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Introduction:Reading Civil War Julia D. Hejduk When in Darkness Visible (1976) W. R. Johnson characterized one strain of Aeneid interpretation as "the somewhat pessimistic Harvard School",1 he could hardly have dreamt that the phrase would achieve canonical status so quickly. In fact, half of the seminal pieces he names—and the only two whose authors, Clausen and Parry, were friends who conversed regularly—were conceived and written at Amherst College, years before the Vietnam War and the "dissent and anguish of the sixties" (Clausen 1995: 313). "The somewhat pessimistic Amherst school" would probably have engendered fleeting thoughts of Emily Dickinson and been promptly forgotten. But America's wealthiest and most powerful university has an aura (some might say, a discolor aura) entirely its own. The Harvard School may be a fiction, yet as every student of the ancient world knows, fictions survive long after the facts have disappeared. My decision to entitle a Vergilian Society panel "Happy Golden Anniversary, Harvard School!" was intentionally provocative, if not perverse.2 Every word is incorrect or ironic. "Happy"? The Harvard School stresses the unhappiness in Vergil's works. "Golden"? Yes, in that most of the works named in Johnson's infamous footnote were published about fifty years ago; but no, in that for Vergil the Iron Age of Jupiter has displaced the Golden Age of Saturn. "Harvard"? Yes, in that all of these scholars were associated with Harvard in some way at some point in their lives; but no, in that half of them were not at Harvard when the ideas were conceived—which negates "Anniversary" too. But the worst offender is "School," a term that encourages people to dismiss any idea as conditioned and derivative, regardless of its actual provenance or its truth. Nevertheless, my call for papers reeled in a wonderful assortment, all, as it happened, by women who, other than as the recipients of Loeb fellowships, had no association with Harvard. Two of the papers have [End Page 1] found homes elsewhere.3 The two in this volume, however, approach the topic from very different perspectives. Nandini Pandey shows how "interpretive contestation" is written into the very fabric of Vergil's works and characterizes their reception even during the poet's lifetime. Zara Torlone demonstrates the key role Vergil played in Russian authors' struggles, with mixed success, to develop a literature reflecting their own shifting national identity. James O'Hara, the respondent to the panel, provides a richer perspective on these papers than I can in this limited space, as well as some insightful reflections of his own. Enlightening and enjoyable as it was, I still did not feel that the panel had gotten to the bottom of what the Harvard School actually is. It seemed that the best way to figure this out was to ask the people most likely to know, and Lee Pearcy's gracious invitation to edit a special issue of Classical World based on the panel provided the perfect excuse to do so. I accordingly wrote to numerous senior (that is, senior to me, b. 1966) Vergil scholars with a very general prompt: "What does the Harvard School mean, or mean to me? How has it affected my reading of Vergil, or my scholarship, or my life? Were there teachers of subjects other than Latin who influenced my reading of Vergil?" To my pleasant surprise, the majority rose to the bait. For full disclosure, I should start by giving at least some idea of my own answers to these questions. That I myself am a product of the Harvard School would appear to be an open-and-shut case. I read the Aeneid with Charles Segal (as an undergraduate at Princeton, but he was a Harvard product); I got my Ph.D. from Harvard, studying with Richard Thomas and Wendell Clausen; and my work reflects the techniques of New Criticism, with its emphasis on attending to the actual words of a poem. But in fact the methodology of New Criticism appealed to me before I had really read any. Verbal echoes in Latin poetry leap out at me and strike me as demanding interpretation: that is simply how my mind works. The...
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