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Sunt lacrimae rerum: ekphrasis and empathy in three encounters between a text and a picture

I. Sunt lacrimae rerum — Whose empathy is it, anyway? ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’ (‘There are tears for things, and what men suffer touches the human heart’) — ‘stubbornly untranslatable’ as much as the most memorable in the Aeneid, this Virgilian line evokes the scene in which Aeneas encounters the murals in Juno’s temple in Carthage. Tearfully, the legendary Trojan hero, whose descendants will build Rome, contemplates the pictures in which he recognizes his own story and that of Troy itself. A refugee in a strange land, he senses in them an empathic response to the suffering of his own people. The location of Juno’s temple seems to confirm Aeneas’ feeling. It is in this shady forest that Dido, the queen of Carthage, and her cohorts found shelter when they first arrived in this country. The presumed empathy is symbolically reinforced by the placement of Aeneas at this particular spot. This placement draws attention to the analogy between Aeneas and Dido, who are both exiles, and are both well acquainted with the pain of losing one’s homeland, one’s family and one’s spouse. The pictures depict scenes of defeat, yet, standing where Dido stood in her time of sorrow, Aeneas is filled with hope for the renewal of Troy’s glory. The scene at the Carthaginian temple has come to be perceived as epitomizing the Aeneid as a whole, and as a paradigm for the topos of ekphrasis — that is, of the ‘literary evocation of spatial art’. In this case, the work of art has no existence outside the text — it is ‘notional’ in John Hollander’s terms. A much discussed element has been the empathy that the pictures evoke. Whose empathy is it, anyway? What does the presentation of the war of Troy in pictures, which depicts Greek victory and Trojan suffering, have to do with empathy? Moreover, not only are the pictures exhibited at the temple of Juno — Troy’s historical enemy — but Aeneas will destroy Dido, and his descendants will wreak havoc on Carthage. Indeed, as many readers have indicated, 4 the scene invites an ironic reading in which empathy is but a delusion in the eye of the beholder, who, deeply moved by the sights and memories the scenes evoke, projects his own feelings on the pictures. Consequently, it is hard to determine cause and effect, or take a definite stand towards Aeneas’ response. Yet, this very uncertainty might be inherent to ekphrasis. This is suggested by Bartsch and Elsner in their discussion of ‘disobedient ekphrasis’, and the notion that every ekphrasis necessarily distorts its visual ‘source’: 1 – See James A. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), 25. The translation of the phrase is by Rolf Humphries.