Book 6, lines 236-265

[Previous: lines 221-235]

Christ's arrival in Hell has sent its demons scattering in fear. The souls of the virtuous greet him with delight.

At casti circùm manes fulgore repente
lustrati passas tendunt ad sidera palmas,
laetitiaque fremunt subita, lacrymasque dedere
, nec saturare queunt animos oculosque tuendo.
Tum laeto ultorem propiùs clamore salutant                     [240]
Unà omnes: “Ut te, cœli lux clara sereni,
optatum aspicimus, nec nos spes nostra fefellit,
qui revehis mundo primo concessa parenti
munera, et humanum genus omne in pristina reddis
ignotasque vias aperis ad sidera cœli?                              [245]
Venisti aethereae facies tua lampadis instar
diffulsit, tandemque oculis lux reddita nostris.
Sed quibus exhaustum aerumnis, quantisque procellis
iactatum accipimus! (nigras ea fama sub oras
detulit). Indigno quissanctum vulnere corpus                    [250]
fœdavit? quaenam hasta tuo intepuisse cruore,
quod ferrum tulit? an tantum mortalibus ullis
in terris licuit scelus? ô quae clausa remotis
aequora littoribus terrarum cingitis orbem,
quae vos, quae tenuere morae? quibus abdita claustris,   [255]
leto opifex tam crudeli cùm vester obiret?
Vos tum diluvio mortalia cuncta decebat
obruere, et terras penitus delere nocentes.
Nosne per haec, superi soboles certissima regis,
vulnera servamur?non ô non praemia tanti,                     [260]
non tanti ipsa salus erat olim nostra: tua ingens
haec pietas: adeon'tibi curae incommoda nostra,
o hominum dulcis requies, superumque voluptas?
Nos Patris aversi nostro irritavimus iras
crimine; tu diras solvisti sanguine poenas.”                     [265]

------------

But the virtuous spirits there, his brightness,
purifying their souls, raised their hands to heaven,
and sang out, weeping tears of happiness:
they could not get enough of looking on him.
Then joyfully they hailed their avenger                             [240]
as one: “To you, clear light from serene skies
we look with all desire, our hope and prospect
who restores the world to our first parent’s gifts
returning humanity to its former goodness
and opening unknown paths to the stars!                            [245]
You have come, your face shining like the sun.
Finally the light has been returned to our eyes!
But how are you so wounded! what storms have
buffeted you! (for news reaches even these black
depths). Who dared inflict such indignity                            [250]
upon your sacred self? What iron blade dared grow
hot with your blood? How could any human
commit such world-crime? Oh, you great remote
Ocean encircling the earth’s far shores
what held you back? In what caves did you hide                 [255]
as your maker suffered so cruel a fate?
You could have flooded the entire mortal realm
overwhelmed them and their lands, ended it all!
Have we been saved, true son of God, by these
wounds? No, oh no! a prize not worth its price!                  [260]
Our salvation does not merit this: your vast
piety ought not to have to been concerned,
o sweet solace of men, delight of heaven!
It was we who provoked God’s anger with
our crime, while you have borne the punishment.”              [265]

------------

It may just be me, but I find all this ‘we’re not worthy! we’re not worthy!’-type abasement more than a little grating, and I have to suspect God does too. This is, I don't doubt, me projecting more than anything else. Garnder thinks the rather striking apostrophe to the ocean, urging it to rise up and drown all of humanity, draws on Magnus Felix Ennodius's Carmina (2.90.5 in fact), though I haven't been able to track down a copy and see for myself. Blame lockdown.

At the top: The Harrowing of Hell as depicted in the Petites Heures de Jean de Berry, the 14th-century illuminated manuscript commissioned by John, Duke of Berry.

[Next: lines 266-293]

Book 6, lines 221-235

[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]

Book 6, lines 198-220

[Previous: lines 164-197]

Jesus has come to harrow Hell.

Ecce autem foribus succedens maximus ultor
haud cunctatus, adest divina luce coruscus.
Porta ingens adversa manet centum aerea vastis                 [200]
vectibus, aeterni postes: hanc nulla neque igni
vincere vis valeat, neque duri robore ferri.
Constitit hïc Deus, ac dextrâ stridentia claustra
impulit: intremuit quo latè exterrita tellus
impulsu, vaga contremuerunt sidera mundi,                         [205]
regiaque umbrosis immugiit atra cavernis.
Ad sonitum horrifico adventu de vallibus imis
lucifugi raptim trepido adsunt agmine fratres,
humana facie crurum tenus, inde dracones.
Tum rudere insuetùm, dirumque è faucibus ignem              [210]
efflare, atque domum piceo omnem involvere fumo.
Continuô patuere fores: procul, ecce, repentè
sponte sua absiliunt convulsi à cardine postes.
Apparet confusa intus domus, altaque circùm
atria, rarescunt tenebrae, et nox caeca recessit.                 [215]
Nam Deus haud secus obscuris conspectus in antris
perstringens oculos divina luce refulget,
quàm cùm gemma ignes splendore imitata corusco
in noctem thalamis lucet regalibus, atrasque
exuperat tenebras, largo et loca lumine vestit,                   [220]
purpurea circùm perfundens omnia luce.

------------

Here he is: the supreme avenger approaches
no delay, glittering with divine brilliance.
In his way was a huge brass-forged gate, hundred-                 [200]
barred, strong as eternity. Not fire, nor
the hardness of iron could overcome it.
God’s son took his stand: his hand pushed the shrieking
doors—and the ground in every direction
trembled, the wandering stars above shivered,                       [205]
and groans crossed the shadowy underland.
At the sound of his coming, the depths disgorged
light-fleeing monsters, terrified, rushing out,
human-faced, but dragons from the waist down.
They groaned strangely, shot flames from their jaws and      [210]
breathed out black smoke, filling the entire space.
But the doors shifted, suddenly breaking,
crashing down, torn forcefully from their hinges!
The gigantic interior was dimly revealed,
the nether darkness receding, night banished.                         [215]
For the god was conspicuous in those dark caves
his divine light gleaming and dazzling their eyes,
like the flashing light that fires from a gemstone
shining in a king’s shadowy chambers
banishing all darkness, illumination                                        [220]
flooding everything with bright purple light.

------------

That Jesus can so easily break-down the door to Hell is, perhaps, less immediately impressive than we might assume. The door, after all, was set there by God (presumably we are not to assume that the devils fashioned this door, like Milton’s crew building Pandemonium, to keep themselves in). It oughtn’t to surprise us that God can undo what God has done. These lower bronze gates parallel the gates to heaven described in Book 5, on which scenes from the war have been

carved by craftsman, and skilfully inlaid with gold.
Here could be seen, hanging in the liquid air,
battles left and battles right, fighting
now here, now there, advances and retreats,
the very heights of heaven darkening
with missiles, soldiers fighting one-on-one and
skirmishing. Those who lacked spears grabbed
their enemy’s long locks in their hands and
whirled them round in a circle by their hair.
By increments one side yielded, attacked from above,
urgent fighting; til wheeling through the air,
the enemy scattered and fled, all at once:
like storm-clouds rolled before fierce South wind.
The Father, a thunderbolt in his right hand
expelled them, pursuing them with fire from
heaven: Erebus’ dark house received them. [Christiad, 5:599-615]

No such decoration down below; these gates really only exist in order for Jesus to burst through them and rescue all the virtuous pagans and Jewish patriarchs. And so he does.

Upon entering these shadowy spaces Jesus shines with a light that Vida calls ‘purpureus’ (line 221), a word that means ‘purple, including reddish, violet, and brownish’. That's an odd kind of light to cast, one might think; like something out of one of the moodier 1980s pop videos, or a Michael Mann flick. Since purple is the imperial colour, it might be that what Vida means here is something more conventionally royal: which, I presume, is why Gardner translates Christ's appearance as ‘deck[ing] everything with its golden glow.’ I'm not sure, though: gold is aureus after all, and that's not the word Vida goes with.

Lewis and Short, after listing all the places where purple means, simply, purple, list a few things described as purple in Latin literature that you or I might not immediately think of as purple, things like blood, dawn, eyes (a hero in Valerius Flaccus's Argonautica [3:179] has ‘purple eyes’) and ‘love’. The obvious go-to for Vida, of course, is Vergil; and in the first book of the Aeneid Aeneas is described as having purpurei laeti oculi—bright and joyful eyes, say the translators (the Loeb Aeneid has ‘his eyes a joyous lustre’), although strictly the phrase means joyful purple eyes [Aeneid, 1:591].

It's a puzzle, generally speaking, trying to recover what precise hues the ancients thought colour-terms referenced. It's tempting, in this instance, to assume that the eyes thing can be assimilated into our modern preference for bright blue eyes, since for us purple is a dark blue-y kind of colour. But the other things to which the ancients used purpureus, like blood and wine and sunset, suggests that they saw it as a much redder shade than we do. Even so late as the end of the sixteenth century we see the word being used in this more classical sense, as when Shakespeare opens his narrative poem of Venus and Adonis with Adonis rising early with the dawn to go hunting:

Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase. [Venus and Adonis (1593), 1-3]

Well at any rate, I decided I quite liked the weird lighting effect of this Princean purple blaze, so I've gone with a literal translation here.

I'm sure you recognise the image at the head of the post: Rodin's large-scale sculpture ‘La Porte de l'Enfer’, ‘The Gates of Hell’. Several copies of this exist; up top is the Philadelphia one; Rodin worked on it for decades, beginning in the 1880s and ending only with his death in 1917. You can undertake a virtual tour of this monumental piece of art here.

[Next: lines 221-235]

Book 6, lines 164-197

[Previous: lines 121-163]

The virtuous dead (who lived before Christ's coming, and so had previously been unable to reach heaven) are about to be rescued from their underworld.

Atque haec inter se laeti sermone serebant:
“En tandem volvenda dies, en imminet illa,                  [165]
cùm lucem liceat supera et convexa tueri.
Hanc claro Pater omnipotens manifestus Olympo
ostendit nobis divino numine plenis:
nos aliis subito mortalibus ore canentes
optandum votis venienti liquimus aevo.                         [170]
Iamiam aderit lux nostra, Dei indubitata propago:
ille erat, ille feri sub imagine saepe leonis
ostensus nobis oculos caligine pressis,
unus pro multis qui sese proderet ultro
morti, defensosque daret nos hoste subacto.                  [175]
Vicit io! tandem leo magni à sanguine Iudae
Davidae genus: ô passim gaudete beati
mortales, gaudete animae iam corpore functae,
Iam vos astra vocant: nunc, quae tot clauditur annos,
ianua siderei nobis aperitur Olympi.                                [180]
Iamque erit, ut, nostris promissum vocibus olim,
laetitia exiliant montes, collesque resultent
pampineis vincti formosa cacumina sertis;
quales creber agris aries, oviumque minores
subsiliunt fœtus, mollique in gramine ludunt,                  [185]
balatus matrum dum per juga longa sequuntur.
Ipsi iam fontes, ipsa et vaga flumina passim
melle fluant, niveo passim vaga flumina lacte,
lacte mero, et dulci distillent nectare rupes.”
Talia perstabant memorantes: cuncta fremebant              [190]
intus laetitia ingenti, plausuque secundo.
Sicut ubi cives longa obsidione tenentur
urbem intra et vallum, portarumque obice tuti,
dum circum sonat, atque in muros arietat hostis;
tum si fortè acies procul auxiliaribus armis                       [195]
adventare vident socias è turribus altis,
consurgant, animosque alacres spe ad sidera tollant.

------------

So they wove joyful talk amongst themselves:
“At last the day has circled round, and soon                     [165]
we’ll be permitted to see the light again.
The Great Father said so, as bright Olympus
shone for us with divine numinousness.
We prophesied to others about this day
giving them the dream of a coming time.                           [170]
Soon, soon our light arrives, God’s manifest son:
he it was, he who often came as a lion
before our darkness-oppressed eyes, he
who died, betrayed, for us all, of his free will,
to protect us and defeat our enemies.                                 [175]
Victory, yes! the great lion of Judah
of David’s line prevails! Rejoice, you blessed
mortals, rejoice whose souls have left bodies—
the stars call you! After so many years locked
the door to starry Olympus opens wide.                             [180]
Now it will be as we promised long ago:
mountains shall leap for joy and the hills dance
shaking their lovely vine-garlanded peaks;
like rams leaping in the fields, or newborn lambs
jumping and sinking into the thick grass                            [185]
as they follow their bleating mothers along.
Soon enough the fountains and wandering rivers
will flow with honey and snow-white streams of milk—
purest milk and sweet nectar distilled by rocks!”

Such was their constant talk, and all around them              [190]
their joy re-echoed to inward approval.
They were like citizens during a long siege
confined within the city rampart, safe behind gates
whilst the enemy could be heard moving outside
beating on the walls and trying to ram the gates;
then, they see allied troops approaching, aid                      [195]
spotted from one of the towers—soon to arrive,
they rise up and shout their relief to the stars.

------------

Line 164, atque haec inter se laeti sermone serebant, is a version of a line of Vergil’s: multa inter sese vario sermone serebant [Aeneid 6:160], which means ‘one to the other, weaving-together varied talk.’ This is Aeneas and Achates leaving the Sybil’s cave after learning of their impending journey to the underworld. ‘Weaving’ words look a little fanciful, maybe, though sero does indeed mean ‘I weave or interlace’: Connington’s 1881 commentary on Vergil says: ‘ferebant was an old reading: but serebant is found in all the best MSS., and recognized by Serv. ‘Serere sermonem’ is as old as Plauus., and ‘serere colloquia’ occurs in Livy: it is doubtless to be explained by giving serere the sense of “connecting,” “setting in order”.’ So there you are. The lion mentioned in lines 176-77 derives from Revelation:

So I wept much, because no one was found worthy to open and read the scroll, or to look at it. But one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep. Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed to open the scroll and to loose its seven seals.” [Revelation 5:4-5]

The vision of heaven draws of course from the Promised Land of Jewish tradition, as described in Exodus 3:8: ‘a land flowing with milk and honey.’

At the head of the post: Gustave Doré's engraving illustrating the Virtuous Pagans Dante encounters on his journey into Hell.

[Next: lines 198-220]

Book 6, lines 121-163

[Previous: lines 99-120]

Christ's spirit is sent by God to harrow hell.

Iam Deus, ut sacros vates, et sancta piorum
concilia educens tenebris inferret Olympo,
corporeis liber vinclis concesserat imos
spiritus ad manes, animarum regna silentum,
per caecos aditus, et praecipites anfractus                      [125]
solis inaccessos radiis, loca nocte perenni
obsita, terrificam caecae formidinis aulam.
Hic stabulant, vivisque tenent impervia regna
noctivagi fratres, superi quos ira Parentis
cœlo immane nefas animis excussit adortos,                   [130]
Tartareisque genus miserabile mersit in antris,
quando illos tenuit regnandi tanta cupido.
Nunc miseros pœnis manes miseri magis ipsi
exercent, vinctosque tenent nigrantibus oris.
Interiora habitant barathrum irremeabile clausae         [135]
crudeles animae, ad superos dum vita manebat.
Nunc merita expendunt vasta fornace sepultae
supplicia, undantemque ferunt caligine fumum.
Ignis ibi aeternus, semper nova flamma renascens.
Innocuae circùm sedes, secretaque longè                       [140]
atria circuitu longo: hic incendia nulla,
nulli obsunt penitus flammis ultricibus ignes;
umbrarum sed iners requies, penitusque silentis
mundi temperies: secretae his sedibus aevum
insontes degunt animae, quibus haud sua damno           [145]
admissa; at primi scelus exitiale parentis
detinet hïc clausas, nostrae nil lucis egentes,
pœnarum prorsum expertes, nisi luce carerent
iucundâ, qua gens gaudet stellantis Olympi.
Hic patres, sanctum genus, antiquissima proles,            [150]
qui vitam vinclo nullo, non legibus ullis
compositam, incultos primi degere per agros
inter oves, patrio tantùm se more tenentes,
iustitiae memores ultro rectumque colentes.
Hic vatesque pii, qui quondam numine pleni                   [155]
ventura intrepidè magnas cecinere per urbes;
quique dedere orbi leges divina reperta;
quosque datis olim iuvit parere volentes;
matronae, atque viri, vitœque in limine rapti.
Omnibus unus amor, cœlique arrecta cupido.                  [160]
Et iam promissi memores tum fortè per umbras
secla recensebant tacitis volventia lustris,
ducebantque animis finem adventare malorum.

------------

Now God, so that sacred bards and holy
men might leave darkness and enter Olympus,
freed his spirit from its material bonds
and sent it to the realm of silent souls.
He travelled by blank ways and steep cliffs that                  [125]
never thrilled with the sunlight: a night land
the baleful territory of blank fear.
This was the dwelling place of outsiders,
night-roamers and their kin. In his wrath God above
had hurled them from heaven for attacking Him                 [130]
sank that miserable race deep in Tartarean caves:
where those that so lusted for power could rule.
Now they’re more miserable than the poor souls
they chain and punish in that black expanse.
Trapped in inner depths from whence none return              [135]
were those souls who knew only cruelty when alive.
Now they paid the price, interred in giant fire
and choking on the constant billows of black smoke:
an endless flame, forever being renewed.

Elsewhere the innocent dwell, their hidden halls                 [140]
circled about. Here there is no burning,
and no punishing flames ignite. Rather
there is deep silence and shadowy stillness
a world without extremes. Here were placed the
souls of innocent people, admitted through                         [145]
no personal fault, but via our first parents’ sin:
enclosed there, but not deprived of all light
or experiencing punishment, though not lit
by the lovely brilliance of Olympus’ stars.
Here holy patriarchs and ancestors                                        [150]
who lived innocent lives and broke no laws
unrestrained existences in their fields
among sheep, paternal custom guiding them,
justice by nature, and righteous by instinct.
Here too were pious prophets, who, God-inspired,                [155]
bravely preached what was coming to the cities
and laid down divine laws and revelations.
Here were many happy to obey such laws
and those, girls and boys, snatched from life’s threshold.
All shared one love and yearning for heaven.                         [160]
And, remembering what had been promised,
darkling, counting the silent rolling decades
they began to hope the travails’ end was nigh.

------------

This passage begins a 150-or-so line account (lines 121 to 293) of the harrowing of Hell, undertaken by Christ so that virtuous pagans and patriarchs might enter Olympus (line 122), Vida's classicizing way of referring to heaven. This, I think, is another bit of Vida that caught the imagination of his greater successor, Milton. Paradise Lost doesn’t need to describe Limbo, since there’s nobody as yet to go there; but Vida's account of ‘Tartarus’ feeds forward into Miton's epic.

So, yes: welcome, again, to Hell. The ‘worldbuilding’ here involves a familiar problem: rather like Hamlet musing on that undiscovered country from whose borne no traveller return, shortly after his chinwag with the ghost of his Dad, undeniably a traveller returned from the borne of that undiscovered country. Here the issue is God’s punishment. These rebel angels have been banished to deepest Tartarus, a place Vida specifies in line 135 as a place from which none return (irremeabile, ‘from which one can not return; irremeable’). But if that’s so, how come so many devils have fluttered up into our world, taking the forms of birds, or bees? They did so at the beginning of Book 2, real devils flying up to Jerusalem to encourage its citizens to condemn Jesus; and they did so again in Book 5, this time as allegorical personifications (something else Milton reworked):

Presently he called from its lair lurking Fear
—a dark, huge and unavoidable monster.
In all that shadowy place there was no more plague
more terrifying, or envious of mankind.
His companions were: Cold, and downcast Sloth.
He told this torpid creature to ascend to
the upper air, ....
The creature did as ordered, forming dark shapes
distilling itself into a flock of black night-birds.
This obscene thing flew across immense tracts. [Christiad 5:309-324]

But what is before handwaved towards as ‘vast tracts’ is here given more specificity. The topography of Milton’s netherworld draws, in part, from this bit of the Christiad—Vida has mentioned Hell before, but not in such as way as to imply its larger geography. Here we have [in Gardner’s rendering] ‘sightless paths and steep cliffs untouched by the sun, realms covered in perpetual night, a baleful dwelling of blind fear.’ Milton’s Satan crosses from Hell to Earth, navigating ‘a dark and drearie Vaile … and many a Region dolorous’, crossing both fiery and frozen mountains and passing, famously, ‘rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death, [PL 2:621]. Then he crosses

                                    a boundless Continent
Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night
Starless expos'd, and ever-threatning storms. [PL 3:343-5]

Satan encounters what Milton, in one of his rare accesses of Carry-on style humour, calls ‘the backside of the World farr off’, a ‘large and broad’ cliff that is, hugely, part of ‘a dark Globe’ (this, we're told, is the ‘Paradise of Fools’).

Prior to that Vida has described his ‘limbo’, here a place without fire or sharp suffering, but also a place of rather claustrophobic silence and darkness: a mundus temperiēs (line 144), ‘a temperate world’, ‘a moderate world’, quite hard to translate actually (I’ve gone, as you can see, with ‘a world without extremes’).

At the head of this post: a fresco of the Harrowing of Hell by Fra Angelico (c. 1430s). Nice to see that Jesus was a supporter of the England national football team.

[Next: lines 164-197]

Book 6, lines 99-120

[Previous: lines 68-98]

Jesus's dead body has been laid in its tomb.

At Solymos penitus nondum omnis cura reliquit
sollicitos; sed adhuc timor acer corda premebat.        [100]
Saepe etenim audierant, sociis mœrentibus hostem
sese olim superas rediturum lucis ad auras
promisisse, palamque sacros id prodere vates.
Id veriti armatos subitò misere viros, qui
noctes atque dies servarent flebile bustum;                  [105]
ne forte auferret furto quis nocte sepultum,
et totam impleret falsis rumoribus urbem,
defunctum vitâ rediisse ad luminis oras,
vitalesque auras haurire, atque aethere vesci.
Aura veni afflanti Patris omnipotentis ab ore,              [110]
aura potens cœli numen, superumque voluptas,
quicquid adhuc superat mihi dira è caede dolorum
mente fuga, laetosque animi nunc reffice sensus,
et placidos per membra riga mihi numine motus.
Sit fas laetitiae sentire in pectore lapsus,                       [115]
laetitiae, qua gens fruitur felicis Olympi;
larga ubi latifluo passim torrente redundant
gaudia, nec fines novit diffusa voluptas.
Vertitur hïc rerum facies; hïc gaudia nostra
incipiunt: longè in melius versa omnia cerno.               [120]

------------

But the Jerusalemites were still oppressed
by worry, and fear was keen in their heart.                     [100]
Often they’d heard their enemy tell his disciples
he would overcome death and return to daylight
as had been predicted by the prophets.
Alarmed, they sent troops of armed men to stand
near the tomb night and day—to stop the bereaved        [105]
from stealing away the dead body, and so
spread false reports around the entire city
that he had returned again to the shores of light
and was breathing heaven’s life-giving air.

Come, breath of heaven, from the Almighty’s                 [110]
numinous mouth, joy of the high angels:
whatever pain remains mine at this slaughter—
banish it! restore joy to my soul and
fill all my limbs with divine tranquillity.
May I be allowed the joy in my heart, that                        [115]
joy known to all the race of glad Olympus;
a wide and everywhere joy flowing strong
in praise and pleasure, delight without end!
For now the face of things is changed; delight
begins! I see all things changed for the better.                  [120]

------------

Happy, happy happy: gaudium (delight) is repeated twice in consecutive lines (118 and 119) and laetus (joy) thrice (in lines 115, 116 and 117). A tad stylistically egregous maybe; rather puts me in mind of Keats's ‘Grecian Urn’: ‘Ah, happy, happy boughs! ... And, happy melodist, unwearied ... More happy love! more happy, happy love!’  Not that I'm suggesting Keats read Vida, although he might have come across Cranwell's 1768 translation of the poem into English heroic couplets, which renders this passage thuswise:

Come, heav'nly Spirit! from th' eternal God,
Thou joy, and pleasure of the bright abode!
Within my breast whatever griefs remain,
What anxious sorrows for a Saviour slain,
Disperse at once; and thro' my senses pour,
The grateful blessings of thy healing show'r!
Oh! give my heart that mighty bliss to prove,
Those joys, peculiar to the realms above;
Where copious torrents of delight abound,
And Pleasures circle in eternal round.
Here sorrows vanish; here our joys arise;
And brighter scenes unfold to human eyes.

Vida needs, here, to signal the shift in mood, from tragic to joyful, of the last movement in his epic, and I suppose this is as good a way of doing that as any. Copious torrents of delight, indeed.

Clearly, the positioning of Jesus's body in a tomb is a needful prelude to his resurrection. Were his body (say) tossed into an unmarked mass grave, it gets tricky picturing his subsequent return to life (struggling through a tangle of corpses, digging his way out like a character in a Tarantino movie. Not dignified).

The actual tomb, assuming there was one, has occasioned a great deal of scholarly and archeological interest. According to Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino's The Jesus Family Tomb (2007) the so-called ‘Talpiot tomb’, discovered in 1980 in the neighbourhood of Talpiot outside of Jerusalem, is actually the family tomb of Jesus. Their evidence is that six of the ten ossuaries found therein had names on them: ‘Yeshua bar Yehosef; Maria; Yose; Yehuda bar Yeshua; Mariamne e Mara; Matya’, Hebrew names conventionally Hellenized as Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Martha and so on. Other experts have been less convinced.

The academic community of archaeologists has concluded that what we are presented with here is an ordinary middle-class Jerusalem burial cave containing a group of ossuaries bearing very common Jewish names of the first century CE. [Petra Dijkhuizen, ‘Buried Shamefully: Historical Reconstruction of Jesus' Burial and Tomb’, Neotestamentica, 45:1 (2011), 115]

Some scholars follow J D Crossan in thinking it likely Jesus's body was left on the cross to be devoured by wild animals. Others disagree:

Several NT scholars have presented valid points of criticism against Crossan's argument for Jesus' non-burial. B. R. McCane (2004) notes that the norm prescribed in Deut 21:22-23 and the Temple Scroll had currency at the time of Jesus. Jews did not customarily leave bodies of executed criminals hanging past sunset on the day of death, but asked for permission to bury them lest the land be defiled. Roman peacetime administration ordinarily granted such a request (Evans 2005, 13) ... McCane argues that in accordance with Jewish religious and cultural norms, one or more members of the Sanhédrin obtained the body of Jesus from Pilate and arranged for a dishonourable interment before sunset most probably in a tomb reserved for executed Jewish criminals. From an early date the Christian tradition tried to conceal this fact, but the best evidence shows that Jesus was buried in shame which meant two things: burial away from the family tomb—by design, not by fate—and burial without the proper rites of mourning being performed [Dijkhuizen, 121-22]

Alternately, Marianne Sawicki thinks Jesus' body was eaten by quick-lime.

The gospel stories mention a gentle enshrouding, a magnanimous laying out, and a loving tomb side vigil; but a limed pit is much more probable. Like countless others of the ‘disappeared,’ Jesus was not important enough to trouble the governor with a trial or the death squad with returning the remains to the family. Lime eats the body quickly and hygienically. Therefore we find virtually no skeletal remains of the thousands crucified outside Jerusalem in the first century. . . . Calvary had been a quarry in antiquity, and after executions the police dumped the bodies into any convenient hole together with some lime to cut the stench. [Marianne Sawicki, Seeing the Lord: Resurrection and Early Christian Practices (Minneapolis: Fortress 1994)]

Much depends upon a couple of imponderables: how significant a figure Jesus was to the Romans (that is, whether denying a request for his body might stir up trouble; or whether, indeed, disposing rapidly of the body might be thought the best way to avoid further disturbance) and how well-connected his (likely, poor and provincial) family were with the authorities.

At the head of this post: ‘Jesus Is Laid In The Tomb’ by Edward Arthur Fellowes Prynne. As you can see by the watermark in the image's bottom right corner, this is a modern work of art that is available for sale at the PaintingStar Fine Art Online Store, should you be interested.

[Next: lines 121-163]

Book 6, lines 68-98

[Previous: lines 31-67]

Joseph of Arimathea takes Jesus's dead body down from the cross.

Huc sese in medios Arimathes urbis alumnus
infert, conscenditque trabem, atque exangue magistri
detrahit, et densis procul aufert corpus ab armis,             [70]
veste tegens, modò quam tales mercatus in usus.
Huc volucres pueri, cœlique effusa iuventus
ferte pedem: aeterni largum date veris honorem:
pallentem violam calathis diffundite plenis,
narcissique comas, ac mœrentes hyacinthos,                     [75]
et florum nimbo divinum involvite corpus.
Ecce autem latè reboant plangore propinqui
fœmineo montes: responsant flebile saltus:
omnia flere putes sola lamentabile letum.
Ipsa sedet vivo genitrix mœstissima saxo                           [80]
aegro corde, comis passis, totoque cruentum
heu! natum complexa sinu, miserabile corpus;
atque oculos fovet ore, patensque in pectore vulnus:
Nec iam ullos gemitus, nec iam ullos amplius edit
singultus, magno se denim exanimate dolore.                    [85]
Frigida, muta silet, gelidoque simillima saxo.
circumstant aliae tunsae omnes pectora palmis:
pars calidis corpusque lavant et vulnera lymphis:
textilibus membra involvunt pars squalida donis.
Haec siccat fuso rorantia genua capillo                             [90]
vulneribus super accumbens haerensque cruentis:
oscula dat manibus, pedibusque rigentibus illa.
Indulgent omnes lacrymis, tristique ululatu
cuncta replent: vix inde viri divellere possunt
ipsi etiam guttis humentes grandibus ora.                           [95]
tum corpus miseras solati exangue sepulcro
condunt marmoreo, atque affati extrema recedunt;
et magnam comites genitricem in tecta reportant.

------------

Into their midst came the Arimathaean
to mount the beam, and bring down his master’s
lifeless body, and carry it from those armed men,                 [70]
wrapped in a shroud he had bought for that purpose.

Come quick, winged youths, down from the stars
to him: honour him with eternal springtime:
In laden baskets bring pale violets,
shaggy narcissus and mournful hyacinth,                                [75]
and scatter his divine body with blooms!

Now everywhere re-echoed with lament and
mountain passes answered the weeping women:
It seemed everywhere mourned that pitiable death.
His grieving mouther sat on a bare rock                                 [80]
her heart ill, her hair dishevelled, red with blood
—alas!—from the son she cradled in her arms;
she kissed his eyes, and the wound in his breast:
She no longer even groaned or sighed
overwhelmed by the enormity of her loss                               [85]
lifeless in her sorrow, silent as cold stone.
Around her the other women beat their breasts:
some washed the body’s wounds with warm water:
others brought textiles to clothe his wrecked body.
One mopped up his spilled blood with her hair                       [90]
bending over his knees and embracing them;
another kissed his frozen hands and feet.
They gave way to their grief, tearful wailing,
filling that place. Men could hardly pull them
away, looking on, their eyes heavy with tears.                         [95]
Comforting the sad, they entombed the body
in a marble sepulchre, and withdrew;
his mother was led back to her home again.

------------

Here, as one of Vida's sources, is the final portion of John 19:

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]

The scene in which Mary cradles her dead, adult son is known (of course) as the Pietà. It is a very common figure in Renaissance paintings and sculpture, although I'm not so aware of the literary tradition in this respect. Vida's few lines are tasteful in their pathos, though Gardner notes that line 82, heu! natum complexa sinu, miserabile corpus draws on Vergil's Haec ubi deflevit, tolli miserabile corpus, ‘thus lamenting they carried his unhappy body’.

The resonance of the Pietà depends, in part, on the way the image of the grieving Mary holding her dead son rhymes visually, as it were, with the image of the joyful Mary holding her newborn son. The two bookend her, and his, life (except for the transcendental get-out-of-jail-free card that is, at this point in the story, yet to come). Vida, by skimping on the descriptive details, avoids the major problem that visual artists have, which is that whilst a woman cradling a baby looks proportionate a woman cradling a full-grown man does not, and can veer inappositely into the ludicrous. Here, for instance, is Pietro Perugino's ‘Pietà’ (c.1490; in the Uffizi):

Pretty precarious balancing, there. One alternative, equally risky in the inadvertent-bathos department, is to shrink-down the cradled figure:

An early 15th-C Rhineland wooden sculpture, there; but whether the deal here is a dwarf-Jesus, or a Hagrid-big Mary it looks disconcerting. A way round the problem was to insert otherss into the scene, helping Mary with her big burden, as with the image at the head of this post: Bronzino's ‘Deposition of Christ’ (1545).

[Next: lines 99-120]