After making trouble behind the lines in France, Knox was sent to do the same in Italy, where he picked up a fancy copy of Vergil’s poems. He read a passage from the Georgics ending “Blasphemous War seethes everywhere” (saevit toto Mars impius orbe). In a talk he gave at a conference in Venice in 1994, he said of his experience in Italy: “Though I might justifiably have been called filocomunista when at the age of twenty I fought in the winter of 1936 on the northwest outskirts of Madrid, by 1945 I was an older and wiser man.” He resolved to study classics if he survived the war.
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In memoriam Bernard Knox (1914–2010), uomo davvero di tempra eroica - New York Review of Books 30-9-2010
(il necrologio completo qui ).
Questo il suo racconto autobiografico dell’illuminazione interiore che lo portò a riscoprire i classici, avvenuta sul fronte italiano, nella seconda guerra mondiale: una volta messosi al riparo dalle raffiche tedesche in una casa diroccata dalle bombe, tra le macerie trovò “a text of Virgil, printed on expensive heavy paper, one of a series of classical texts issued by the Royal Italian Academy to celebrate the greatness of ancient (and modern) Rome; the title page bore the improbable heading, in Latin, IUSSU BENEDICTI MUSSOLINI”; in quelle circostanze, alla lettura del finale della prima georgica , nelle parole dello stesso Knox:
“These lines, written some 30 years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked, mine-infested fields, the shattered cities and the starving population of that Italy Virgil so loved, the misery of the whole world at war.” (…) “As we ran and crawled through the rubble I thought to myself: ‘If I ever get out of this, I’m going back to the classics and study them seriously.’ ”
Essays Ancient and Modern, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990
“Illuminazione” quasi mistica, sulla scia delle sortes virgilianae, così ricordata da G.W.Bowersock, qui :
Knox was redeployed in a ravaged Italy, where he had an almost mystical experience that determined his postwar career. He came upon a text of Virgil and, in accordance with the medieval tradition of “Virgilian lotteries (sortes Vergilianae),” sought to read the future from the first lines he saw upon opening the book at random. His eyes fell on the final verses of the First Georgic, which, if less than prophetic, vividly described the world in which he found himself: “Here right and wrong are reversed: so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil. The plow is despised and rejected; the farmers marched off, the fields untended. … On the one side the East moves to war, on the other Germany.”
(Source: nybooks.com)
