Book 5, lines 153-182

[Previous: lines 101-152]

The elders of Jerusalem petition Pilate for Jesus's death. He tries to dissuade them, but to no avail.

Romulus at dictis nequicquam flectitur ullis.
nec nova primum audit nunc crimina. Cuneta nefando
scit fabricata odio, dum Christi gloria, et ingens          [155]
sacrilegos stimulis virtus exercet Amaris.
Atque ait: ‘Haec coram fama est vos saepius illi
obiecisse, quibus semper sermone paratus
restitit, et vera victor ratione refellit.
Nec se progeniem superi negat ipse parentis                 [160]
quem vos promissum caelo divinitus olim
venturum tandem auxilio mortalibus aegris
non latet, ut veteris genitoris molliat iras
concillans generi vestro, culpamque parentum
ipse sua virtute luat. sic ferre priorum                            [165]
accepi monimenta, patres id prodere vestros
et rebus probat ipse. adeo circum oppida lustrans
arrexit totam monstris ingentibus oram,
quae non ullae artes hominum, non ulla potest vis.
Quin etiam in lucem qnosdam revocavit ab umbris,       [170]
quis penitus iam mors totos immissa per artus
Solverat haerentes animae de corpore nexus.
Quare agite o odiis, miseri, desuescite iniquis.
Ne frustra pugnate; deum sed discite vestrum.
Dixerat. At magis, atque magis violentia gliscit             [175]
omnibus. Ingenti clamore insistere, et una
infreni saevire, humerisque abscindere amictum.
Nec secus increvere animis ardentibus irae,
quam cum Athesimve Padumve undis laeta arva paranem
diluere, agricolae subiti compescere tendunt                   [180]
aggeris obiectu, praeceps magis aestuat amnis
insultans, victorque altas ruit agmine moles.

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The Roman was unmoved by all these words.
This was not the first he’d heard of these crimes—
lies, he knew, driven by hate of Christ’s glory                 [155]
impious enemies goaded by his virtue.
He said: “This is what you are always saying:
reproaches he himself has refuted
with words and acts and with the truths of reason.
He does not deny he’s his High Father’s son,                  [160]
that he has come to you as promised, from heaven
to help weary mortals, and reconcile
your people to his Father’s long-held wrath
conciliating your ancestors’ sin
through his own virtue. I know your antique                    [165]
scripture predicts this, your fathers proclaimed it.
He has proved himself through all the towns here,
performing miracles up and down the coast
things quite beyond the power or arts of men—
even calling from the shadows to the light                       [170]
reinstalling into the dead with his skill
souls that had been dislodged from their bodies.
So give up your hatred, you miserable men!
It’s futile to fight: accept him as your God.”

He spoke. But the whole crowd grew more and more      [175]
violent. Yelling vehemently, as one,
in unbridled rage against him, they tore their clothes
Their incensed souls, flaming wrath, were like the
Adige or the Po as it prepares to flood wide fields,
though the farmers hurry to contain it, with                      [180]
built-up earthworks, the river bursts headlong
triumphing over the dam, victorious, rushing in.

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The Adige is Italy’s second-longest river, rising in the Alps near the Italian border with Austria and Switzerland, and flowing 250 miles through northeastern Italy to the Adriatic Sea. The Po is Italy’s longest river—over 400 miles—flowing (again) eastward across northern Italy from the Cottian Alps, debouching into the Adriatic. Both rivers, and especially the latter, were liable to flooding. This is the second time, actually, that Vida has used the modern-day (to him) Po as an epic simile. The first comes right at the beginning of the epic: Book 1, lines 24-31. There's an anachronism involved in this analogy, of course; and here's what I said about that back at the beginning of this project:

why use a river famous across 16th-century Europe in order to talk about an event in 1st-century Judea? Why not, say, the River Jordan? We might retort that the Po was also around in the 1st-century, so mentioning it here isn't strictly speaking anachronistic. But this would be disingenuous of us. Vida compares Christ and his followers to the Po in order to tie the sacred drama to Italy and so to Rome (as Vida, a good Catholic, has motive to do). ... It's a large question, actually, more usually discussed in the visual arts (Renaissance paintings of Christ and his saints are packed with anachronisms and contemporaneities, of course) than poetry, but relevant here too. One group of critics, following Aby Warburg, thinks the point of painting antique figures in Renaissance style was to emphasis the aliveness of the subject matter, its vitality: clothing the ancient in the habilments of the now-living to stress the nowness and the livingness of the gospel message.

For Warburg, the figures of the past appeared “not as plaster casts but in person, as figures full of life and color,... the embodiment of antiquity as the early Renaissance saw it.” He offered as a prime example Baccio Baldini's engraving of Bacchus and Ariadne, in which the deities appear just as Florentines had actually witnessed them being enacted in the carnival festivities of 1490, for which Lorenzo de' Medici himself composed the immortal canto di carro. [Charles Dempsey, ‘“Historia” and Anachronism in Renaissance Art’, The Art Bulletin 87 (2005) 416; Dempsey is quoting Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Getty 1999), 89]

But another school argues something the opposite, that the function of these anachronistic touches is precisely to orchestrate what Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood call ‘a clash of temporalities’. Rather than bring the ancient story up-to-date, what such anachronism does is to pull up-to-dateness back into the past, to revert contemporaneity into the holy aura of the epoch of Christ and his saints.

To perceive an artifact in substitutional terms was to understand it as belonging to more than one historical moment simultaneously. The artifact was connected to its unknowable point of origin by an unreconstructible chain of replicas. That chain could not be perceived; its links did not diminish in stature as they receded into the depths of time. Rather, the chain created an instant and ideally effective link to an authoritative source and an instant identity for the artifact. [Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, ‘Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism’, Art Bulletin, 87 (2005), 407]

This argument intrigues me. I wonder if it's right, and more to the point I wonder how we might apply it to Vida. Nagel and Wood hang their dicussion on a 1503 painting by Vittore Carpaccio picturing Saint Augustine seated at a table in a very sixteenth-century-looking study ‘pausing, his pen raised from the paper’. But saints are one thing; Christ is another. We might want to argue that the anachronism here figures the way Christ in a sense, broke history, and remade it: it registers, in other words, a shift from chronos to kairos, from a blank succession of hopeless years into a calendar structured by grace. But there's an added wrinkle. Because Vida is not simply reaching back to first-century AD Judea, he's also reaching back to first-century BC Rome, and Vergil. So the anachronism splits, as it were, three ways: pagan, Christian and modern.

Otherwise, this passage is the last opportunity Pilate gets to make a positive case for Jesus. In the next few verse-paragraphs of Book 5 he first tries to shuffle the responsibility for judgment onto Herod (‘hearing that Herod had returned,’ is what Vida says, lines 187-188, ‘he looked to free himself from a thankless task’), and when Herod bounces the prisoner back to him he resolves, though with sorrow (tristis, line 226) to crucify him. From this passage, in which Pilate all but concedes that Jesus is indeed the Son of God, to those passages in only a few lines of hexameter verse is a jolt, and no mistake. The character Vida has painted here is constrained by the actuality of the gospels; his character-arc (to use an anachronistic idiom) ought to see him abandoning his Roman paganism and converting to Christianity. But no. One swift epic-simile about rivers is insufficient to motivate this falling away or to shift the logic of the story about.

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