John Miller interviews Sarah Ruden

• MILLER: Would the Aeneid be better if Virgil had finished it?
• RUDEN: It’s hard to imagine how a finished work would have been better. The remaining twelve books, according to later sources, were going to be about the war ending and the Julian dynasty becoming established. But this existing story is cool for ending where it does. An essential thing about a classic is that it is just handed to us to struggle with, like life. It serves our freedom and dignity by allowing us to make up our minds about most of the meaning.
• The most esteemed Greek tragedies end almost this way, right after the climax. You might get a summary of what has happened, but you don’t get everything tidied up. Critics from Aristotle onward have disliked an author barging in as a fixer. The deus ex machina is the oldest manifestation of this attitude. It declares, “I, the author, am telling you what fate is like and what the gods are like, and assuring you that virtue and suffering will always be rewarded, in spite of what the myth and your own experience tell you.”
• It’s not clear that Virgil would have produced a Roman version of this, but I bet it would have been tempting to give the second half more ideological force than the first half had. This is the endemic disease of sequels, which I first noticed in reading Little Men by Louisa May Alcott. Little Women was interesting — tragic, full of disappointment and stupidity and compromise; it was believable. In the sequel, a lot of mawkish puppets were acting out Alcott’s father’s educational theories. It’s not just a phenomenon of the movies, but goes clear from the later Euripides to the later Tarzan episodes, where Jane and Boy create a mid-fifties suburban jungle treehouse.
• MILLER: Why should people even bother with Virgil today? Isn’t he just a dead white male?
• RUDEN: Well, I have an intense and intimate relationship with literature. I look in an author for some of the things I look for in a friend or a lover. Most of the authors I choose are dead and white, which makes sense. They are privileged. Their own grievance is small enough to be put aside, so that they can take in what’s happening around them. Who wants to live with somebody who can’t do this?
• Put more bluntly, why would I live with someone who treats me like a moron, as if I can be entertained and instructed, and asked to give something meaningful in return, by someone with nothing in her brain but the mean things done to her or her ancestors?
• Virgil would have been stumped to be told that someday a woman would translate him, but he respected me much more than race-gender-class authors do, by respecting the complexity of the world, which is a respect for all possibility. Worrying about him being dead, white, and male is like worrying about the gender, color, and mortality of the Labrador who pulls me out of a lake and saves my life. For me, having something to think about is life.
• MILLER: What’s the point of learning a dead language such as Latin? Isn’t it more useful to study Spanish or Chinese?
• RUDEN: I picture the peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who squeaks, “But I’m not dead yet!” and “I’m feeling better!” and “I think I’ll go for a walk now!” to keep from getting loaded onto the cart with all the actual corpses. Only a deliberate whap on the head kills him.
• Who says this language is dead? Is literature dead? Is the West dead? Check in early next year, when my book on Paul of Tarsus comes out, and see how reading the “dead” language of Koinē Greek can challenge what is actually dead in us.