The Aeneid, A Raj Mystery, and the good ole' Old Fashioned.
The Aeneid. When I teach my Latin Survey, I always start with a book of the Aeneid, because I want to start with something good and chewy, a mature work of literature that we can really dig into. In other words, a real classic. The Hellenists, after all, get to start with Homer, so why should we wait a whole entire semester for an extant epic? So we do the Aeneid, and then immediately double back for some fun times with Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and every one’s favorite early hexametrician, Ennius.
Obviously, the Aeneid being what it is (and what it is is the twelve book journey of Aeneas from the ruins of Troy to settler-colonialism in Italy), there are a few problems in starting with it. First of all, it rather distorts a historical view of the growth of Latin literature. As Jackie Elliot has established, the Aeneid did a lot of damage to its poetic ancestors when it was published, and reading it first entrenches that damage, because it not so implicitly implies that all roads lead to Vergil. It also starts the semester off on as canonical a note as possible; there is no bigger Latin cliche than reading the Aeneid, except perhaps reading Catullus’ Lesbia poems.
Still, I love the Aeneid. Not as much as some, of course, but certainly more than others (how’s that for subject positioning?). And I will freely admit that what I love about the poem is how schamltzy it is, how it explores pomposity and finds out exactly how much emotion it needs to rouse to make up for how, well, unlikeable everyone is. And in some ways, isn’t that precisely the whole paradox of doing Classics in this day and age?
Take Aeneas, the eponymous hero who in the first book of the poem alone states that he wishes he were dead, tries to put the moves on a lady who turns out to be his mother, discovers that his fame has reached Carthage much before him, but not in a good way, and then sets out to seduce the local queen, because what else can you do when you’re shipwrecked in a foreign land that put your most awkward moment on a billboard in the middle of town?
This is not a likable guy, but in a real sense, he doesn’t need to be, because Aeneas is a man on a mission, and like all such heroes, his main value is in doing what he’s told, which he does repeatedly, and not always to best results. Aeneas, in other words, is a Roman hero for readers who are trying to figure out the fine balance between uniqueness and conformity, between rising to the moment and wanting to be left alone. In other words, teenagers, but also Romans in the first century B.C. And in fact, Aeneas needs to be constantly coaxed to learn the right thing to do. Whether he does or he doesn’t is a matter for interpretation, and so he slogs and slogs, only to find out that the real reward is not actually for him. He’s not the founder of the Roman people. He’s just the guy who had to be there to make it happen.
I’ll come back to individual books of the Aeneid in the future, but for now, it’s time to turn to more modern stuff. Our modern book pick for this newsletter is…<drum roll>
A Necessary Evil, by Abir Mukherjee (2018, Pegasus Books). This is a detective mystery set in India during the British Raj, specifically in Calcutta and and the principality of Sambalpore (which is mentioned by Ptolemy!). It’s actually the second in a series, but it’s entirely standalone, and while I enjoyed it, I’m not sure I’ll seek out the other books in the series, at least not yet.
Anyway, the premise is that Captain Sam Wyndham and his erstwhile Indian (‘native’ as Wyndham calls him) partner, ‘Surrender-Not’ Banerjee (a brahmin, as my in-laws would immediately note, and actually a recurring joke in the book, on which more in a second) investigate the mysterious murder of the crown prince of Sambalpore, with all the relevant tropes of the genre. Wyndham has an opium addiction, their commanding officer threatens to close the case at the crucial moment, there is a female love interest who assists at crucial junctions, and you can kinda see the end coming, but not from very far away.
An unlikely companion to the Aeneid, you say? Sure, though if you can’t see the end of the Aeneid coming from about book 8, you’re not reading very carefully. Still, what put me in mind of this book is not actually the trope and set-pieces (although, reading the Aeneid as genre fiction is not the worst take you can have, both in its adherence to and adaptation of a tight generic core, and in its vast popularity). No, it was, for lack of a better word, the settler-colonialism, and the subtle way this book both naturalizes it and exposes it in ways that are sometimes uncomfortable, but not too much.
What do I mean? This is set during the Raj, and Wyndham, as you can guess, is a white man. The book is told from his perspective and in his voice (again, a mainstay of the genre), and he is very much a man comfortable in his privilege. His partner, “Surrender-Not”, has been educated in England, where he got the name, but he was actually born Surendranath, and Wyndham is happy to continue with the English nickname rather than adopt the (nearly identical!) Indian name. This is pretty infantilizing, and remains pretty consistent: Banerjee is nervous around women, lives with his mother who tries constantly to marry him off, and gets given all the tedious yet, as it turns out crucial, tasks. He’s also a Brahmin who doesn’t know very much about Hindu religion, as Wyndham never misses a chance to remind him.
Further, Wyndham is by default orientalizing. He describes the wealth of Sambalpore in deep detail, is fascinated by the zenana (the Maharaja’s harem) and the book contains a lurid description of the execution of a eunuch by war elephant - which may be historically accurate, but very much gives off a native-loving-atrocities kind of vibe. I don’t know anything about Abir Mukherjee beyond what is on his website, but I find it interesting that an author of Bengali origin gives us a character so unaware of their own prejudices - historically accurate, for sure, but one that replicates the kind of privilege that eventually cost the English their empire. Two literary predecessors that must lie behind this series are Satyajit Ray’s Feluda series and Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi series, both set in the 30’s, both inspired by Conan Doyle, and both featuring a Hindu Bengali hero - so the fact that A Necessary Evil sits between the English and Bengali traditions is pretty cool, too.
Unlike the Aeneid, this is not a very emotional book, and there are many likable characters, but like the Aeneid, this is a book that looks straight at something that can be dismissed as “the way things were back then” and doesn’t try to whitewash (no pun intended!) his hero as somehow ahead of his time (despite his willingness to court an Anglo-Indian lady). That somehow feels appropriately Vergilian to me, and the prose is spare and precise, which is also on the spot for Vergil.
And now I bet y’all are ready for a drink. So without further ado….
Old Fashioned. Something about the Aeneid says whiskey to me, and there’s nothing more old-fashioned than the Raj, so with that in mind, here is the NYT’s recipe for this stalwart cocktail:
sugar cube (or 1 bar spoon simple syrup)
2 dashes Angostura bitter
2 ounces rye or bourbon
Orange twist
Muddle the sugar cube and bitters with one bar spoon of water at the bottom of a chilled rocks glass. (If using simple syrup, combine bitters and one bar spoon of syrup.) Add rye or bourbon. Stir.
Add one large ice cube, or three or four smaller cubes. Stir until chilled and properly diluted, about 30 seconds. Slip orange twist on the side of the cube.
Enjoy, and thank you for reading! See you next time.
Ayelet