Virgil’s Equus Graecus and the Monstrosity of a Literature in Latin

Kachuck, Aaron [UCL]

To answer this conference’s title-question, yes, there is a post-human in ancient Greek literature, and it’s called Latin literature. Since its beginnings, there has always been something monstrous about the idea of a literature in Latin. Maurizion Bettini (2013), in a celebrated essay, has used the legend of the Sphynx to show how ancient culture associated monstrosity with hybridity and the ainigma, “the riddle,” as defined by Aristotle as “an impossible combination,” or, as we would say, a hybridization of words, ideas, animals, and people that have not yet, that are not supposed to, go together. Latin literature is such a hybrid enigma. For us, or at least for the O.E.D’s first definition of the word, the “monstrous” is that which “deviates from the natural or conventional order,” and in that sense too, Rome’s “translation project”, as Denis Feeney (2016) has called the origins of literature at Rome, is monstrous indeed, for never before, and never after, has there been a comparable case of one nation taking another, socio-economically dependent, language’s literature up wholesale in order to make it their own, and in their own language. “Being Roman over Greeks,” to pervert a clever phrase, was an ongoing cultural project, and not an easy one; for if, since the late 3rd century BCE on, Romans were able, in the words of Paul Zanker (1995:204), to assume “a secondary identity as Greeks, much as they might build a large Greek peristyle onto their Roman atrium-style houses,” their Greco-Latin literature was also a way by which Romans, at least the writers we have access to, tended to find themselves “more truly and more strange,” or, as Socrates (Phaedrus) would put it, “a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho”. This paper argues that the Greek Horse under whose shadow Troy falls and the second Aeneid unfolds was, for Virgil, a way to explore the monstrosity of, firstly, his own epic project, and, secondly, of two related birth-scences of a literature in Latin: Livius Andronicus’ hymn in 207 BCE, and the re-performance of the Equus Troianus of Livius (or perhaps Naevius) at the celebration dedication of the Theater of Pompey and the adjoining Temple of Venux Victrix.