[Previous: lines 198-220]
Christ breaks into Hell. The terrified demons flee before him.
Ut verò in mediis Divum penetralibus hostes------------
videre, et faciem invisam agnovere per umbras
ardentem radiis, ac mira luce coruscam;
protinus aspectu subito terrentur, et imas [225]
coniiciunt sese in latebras, linguaque remulcent
commissas utero caudas, stratique tremendum
nequicquam umbrosis in spelaeis ululârunt.
Quales, quae celsis habitantes Alpibus Euros
semiferae gentes semper patiuntur et imbres, [230]
Romanas si fortè procul fulgentibus armis
ora exertantes antris videre phalangas,
fumosa extemplo palantes tecta relinquunt,
dispersique jugis, siqua altiùs exit in auras,
rupe sedent, longeque duces mirantur euntes. [235]
When God’s enemies saw he’d reached the inner------------
regions, saw his hated face in their shadows
radiant and blazing with amazing light
they were straightaway struck down with fear, and [225]
fled to the deepest hiding places, licking
at their tails which lay across their bellies
and howling vainly into the darkness.
They were like dwellers the high windy Alps—
a half-savage people, lashed by endless rains— [230]
who see a Roman army gleaming in the distance
from their heights, and run from their caves,
abandoning their smoke-filled homes to scatter
in one and twos; hiding on the highest peaks
of rock, they watch amazed as the soldiers come. [235]
The terrified devils hiding away in Hell’s deepest lairs and licking their tails is a striking little detail. The ‘tails lying across their bellies’ is from Vergil (an epic simile in Aeneid 11:812-3 when Arruns, dying warrior halting off the battlefield, is compared to a wounded wolf who goes back to his lair and ‘curls close against his paunch a quivering tail’). But the licking is a very vivid little detail, properly bestial and, I think, original to Vida.
Line 228’s ulularunt (from ululō: ‘I howl’) also derives from Aeneid 4:168 ( summoque ulularunt vertice nymphaea). This is that moment in Book 4 when wood-nymphs on the mountains ‘ululate’ a wedding song for Dido. Vida seems to have swapped the polarity of Vergil’s usage, though: according to Conington’s commentary on the Aeneid:
From the imitation of this passage by Ovid (Her. 7. 95), it is clear that he supposed the ‘ululatus’ of the nymphs to be a good sign. ‘Ululare’ is used of triumphal or festive cries, such as doubtless greeted the marriage procession, like the Greek ὀλολυγμός. So Lucan 6. 258, “laetis ululare triumphis.” The nymphs may be Oreads, Dryads, or Naiads, according to the view we take of the nature of the sound. Henry argues from ‘summo vertice’ that they are Oreads [comp. Apoll. R. 4. 1150]. The words, as Heyne remarks, are probably from Apoll. R. 3. 1218, “αἱ δ᾽ ὀλόλυξαν Νύμφαι ἑλειονόμοι ποταμηΐδες”, but the sense is different.I learn, from poking around in the etymological history of words deriving, like ululo from the Ancient Greek ὀλολύζω, that it has given us not only the Irish uileliugh (‘wail of lamentation’) but also the Old English ule, whence derives the English ‘owl’. So an owl is actual a howl. That’s rather cool.
There's something interesting happening in the epic simile with which this passage ends: the devils, hiding from Jesus in the very deepest places imaginable, are compared to rude Alpine peasants hiding in the very highest places imaginable. Whether this poetic inversion does anything to defang the strange parallel by which Christ, previously crucified by the Roman military machine, becomes here poetically embodied by that same machine, I'm not so sure.
The colourful devil at the head of the post is a detail from the Hell panel from the ‘Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation’ by Hans Memling (c.1485).
[Next: lines 236-265]
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