We are closing out this year's Humanities: The Classical World with the study of westerns. Long before cowboys hit the screens of the moving picture shows, before Louis L'Amour penned a Sacket tale, before Zane Grey's
Riders of the Purple Sage, before Owen Wister's
The Virginian, and before James Fenimore Cooper sent Natty Bumpo away from upstate New York out to the prairie, the Roman poet Virgil penned the first western. It is titled
The Aeneid.
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| The fight to settle Hesperia--the western lands |
Like many westerns, this one involves moving out and settling western lands, meeting pretty girls, some of whom get jilted, fighting over pretty women, claiming land that has to be fought over, fighting over live stock, meeting girls who ride and fight like men, and establishing law and order--by violence.
The western always then paves the way for a future. More settlers will eventually come, towns will be built, and an empire will grow. People of the future will look back on the days of settlement as defining and as days of character, guts, true grit. Yep, that's what Virgil wrote about, but the west for him was Rome in Italy, the land of Latium, up along the Tiber River.
Virgil was writing with the intent of getting Augustus Caesar to be the strong cowboy, man on horseback, by calling his attention to "How the West Was Won." The settling of Rome was more myth than history. Likewise, the strong, resilent, tough-minded, lone cowboy of American westerns was more the product of myth than history. Every myth, every proto-type, every paradigm has to have something it is rooted in. There was something "cowboy-like" about the men who settled America, whether the "West" that they settled was in Texas or cleared out some forests just up from the beaches of the Atlantic.
There is always the crying need for a strong man, for someone willing to go against convention, the placid majority, the status quo. There is always the need for the man of the hour, the man on horseback, the knight on his quest, the surviving Trojan prince carrying the images and remnants of burning Troy with him, or the cowboy packing a big iron on his hip.
Willie Nelson tells us in song that his heroes have always been cowboys. The sentiments of that song is quintessentially American. There was something reassuring when we saw images of Ronald Reagan back in 1980, not only wearing the hat, but riding a horse on his ranch. The Soviet Union at that time was ruled by a group of tottering, sickly old Bolsheviks, who had survived by kowtowing and cringing before Stalin and his successors. They tried to figure Reagan out by watching westerns and they were skeered. The effete and pampered current President fails to inspire, despite the power of the teleprompter and the promise of limitless government largesse, because we cannot imagine him hoping up on a horse and riding off to face America's enemies, foreign and domestic. (And the west of both history and movies included plenty of African-American cowboys.)
In
The Aeneid, Aeneas headed out west. Each stop along the way was filled with promise, but each stop was just that--a stop and not a destination. He was hitching his wagon, or ship, to a star and headin' further west--to Latium, to the future city of Rome. What he first saw of the future city was brush and tangled growth.
He nearly got sidetracked by a woman, Dido, but that would never do. After all, she was an easterner, a Phoenician (a relative of Queen Jezabel). Aeneas had his own ranch to settle. Being the foreman of Carthage was never meant to be.
Settling in Latium opened the door to conflict. Those already there faced two choices. Either they could give up land and titles and yeild to the future, or they could resist, fight, and die. Securing the land always called for a sacrifice, for blood to be shed.
It all started when a deer strayed into view of Aeneas' son, Ascanius. The boy shot the deer. What do you expect? He was a boy with a bow and arrow, and this stupid pet deer is out traisping around. Unfortunately, he gut shot it, so the deer made it back home where it whined piteously. It wasn't much of an event, but matters were already tense, so everyone who was already itchin' to go against Aeneas and the Dardanians jumped at the chance to round up a posse to take out the Trojans.
The result was a range war. The long term result was that Aeneas would win the hand of fair Lavinia, who, unfortunately, is a dingy, but pretty girl. The other result was that Turnus, the rough-hewn Rutulian prince who had his sights set on Lavinia, bits the dust. In a gunfight, I mean, spear fight, Aeneas takes him down.
It is brutal, rough, and frontier justice, but that is how Hesperia, the western lands, would be settled.
To parallel the study of
The Aeneid, we have been watching the classic 1948 western
Red River, directed by Howard Hawks, and starring a young John Wayne, in what will be a defining role for him. He plays the part of the single-minded, tough, unbending, sometimes tyrannical, often ruthless Tom Dunson. He builds a huge cattle ranch in Texas, having arrived with one cow and one bull. He sacrifices the woman he loves to go settle the land. When work was necessary, he worked, and when killing was necessary, he killed.
After the War Between the States, the South had no money, carpetbaggers were looking for everything they could get their hands on, and the economic future looked even more bleak than it does now. God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and at that time, most of those cows were in Texas. Texas had cows; the east had hungry people. In the movie, he gives a speech about feeding good beef to hungry people that resonates with lyric brilliance. Tom Dunson had a plan to drive cows north to Missouri to ship them east.
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| A Classic Western |
