2 At the very least, the broad outlines of Virgil s conception of A. suggest that we should not expect Aeneas mission to culminate in a message of hop

Transcription

1 1 Aeneid Soon after Virgil s death and the publication of A., an improbable story arose one of the many fictions about his life that he, on his deathbed and unhappy with his unfinished epic, ordered for A. to be burned (see: Aeneid, burning of ). Only the intervention of Augustus himself saved it from the flames. It is a good story, the origin of which we can see in the fifty-seven or so half lines scattered throughout the poem and in a few other apparently contradictory details that a close and pedantic reading can find or imagine. Whatever Virgil s final instructions might actually have been, his literary executors, Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca, would have found and published a substantially complete and polished work, which lacked only the poet s summa manus finishing touch. A., like E. and G., evolved as an organic whole over the years during which Virgil worked on it. As the grand design clarified, its parts and details became more complex. It is clear from the extraordinary unity of imagery and themes that Virgil did not compose the twelve books sequentially, but rather, once the design emerged, he revisited and shaped related passages into a wonderfully coherent whole. It is also clear despite Aelius Donatus, the fourthcentury grammarian who alleges Virgil s desire to have the incomplete epic burnt that no passage, no line was left propped up temporarily with a makeshift word or phrase: the half lines themselves attest to this. A lesser poet would have completed them just as easily as later wits did. Pl an of A. A. most obviously confronts Homer s Iliad and Odyssey ; but it is an epic of Rome that also engages the Hellenistic epos (see Hellenistic poetry; Rome, myth and history of ). From these three main sources Virgil created an entirely new poem. War [literally, arms] and a hero [literally, man] I sing ( A. 1.1): Virgil begins with the first words of the Iliad ( The wrath ) and of the Odyssey ( The man ); and, very generally, the first six books recount the wanderings of Aeneas and his Trojans and the last six the war in Latium. The seven-line movement of the proem begins with Troy abandoned by the hero and ends with Rome and its lofty walls. This is to be, then, not just a revision of Homer, but a Roman epic. The thematic scope of the poem (from Troy to Rome) is so clearly and grandly established that it is easy to overlook the obvious, that the city the hero is to found, bringing his gods to Latium, is not, of course, Rome, which will arise only years later, after the Alban kings. And it is easy to overlook the fact that Virgil s modern hero exists only in an emptiness of both time and place, somewhere between his lost home and the distant expectation of a new city, about which he can know nothing. This is Virgil s new hero, an exile indeed. Virgil would have seen Homer s plan, just as we do, to be the creation of an epic of war and destruction of a city, followed by an epic of return and reestablishment of social order, family, and peace. Virgil s plan is to achieve an inversion of this. His hero starts from the loss of home, social order, and his beloved wife, and he experiences seven years of wandering until, after losing his father, he arrives finally in a land of hostility and war. The anger of Poseidon (see Neptune ) drove Odysseus (see Ulysses ) only until his return to Ithaca ; but in A. Juno does not put aside her savage wrath (announced at A. 1.4) until the poem s very end ( A ). Virgil s plan for the first six books is also revealing. They alternate between books of the sea ( A. 1, 3, 5) and books of the land ( A. 2, 4, 6). The sea is hostile (the storm in A. 1; see storms ) and inhospitable, unstable (the wanderings in A. 3), and transitory ( A. 5 begins and ends at sea and looks to the past and Troy). But, if we expect stability and certainty in the books of the land, we will be disappointed. A. 2 recounts the fall of Troy in a night of fire, deception, and error; A. 4 similarly tells of the parallel deception of Dido and ends with the flames of her pyre (see pyres) ; and A. 6 deals with the Trojans arrival in Italy and with Aeneas journey to the shades in the underworld (see ghosts ). The Virgil Encyclopedia, First Edition. Edited by Richard F. Thomas and Jan M. Ziolkowski John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

2 2 At the very least, the broad outlines of Virgil s conception of A. suggest that we should not expect Aeneas mission to culminate in a message of hope and glory. Major themes E. was concerned primarily with place in the present, both real and idealized. G. extended place (the farm) so that it became the cosmos, Italy being its focus, and also extended the temporal scope, from the creation through various stages to the present an extraordinary conception, with humanity at its center. In A. Virgil considerably narrowed his vision to Rome through its history and to an individual, Aeneas; because of this focus we (just like Virgil s contemporary reader) see the past as Troy and the future as Rome, whose foundation is still some centuries away. Thus, in a striking respect, Virgil s hero is unlike any previous epic hero: it is as if he did not exist in either time or place. His past (Troy) has been destroyed and remains to him only as a succession of remembered images, and of the future city he can know nothing but what he learns through revelation: insubstantial images of promise and hope. For Augustan Romans, Troy had acquired a certain presence through its carefully exploited connections with the Julian family: Julius Caesar and his adopted nephew Octavian, known after 27 bce as Augustus. The gens Iulia, originally from Alba Longa, traced its lineage back through the Alban kings to Iulus ( Ascanius ) and to his father, the Trojan Aeneas, son of Venus. Conveniently, then, when Caesar built the first imperial forum at Rome, he anchored it with the temple of Venus Genetrix, the ultimate ancestor of his family and of Rome. Prominent in this iconography was the representation of Aeneas fleeing from Troy, carrying on his shoulders his father Anchises with the city s gods, and leading his young son by the hand the perfect image of Augustan pietas : duty to family, gods, and country, embodied in the pius pious Aeneas (see flight from Troy in art ). This, together with much else, was the Augustan representation of Troy, Aeneas being the critical link with which Virgil began. A number of other Troys appear in the epic, however: a varied set of images of remembered ideals. Aeneas is driven by a mission to found a new city for his people in a foreign land a new Troy, as he thinks. But a new Troy cannot be, as Jupiter tells Juno at the end ( A ), for the attempt to restore the past is futile and misguided. In one of the poem s most moving episodes, Aeneas happens upon Andromache s restoration of Troy (A ); but this is merely, and sadly, an empty image of the old city, complete with a cenotaph of Troy s greatest hero, her husband Hector. The new Simois River is false ( A ; see rivers ); Hector s tomb is indeed empty ( A ; see graves and tombs ); and Andromache herself lives a life that died years before a life devoted to grief for her son and to an ideal of heroism that cannot be, and perhaps never was. The reality of heroic Troy is sometimes set vividly before us. We meet it first when Hector, mutilated and bloody, appears to Aeneas in a dream in Troy s last night, telling him to flee (see dreams ). So changed is this Hector from the hero of the great deeds that Aeneas hardly recognizes him ( A ). The Deïphobus whom Aeneas meets in the underworld is very similar not the great warrior descended from Teucer, as Aeneas greets him ( A ), but a real, mutilated, disfigured shade. So, too, are the scenes from the Trojan War that Aeneas sees on Juno s temple at Carthage ( A ) none of the glory, but all of the waste and shame, the senseless destruction wrought by a very unheroic Achilles. Finally we see Achilles son Pyrrhus, in an inversion of the heroic ideal, slaughtering Priam s defenseless son Polites a human sacrifice at the central altar in Priam s palace before the faces of his parents (see ante ora parentum ), and then the beheading of the king himself ( A ). But A. is not, of course, simply a reworking of Homer. Aeneas is a Roman hero, a man on a grand mission. There are three prophecies of the Rome to be (see prophecy ): first, Jupiter assures Venus that the promise of her future city is not in danger ( A ); second, Anchises in the underworld shows his son the Parade of Heroes ( A ) ; and, finally, Venus shows her son the representations of Roman history on Vulcan s shield ( A ; see shield of Aeneas). Each of these scenes is, significantly, the attempt of a parent to console and encourage a child at a time of crisis, and each is specifically associated with, or forthrightly called, deception.

3 3 Jupiter s revelation in A. 1 is relatively simple in outline: it consists of announcing Aeneas rule in Italy for three years, which is to be followed by Iulus rule at Lavinium for thirty, by his founding of Alba Longa, and by the three hundred years of Alban kings, until Romulus founds Rome; then the eventual rule of Troianus Caesar (Julius) and pax Augusta peace under Augustus come (though the latter is not named as such). The somewhat petulant Venus is assured and Mercury is immediately dispatched to Carthage to deceive Dido, keeping her ignorant of destiny ( A ). Anchises review begins with the Alban kings, Romulus, and Rome s glory (there is a chronologically odd intrusion of Augustus at this point; see Aeneid, chronology of ), and then it goes on to show the Roman kings and the figures of the Republic, ending with the warring Julius and Pompey. Finally, on Vulcan s shield Aeneas sees Romulus, Remus, and the kings of Rome (see Romulus and Remus ); scenes from the Republic; and, in the center of the shield, Augustus at Actium. All these previews are rich in detail and complex in significance. There is the glory to come, most certainly, as in Jupiter s pronouncement I have granted rule without end ( A ), or when Anchises points somehow to Rome itself, on its seven hills ( A ; see hills of Rome, seven ). Yet there is also war and violence, which are present at the founding and continue throughout Julius civil wars, while peace is to come only with Augustus and after Actium (see civil war ). Such is the character of the city. Having revealed Rome s clari viri famous men as a parade of mixed blessings, Anchises then purposely sends Aeneas and the Sibyl back to the world above through the ivory gate of falsa insomnia false dreams ( A ; see Gates of Sleep ). And, when Aeneas lifts Vulcan s shield the fateful history of his people ( A ) he does so in ignorance, glad only in the image of history ( A ). The reader, too, must look forward to these images of Roman history in ignorance, like Aeneas. A. is a poem about time, past and future; both of these aspects of time are human constructions of hope and glory without substance, images that project ideals and therefore turn out so often to be deceptions, like Andromache s Troy. Latin words meaning image, shade, dream, and the like simulacrum, umbra, somnus /somnium, and imago occur frequently throughout the poem; frequent too are occurrences of the forms of fallere (whence falsus ) to deceive. When Creüsa s ghost appears to Aeneas, it is emphatically marked as a simulacrum, an umbra, and an imago (A ). Aeneas greets his father in the underworld as the tristis imago grim shade ( A ) that had often summoned him to the land below. When Aeneas attempts in vain to embrace the shade of his father and the ghost of his wife, Virgil repeats the same three lines ( A = A , a unique repetition ): Three times he stretched out his arms in an embrace, and three times the image ( imago ), grasped in vain, escaped his hands, very like a gentle breeze or a fleeting dream ( somno ). Aeneas mother is similarly elusive: at Libya Venus appears to her son in an almost comical disguise (A ), justly evoking Aeneas bitter parting words to her, quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis ludis imaginibus? Why do you, cruel too, so often mock and deceive your son with false images? ( A ; see embraces; mothers; Libya and Libyci ). Night is a frequent setting for deception throughout, and the coming of dawn (no mere Homeric formula in Virgil; see Aurora ) often dispels the blindness and error of the dark. Sinon s deceit sets up Troy s fall in A. 2, but it is played out in the darkness of night, in which the Trojans are frequently blinded and deceived; dawn finally comes at the end of the book, as Aeneas, his father on his shoulders, departs ( A ). The passage through the underworld occurs at night, as the Sibyl frequently reminds Aeneas. Conversely, at the beginning of A. 7, the pure light of dawn breaks forth in an extraordinarily naturalistic setting, complete with bird song, as Aeneas arrives at last at the mouth of the Tiber (A ; see birds ). But the most extensive and complex passage about night, blindness, and deception is the night raid of Nisus and Euryalus ( A ). Seduced by the desire for glory, which in the dark of night turns into lust for slaughter and spoils, and trusting the night, they lose their way in their mad violence, wandering finally as if lost in a maze (see especially the verbal complex in A ) and are killed and beheaded just before the sun rises ( A ).

4 4 Heroism ( virtus ) is an ideal shared by both Troy and Rome, so long as it is in balance; but if, like a physical body becoming ill, it becomes unbalanced, what results is furor madness, as the Nisus and Euryalus episode illustrates so powerfully. In the Iliad each traditional hero in turn has his moment of inspired excellence (see aristeia ) : the greatest hero, Achilles, fired by Hector s killing of Patroclus, has his in Iliad 20 21, slaughtering the Trojans indiscriminately, until he fights the Xanthus River itself and is transformed into pure fire, an elemental opposition. Aeneas aristeia (A ) reenacts Achilles rage, and the vocabulary of fire and furor is present throughout. Aeneas, driven to madness by Turnus killing of Pallas, captures eight Rutuli for later (human) sacrifice at Pallas funeral; he refuses appeals on grounds of pietas ; he slaughters a priest and two brothers and beheads a figure of sylvan innocence, repeatedly denying burial and taunting his victims (see priests ). He is compared to Aegaeon ( A ), a hundred-handed, fire-belching Giant (always the paradigm of brute irrationality and violence), who fought against Jupiter and who appears as Briareus among the monsters at the entrance to the underworld ( A ; see Giants ). Aeneas pietas has been completely inverted in his aristeia, reminding us of Achilles son Neoptolemus (Greek for new warrior, an alternative name for Pyrrhus) in A. 2. Heroic virtus can easily become furor. So too can the fire of love become madness. Dido s initial fascination with Aeneas heroic qualities ( A ) soon becomes the subtle flame of love, burning unseen within and eventually driving her to madness and to a terrible isolation. Throughout A. 4 the imagery of love s fire and wound recurs again and again, as furor and insania insanity overwhelm another victim (see wounds ). En Priamus. sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt There s Priam. Even here heroism has its rewards, there are tears for the human condition, and we realize our very mortality ( A ). So Aeneas to Achates, as he views the scenes of war on the wall of Juno s temple at Carthage; and indeed, deeply moved, he weeps copiously ( A , 1.470; see weeping ). There are tears throughout Virgil s poem, often too late and always futile, as those intentionally ambiguous tears: mens immota manet, lacrimae volvuntur inanes his intention remains unchanged, but tears fall, uselessly ( A ; see ambiguity ). Ultimately man is mortal, and in A. tears are the final response to his brief moment between the images of past and future. The characters Aeneas invites misunderstanding. Ever so often he has been seen as wooden, unfeeling, not overly bright, a mere puppet controlled by divinity or fate. There are good reasons for such conclusions, but they are based on an incomplete understanding of Virgil s new hero. What is hardest to come to terms with about Aeneas is simply that there is not very much that he, the epic s hero, can actually do. Our first sight of him, and his first words, show this clearly ( A ): with a characteristic groan of despair he wishes he could have died fighting at Troy, and he names Diomedes, Hector, and Sarpedon (two of whom died at Troy and recognized the futility of heroic duty). Shipwrecked and still despairing, he encourages his own men ( A ), reworking a speech that Odysseus delivered in similar circumstances and reminding them that they have experienced harder trials, that now they must go on to Latium (see speeches ). But then, in conclusion, Virgil lets us see his new hero: Such were his words, and sick at heart with huge care he feigns hope outwardly but suppresses his anguish deep within ( A ). Virgil gives us all we really need to know about Aeneas in these first two appearances. All those closest to him, all his human contacts, are taken from him along with his city and have become ghostly shades, and, as we have seen, even with his divine mother he can share no human words in sharp contrast to the motherly affection and concern that Thetis offers her son Achilles in the Iliad. Ascanius (Iulus), too, is but a link in the chain of destiny: it is remarkable that Virgil allows no paternal instincts to intrude. Aeneas speaks to his son only once, in the final book, and then only to assert the heroic values that by this point, again and again, have proved empty ( A ): again Hector, who knew no other way than the heroic ideal but recognized its ultimate cost, is the exemplar.

5 5 There is not much Aeneas can do about his deep love for Dido either, and that is precisely the point. There ought to be no question about the depth and sincerity of his feelings for her, which Virgil can only let us see in the same way in which he lets us see the grief that Aeneas has to suppress after he encourages his men in A. 1: the love he cannot show ( A ); his grief and great love ( A ); his futile tears ( A ); and especially his anguish and regret as he meets Dido in the underworld ( A , with tears again at A , 6.468, 6.476). Once the command from on high was received, once the mission had to be resumed, the Roman hero could do nothing except watch helplessly as, yet again, unavoidable human suffering resulted. Yes, Aeneas words to Dido ( A ) are just a self-justifying legal brief he begins in legal language, I will speak a few words for my case (see law ) but this is all he is allowed to say and all he can say, only the closing half line being spoken from within ( Not by my own will do I go to Italy ): once again his own love must be hidden deep within ( A ). Dido is the first of the many victims of the Roman mission. She descends from heroines familiar from Alexandrianism, especially Apollonius of Rhodes Medea and the Ariadne of Catullus 64, deceived and abandoned by the modern hero. But Dido goes well beyond these precedents. If Aeneas must appear unfeeling, Dido is a human creation of supreme imaginative power, as her love turns to madness and, once blind, she begins to see more clearly than anyone what lies ahead for her. Ariadne may be alone on an empty shore, but Dido s ultimate isolation, cut off as she is from her sister and her people, is the terrifying finality of the furor that consumes her. Further victims await in Italy Nisus and Euryalus, Lausus, mothers and fathers, Camilla, and finally Turnus himself, falling to Aeneas final act of rage and madness. The Trojans have become the Greeks at Troy, their great enemies, as they besiege the city of Latinus, just as Aeneas becomes Achilles in his aristeia yet another of Virgil s inversions. They, though unwittingly and unwillingly, are the invaders, bringing war upon a land of Saturnian peace and harmony: Italy is another of the victims of the impersonal movement of history. What, or who, is responsible? Virgil doesn t say. Certainly it is not Venus, Juno, or even Jupiter. For the most part, the gods in A. are characters too. Because they do not share in man s mortality, they live without restraint or remorse. Venus is interested only in the Roman imperium s ome day to come, caring for her son only as he is necessary to this future glory. Juno is the distillation of spite and petty jealousy: her actions have consequences only for the sufferers below. Jupiter, for one pathetic moment, actually does feel pity for human sorrow and death, as he thinks of Sarpedon, his offspring, dead at Troy, and as Hercules sheds lacrimas inanes futile tears for Pallas, who is about to die ( A ). Elsewhere, though, it is business as usual, Jupiter as the abstraction of pure political power. Likewise, Virgil s fate is most often simply a convenient term for what happened, not a philosophical concept. Fate is the way the world rolled on, unconcerned for what the results might entail. The poem A. is a poem. It is not a work of moral philosophy or of theology, nor is it a political apology, nor does it deal with historical causation. Simply, Virgil was not concerned with questions of right or wrong, or with justifying the gods ways to empire, or with what might have, or should have, happened. As a poet, he was moved by the way things are and was concerned to extend our awareness of life as it is, through words and images and the constructions of previous poets. Virgil was a poet in the tradition of Callimachus and the other Alexandrians, of the Roman new poets (Catullus and Calvus especially; see neotericism ), and as a young man had been a student of the learned Parthenius and a friend of the elegist Cornelius Gallus : to write a historical epic, one continuous relation of kings and battles, was programmatically unthinkable (see, e.g., the Callimachean recusatio at E ). To understand Virgil s poem, then, we must start from this poetic premise: that it simply cannot have been conceived as an Ennian historical epic for Augustan readers (see annalistic tradition, Roman; Ennius ). Virgil lived during a time of real change, when the chaos and everyday violence of a century of unrest and civil war culminated in

6 6 Caesar s brief dominance, in Octavian s unlikely emergence as the sole power remaining after the defeat of Antony at Actium in 31 bce, and in the façade of peace after his restoration of Republican order. E. are poems of imagined calm in which, however, the reality of chaos intrudes; and G., which (we must remind ourselves) evolved in the years before Actium, conclude with the inevitability of universal disorder and the consequent storms in the microcosms of the farm and the state. A. came into being during those first groping attempts by Augustus and his advisors to convince the Roman world that order and the values of old Rome had been restored (ca bce ), but (again we must remind ourselves) well before the high Augustan iconography of the Ara Pacis or the Forum Augustum. Given Virgil s own experience, have we any reason or right to expect to find in his poem anything more than the hope of peace in Roman Italy? A. follows naturally from the poetic worlds of E. and G. The great themes remained the same for Virgil throughout his life, basic and simple as they were: the furor that dominates in human experience, in love and war, and that dominates, too, in our world and in the universe; the balance of the elements that allows pastoral peace, the farmer s productivity, political harmony, and the heroic ideals of virtus and pietas ; and the imbalance of the same elements that inevitably destroys all, as pastoral warmth becomes the fire of disease (see plague ) and the sting of the gadfly, or as Saturnian Italy is tipped into the madness of war. These themes, and many others, are Virgil s constant poetic explorations and reflections, the changing patterns of images, the imagines of history and of the human condition. Further Reading Camps, W.A An Introduction to Virgil s Aeneid. Oxford : Oxford University Press. Clausen, W.V Virgil s Aeneid and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry. Berkeley : University of California Press. Commager, S., ed Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice-Hall. See especially the essays of W. Clausen, A. Parry, B. Knox, and R. Brooks. Heinze, R Virgil s Epic Technique. Berkeley : University of California Press. Jackson Knight, W.F Roman Vergil. London : Faber and Faber. Johnson, W.R Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil s Aeneid. Berkeley : University of California Press. Lyne, R.O.A.M Further Voices in Vergil s Aeneid. Oxford : Oxford University Press. Lyne, R.O.A.M Words and the Poet: Characteristic Techniques of Style in Vergil s Aeneid. Oxford : Oxford University Press. Otis, B Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry. Oxford : Oxford University Press. Putnam, M.C.J The Poetry of the Aeneid. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Ross, D.O Virgil s Aeneid: A Reader s Guide. Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishing. david o. ross