If we can trust the Roman epic poet Virgil, Queen Lavinia ought to be honored as the mother of the Western world. As wife to Aeneas, she gave birth to Silvius, whose descendants include Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome. But her existence is neither validated by historical accounts—which give some credence to Romulus, but hardly any to Lavinia—nor elaborated by mythology. Our knowledge of her is restricted to her appearance in Virgil’s Aeneid , where she plays a modest role in the background of the larger narrative.
Here’s what Virgil tells us: Lavinia turns down her suitors, including the formidable warrior Turnus, because an oracle declares that this princess of Latium is destined to marry a foreigner. When Aeneas, an exile from his native Troy, arrives on the scene, he is greeted as the prophesied suitor, and his rival in romance, the scorned Turnus, turns into an adversary on the battlefield. Virgil focuses his attention on warfare, the time-honored subject of epic poets, and Lavinia disappears from the story.
This seems odd, especially when compared with the love affair of Aeneas and Dido, a much shorter fling in Carthage before the Trojan’s arrival in Italy. That precursor romance has been celebrated in more than a dozen operas, and the Queen of Carthage’s presence can be detected everywhere from Shakespeare plays (the Bard mentions Dido almost a dozen times) to the Civilization series of video games. Meanwhile Lavinia lingered on in semi-obscurity. She makes a brief appearance in Dante’s Inferno , introduced and dealt with in a scant two lines. You can find her in a few paintings, for example in Tiepolo's Latinus Offering his Daughter Lavinia to Aeneas in Matrimony from 1754. The sixteenth century Italian painter Mirabello Cavalori (1535–1572) has left us an image of the most famous incident in Lavinia’s obscure life: when her hair is crowned with supernatural flames, an omen of her special status in the prehistory of Rome.
Speculative authors of the current day have aimed to fill in the gaps in Lavinia’s biography. Poet Claudio R. Salvucci has written an entire alternative epic in her honor, the Lavinium , published in 1994. But no one has done more for our neglected Latin princess than Ursula K. Le Guin who provided her with a complete biography and rich inner life in the 2008 novel Lavinia . This book was awarded the Locus Award as best fantasy novel of the year, and was Le Guin’s last full-length work of fiction, a fitting swan song to an illustrious career that began even before her teens, when she submitted a story as an eleven-year-old to Astounding Science Fiction .
Related Reading (essays by Ted Gioia) The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin makes clear that her intention isn't to replace Virgil’s Aeneid. In her afterword to Lavinia , she even laments the disappearance of Latin literacy over the last several decades, a shift that ensures future generations will rarely experience the great Roman epic in the original language. Virgil’s poetry, Le Guin declares, "is so profoundly musical, its beauty so intrinsic to the sound and the order of the words, that it is essentially untranslatable.” She describes her novel about Lavinia as “an act of gratitude to the poet, a love offering."
But Le Guin is too modest here. She has gone far beyond the hints and allusions in the Aeneid , and even when Virgil has offered a telling detail, Le Guin doesn’t hesitate to change it to meet her own very different needs. As a result, Virgil’s fair and blonde Lavinia becomes a dark-haired Mediterranean woman. A passive participant in the destiny imposed by the deities in the original Latin, Lavinia turns into a self-willing protagonist in the modern mold under Le Guin’s tutelage. In fact, the Roman gods take a back seat throughout this entire novel, with even oracles coming from ancestors rather than deities, and divine intervention relying on human intermediaries. These are all wise authorial decisions, and enhance the novel.
But Lavinia herself also gets a chance to challenge Virgil. At several junctures in the novel, the spirit of the Roman poet appears to the young princess of Latium, a quasi-ghost who serves as a soothsayer and oracle—and who could be better positioned to predict the future than the same author who composed the epic tale of Aeneas and Lavinia. By the time our protagonist has finished with him, Virgil is even apologizing for not giving Lavinia a bigger role in his famous work.
At first this seems like a familiar postmodern trope: an author shows up as a character in a story. But Le Guin is doing something far cleverer here. She is building on Virgil’s peculiar reputation as a seer, a strange legacy that found the author of the Aeneid treated by later centuries as a kind of wizard or mystic. Virgil’s writings were used as a tool for divination; applying a technique known as Sortes Vergilianae , randomly selected passages of the Aeneid are interpreted as a guide to future events. This aspect of Virgil’s legacy served as the spring - board for his appearance as a guide to the Inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy and as a channel for Christian revelation in Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil . When Lavinia goes to consult her ancestors, at a key juncture in Le Guin’s novel, her encounter with Virgil both resonates with this history of oracular pronouncements and adapts it to the narrative techniques of the current day.
In the current instance, Lavinia gets more prognosticating than she wants . Virgil promises her Aeneas as a husband, but also provides a long litany of the victims and assailants whose bloody conflicts will pave the way for her to become Queen. She also gets advance warning of her husband’s death. Perhaps worst of all, she begins to suspect that she is just a literary invention of the poet—a hypothesis so troubling she prefers not to dwell on its full implications.
We are now far afield from the starting point of this novel as a kind of feminized alternative to a classic text. Le Guin calls into question a wide range of issues that Virgil merely took for granted, ranging from metanarrative concerns about character motivation to richer philosophical questions dealing with free will and just wars. By removing the pagan deities from the center of the story of Rome’s founding, our author leaves us with a tale burdened with too much guilt and responsibility even for a founder of a great civilization.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of ten books. His most recent book is How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books).
By the time our protagonist has finished with him, Virgil is even apologizing for not giving Lavinia a bigger role in his famous work.