, whether I walk, or cross the seas by ship.
Who’ll take me? Who do I flee? Idle dreams
are wasting my time. Gape, Earth, and swallow me!
Do I doubt? These are your wicked crimes, Judas             [50]
the Bad! You should of thought of this before,
when you still had time to reverse this plague.
Now: die! Avenge your crime with your own hand!
Choose to leave mankind and the light of day.’

Such his thoughts, as he planned to break off life,              [55]
to end cruel misery via sharp death:
the only way to stop care's agony.
But he balked, thinking of earth swallowing him,
or violent fire from heaven burning him up.
The prisoner’s image passed before his vision.                   [60]
He grew pale, bloodshot in his eyes, his body
shivered in pain—signs of impending doom—
as night’s gathering shadows veiled his face.
Black, thick, stifling clouds covered everything.
Out of his mind, he dared not hope for pardon                    [65]
by confession—even though prayers do reach
the High King, who forgives and relents his anger.

And so, determined, he set off and took
the familiar way, trembling, to the dark woods
besides the palace, dense with foliage.                                 [70]
And here, anxiously, he wondered how to die,
unsure—should he open his soul with a blade
press a sword to his chest and heave down on it?
Or throw himself headlong from the wooded cliff?
But, swaying between passion and death                              [75]
the Furies drove him onwards to his proper doom.
A shameful rope tied to a twisted tree was
the way for him. He hung it round his neck
as he deserved, that infamous noose, and
broke his neck, wheezing out his final breaths:                     [80]
his hanging corpse instantly melted away.

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The coin of lines 19 is aes, which does indeed mean ‘money, fee, fare’, but more specifically means a copper or brass coin (aes also meaning copper or bronze). But we know that Judas was paid in silver, not in copper; and the Romans would never have called a silver coin ‘aes’. The correct word is dēnārius, but that doesn’t fit into Latin hexameter metre. So Vida shuffles things a tad. The ‘prisoner’ (captus) of line 60 is, of course, Jesus himself.

This passage is a pretty good piece of writing, I’d say: there is actual pathos in Vida’s portrait of Judas’s anguished mental state, and a ghastly urgency in the account of his suicide. Vida can only take this so far, though. He’s too committed to a model of Judas as the wicked villain to enter too much into any kind of empathetic account of the man’s sufferings. There’s certainly none of that Dorothy L Sayers-type ‘Judas’s betrayal was needful for the redemption, without it we would have been deprived salvation, so in a way he’s a hero’ type reading. Indeed, Judas’s state of mind is so vividly rendered, and the fact that Vida makes a point of mentioning in lines 66-67 that God always forgives the truly penitent sinner, one almost wonders if the idea here is that Judas is damned less for his betrayal of Jesus and more for the sin of despair. It’s not exactly spelled out, but it may be there, or as much of it may be there as is compatible with the Gospel account that Vida follows quite closely:

Then Judas, His betrayer, seeing that He had been condemned, was remorseful and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, 4 saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”

And they said, “What is that to us? You see to it!”

Then he threw down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed, and went and hanged himself.

But the chief priests took the silver pieces and said, “It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, because they are the price of blood.” And they consulted together and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in. Therefore that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. [Matthew 27: 3-8]

An extra datum comes from Acts 1:18, which states that Judas ‘[fell] headlong ... burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.’ But wait: so he didn't hang himself?

Vida’s order of events, by which Judas hangs himself and afterwards ‘melt[ed] away’, like the Wicked Witch of the West, is striking, and I think unique (I can’t find it anywhere else). It’s important, because the apparent contradiction of these two accounts—hanged in Matthew, struck in Acts by a blight that caused his bowels to erupt—has long (in the words of 19th-C theologian J. Rendel Harris) ‘rendered the incident almost the despair of those very patient and ingenious people who occupy themselves with the harmonization inter se of the biblical accounts.’ Nor is this the only inconstancy:

For it is not very easy to reconcile the purchase of a field by the priests with the purchase of the same field by Judas himself; nor has it been possible, hitherto, to make a convincing demonstration of the equality of the statements ‘he hanged himself’ and ‘he fell on his face and burst asunder, and all his bowels gushed out.’ Naturally when harmonizing became ingrained in the habit of the commentator there have not been wanting persons whose intellectual courage and sophistical adroitness have been ready for the task of reconciling these conflicting statements. One of the simplest methods was to carry the word ‘hanged’ over from Matthew and attach it to the account in the Acts. Traces of this violent proceeding are extant both in the texts and in the commentaries upon the Acts. Thus the Vulgate boldly reads, Suspensus crepuit and, from the Vulgate, the harmonized reading acquired a great influence. For example, it appears in the version of Luther. [J. Rendel Harris, ‘Did Judas Really Commit Suicide?’ The American Journal of Theology, 4:3 (1900), pp. 493]

The Vulgate fudge perhaps explains where Vida gets his ‘melted away’: for crepuit means both ‘clattered, fell apart’ and ‘rustled, cracked, creaked’, and so perhaps crackingly or creakingly informs Vida’s extabuit in line 81 (extābēscō, ‘I melt away, vanish, disappear’). There were certainly lots of grisly stories associated with Judas's death. Here the 12th-century Assyrian bishop Jacob Bar-Salibi summarises some of them:

He went and hanged himself. Matthew sayeth thus: but Luke in the Acts writes that he burst in sunder in the midst and all his Bowels gushed out, and both are in the Right: For there was strangling and bursting in the case, and each of the Evangelists writes of the one; for after he had cast down the Silver in the Temple, he cast a Rope about his own neck in a Wood belonging to his House; and it happening that some passing by saw him hanging, and loosed him before he was choked. Others say the Rope broke, and that for some days after he was sick, and swelled to so large dimensions as that a Cart could not bear him, and his head was sore puffed up, and his eyelids so swollen that he could not see. And Papias saith, that his privy members were mightily enlarged, and that putrid matter, abominable stench and Worms proceeded from them. Epiphanius saith, That he lived four days after his Suspension and that he was cut in twain and that his Bowels gushed out. Others that he died of that Disease, and they did not bury him, for that it was a custom to leave those unburied who hanged themselves: Wherefore he did stink and became offensive, and a nuisance to the Inhabitants round about, and they were forced to remove him thence on a Bier; when they lifted him up he fell, and bursted and all his bowels gushed out. It is said by St. Luke in the acts of the apostles, Let his habitation be waste: That is to say, after they had buried him, the ill savour of his house offended the inhabitants, and they removed thence the stones and the rest of the materials, and so his habitation became waste, to wit, Scariot, and uninhabited. [Bar-Salibi, Commentary on the Four Gospels, translated by Dudley Loftus, in A clear and learned explication of the history of our blessed Saviour Jesus Christ: taken out of above thirty Greek, Syriack, and other oriental authors: by Dionysius Syrus, ... and faithfully translated by D. Loftus (1695)]

Eek!

Following on from that, the rather grisly images at the head of the post is art by the French-based, Italian-born Giovanni Canavesio (1450 – 1500), ‘The Suicide of Judas’ (1492), a fresco painting from the Chapel of Notre Dame des Fontaine, France. You can see the gleeful devil snatching Judas's soul from his ripped-open bowels, like some ghastly spiritual Caesarian.

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