Book 6, lines 1-30

[Previous: Book 5, lines 959-995]

Christ has been crucified. Now Joseph of Arimathea begs Pilate for his body.

Iamque nigrescenti properabat vesper olympo:
corpora adhuc stabant inhumata, infletaque cano
vertice, stipitibusque etiam nunc fixa manebant.
Talia Josephus veniens Arimathide ab ora
non tulit, egregiusque animi, praestansque iuventa,       [5]
et bellis assuetus, agri ditissimus idem,
atque auri; is, Christi miratus maxima facta,
addiderat comitem modò se, quocunque vocaret.
ergo dum sylvis alii formidine turpi,
speluncisque vagi passim conduntur in altis;                 [10]
protinus ipse animi intrepidus, fretusque iuventa
aggreditur gentis rectorem, ac talia fatur:
“Optime Romulidûm, te cari in caede magistri,
quem gens nostra odiis leto mulctavit iniquis,
fama pias servâsse manus, caecumque furorem              [15]
adversùs totis nequicquam viribus îsse.
scis falsa exceptum sub proditione, quòd illis
obstaret coram scelera urgens impia verbis.
Quod potes, exanimum terrae succedere corpus
da saltem, sociis casûs solamen acerbi.                          [20]
ipse novo condam, mihi quod de more paravi,
funera mecum animo dum verso incerta, sepulcro.”
Pontius haec contrà: “Ut potius concedere vivum
nunc corpus cuperem! vos veri conscia testor
numina, tentavi versans mecum omnia, siqua                 [25]
insontem morti excipere ac dimittere possem.
Et nobis pietas colitur, sanctique penates:
sed nihil invitâ tandem profecimus urbe;
crudelis vicit gentis furor: ite, sepulcro
muneribusque pii exanimum decorate supremis.”            [30]

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As darkness sped across the evening sky
the bodies were still up, unburied, rotting on
the grey hill, still nailed to their timber.
It fell to Joseph of Arimathea—
peerless of mind, still remarkably youthful                        [5]
a veteran soldier and rich in land,
and gold; he had marvelled at Christ’s great deeds
and added his voice to the other disciples.
So whilst the others hid, disgraced, in the woods
or caves, or scattered through the mountains                      [10]
he, unperturbed, in the vigour of his youth
went up to the people’s ruler, and spoke thus:
“Noblest son of Romulus! My master’s
death was not your fault. Our people's odious wrath
was the cause, that blind anger, which you strove               [15]
against, trying in vain to save his life.
You know he was falsely arrested, betrayed
because he opposed their base and urgent sins.
So please—let us bury his lifeless body:
give his followers at least that small comfort.                     [20]
I have a tomb prepared—it was for me,
aware as I am of life and death’s vicissitudes.”

Pontius replied: “if only I might give you
his body still living, now! I call the gods
to witness, I tried everything I could, to                               [25]
save this innocent man from death, and set him free.
I too honour duty, and my household gods.
But the citizens would not permit it;
their harsh anger won the day. Go: in a tomb
place this pious man, a lifeless last farewell.”                      [30]

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I think ‘rotting’ (line 2) is right: the Latin is from īnflō, whose primary meaning is ‘I inflate; I blow into’ (as when playing a wind instrument), the word carrying the secondary meaning ‘I puff up or swell’. Vida might mean that the winds plays upon the still-crucified bodies, as upon an instrument, but that seems far-fetched to me; more likely (surely) is that the bodies are swelling with putrefaction. But I could be wrong.

So: this opening to Book 6, and its introduction of a new character, Joseph of Armithea, draws on the gospels. Matthew 27:57 calls Joseph a rich man and disciple of Jesus, and Mark 15:43 includes the extra information that he was ‘a respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God’ (Luke 23:50–56 says he had recused himself from the council’s decision to condemn Jesus). Here is the relevant bit of John:

After this, Joseph of Arimathea, being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly, for fear of the Jews, asked Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus; and Pilate gave him permission. So he came and took the body of Jesus. And Nicodemus, who at first came to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds. Then they took the body of Jesus, and bound it in strips of linen with the spices, as the custom of the Jews is to bury. Now in the place where He was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid. So there they laid Jesus, because of the Jews’ Preparation Day, for the tomb was nearby. [John 19:38-42]

By far the most famous (at any rate, in Britain) legend associated with Joseph of Arimathea is that he brought the Gospel to first-century Britain, along with the Holy Grail, which he deposited somewhere, perhaps at Glastonbury. This rich Arthurian tradition stands, it seems, on shaky grounds:

Though legends about the arrival of Christianity in Britain abounded during the Middle Ages, early writers do not connect Joseph to this activity. Tertullian (AD 155–222) wrote in Adversus Judaeos that Britain had already received and accepted the Gospel in his lifetime, writing, “all the limits of the Spains, and the diverse nations of the Gauls, and the haunts of the Britons—inaccessible to the Romans, but subjugated to Christ.” Tertullian does not say how the Gospel came to Britain before AD 222. However, Eusebius of Caesarea, (AD 260–340), one of the earliest and most comprehensive of church historians, wrote of Christ's disciples in Demonstratio Evangelica, saying that “some have crossed the Ocean and reached the Isles of Britain.”

In none of these earliest references to Christianity’s arrival in Britain is Joseph of Arimathea mentioned. William of Malmesbury's De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae (“On the Antiquity of the Church of Glastonbury”, circa 1125) has not survived in its original edition, and the stories involving Joseph of Arimathea are contained in subsequent editions that abound in interpolations placed by the Glastonbury monks “in order to increase the Abbey's prestige—and thus its pilgrim trade and prosperity.” ... In 1989 A. W. Smith critically examined the accretion of legends around Joseph of Arimathea, by which the poem hymn of William Blake And did those feet in ancient time is commonly held as “an almost secret yet passionately held article of faith among certain otherwise quite orthodox Christians” and Smith concluded “that there was little reason to believe that an oral tradition concerning a visit made by Jesus to Britain existed before the early part of the twentieth century.”

There he is, at the head of this post: William Blake's Illustration Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion (in its second state after Blake's 1773 original, engraved circa 1809). Indeed, it seems not only did those feet, in ancient times, not walk upon England's mountains green, there is some scholarly debate as to whether they even walked in Judea. ‘Did Joseph of Arimathea Exist?’ ask Gerald O'Collins and Daniel Kendall [Biblica 75:2 (1994), 235-241], summarising the both-sides debate:

For a critical assessment of the NT tradition(s) about Jesus' empty tomb much depends on one's evaluation of the burial story [Mark 15,42-47 in its first intracanonical form]. A reference to Jesus' burial turned up in the early kerygma quoted by Paul [1 Cor 15,4a; see Rom 6,4]. But it was ten or fifteen years later before Mark ended his passion narrative with the episode about Joseph of Arimathea following the prescriptions of Deut 21,22-23 and burying Jesus' body before sunset on the day of the crucifixion. Obviously if we deny any historical reliability in this burial story and dismiss it as a legend created either by the evangelist (or one of his sources), we would have to make the same negative judgment about the subsequent empty tomb narrative. ... In three recent books John Dominic Crossan has argued inter alia that the tradition about Joseph of Arimathea originated with Mark and was then derived from him. Essentially four arguments come into play to support Crossan's position: three are general propositions (about the original source for the gospel passion narratives in an earlier version which, though no longer extant, is embedded in the Gospel of Peter; the tendency to historicize OT prophecies; and Mark's extraordinary creativity), and one deals with a specific point (Joseph of Arimathea as an ‘in-between’ figure).

Criminals executed by exposure, like crucified men, were generally left to rot on their frames as a warning to others, but it seems there was a tradition, at least in 1st-century Judea, of obtaining the permission of the authorities to retrieve the dead bodies and bury them. It's such a central part of the Resurrection narrative of Christianity that it's hard to think of it going otherwise, although if you think about it, things might easily have been different. Picture Jesus returning to life not in a still tomb, wrapped in grave clothes, but still pinned to the cross. Which is to say, it's hard to picture that, isn't it? It diminishes the dignity and transcendence of the moment so catastrophically we can imagine early disciples wanting to banish all such speculation (how would it go? Jesus returned not just to life but agony? Would he then die again, on the cross? Or would he endure, perhaps forever, like a character from a cheap late 18thC Gothic novel?) Hence this conveniently wealthy and devout Arimathean appears, to beg for the body and deposit it in a more fitting locale prior to its resurrection.

Crossan (cited in this paragraph) makes the argument that crucified bodies would eventually be disposed of by the authorities—as, for instance, when time came to reuse the crosses—by being deposited  in a communal unmarked grave. There is a good chance that this is what actually happened to Jesus, but, according to Crossan, for obvious reasons, the early evangelists decided to change this story, so that instead of Jesus' body being taken down by his enemies it was removed by his friends. To effect this change they invented a new character who was halfway between a friend and an enemy:

The story of Jesus' burial by Joseph of Arimathea originated with Mark, who began the process of taking Jesus' burial away from his enemies and giving it to his friends. He did so by inventing and using the in-between character, Joseph of Arimathea, who mediates ‘between enemies and friends’ a ‘limbo’ character, described in Mark 15,43 with two carefully balanced qualities: first, he is ‘a respectable member of the council’ but, second, he is ‘one who was also looking for the kingdom of God’. This locates him somewhere in between the ‘Jewish’ side and the ‘Christian’ side. Still one recognizes a problem in that description. If he was a member of the Sanhédrin, where was his voice when Jesus needed him earlier during the trial? The rest of the intracanonical tradition would solve, each in its own way, the problem created by Joseph's ambiguous position and Mark's difficult description [Crossan, Cross That Spoke. The Origins of the Passion Narrative (San Francisco 1988), 238-39]

For what it's worth, O'Collins and Kendall answer their question ‘Did Joseph of Arimathea Exist?’ in the positive, and disregard Connar's thesis. But it is still up for debate, it seems.

One more note on this passage: pietas and penates (line 27) are, of course, the two most crucial items or values in the Aeneid: Aeneas serves the latter, his ‘household gods’ (the numinous externalisations of the values of hearth and home) and undertakes his voyages in order to find them a new home; and he himself, repeatedly is called ‘pius Aeneas’ (dutiful, worthy, good Aeneas). I’ve talked before about the difficulty of translating this word. Here I go with ‘duty’; in previous sections I've tried ‘faithful’. Indeed, here’s what I have earlier said, starting with a quotation from James Garrison:

At the centre of [Vergilian] interpretation is pietas, an idea that long sustains the highest claims of value even as it is accommodated to conditions and assumptions widely divergent from those articulated in the Aeneid. This divergence is eventually reflected in the European vernaculars, creating a notoriously vexed problem for Vergil’s translators. In the preface to his 1697 Aeneis John Dryden calls attention to the difficulty of translation … [insisting] “the word in Latin is more full than it can possibly be exprest in any Modern Language.” Dryden then defines the Latin word in English: “Piety alone comprehends the whole Duty of Man towards the Gods; towards his Country; and towards his Relations.” [James D Garrison, Pietas from Vergil to Dryden (Wayne State University Press 1987), 1]

Garrison’s large book explores the complexifications of the term as it works its way through several European languages, tracing both the ways it worked, and the trajectory by which its high status in the 16th and 17th-centuries was followed by a falling away (by the 20th-C, Garrison argues, ‘the decline of the word in modern discourse has been decisive’; despite some attempts to revive it ‘it is no longer a “pivotal” or “key” term’ [20]). There’s an added layer in Vida, where Christian ideas of piety tangle in eddying ways with the older Vergilian original. But the Christiad is intensely Vergilian, all the way through. This is what I said about pietas earlier on this very blog:

Christ tells his disciples to be ‘pious’, pius, a Latin word with a notoriously tricky semantic field. It’s Vergil’s favoured epithet for Aeneas; the jangling almost-rhyme ‘pius Aeneas’ chimes all the way through the Aeneid. But although the English word ‘pious’ does derive from the Latin pius (just as ‘piety’ derives from the Latin pietās) these modern words mean rather different things. In today's usage ‘piety’ has an inescapable whiff of sanctimoniousness about it, a holier-than-thou stiffness. But for a Roman, pietas meant a particularly engaged kind of goodness: a duty to respect and uphold your nation, your family and your household gods. For them it described a certain relationship to one's parents (especially) but also to one’s children and other relatives, as to benefactors and friends: a mode of affection, love, loyalty, gratitude, and putting their needs before your own, a mode of gentleness, kindness, tenderness, pity, compassion. How to translate that into English with one word? Not easy. I’ve seen translations of the Aeneid that use “good Aeneas” (smacks, rather, of the patronising “good boy!” we bestow on a well-behaved dog I think) or “dutiful Aeneas” which is much too strenuous and Kantian. ‘Kosher Aeneas’ has a pleasant cultural-cross-current gnarliness (not inappropriate to Vida’s poem, actually) although it makes the Trojan hero sound a bit like a sausage. ‘Decent Aeneas’ is probably too bland, too passive; ‘good-bloke Aeneas’; ‘upright Aeneas’—perhaps we need to adopt a surfer-dude accent and call him ‘righteous Aeneas.’ I don’t know what the answer is to this translation conundrum, to be honest. It’s a different fight, for a different arena, but I’ve often thought we should battle to reclaim nice as a positive descriptor, to purge it of its weak-tea and mimsy overtones. Being nice is a profound and (yes) righteous business, much harder than it might seem (since it requires us to learn how to muzzle our nastiness, our anger and spite) and very potent as a means of cleansing and shining sunlight onto social interactions. Plus ‘nice Aeneas’ reproduces something of the near-rhyme of Vergil’s original.

Going back to Book 6, line 27: despite the strong Vergilian vibe of this line, Gardner alerts me to something I wouldn’t otherwise have known: that it’s actually modelled on a line from Columella: casta fides nobis colitur sanctique penates. [De re rustica 10:279]. So that's interesting.

[Next: lines 31-67]