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Larger Manners and Events: Sallust and Virgil in Absalom and Achitophel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
John Dryden's work is part of that great stylistic synthesis called neo-classicism; and in it the classical, particularly the Roman, past finds a new relevance to the modern world. The classical tradition not only remains a constant presence but also (in Reuben A. Brower's metaphor) exerts an “active pressure.” Awareness of this basic element, this Roman posture, in Dryden's art shows signs of disappearing behind the varied ingenuities of our own age of criticism. Since A. W. Verrall's lectures were first published in 1914, Dryden's work has been studied extensively and, we may say, has been looked at with new eyes. His great poem, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), has been recognized as a complex and highly sophisticated work of art. The past five years have brought (not to mention the reprinting of Verrall's lectures and the publication of many articles) three important books on Dryden's poetry. One is about Absalom and Achitophel; two others devote many pages of discussion to this poem. Each of these books reminds us, in a slightly different way, that when we have supplied the English equivalents for Biblical persons, institutions, and events we have scarcely begun to read Absalom and Achitophel.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967
References
1 I owe this phrase and the first (and better) half of my title to Reuben A. Brower's “An Allusion to Europe: Dryden and Tradition,” ELH, xix (1952), 38–48. This splendid essay is, perhaps, the best starting point for fruitful analyses of Dryden's poetry.
2 Bernard N. Schilling, Dryden and the Conservative Myth (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1961).
3 Arthur W. Hoffman, John Dryden's Imagery (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1962) and Alan Roper, Dryden's Poetic Kingdoms (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965). A. W. Verrall's Lectures on Dryden, ed. Margaret DeG. Verrall (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), though first published in 1914, compares favorably with these three recent works.
4 See George R. Noyes, The Poetical Works of Dryden, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), pp. 956–963, 1054–57, and James Kinsley, The Poems of John Dryden (Oxford, 1958), pp. 1877–1903. When I quote Dryden I shall quote from Noyes's edition.
5 The truth of this is vividly illustrated in John M. Aden's The Critical Opinions of John Dryden: A Dictionary (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1963): Dryden has something to say about nearly every classical writer and more about Virgil than Shakespeare, more about Horace, Juvenal, and Persius than Jonson and Donne. See the unpubl. diss. (Univ. of Minnesota, 1951) by Lillian Feder, “John Dryden's Interpretation and Use of Latin Poetry and Rhetoric,” pp. 201–218, 228–230, for a detailed treatment of Dryden's use of the Latin poets (including Virgil) in his satire.
6 Verrall, pp. 58–63. Dryden himself, in the Discourse Concerning … Satire, called it a Varronian or Menippean satire; but Verrall considers the poem to be something like an epyllion, or miniature epic. For a slightly different view, see Ian Juck, Augustan Satire (Oxford, 1952), pp. 71–72, 75–76.
7 Most of the allusions to the Roman poets are identified in the notes to the editions of Noyes and Kinsley, or both. I shall, in my discussion, point out the most striking allusions to Sallust.
8 Ronald Syme, Sallust (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1964), p. 272. It is, along with other works once attributed to Sallust (and now held to be of doubtful authenticity), the confrontation (Cat. li–lii) in the Senate between Caesar and Cato, the one advocating humane and merciful treatment for the conspirators and the other bloodthirsty and rigorous, which led to the tradition that Sallust painted his brutal picture of republican institutions in decay as propaganda for Caesar and monarchy (see Syme, pp. 105 ff.). Although Dryden makes no explicit comment on Sallust's politics, we may reasonably assume that he held the traditional view.
9 Dryden, writing in his Dedication of the Aeneis, suggests that Virgil was “of republican principles in heart” and must have regretted the collapse of the “commonwealth” and the repeated use, in the course of one century, of the “pretense of reformation” to gull and enslave the Roman people. Virgil, having decided that under the best of autocrats “men might be happy, if they would be quiet,” made it the purpose of his Aeneid “to infuse an awful respect into the people towards such a prince; by that respect to confirm their obedience to him, and by that obedience to make them happy” (Noyes, pp. 493–494).
10 An adequate study of Cicero's attacks on Catiline would require the quotation of most of his Catilinarian speeches; but we may get some idea of the language he uses from the following examples: Catiline is “perditus” (abandoned, incorrigible) and “improbus” (wicked, vile) (i.ii); he is without an “aequo animo” (calm spirit) (i.viii); he is corrupted by “vitiis” (vices) and “furore” (raving madness) (i.ix); he is, in summary, a man who has made himself “acrem” (bitter), “audacem” (bold), “paratum” (ready), “callidum” (clever), “vigilantem” (vigilant), and “diligentem” (diligent) in crime (iii.vii). Cicero's Catiline is almost too evil; Sallust's is more believable. Cicero's account of Catiline's followers is similarly exaggerated. They are nothing but misfits and criminals; Sallust has little more use for them, but he does allow them at least the ghost of a (bad) cause. Sallust, it is true, makes use of Cicero; but Dryden always seems to echo Sallust.
11 See, for example, Petrarch's Letters to Classical Authors, ed. and tr. Mario Emilio Cosenza (Chicago, 1910), pp. 21–22: “I look in vain [in Cicero] for a deep-rooted antipathy to civil dissensions, to strifes utterly of no avail, considering that liberty had been crushed and that the Republic had already been mourned as dead.”
12 See Samuel Pordage's dedication to Shaftesbury of John Reynold's Triumphs of God's Revenge … (London, 1679). The continuing adventures of Cicero, Catiline, Caesar, and the Roman historians in eighteenth-century historiography and political debate are traced by Addison Ward in “The Tory View of Roman History,” Studies in English Literature, iv (1964), 413–456.
13 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, tr. S. G. C. Middlemore (New York: Harper Torch-books, 1958), pp. 78–79. Seventeenth-century Englishmen recognized in Catiline the monster of political wickedness. At the opening of Ben Jonson's Catiline (1611), Catiline confesses his wicked designs: “I can lose / My piety, and in her [Rome's] stony entrails / Dig me a seat.” The Royalist author (probably John Cleveland) of Majeslas Iniemerata ([London?], 1649) looked upon Simon de Montfort as the spiritual father of all English rebels and called him “our English Catiline” (p. 139). The author (probably Marchamont Nedham) of A Pacquet of Advices and Animadversions … (London, 1676) referred to Shaftesbury as Catiline (p. 3).
14 This is J. C. Rolfe's interpretation of “incendium meum” in the Loeb Classical Library Sallust, rev. ed. (London, 1931), p. 55, n. 3.
15 Schilling suggests in passing (p. 162) that Absalom and Catiline are perhaps to be associated. But this seems to me to strain the characters of both. Though Absalom is not so innocent as he at first seems, he is clearly lacking in the audacity and cunning which made both Achitophel and Catiline conspirators to be reckoned with.
16 In one case, at least, Dryden echoes another of Sallust's works. W. D. Christie pointed out (see Noyes's note on l. 204) in the phrase “manifest of crimes” an allusion to “manifestus sceleris” in the Bellum Jugurthinum (xxxv.8). Again the context in Sallust is strikingly relevant: there is both the political murder of a claimant to the Numidian throne and an avid and ambitious Roman politician encouraging and expecting to profit from the general confusion.
17 See Hoffman, pp. 81–84, where these are discussed in connection with echoes of Milton. It seems to me that, however great and important Biblical events may have been, they do not carry the weight of the classical heroic. It is worth noting that Ian Jack, p. 63, mentions the speeches (an element of the classical heroic) as the most obviously heroic element in the poem.
18 See D. W. Jefferson, “Aspects of Dryden's Imagery,” Essays in Criticism, iv (1954), 29, the notes of Noyes and Kinsley on l. 633, and Schilling, p. 212.
19 Thomas Heywood, tr. The Conspiracy of Catiline and the War of Jugurtha, by Sallust, the Tudor Translations, 2nd Series (London, 1924), p. 55.
20 The major point of the following remarks was made by Brower in his longer and more detailed discussion of the portrait of Corah (pp. 40–43).
21 The parallel in Sallust is close: “all who … assailed the government used specious pretexts, some maintaining that they were defending the rights of the commons, others that they were upholding the prestige of the senate; but under the pretense of the public welfare each in reality was working for his own advancement” (tr. J. C. Rolfe).
22 Schilling suggests (p. 178) that Tacitus may have exerted some influence on Absalom and Achitophel and that there may be in the character of Titus Vinius (Hist. i.48) a classical parallel for Dryden's treatment of Achitophel. This is possible, but I think the Sallustian parallels at least of primary importance among the possibilities. We know from his Life of Plutarch, in Of Dramatic Poetry and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent, 1962), ii, 6, that Dryden was aware of the anti-monarchical prejudice of Tacitus and disapproved of his “sinister interpretations” of events under the emperors.
23 See, respectively, Rachel Jevon's Carmen ΘPIAM-BETTKON Regiae Majestati Carole II. Principum et Christianorum Optimi in Exoptatissimam ejus Restaurationem (Londini, 1660), a Latin poem published with an English translation under the title Exultationis Carmen …; Abraham Cowley's “Ode Upon His Majesties Restoration and Return,” Poems, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge, Eng., 1905), pp. 420 ff.; and Walter Charleton's [?] An Imperfect Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majesty Charles II (London, 1660/61).
24 See Hoffman, pp. 86–88. But the “symbolic matrix in which David is stoutly set” in the last part of the poem may not be so much the “acts and utterances of God” (p. 88) as that of the god-king or emperor using his irresistible power.
25 Roper, p. 106.
26 Ibid., p. 28.
27 There may be an additional reminiscence of Geo. ii.458–474, where Virgil describes that country life in which there may be seen a few traces of the old dispensation (“Iustitia excedens terris vestigia fecit”): “From hence Astraea took her flight; and here / The prints of her departing steps appear” (Dryden's trans., ll. 671–672).
28 In his notes Noyes refers to similar language in Astraea Redux, ll. 292–293, and in Annus Mirabilis, l. 71.
29 Hoffman, p. 80; cf. pp. 147, 159–167.
30 To do justice to Dryden's poetry we need do no more, Brower suggests, than describe it as a “triumph of neo-classicism”—if we take an intelligent view of the nature and quality of neo-classical art (p. 45).