Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

VALERIUS
instead a historic Weltbild. The Argonautic voyage is to precede the transference
of wealth and empire from Asia to Greece (5436°.). The art of navigation,
now invented, will make international conflicts easier: hence the Trojan
War, for which the Voyage is a preliminary (546ff.). Greece too will decline
and fall. Her primacy will pass to another race. Jupiter does not specify the
legatee, but it is Rome that is to have the imperium sine fine:
arbiter ipse locos terrenaque sumtna mouendo
experiar, quaenam populis longissima cunctis
regna uelim linquamque datas ubi certus habenas. (558—60)
By moving the centre of earthly governance I, as lord, shall prove what dominion I
desire to be longest-enduring and universal, to whom I can, in safe assurance, entrust
the reins of power.
Finally Jupiter looks down at Hercules, at Castor and Pollux aboard the Argo,
remarking:
tendite in astra, uiri: me primum regia mundo
Iapeti post bella trucis Phlegraeque labores
imposuit: durum uobis iter et graue caeli
institui. sic ecce meus, sic, orbe peracto
Liber et expertus terras remeauit Apollo. (563—7)
Make your way to heaven, heroes! Only after war with savage lapetus and struggles
at Phlegra did I become ruler of the universe in my kingly palace. I have fixed for you
a tough and onerous path to heaven. Only so did my own Liber, after traversing the
globe, only so did my own Apollo, after dwelling on earth, return to Olympus.
There is an obvious parallelism between the cursus of the universe (531), the
path of history, the voyage of the Argonauts and the iter of the heroes to
Olympus. Valerius had already stated that Jupiter's sway had abolished the
peace (otid) of Saturn's reign (1.500). Henceforth it is to be through hardship
and suffering that godhead will be won. The journey of the Argonauts initiated
a new epoch (as Catullus had seen in his Peleus and Thetis), an epoch that gave
birth, purposefully and inevitably, to the Roman empire. Power shifted from
Asia to Greece: and then from Greece to Rome, where dwelt the scions of
Asian Troy. The Argonauts became emblematic figures, not merely of the new
men of a new saeadum but of the providential and cyclic movement of history,
predetermined by divine will. If Hercules and the sons of Boreas are precursors
of the Roman emperors, then Jason is ultimately representative of the qualities
of outmoded Hellenism. The Golden Fleece is a token of Fate — a veiled symbol
of that glittering, but perhaps illusory, ambition that man, whether as an individual
or as a part of a larger community, seeks in the long pilgrimage of life,
an arcanum which he cherishes but which can be only temporarily or fraudulently
possessed.
589
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