How Not to Adapt Ancient Epic Poetry, Part 2
A spiritual sequel to my essay on how and why one ought to handle the Greco-Roman myths with respect, rather than self-aggrandizement and cashing in on trends.
When I started reviewing books on this website, I decided that it would be counterintuitive to have a regular release schedule only to blow a week talking about how much I didn’t enjoy a novel. This is not so much a kindness to bad authors as it is a boon to my audience: reading this blog will allow one to receive some kind of lesson once a week, and there’s nothing gained from saying a book is bad in the sense that a typical review will provide. There are occasions, however, where one can learn from a poorly-crafted piece, usually by counterexample. The last time we ran into such a work was John Dolan’s mess of self-indulgence in The War Nerd Iliad. It is only too appropriate that the follow-up to a botched adaptation of Homer is a botched adaptation of Vergil.1 I cannot remember when Vergil: A Mythological Musical first appeared on my radar, but I’ve waited out using my Audible free trial in anticipation of reviewing original content like this.
At the height of the age where nerds encouraged each other to be as insufferable about “erm, actually”-ing every statement, there was a minor controversy over whether the Marvin Berry scene in Back to the Future ought to be considered a fun little joke about how boring music was prior to rock & roll, or whether it represents the way white bands stole from black artists, or whether it unintentionally undercuts the black invention of rock & roll altogether. Robert Zemeckis’ career as a director has taken a turn for the weird since the development of CGI seemingly broke his brain, but even if his reputation hadn’t diminished in the following years, I doubt this would have made much more of a fuss. Vergil: A Mythological Musical operates all across its 9 hour run time under the assumption that the eponymous poet wrote few lines outside what he’d famously shown to Augustus across its reported 11 year composition. Instead, large swaths of the actual writing come from Sulpicia, a very real and well-studied minor poet, at the 11th hour of its deadline. The “few lines” that they say Vergil read to Augustus were, in reality, the entirety of the sixth book. Since Milman Parry blew up the Homeric Question by bringing oral tradition to the forefront of the discussion, it has been fashionable for scholars to suggest that no one person could have possibly written all the words of their famous works as well to tie them back to The Poet. Most recently this controversy has come after Shakespeare despite the fact that his contemporaries have talked about talking to him. We previously covered the way Percy Shelley sometimes gets credited for writing parts of Frankenstein, which I also believe to be dubious. In this case though, there’s really no argument; Vergil is just that. damn. good. The musical posits that Augustus approached other writers like Ovid and Cicero to take on the task of writing a national epic.2 Ovid does come close to Vergil in terms of skill, but ask any Latin 301 student how much fun they had reading Cicero in prose and one can estimate how great his poetry is from there. Admittedly it is difficult to value any poet’s reputation before they have written their masterpiece, but I would assume the Georgics and the Eclogues to rank him highly enough among the Latin poets for antiquarians to preserve them, in the event that Varius had fulfilled his deathbed wishes. Others may come at this as a culture war/“wokeness” issue, but I think it’s an injustice to discredit any poet from the work they truly wrote.
Vergil once famously reflected that it is easier to steal the club from Hercules than it is to take one line from Homer. This musical shows a lesser-discussed reason why such a feat is so hard to pull off. The biggest musical to use mythological imagery since the turn of the century was Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown, which uses blues-y, jazz-y folk music to tell its story because it has been set in the 1920s in the American south, where those genres first began to develop. The biggest musical overall since the turn of the century has undeniably been Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which uses the genre of hip-hop in order to cater a historical story to audiences more receptive to that style of music. Vergil: A Mythological Musical has Hamilton songs and Hadestown songs.3 It’s not right to call them plagiarism, but to refer to them as “tributes to the source material” ignores how utterly soulless the move to capitalize off others’ successes is. Georg Nicolaus Knauer’s Die Aeneis und Homer is a study on just how many lines of Vergil’s Aeneid pay tribute to lines from the Homeric corpus because Vergil loved epic poetry and, again, dedicated 11 years to write his own. There is a distinct possibility that the author believes it to be plausible that Vergil squandered all that time because they finished the majority of the lyrics for the songs in an afternoon. The first couple of songs that are meant to reflect passages from the actual Aeneid do rhyme, but about halfway through they drop the premise of either maintaining verse or meter whenever Sulpicia starts writing the longer passages. There’s absolutely no consistency whether they want the poem to be portrayed as sung or read aloud or written at any point, because such a creative decision requires forethought and planning rather than cramming as many syllables as will fit into a line to meet some kind of quota of a historical reference.
“Queerbaiting” is a term used to describe the addition of characters with ambiguous sexualities into work of fiction in order to entice a gay audience into paying more attention. This musical inverts this trope entirely; every character is a straight down the middle, 50/50 bisexual. Whenever it is convenient for the plot to have someone talking about having sex with a woman, a name is pulled out of a bag to do so. Whenever it is convenient for the plot to have someone talking about having sex with a man, it’s exactly the same protocol. There are enough fruits in the musical to make a salad with none of the flavor and an awful aftertaste. Had they gone with subtler allusions to the sexualities of one or two members of the main cast it would have been more tolerable, but I had the displeasure of waking up one morning and resuming an episode at the moment two characters begin to moan in my ear. There’s a ridiculous piece of discourse that keeps floating around the internet about the “necessity” of sex scenes in movies, and I’m no prude, but sticking that in the middle of a podcast comes off as silly at best.
The one redeeming factor about the whole project is the casting, which was excellent. I cannot find a detailed breakdown of credits for the work (every site lists the cast as a whole rather than their individual roles which is awfully lazy) but Derek Jacobi did get dragged into this, and performs as well as his reputation would cause one to expect of him. The actor who played Ophius nailed all the songs even though the written lyrics were terribly clunky during their “big” solo performance, and Sulpicia is the other big standout performance.4 Vergil’s voice actor5 is able to maintain an old man’s warble in his tone across the whole of the show without noticeably faltering, and deserves praise for that kind of longevity alone.
Future projects of this nature ought to pursue bringing at least someone who has read the epic in the original Latin on-board as a creative consultant, if not giving a team of classicists the final say on any decisions. I don’t think that anyone among our discipline realistically could have salvaged a decent production from this garbage heap of a musical. In this case it’s not a huge concern, (for any musical to not end up on YouTube as a “slime tutorial” bootleg, it must have done something horribly wrong), but I envision some poor kid out there having this as his first experience with classical literature and getting turned off reading the Aeneid altogether, and that’s the kind of thing I’d like to avoid at all costs.
I won’t be intentionally seeking out any poorly thought out copies of the Divine Comedy anytime soon.
The writer seems to believe that Vergil invented all the different bits and bobs of the story, by the way. There's a point where Sulpicia asks why Vergil hasn't written anything about Romulus and Remus as if that's the "true" mythological founding of Rome and Aeneas is just something he made up. The truth is that the poet collated those two contradicting myths into a singular legend, and the research into Roman folklore was also a major part of that 11 year writing period.
That is to say: not blues songs or hip-hop songs, but rather music meant to draw to mind better musicals than the one in front of the listener.
Claudia Kariuki is one of two mentioned by name as playing a role to begin the recording. Props to her.
Will Young, in the other named role.