Discovering Virgil During the Italian Campaign

By Dr. Joshua Cannon

An Arabic cryptologic linguist with the Marine Corps from 2000 to 2005, Dr. Joshua Cannon deployed twice to Iraq—first with the invasion in 2003 and again in 2004. Upon his return, Josh pursued graduate studies in linguistics and archaeology at the University of Chicago, earning a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Now a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, Josh’s new book, Fatal Second Helen (Blue Ear Books) brings both the scholar’s lens and the veteran’s heart to Homer’s tale of rage, loss, and honor.

In the following essay, Josh explains how, during the final months of WWII, a US Army captain chanced upon a book of Virgil’s poems and employed Sortes Virgilianae, an ancient ritual of prophecy, to divine his future.

Italy bears the ancient scars of war in virtually every hill, beach, and town. No place in the world has hosted more campaigns, more armies, more ambitions colliding across the same ground. From Aeneas landing in Latium in mythic time, to Hannibal sweeping down from the Alps with his elephants, to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, the Italian peninsula has been defined by battle.

It was during Italy’s most recent conflict, World War II, that a young OSS officer, Army Captain Bernard Knox, discovered an ancient truth that would shape the rest of his life.

The path that led Captain Knox to this fateful moment was no regular one. Knox was British born, and his earliest memories were of rushing to a London bomb shelter during World War I as searchlights scanned the skies for German zeppelins. Later, as a student, he showed remarkable aptitude for foreign languages and would study Classics at Cambridge University.

At Cambridge, Knox served in the Army Cadet Corps. But he was also, for a while, fiercely anti-war, fearful that Britain might stumble into another continental catastrophe like the one he remembered as a child.

The rise of Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Franco in Spain steered him away from any pacificist tendencies. In fact, in 1936, he volunteered to fight with the Communist-led International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. There, during a battle in Madrid, he was shot in the neck and shoulder, his carotid artery punctured. His unit left him for dead. But he woke up, then walked himself many miles to a dressing station in Las Rozas. His recovery from these wounds was slow, and, according to his doctors, miraculous.

Back in England, he ran into an American friend from his undergraduate days, Betty Bauer, and married her. In 1939, they moved to Connecticut, where Knox taught Latin at a private school.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed, he quit his job and volunteered for the United States Army. With his language proficiency, Knox was a natural for the Office of Strategic Services’ Jedburgh program, which trained three-man teams to parachute behind enemy lines and conduct sabotage and guerrilla warfare operations in France ahead of the Normandy invasion.

The OSS moved Knox to Italy in the spring of 1945, as Allied forces were pushing north in the last phase of the peninsular campaign. He served in the mountains north of the Po Valley fighting the Germans as they withdrew.

One day that spring, after capturing the village of Fanano in the Apennine Mountains, Knox got pinned down in an abandoned villa by an enemy machine gun. It was there that he stumbled into a strange moment of clarity linking his war to time immemorial.

On a bookshelf was an Italian copy of the works of Virgil, ancient Rome’s greatest poet.

Curious to see if his Latin was still any good, he picked the book up. He decided to perform a Sortes Vergilianae (Virgilian lots), a centuries-old practice where a reader opens a work of Virgil and stabs their index finger on a random passage. The passage, it is said, will predict the reader’s future.

The passage from Virgil’s Georgics that Knox selected, he would later say, “was not a prophecy [but] a cry of agony”:

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. The curving sickles are beaten straight to make swords. On one side the East moves to war, on the other, Germania. Neighboring cities tear up their treaties and take to arms; the vicious war god rages the world over.

Knox later wrote “These lines, written some thirty 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 Knox and his troops left the area (he tried to take the book with him, but it was too large), he decided that, if he survived the war, he would return to the study of Classics.

He did survive, and, in 1946, used the GI Bill to enroll in Yale’s PhD program in Classics. He then taught at Yale until becoming the founding director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in 1961.

Knox would spend the next half-century as one of the most important scholars of ancient Greek and Roman literature in the world. He never stopped urging all Americans to read the Classics, especially Virgil.

Captain Bernard Knox was buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery in 2010.

In Fatal Second Helen, Dr. Joshua Cannon retells Homer’s epic in clear, vivid prose, weaving in his own combat experiences and reflections on the warrior’s life. It’s a book that asks timeless questions: What draws people to war? What do they bring back from it? And what can ancient heroes like Achilles teach modern warriors about grief, pride, and the search for meaning?

Fatal Second Helen (Blue Ear Books) is available online at major booksellers. To view Josh talking about his experiences and discussing his book, check out our VBC livestream at veteransbreakfastclub.org/the-oldest-story-what-homers-the-iliad-teaches-us-about-modern-war/