VIRGILS MESSAGE FOR THE MIDDLE EAST

Boris Johnson says that Ian Gilmour and other critics of Israel should study the humanity and generosity of Rome's best poet

IT was the custom for many centuries, and in some places it still is the custom, to mark any great crisis by consulting Virgil. You flip open the collected works of the greatest Roman poet, close your eyes and jab: so that, for instance, if your finger lights on equo ne credite, Teucri (trust not the horse, Trojans, Aen. II 47), you don't bet on the 4.15 at Doncaster. The habit seems to date from early Christian times, because the Fourth Eclogue, published in about 40 BC, was found to contain some stunning stuff about the birth of a saviourchild, not to mention a virgin. This chap Virgil,' said the early Christians, he must have been a prophet.'

King Charles tried the sortes Virgilianae on the eve of the battle of Naseby and, if you read Virgil, you can dimly see why. Perhaps it is the elevated diction, the poetic compression. It may be that his words, which, as he said, he licked into shape like bear-cubs, can bear a multiplicity of meanings. Or it might be that he truly was a marvel, that he understood human nature in some deep and universal way.

I have never been so amazed by his gifts for prophecy as I was one summer, while languishing on a kibbutz in Israel. The invasion of Lebanon had recently taken place, and the massacres of Sabra and Chatilla. The name of Arid Sharon, who is now Prime Minister, was already the object of international vilification. I was trying in my undergraduate way to apportion right and wrong, while mugging up on the Aeneid, when suddenly the words seemed to swim. I saw the hidden meaning of the text. And the vatic truth of Virgil is all the more useful now when the Middle Eastern conflict seems so bitter, and uncontrolled, and has spilled on to the letters pages of this magazine.

What is the second half of the Aeneid, which tells of the foundation of Rome, but an extraordinary allegory, 2,000 years in advance, of the postwar foundation of Israel and the cruel struggle with the indigenous Palestinians? Do you remember it? Do you hear your Latin 0-level tolling from the depths, like the church bell of some sea-drowned village? You don't? Then let me remind you.

At the end of the Trojan war the city is in ruins, the population massacred. There is a small band of survivors, led by Aeneas, and they have no choice but to flee overseas in search of a new homeland. Throughout the voyage they are persecuted by Juno, queen of the gods, with a bias and vengefulness that border on the irrational. Finally, they come to their destined land in Italy. Now when I say it is destined, I mean just that. Throughout the poem, we are told that Italy is the location marked out by fate, a special place, reserved by the gods, for the survivors of the Trojan massacre. Virgil goes to some lengths to contrive a link between Troy and the site of the future Rome. We are informed that a very long time ago a shadowy hero called Dardanus had left Italy and made his way to Troy.

In other words, it is important to Virgil that we should think of the Trojans as having some right of return to this land, some link with it sanctioned by myth (though you will agree that the Trojans had a much less impressive territorial claim to Italy than the Jews had to Palestine). And, of course, when Aeneas and co. arrive there are people already there, indigenous people, and they view the newcomers with fear.

Aeneas and the Trojans find themselves

sucked into war with Turnus and the Italians, the Latins. Ostensibly it is a struggle for the hand of the beautiful Lavinia, but her name also connotes the geographical area around Lavinium. This is a struggle for land and for mastery. The Latins live in Latium. The Trojans want to live there. One or other will have to give ground. Latium, incidentally, is on the West Bank of the Tiber. For the last six books of the poem, this means bella. horrida belle:: war, bristling war.

Who is in the right? With whom should we expect Virgil to side? For a lesser poet, that question might have been easy. The Aeneid is a political poem, written to please the emperor Augustus. It is an epic that glorifies the foundation of Rome. Virgil was a Roman. He could have demonised all those who stood in the way of Rome's greatness. He could have blackened Turnus, so that Aeneas might shine the more brightly. And what does he do instead?

Respectfully, I say to all those who have strong feelings on the Arab—Israeli question that they could do worse than read the climax of the poem, in Book XII, to see how Rome's best poet dealt with the tragic dilemma.

Here is Turnus, fleeing for his life before the wrathful Aeneas. He has no weapon but a stone and, as he tries to throw it, his blood freezes and his limbs fail, and he falters in fear. And there is Aeneas, infinitely better armed, his spear and sword newly forged by Vulcan. Does he stay his hand? Does he show mercy to the underdog? He does not.

He hurls that spear like a black hurricane, and it passes through the outer circle of the sevenfold shield, and through the cuirass, and into Turnus's thigh. Then, as Aeneas stands over him, the stricken Latin holds up his hands in the universal, eternal gesture of surrender. For a second or two, as we enter the last 20 lines of the epic, the Trojan hesitates. He lets fall his sword arm, until his eye is caught by a trophy on Turnus's shoulder, the baldric of Pallas, another Trojan whom Turnus has killed.

Then, on fire with fury and terrible in his rage, Aeneas gives way to vengeance, and he butchers Turnus. Boiling with anger, he buries his sword in the chest of his adversary, and, as the poet tells us, 'his limbs relaxed and chilled, and his life fled moaning and resentful to the Shades'. And that's it. That's the end.

You put down the Aeneid, as they used to say on the back of blockbusters, breathless and stunned. No one can read it without being aghast at the sudden brutality of Aeneas. No one can fail to feel pity for Turnus. That is what makes the poem, and the greatness of Virgil. He has been venerated down the ages because he has the moral depth and poetic sensibility to see tragedy on both sides.

It wasn't the fault of Aeneas that he was to found a new homeland in Italy. It was an act preordained by the gods. And, in any event, where else were the Trojans to live, harried as they were over land and sea by the hatred of Juno? And it wasn't the fault of the poor Latins that they should be living in the exact spot which fate had 'PEOPLE are not in quarantine,' asserted Margaret Beckett the other day. 'Animals are.' Really? She should try repeating her words to the Bishop of Carlisle, the Rt Revd Graham Dow. Since last Wednesday, Bishop Dow has been imprisoned in his residence, Rose Castle in Dalston. His offence? To live next door to a field containing footand-mouth-infected sheep.

Even though he does not farm the sheep himself, Maff officials informed the bishop that no one would be allowed to enter or leave the premises until further notice. After some negotiation with Maff, the bishop, who was out at the time, was allowed to return, but the gates were then locked.

The bishop is reported to be taking his plight with good humour, and may well feel it brings him closer to the suffering of the farmers in his flock; yet it constitutes a grave warning as to the powerlessness of the individual at the hands of the supposedly benign British official. If foot-and-mouth is such a sinister disease that bishops must be deprived of their freedom in order to contain it, then why are Maff vets not also subject to incarceration once they have been on foot-and-mouth-infected farms? Upon venturing to a farm to test animals or put bullets into their heads, they simply disinfect their clothing and move on to the next farm; so why cannot Bishop Dow, who has been far less close to animals than have the vets, be allowed to come and go from his home as long as he disinfects his clothes each time?

Maff is having severe problems answering its telephones at present, so I resorted to its website. 'Anyone failing to comply with the requirements of these statutory provisions', it warns grimly, 'may be guilty of an offence punishable by a fine or, in some cases, imprisonment.' Has not that latter sentence already been summarily passed?

Ross Clark

marked out for the new nation.

I remember munching my felafel back in the kibbutz, and preparing for another 12hour session of washing-up, and thinking, by gum, yes, Virgil is right. That is how to look at Israel and the displaced Palestinian peoples. It is possible to support Israel's right to exist, and to believe in the destiny of Israel as passionately as Virgil believed in the destiny of Rome, and still to feel moved by the sufferings of those who were forced to make way.

With Virgil in your hand, you begin, too, to see the enemies of Israel with new eyes. There is a trace of Juno, surely, in the blistering fury, the implacability, of some of the recent correspondents to The Spectator. I think of Juno's raging speech in Book X, where she denounces the Trojans and their illegal settlements. 'They take up the pitchy firebrand and violently assault the Latins, they lay a heavy yoke on farmlands not their own and drive off their plunder,' she froths, furious with Jupiter for letting it happen. And there, I think, speak Ian Gilmour and his kind, as they call attention to the breaches of UN declarations, the shootings, the disproportionate Arab casualties.

They have a point; they have a view. But it is a partial view and one wonders whether deep down they accept the hard, fated necessity of Israel to exist. Lord Gilmour has elsewhere analogised between the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Nazi occupation of France, as well as the Soviet occupations of Hungary or Afghanistan. These do not strike me as happy or accurate comparisons. For all its faults, Israel is the only democracy in the region; and it seems to me that critics of Israel pay insufficient attention to another aspect of the Palestinian tragedy: the mad way in which young Arabs are manipulated into violence by their leaders.

But then you will find all that in Virgil, too, if you look. You will find how the virus of madness, furor, infects the Latins, when a peace might have been attained. You will also find a prophecy that one day, after Turnus is dead, 'paribus se legibu,s ambae invictae genres aeterna in foedera mittant' (both peoples, unconquered, will join with equal laws in an everlasting pact). In the days when MPs could quote Latin they used to say this about Ireland with such blissful persistence that O'Connell had to beg them to stop.

I know it sounds optimistic to talk now about a pact between Arabs and Israelis. You may also say that they haven't much call for Virgil these days, the suffering peoples of Nablus and Hebron and Jerusalem. To which I would say that nothing much else seems to have worked. Virgil the prophet has not always been wrong, and he understood the tragic symmetry of a war between predestined settlers and displaced natives. Read him, Gilmour, and see the position of Juno for what it is.