欧宝娱乐

Being a lady classicist often requires willful acts of cognitive dissonance. It's not just that nearly all your extant source material was written by men, about men, for men, it's also that Greek and Roman culture, particularly the culture portrayed in the great epics (the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid) is brutally testosterone-fueled and flagrantly anti-woman. In epic, the worst women are pure, unadulterated evil--monsters like Scylla, Charybdis, and the Sirens. Slightly less evil are those who use their sexual wiles to distract men from their noble purposes--Circe, Calypso, Dido. And "good" women are those who simply shut the fuck up, bear legitimate children, and get out of the way--Andromache, Penelope, Creusa. This makes reading epic a challenging experience for any woman who is looking for more than just a rollicking adventure story.

I read the Aeneid in high school, the whole thing in English and about half of it in Latin (skipping around for the best bits, or course), and I was a huge pain in the ass. I was convinced that Aeneas was a douche, that Creusa got screwed over, that Dido got royally screwed over and should have ripped Aeneas's balls off, and that Lavinia was a breed sow with pretty hair. My poor teacher tried again and again to calm me down, to remind me of the historical context and cultural differences that should have been informing my reading of the poem, to point out the elegance of the scansion or the cleverness of various poetic devices, but I just didn't buy it. I absorbed enough to ace the AP test, but the Aeneid left a bad taste in my mouth. When I got to college and read the Greek epics I was a bit better at detaching myself from the content of the poems so that I could appreciate their language and structure, but I still had to work hard to keep a lid on my roiling feminist ire. My biggest flaw as a historian, the reason why I decided to teach Latin to middle schoolers instead of going to graduate school, is that I get too emotionally invested in whatever I am studying, and am unable to confine my judgments to the appropriate historical context. I may acknowledge the fact that Aeneas was the model of pietas for his time and place, but in the here and now he'd be a douche, and I just can't forget that.

This is why Lavinia is such a wonderful book. Le Guin does that forgetting for me. She is able to immerse herself in a different time and place and culture in a way that is judgment-free, and she sells this world in such a way that I buy it. And like it. And enjoy it. The angry feminist pot ceases to boil. I actually like this Aeneas. He seems to be a nice guy. I really like and identify with this Lavinia, and I support her choices, whereas in the Aeneid I simply pitied her for not having any choices. I understand and appreciate a concept of pietas that is completely different from the kind of piety or rightness I seek in my own life, in a way that I was never able to understand it when I was reading the actual Aeneid. Part of what makes this novel work for me is the way she strips the story of Aeneas of its Augustan influences--Vergil originally wrote the poem as a propaganda piece for the emperor (okay, maybe that wasn't his only purpose, but he had to throw it in there to keep the people in charge happy), and the ostentatious wealth and fantastical religion it promotes help divorce it from reality and make it harder to relate to. Le Guin's simpler version feels much more authentic and relatable.

I did find the book a little hard to get into, and I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the relationship between Lavinia and Vergil. But overall, I found it an extremely enjoyable and readable story that left me with warm fuzzies inside. It may actually motivate me to reread the Latin Aeneid sometime soon-ish (if I can find my old book), and to not be full of fiery rage when I do. That's a good thing, right?