SOURCE: “The Lusiads: Epic Celebration and Pastoral Regret,” in Portuguese Studies, Vol. 6, 1990, pp. 32-7.

[In this essay, Macedo evaluates the effect of Camões' “integration of pastoral values into the epic discourse” of The Lusiads. According to Macedo, the message of the poem is that “pastoral peace is the result of properly directed heroism.”]

The epic and the pastoral reflect contrasting historical perceptions. From the viewpoint of the pastoral, associated with the myth of the Golden Age, the very subject matter of epic celebration—voyages and quests, wars and conquests—reveals the degeneration and decadence that characterizes the Iron Age. The epic celebrates what the pastoral regrets.

In one of the best-known passages of the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells us that in the impious Iron Age, the final collapse of the ancient pastoral harmony of the Golden Age is marked when the trees were brought down from the mountains and ‘as ships, ploughed the unknown seas’. In the first stanza of The Lusiads Camões echoes Ovid's image to claim that the Portuguese ships, which in other passages he refers to as ‘lenhos’ (timbers) or ‘troncos’ (tree trunks), have ploughed through ‘mares nunca dantes navegados’ (‘seas no man has ever sailed before’). But what was cause for lamentation in Ovid has become cause for celebration in Camões.

By transforming Virgil's phrase ‘Arma virumque cano’ into ‘As armas e os barões assinalados’, Camões in the opening words of The Lusiads explicitly links his epic to The Aeneid. But the echo from Ovid also establishes a subliminal link between the epic project celebrated in The Lusiads and the subject matter of pastoral, which is immediately developed and emphasized in the Invocation to the Muses. The poet asks them to give him a song which will transform the joyous ‘verso humilde’ (humble verse) of the past into a ‘novo engenho ardente’ (an ardent new invention), replacing the ancient pastoral music of the wild oaten pipe or rustic flute by the grand resounding fury of the trumpet of war.

Here again, and more explicitly than in the earlier semantic inversion of Ovid's verse, the epic mode of The Lusiads is characterized by contrast with the pastoral. In making the contrast, however, he also incorporates the pastoral subject matter into his epic and thereby lends it a new dimension—this is one of Camões' most striking originalities.

The episode of the ‘Old Man of Restelo’ illustrates how Camões brings about a semantic metamorphosis of pastoral subject matter to make it part of the overall concept of his epic. In this episode, a nameless old man of venerable aspect (‘um velho de aspeito venerando’), who is standing among the people assembled on the water-front as the expedition is about to sail, condemns in explicitly pastoral terms not only the entire undertaking, but also any attempt to give it ‘fame and remembrance’ in song, thus condemning, by implication, the epic poem which Camões, his creator, is engaged in writing. On the immediate level, all the old man's arguments are centred on the retrospective pastoral vision of the lost Golden Age. In making the old man condemn the enterprise that is the purpose of praise in The Lusiads as an instance of degeneration in ‘an age of iron and arms’, Camões demonstrates, with incomparable dramatic timing, the polarization of the moral values associated with the two literary traditions. Indeed, as Peter Marinelli so aptly points out in his excellent study of pastoral, while other Renaissance authors may have reflected that polarization, ‘none faced it more squarely or more courageously than Camões’ who, in this episode, reveals ‘at one and the same time that he was aware of the darker side to the heroic gesture and had the artistic integrity to make it part of his total vision’.¹

This is true, but there is more to be said. For the episode of the Old Man of Restelo is not simply a pastoral palinode of epic which Camões himself provides in his first elegy, ‘O Poeta Simónides falando’. By integrating the old man's dramatic intervention into the narrative at the crucial moment when Vasco da Gama's ships are about to sail, Camões is inserting into the historical time of the epic the timeless mythical retrospect of the pastoral, the exact opposite of what he does in the elegy. The old man curses ‘the first who launched on the waters dry timber with sails’ (‘o primeiro que no mundo / Nas ondas vela pôs em seco lenho’) and laments that musician's lyre or poet's imagination should ever sing his name (‘citara sonora ou vivo engenho / (lhe) dê por isso fama nem memória’). But he does so as a character in a poem which gives fame and remembrance to an equivalent feat. His retrospective vision does not alter the perception of the historical process and his intervention does not neutralize the meaning of the poem: the trees of the Golden Age had long since been transformed into ships like those about to sail, and Camões tells us that the voice of the ‘honoured old man’ could still be heard when, with proverbial indifference, the wind sets the ships in motion (‘o vento / Nos troncos fez o usado movimento’).

The poem can proceed to take up the narrative of the voyage. The retrospective pastoral vision of the old man on the water-front has been integrated into the epic meaning of the poem as its ‘opposite within the subject’ (‘o seu contrário num sujeito’), to use a Camonian expression taken from the lyric poetry, or as a ‘dialectic counterpoint’, to use the neat formulation of Professor Pina Martins in his erudite and stimulating study of humanism in the work of Camões.² The opposite integrated into the poem can no longer be, however, the pure retrospective pastoral vision situated in mythical time. It is its possible equivalent in historical time. For, just as the subject of The Lusiads incorporates its pastoral opposite, so the old man's condemnation of the epic enterprise incorporates its dialectical counterpart through the historical justification he proceeds to make for waging a just war against the infidel at the gates of the kingdom, with all the potential gains of ‘lands and riches’ this may bring. The dubious concept of the ‘just’ or ‘holy’ war thus makes its entry into the poem in pastoral garb.

Some critics have tried to see the old man's speech as an ideological corrective to the dreams of Empire, or even as the expression of an underlying anti-imperialist attitude on the part of Camões. But the existence of such an attitude is not only implausible in the spirit of the time but is belied by the spirit of the poem. Even in the most outspokenly critical passages of The Lusiads, Camões only condemns the evils of imperial power in order better to defend what he regards as the proper exercise of that power. And if there is an ideological corrective in the old man's speech, it lies in the linking of the peaceful pastoral values of the Golden Age to the Christian concept of a just war as a means of achieving universal peace. It is this connection that Camões uses to formulate the nature of the new enterprise worthy of epic celebration, which, in the closing stanzas of the poem, he exhorts King Sebastião to undertake.

The historical enterprise was condemned by the old man in terms of pastoral values; but it is in terms of these same values that the returning heroes receive their reward and, being mortal, partake of the divine. The condemnation is thus neutralized, in so far as the historical heroes are concerned, in terms of the very values on which it was based. And pastoral values also provide a basis from which Camões can criticize the inglorious present and exhort his king to embark on a new enterprise in North Africa and so redeem the time and deserve an equivalent consecration in the future.

The criticism of the Portuguese formulated by the old man in condemning Gama's expedition are applied to the Portuguese of Camões' own time—the audience to whom The Lusiads is addressed—through the development of the poet's personal reflections as the poem progresses. In the personal interventions which punctuate the impersonal epic narrative, Camões develops moral topics traditionally associated with pastoral: the condemnation of egoism and greed, unequal laws, unmerited honours and the craving for power, ‘o torpe e escuro / vício da tirania, infame e urgente’.

As Professor Pina Martins shows in the study already mentioned, the social criticism of Camões is in the line of Humanist satire from Petrarch to Erasmus and has a notable national precedent in the work of Sá de Miranda.³ The reference to this pioneering master of Portuguese pastoralism confirms the importance of the ideas of pastoral for an understanding of the humanist social criticism of Camões.

The integration of pastoral values into the epic discourse of The Lusiads brings about a number of semantic shifts, the most striking of which is probably the transfer of the concept of pre-lapsarian innocence to post-lapsarian enlightenment. Rewarded with a sojourn on the earthly paradise of the Island of Love, the returning heroes are there vouchsafed a vision of the future and the ‘secrets of the spheres’, seeing ‘with their bodily eyes what is denied to other mortals’, and becoming ‘enlightened heroes’. At the same time, the contemplative ideal associated with a prodigal Nature that brings forth abundantly of its fruits merges with the active ideal, integrated into a world in which the fruits of Nature must be conquered. Pastoral peace and plenty ceases to be a mythical retrospect, to become a historical project which places the Golden Age in the future. The allegory of the Island of Love thus represents the pastoral joys of the Golden Age which reward the heroes of the past and which may also be attained by the heroes of the future if they show themselves worthy by redeeming the unheroic present time. In other words, the Island of Love is not only a just reward but a moral objective. Having achieved this objective, the heroes of the past can become the epic instruments of a pastoral criticism of the present.

As a critical model of the present, the Island belongs to the Renaissance Utopian tradition. But as a reward for a future epic project, it brings into the vision of a Utopian ‘nowhere’ a specific, and specifically localized, historical purpose. This is the ‘just war’ prefigured in the old man's speech, which the poet offers King Sebastião as matter worthy of new epic celebration.

The integration of pastoral themes into the epic mode was subliminally suggested, at the level of poetic imagery, in the opening stanzas of the poem. In the episode of the old man on the water-front, the moral values of pastoralism were integrated into historical time by serving to justify the alternative epic project of a just war. In the allegory of the Island of Love, where all opposites are shown to be complementary, the pastoral subject matter becomes indistinguishable from the poem's epic significance: the allegory is emphatically pastoral, combining all the traditional Arcadian images with all the traditional associations of the Golden Age. But the Island itself is the result of another just war, the crusade waged by Cupid against the disorder of the world. A prominent feature of this disorder is the prevalence of base love, understood as disservice to king and country. Cupid's crusade is semantically linked to the martial deeds of the Portuguese who serve king and country in their just wars against the infidel, introduced into the peaceful idyll of the Island through the ‘prophetic’ song of a siren-nymph who narrates the exploits of the Portuguese in the East from the time of Vasco da Gama to the time of the writing of the poem.

Cupid, ‘the providential god in the pastoral machine’, as Harry Levin calls him,⁴ embarks on his crusade to assert a love capable of restoring the Golden Age to the disordered world. And, however much this may distress modern sensibilities, the corresponding imperial crusade of the Portuguese is seen in The Lusiads as having a similar purpose. Indeed, the civic message of the poem to its contemporaries could be summed up in the following proposition: pastoral peace is the result of properly directed heroism and the Golden Age is an objective to be attained in historical time rather than a retrospective mythical vision. Thus, it is the same Tethys, the sea goddess who participated in the nuptials of the enlightened heroes on the Island of Love, who can offer one of her nymphs as bride to King Sebastião, and will give him ‘the whole realm of ocean as dowry’.

The epic quest of the pastoral harmony of the Golden Age which I have sought to define as an inseparable element of the overall meaning of The Lusiads has a precedent and a model in Virgil. But, as I have suggested in another context, this model is not to be found in the epic Virgil of the Aeneid but in the Messianic bucolic Virgil of the fourth eclogue.⁵ In that eclogue, Virgil removes the traditional images of the Golden Age from their retrospective context and adapts them to the different purpose of prophetic exhortation, announcing the birth of a Child under whom ‘The Iron Age will cease and a Golden race spring up throughout the world’. The Child, whether his advent is understood in political or religious terms (and it has been understood in both along the centuries), symbolizes the spirit of a new age in which human society will have been perfected, as the result of an historical process capable of reversing the traditional sequence of decline and corruption. But before the peace and plenty of the new reign of Saturn can return to the earth, new voyages must be undertaken, new deeds of valour accomplished, new towns walled, new wars fought and a new Great Achilles must be sent to Troy.

Virgil thus prophesies in the fourth eclogue the reversal of the process of degeneration from the Golden Age through an enunciation of all the activities traditionally associated with the hard Iron Age. And just as Camões was to do in The Lusiads, he transforms the war-like matter of epic celebration into the vehicle which will permit the pastoral peace of the Golden Age to be reconquered. The new ‘Golden Race’ announced by Virgil corresponds, in Camões, to the ‘strong and beautiful progeny’ (‘progénie forte e bela’) visualized as the fruit of the marriage between mariners and sea nymphs in the Island of Love. In both Virgil and Camões, there is a paradoxical millenarian vision of a pre-lapsarian future which comes after a decline, or the Fall, or is even justified by the decline or Fall, since it can only be achieved in the wake of the process they initiated.

But there are other equally significant correspondences between The Lusiads and the fourth eclogue. For example, in the closing lines of the eclogue, Virgil exhorts the Child to assume his destiny, which will bring him the rewards bestowed on heroes, whom a god will honour with his table and a goddess with her bed. In The Lusiads the reward granted to the ‘enlightened heroes’ after they have fulfilled their destiny includes the fruits of the ‘divine island’ and carnal union with the ‘divine nymphs’. The most significant correspondence is, however, that between King Sebastião and Virgil's Child, both seen as predestined to restore universal peace through feats of arms.

Camões was not, of course, the only Renaissance poet to use Virgil's eclogue to praise a prince in power. Indeed, he was following a well-established tradition, which has been continued into our own time, the latest example being perhaps a poem written for the investiture of President John F. Kennedy.⁶ But the historical circumstances of the millenarian fervour associated with the birth of Dom Sebastião, ‘o Desejado’, the boy-king in whom Camões thought he could see the ‘pride and portent of our age’, were enough, in his case, to give to the Virgilian prophecy a credibility and a historical relevance which far exceeded mere laudatory decoration.

In the opening stanzas of the poem, Camões emphasizes the crucial difference between myth and history by asserting, in an explicit contrast with both the classic and chivalrous epics, that the deeds he is celebrating are real and not fabled. And it is in terms of his perception of history that he criticizes his contemporaries and, in the colourful image of his seventeenth-century editor and commentator, Faria e Sousa, ‘stands before King Sebastião like John the Baptist before Herod, condemning his ways’.⁷

In integrating myth into history, Camões was reflecting the fervent national feeling personified by King Sebastião, which, ironically, was soon to lead to the ill-conceived and ill-fated expedition to North Africa, with the disaster of Alcazar Kebir and the loss of Portugal's independence. But his profound awareness of the contrast between the heroic Portugal of his poem and the unheroic Portugal to whom it was addressed, places his redemptive message in an area of ambiguity, if not of insidious doubt. Thus, his hopeful association of King Sebastião with Virgil's redemptive Child is set against the tone of growing despair that marks his successive personal interventions in the epic discourse. In the last stanzas he even comes close to rejecting his poem, with the elegiac recognition that he is singing to a ‘deaf and hardened people’, a nation ‘fallen into greed and an austerity of a gloomy and vile sadness’ (‘uma austera, apagada e vil tristeza’). His final exhortation to King Sebastião is in the conditional mode, leaving the conclusion to history.

Notes

1. Peter V. Marinelli, Pastoral (London, 1971), pp. 17-18.

2. José V. de Pina Martins, ‘El Humanismo en la Obra de Camões’, in Eugenio Asensio and José V. de Pina Martins, Luis de Camões (Paris, 1982), pp. 31, 33.

3. Pina Martins, ‘El Humanismo en la Obra de Camões’, pp. 10, 30-33.

4. Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Oxford, 1972), p. 45.

5. Helder Macedo, The Purpose of Praise: Past and Future in ‘The Lusiads’ (London, 1983), pp. 15-16.

6. Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age, p. 18: ‘During the fourteenth century, Petrarch would hail the tribunate of Rienzi as a restoration of the golden age. … The … Eclogue had virtually created a minor genre, a means for the court poet to flatter his sovereign’.

7. Manuel Faria e Sousa, Lusíadas de Luís de Camões (Lisbon, 1972) II, Canto IX, Tomo 4, p. 53.