Joe Paterno's Aeneid

John Lessingham considers Joe Paterno and the Aeneid in a recent essay for n+1. Drawing on Paterno's biography and decades of press interviews, he traces the football coach's fascination with the epic poem back to the 1970s, then reflects on all the ways that Paterno misread the motivations and character of its central figure, and finally imagines what that misreading might have to do with Paterno's recent fall from football grace. Lessingham writes, "For [Paterno] Virgil’s epic poem provided in the stolid and long-suffering Aeneas the great object lessons of honor, duty, and courage." He continues:

While it’s always easy to cry hypocrisy and turn our backs on a ruined idol, it might be more worthwhile to sift the ruins of the Paterno cult of football warriors to see if we can find the tragic flaw in how he understood his model hero, Aeneas.

So, where did Paterno's fascination with the Aeneid come from? Apparently, he was introduced to it by one of his Jesuit high school teachers — a guy named Thomas Bermingham, who coaxed Paterno through the 400 page epic, saying, "What's important... is not how much we cover... it's not how much we do, but the excellence of what we do." The poem made an impression, writes Lessingham:

Paterno’s central fixation is with Aeneas and how he responds to adversity, as they say. In Paterno he writes: “Aeneas has to struggle and suffer—and make his own decisions. How he acts is not determined by fate... he must act out of free will.” Paterno is basically right about some important things: the ancient idea of fate allows a fixed divine plan to coexist with individual choice in its constituent events; Virgil consciously Romanized the Homeric hero by giving Aeneas the responsibility of founding a nation; we see Aeneas struggle and become, through bitterly won experience, a better leader. Like many Catholics before him, Paterno sees Aeneas as a pagan guide through the difficult problem of divine providence, free will, and a world full of woe.

BUT, Lessingham writes, Paterno is also basically wrong about a lot: Aeneas is not, as Paterno has said, a great team player. He's more like a lone wolf killing machine. And while he's quite a hero in the first half of the epic, the second half is a different story. Lessingham writes:

Paterno is not alone in emphasizing the Odyssey–like first half of the Aeneid, which includes the sack of Troy, the Dido interlude, and Aeneas’s visit to the underworld. Nothing nearly as famous happens in the Iliad–like rest of the poem, but in literature, as in football, important things happen in the second half. Paterno has completely missed a major theme: in the second half of the poem, the Trojans become like Greeks, Aeneas like Achilles. The coach — who is so enamored of classical heroism as a moral compass that he changed the general football jargon term for a specific type of roving safety from "monster" to "hero" — seems not to realize that Virgil spent an entire book turning his hero into a monster.

Lessingham spends the rest of the essay unpacking that transformation and then tying to it Paterno's own downfall. So read on for the exciting conclusion.