14
My state must not be lacking in art; the peace that I am
establishing is in need of art as much as that of Pericles, who
gloriously crowned his by building the sky-towering Acropolis.
Caesar Augustus, speaking in H. Broch, The Death of Virgil1
Augustus’ Principate was Rome’s ‘Golden Age’ of literary creativity. Horace, Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus and Livy all wrote at that time, but the poet Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) stands out even against this stellar background. Virgil was also at the sharp end of the political events of his time, and his work not only reflects the ideas and ideals of the Augustan Age, but had a role to play in creating them.
Virgil was born near Mantua in 70 BCE. A fourth century CE Life of Virgil tells us that he was tall, dark and rustic-looking, had a number of health issues, didn’t eat or drink much, and was given to passions for boys. He had a narrow escape during the proscriptions of the Second Triumvirate, but he eventually became an extremely rich man, friendly with Augustus himself. He worked by dictating a large number of improvized lines in the morning, and then spending the rest of the day refining them. His unfinished masterpiece the Aeneid, started in 30 BCE, acquired celebrity stature almost from its inception. Augustus pestered Virgil to show it to him and, when he did read some extracts, one line caused Augustus’ sister Octavia to faint with emotion. By 19BCEVirgil had allocated three years to the final polishing of the Aeneid, but he fell ill in Greece, and died at Brundisium that October.
Virgil had asked his friend Lucius Varius to burn the Aeneid if anything befell him, but Varius published it at Augustus’ request. It acquired ‘classic’ status soon after his death: the satirist Juvenal bewails the fate of the schoolteacher working in a shed with smoking lamps so that ‘every Virgil is grimed with lampblack’;2 schoolboys in Roman Egypt studied him; and the opening lines of the Aeneid were frequently scrawled on the walls of Pompeii as graffiti.
The Aeneid is written in 12 books of between 705 and 952 lines of hexameter verse. It is based around the legend of the establishment of the Roman race. Aeneas, a Trojan who was also a mythical ancestor of Augustus, escaped when the Greeks sacked Troy, and his destiny was to lead a small group of survivors to Italy and prepare the ground for Rome, ultimately to become the ruler of the world.
‘Talent borrows, genius steals’, and right at the beginning of the Aeneid Virgil acknowledges his influences by ‘imitating’ the beginnings of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey with the immortal words Arma virumque cano, ‘I sing of war and the hero’. This tells us that his poem is both an Iliad – a story of war (arma)3 – and an Odyssey – the story of a hero/man’s (virum) adventures: in Homer’s Greek, ‘man’ is the first word of the Odyssey, and the man is defined, by both Homer and Virgil, in a relative clause ‘who …’. But the men are very different: Homer’s is trying to survive and get his comrades home; Virgil’s is trying to found a city and march his gods into new territory. It is also noticeable that whereas Homer seeks his Muse’s inspiration, Virgil confidently starts in the first person: ‘I tell’. Virgil’s opening five lines reflect the opening sentence of the Odyssey, but Virgil’s sentence is seven lines long – just like that of the Iliad — and Virgil has further synthesized Homer’s two opening sentences by arranging them in a chiasmus (a crosswise ABBA arrangement where the order of the second phrase inverts that of the first).
Additionally the key deities are included too: ‘the will of Zeus’ in line five of the Iliad is picked up by ‘the brooding anger of Juno’ in Virgil’s fourth line. So Books 1 to 6 of the Aeneid become Virgil’s Odyssey, whose itinerant hero is defined by the relative clause of line one (‘who’ first from Troy’s frontier, displaced by destiny, came to the Lavinian shore), and Books 7 to 12 become his Iliad, whose martial hero is defined by the participial phrase of lines 5–7 (‘suffering much in war’ until he could found a city and march his gods into Latium). This kind of literary trickery is going on right through the Aeneid.
Homer and the Aeneid share the hexameter metre; a distinctive vocabulary; similes; the divine machinery; major incidents such as storms, games, a journey to the Underworld, night raids and duels. But Virgil is not ‘ripping Homer off’: he is alluding, evoking and challenging, in exactly the same way as contemporary rappers do. His approach is very close in ethos to that of the Hellenistic Greek scholar-poets, whose work is crammed with allusions to pre-existing material: Kallimakhos wrote, ‘I sing of nothing that hasn’t been sung about before.’4 Yet Virgil is definitively Roman, and highly original. What at first appears to be straightforward comparisons and likenesses often betray significant differences beneath the surface. So although parallels are set up between, say, Aeneas and Odysseus, they are actually very different: ‘wily’ Odysseus is a great individualist; pius Aeneas (regularly translated ‘god-fearing’, ‘good-hearted’ and ‘the true’) is not – his overriding quality is the quintessentially Roman pietas, a sense of duty to your gods, state and family. So although much of the Aeneid comes out of Homer, nothing is the same any more: I sing; I am Roman; I am Virgil.
The narrative jumps in at the point where, seven years into their wanderings, Aeneas and his Trojans have reached Sicily. However, Juno, whose hatred of Trojans goes back to losing the Judgement of Paris to Aeneas’ mother Venus, embroils them in a storm. Aeneas’ destiny is both divinely ordained and divinely opposed. Neptune steps in and calms the sea like a respected man of pietas calming a mob seething with furor ( = ‘violence/hysteria/madness/frenzy/loss of rational control’). Aeneas himself will have to confront furor with pietas, but, as his mother testily observes, his pietas is not getting him very far. When she challenges Jupiter about this, he gives her a prophecy about the glittering future of the Romans: ‘To these I set no bounds, either in time or space; Unlimited power I give them.’5
Venus guides the Trojan ships to Carthage in North Africa and conveys Aeneas to the city in a cloud. There he is hospitably received by Queen Dido. Carthage now has many impressive completed infrastructure projects, including a temple of Juno that is adorned with scenes of the Trojans’ ordeals, but Dido and her people also acknowledge ‘tears for human suffering’,6 even if Dido has already achieved much of what Aeneas will have to do. He respects her greatly for this.
Venus then makes Dido fall in love, and at an opulent banquet she asks Aeneas to tell her about his wanderings. What she gets is an intense eye-witness account of Troy’s last night, as Aeneas begins with the Wooden Horse, which is now one of the incidents most commonly associated with the Troy story, but did not play a particularly prominent part in the Greek literary tradition – it only assumes massive importance through Virgil’s poetry. The Greeks had pretended it was a votive offering for their safe return, but filled it with their finest warriors and sailed away to the nearby island of Tenedos, as though they had abandoned their campaign. However, they did leave Sinon behind to signal to them with a beacon.
The Trojans assumed that the siege was over, despite the suspicions of the priest Laocoon, who tried to stop them taking the Horse into the city. It was he who told the Trojans to ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’,7 and he thrust his spear into the Horse to prove that it was hollow. However, Sinon, pretending to be a deserter, persuaded them that it was a bona fide offering, and his evidence seemed to be corroborated when two enormous serpents emerged from the sea, made straight for Laocoon and his two small sons, crushed them all in their coils, devoured their flesh with their venomous fangs, and slithered away to Troy’s citadel. The Trojans misguidedly interpreted these horrors as punishment for advising against accepting the Wooden Horse, and for spearing the goddess’s offering. They joyfully dragged the ‘engine of Fate’ into their city, although even then it might not have been too late, had anyone listened to the prophetess Cassandra. But no one ever believed her. The Trojans’ blissful sleep was shattered by violence and terror. The Greek fleet moved in from Tenedos; Sinon released the warriors; the city gates were flung open; and the Greeks swarmed in.
The fall of Troy, seen from Aeneas’ perspective, was not a wonderfully heroic feat, but a tale of brutality, murder, rape and enslavement. Hector’s ghost told him to escape, but Aeneas was still thinking like a Homeric hero: he believed death in battle to be a good thing. Yet his life was not his own to throw away. The sheer savagery of the Greek assault was rammed home in the repulsive slaughter of Priam. Aeneas was a helpless bystander as the old king, who was taking refuge at an altar, watched Achilles’ son Pyrrhusslaughter his son Polites. Priam cast his spear at Pyrrhus, but his throw was too weak. After taunting him, Pyrrhus dragged him by the hair through a pool of his own son’s blood, right up to the altar, and buried his sword in his side: ‘His tall body was left lying headless on the shore, and by it the head hacked from his shoulders: a corpse without a name.’8 Aeneas would have killed Helen if Venus had not intervened, and told him that the fall of Troy was fated. She showed him a supernatural vision of the gods destroying the walls of Troy, and ordered him to collect his family and leave. His old father, Anchises, initially refused to go, and again Aeneas expressed his desire to die at Troy, but when a flame appeared like a halo around his son Ascanius’ head without harming him, and a shooting star flashed across the night sky and landed on Mount Ida, he knew he must escape.
His pietas then shined through as he carried Anchises on his shoulders, and led Ascanius through the carnage to safety. Sadly his wife Creusa got lost in the confusion, and Aeneas endangered himself yet again by trying to find her, but her ghost re-emphasized that a new fate awaited the Trojans under his leadership, in the shape of a new city in Italy, destined one day to rule the world. Virgil concluded the meeting with a memorable image lifted from Homer, where Odysseus had tried to embrace the ghost of his mother:
Three times I tried to put my arms round her neck, and three times
The phantom slipped my hands, my vain embrace: it was like
Grasping a wisp of wind or the wings of a fleeting dream.9
Aeneas finally accepted defeat and headed for the hills.
Dido then learns about Aeneas’ years of wandering. The Trojans set sail, landing at Thrace, various Cycladic islands and Crete, where Apollo prophesied that their final goal was Hesperia, from where Dardanus, one of the founders of the Trojan race, originally sprang. They then survived a storm, negotiated the islands of the Harpies, and received a prophecy from the Harpy Celaeno to the effect that they would not be given a city before they had been forced to gnaw round the edges of their tables.10
On they went, past Zacynthus, Dulichium, Same, Neritos and Ithaca, and then, in a transparent reference to Augustus’ victory over Antony and Cleopatra, they celebrated games at Actium. From there they headed for Buthrotum in Epirus, where they encountered Hector’s ex-wife Andromache, now married to the Trojan prophet Helenus, living in an imitation Troy. Helenus prophesied that the place for their city would be a spot by a river, under some holm-oaks on the shore, where they would find a great white sow with a litter of thirty all-white piglets.
Westwards they went again, near the Ceraunian Rocks, making a brief landfall in southern Italy, and, thanks to Palinurus’ expert seamanship, safely avoiding Charybdis. Arriving in Sicily near Etna, they encountered the Cyclopes and rescued Achaemenides, a survivor of Odysseus’ encounter with the monster. Again, Virgil lets us see the similarities and differences between Odysseus (full of prowess and ingenuity; very proactive) and Aeneas (full of horror and suffering; often passive). Having put to sea in haste, the voyagers managed to avoid Scylla and Charybdis (again), and then sailed clockwise around Sicily to Drepanum on the west. It is here that Aeneas’ father Anchises died. With a brief mention of the storm that drove them to Carthage, Aeneas brings us back to where the narrative started in Book 1.
Although Virgil has used the Medea of the poet Apollonius Rhodius and the Ariadne of Catullus as models, along with various heroines of Greek tragedy, the version of the Dido mythology that he presents in Book 4 is very much his own. So far we have seen that she is beautiful, happy, brave, dynamic and kind. But after Aeneas’ story she is overwhelmed with passion and cannot sleep and, as dawn breaks, she talks about it to her sister Anna. However, she does not want to be unfaithful to the memory of her dead husband, Sychaeus, no matter how tempting a prospect Aeneas might be. Anna, though, comes up with a number of persuasive arguments for starting a relationship with him. Her words are persuasive; Dido stops dithering; she is ablaze with passion, compared in a simile to a deer that has been accidentally and unknowingly shot and wounded by a shepherd hunting in the woods; she cannot bear to be without Aeneas; she becomes clingy when she is with him; and yearns frantically when she is not.
All the building work in Carthage grinds to a halt, and during the lull Juno offers Venus a truce and a deal: she will let Aeneas marry Dido, and Carthage will be the dowry. This is a fairly transparent trick to make Carthage all-powerful, but, although Venus seesthrough it, she still accepts. The next day a hunting party assembles, and Dido finally appears in her full exotic royal splendour, decked out in purple and gold; Aeneas joins her, as radiant and graceful as Apollo. On the mountains they find deer in abundance, and little Ascanius has the time of his life.
Then a storm breaks; the torrential downpour makes Aeneas and Dido take shelter in a cave; and amid thunder and lightning and wailing nymphs – with all the forces of nature and the supernatural imitating the events of a real wedding ceremony – Dido and Aeneas consummate their passion. But what Aeneas regards as enjoyable casual sex, Dido interprets as serious commitment. It is the beginning of a tragedy.
Rumour – personified as a terrifying monster covered with eyes, tongues and ears – now flies through Libya spreading the gossip, the most significant recipient of which is Dido’s spurned suitor, Iarbas, the son of Jupiter/Ammon. He furiously taunts his father for allowing him to be scorned by a foreign woman and an eastern adventurer, and his prayers hit home. Jupiter orders Mercury to remind Aeneas about his great mission, and to add the guilt-trip that if Aeneas’ own ambition is dead, he has no right to ruin his son’s hopes. Mercury responds with alacrity. He swoops down to the coast of Libya, and what he sees is a shocking sight: Aeneas is supervising the building of Carthage, dressed in a cloak that Dido has given him; he should be building Rome wearing a toga. Mercury’s message puts Aeneas in a terrible situation: he has to obey (he is Mr Pius), but breaking the news to Dido is going to be difficult. He genuinely loves her, but, by trying to soften the blow, he makes the situation far, far worse. Hoping that he will be able to find a good time to tell her, he orders the fleet to prepare to sail.
Aeneas and Dido have both made mistakes that countless ill-starred lovers have made ever since: she mistook sex for commitment; he waited for the perfect time to tell her it was over, but someone else told her first. When Dido hears the inevitable rumours of what is happening she confronts Aeneas before he can get a word in. She tries all manner of emotional manipulation to get him to stay; he remembers Jupiter’s warning, suppresses his churning emotions, and responds directly and assertively. Virgil only gives him this one chance to get it right, and where her appeal was to the heart, his is to the head. He acknowledges his debt to her, and says that he can never forget her, but he protests that he never planned to mislead her or to marry her. He tells her about Mercury’s orders, and concludes by saying: ‘It is not by my own will that I search for Italy’. Modern readers frequently pour scorn on him for this, but he has to choose between pietas and passion, and it tears him apart. He certainly has wronged Dido, but he did not deceive her; tragically, she has deceived herself.
Dido clearly does not believe all the stuff about ‘oracles’ and ‘messengers from heaven’, and her response is one of unmitigated scorn and rage. When she faints and is carried away by her maids, Aeneas prepares to sail. Dido comes round, sends Anna to ask him at least to stay until the weather is fair, but like an Alpine oak battered by the north winds, Aeneas remains firm.
Dido now prays for death, and her resolve is strengthened by uncanny portents. To keep Anna in the dark about her true intentions, she pretends to have consulted a sorceress, who has advised her to erect a pyre and burn every memorial of Aeneas, in the hope of either winning him back or curing her passion. The completely unsuspecting Anna helps her build it.
During the night Mercury appears to Aeneas in a dream and warns him with the notorious line ‘a woman is an unstable and changeable thing’ that Dido could be dangerous.11 He puts the fleet to sea immediately, and as dawn breaks Dido sees the Trojan ships and realizes it is too late. She prays that if Aeneas must reach Italy, that it should be with a curse upon him and all his descendants:
I pray that we may stand opposed, shore against shore, sea against sea and sword against sword. Let there be war between the nations and between their sons for ever.12
These references to hostilities between Dido’s and Aeneas’ people and his are to Hannibal and the Punic wars.
Dido sends Sychaeus’ old nurse Barce to ask Anna to bring everything for the magic rite. She then climbs on to the pyre and draws a sword that Aeneas once gave her. Her final words add up to a statement that just as she has been great in life, so she will be great in death. Then she falls on the sword. There is blood everywhere. Anna rushes to Dido, reproaching her, but also blaming herself; her feelings turn to love and pity; she tries to staunch Dido’s wound with her own dress; Dido tries to lift her eyes, but cannot; after three unsuccessful attempts to raise herself up, she falls back with a groan of agony; Juno sends Iris down from Olympus to end her pain; Iris takes a lock of her hair as the Death-god’s due, and releases her soul from her body.
As Aeneas and his men sail away from Carthage, watching the flames from Dido’s pyre on the horizon, they are unaware of what has transpired. Another storm then forces Aeneas to revisit Sicily, where he visits his father’s tomb and celebrates games in his honour. These games are based on the funeral games of Patroclus in the Iliad, but they also have a special contemporary interest, primarily in respect of Augustus’ Actian Games. The boat race is contested by men who will become ancestors of great Roman families; and in the foot race Nisus deliberately trips Salius so that his dear friend Euryalus can win. Aeneas needs a good deal of tact to deal with the damaged egos, and he also exercises shrewd judgement when he intervenes to prevent the mighty boxing champion Dares being unexpectedly battered to death by the veteran Entellus. Finally, an archery contest ends in a miraculous omen when Acestes’ arrow bursts into flames and leaves a trail of fire until it fades into thin air like a shooting star. The games are rounded off with a glittering ceremonial cavalry parade of boys, led by Ascanius, but the event is interrupted when some disaffected Trojan women try to set fire to the fleet. Jupiter saves all but four of the vessels by sending a rain storm, but the incident is such a shattering blow to Aeneas’ self-confidence that it requires the appearance of his father’s ghost to persuade him to carry on. The death of the helmsman Palinurus, who is lost overboard during the night, affects a neat transition to the next book: Aeneas’ journey to the Underworld.
The Trojans land at Cumae in Italy, where Aeneas goes to the temple of Apollo to request that the Trojans should be allowed to settle in the country. The priestess of the temple is the prophetic Sibyl, and the famous Sibylline Books of prophesies were said to have been bought from a Sibyl of Cumae by King Tarquinius Superbus, so when Aeneas vows to build a temple to Apollo where the Sibyl’s oracles will be deposited, Virgil is making an obvious reference to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine hill dedicated by Augustus in memory of Actium, to which he had the Sibylline Books transferred. Once again, the historical perspective is deliberately distorted: we are in two different periods at once.
Aeneas asks the Sibyl if he can go down to the Underworld (the entrance is close by) and visit the ghost of Anchises. She grants his wish, instructs him to find a Golden Bough, which will act as his ‘ticket’ to the Underworld, and then behaves like a high-quality tourist guide as Aeneas undergoes all the traditional experiences of the trip. He goes past various personified abstractions such as Grief, Death, Perverted Pleasures, War and Discord, and then sees various mythical monsters – Centaurs, the Hydra of Lerna, the Chimaera, Gorgons and so on. Next he comes across the first of four groups of variously categorized ghosts that each contains a significant person from his past. This group comprises shades of the unburied, pathetically begging to be allowed to cross the River Styx. In rather cinematic fashion, Virgil moves from the wider scene to a close focus on the helmsman, Palinurus, whose body is still being tossed around in the sea. He learns that he will have a headland named after him.
Aeneas crosses the Styx in the boat of Charon, who is beautifully characterized as a filthy, unkempt jobsworth, and the Sibyl adeptly administers soporific drugs to the Underworld’s guard-dog, Cerberus. They then reach the souls of the prematurely dead, which include, in the Vales of Mourning, a number of Greek heroines who are victims of unhappy love. Dido is here, too, and with their previous roles reversed Aeneas pleads and she remains unmoved. He reiterates that it was not of his own free will that he left Carthage, but in accordance with heaven’s commands; only now does he realize that his going had brought such terrible agony to her. However, she will not even look at him, and finally vanishes into a shadowy wood to join her first husband, Sychaeus, who reciprocates her love. Aeneas weeps tears of compassion, even though he feels neither guilt nor remorse. His pietas meant that he had no alternative but to follow his destiny, but Virgil still forces him to confront his past face to face.
Beyond the Vales of Mourning are the great warriors. Virgil ‘zooms in’ on Deiphobus, the Trojan who had married Helen after the death of Paris, but who was horrifically mutilated during the fall of Troy, bringing back all the horrors and hopelessness of that terrible night. Once again Aeneas has to come to terms with his past before he can move on.
Aeneas and the Sibyl then reach a fork in the road: to the left is Tartarus, whose inhabitants have all been condemned for extreme wickedness and are receiving their traditional Greek mythological punishments. Aeneas is not allowed to go there, so he and his guide turn right, deposit the Golden Bough at the palace of Dis and enter the homes of the blessed. Everywhere on their journey so far has been grey, dingy and eerily quiet, but now they enter an area of light, colour, sound and fragrance. Aeneas finds Anchises there, conducting a survey of his future descendants. An emotional reunion follows in which Virgil uses precisely the same three lines that described Aeneas’ attempt to embrace his mother’s ghost in Book 2.
Aeneas catches sight of a multitude of souls who are awaiting reincarnation. In the light of his own unhappy experiences, he is sceptical and amazed that they should have ‘this terrible longing for the light’.13 Anchises responds by expounding the doctrine of the transmigration of souls in a style that owes much to the Roman philosophical writer Lucretius, although the subject matter is a curious mash-up of the Stoic doctrine of the ‘world spirit’ (anima mundi) with the Platonic/Orphic teaching of rebirth. The souls in question are those of eminent Romans, allowing Aeneas a vivid insight into Rome’s glorious future, which for Virgil’s audience, of course, was a celebration of Rome’s glorious past.
The ‘procession’ of souls is not organized chronologically, but, covering a period that would stretch from about 1053 to 753 BCE if viewed ‘historically’, it starts with the immediate ‘future’ with Aeneas’ last child, Silvius, and moves via four more kings of Alba Longa (Procas, Capys, Numitor and Silvius Aeneas) down to Romulus. From the traditional founder of Rome we move, via a quick mention of Julius Caesar, to Emperor Augustus:
And here, here is the man, the promised one you know of –
Caesar Augustus, son of a god, destined to rule
Where Saturn ruled of old in Latium, and there
Bring back the age of gold.14
Then Anchises goes back via several Roman kings, to the Brutus who overthrew the last Roman king Tarquinius Superbus, but whose name also recalls the Brutus who assassinated Julius Caesar. A quick mention of some old Republican-era heroes leads us torecent Roman history with Caesar (again) and Pompey. Anchises finally surveys the military successes of more distant times, finishing up with Q. Fabius Maximus Cunctator, who fought Hannibal to a standstill in Italy.
The climax of the whole passage comes when Anchises contrasts Rome’s imperial greatness with Greek cultural genius:
Let others fashion from bronze more lifelike, breathing images –
For so they shall – and evoke living faces from marble;
Others excel as orators, others track with their instruments
The planets circling in the heavens and predict when stars will appear
But, Romans, never forget that government is your medium!
Be this your art: – to practice men in the habit of peace,
Generosity to the conquered, and firmness against aggressors.15
Anchises’ survey concludes in a minor key when Aeneas asks about the soul of Marcellus, Augustus’ nephew and heir, who had in fact died in 23 BCE. Anchises tells his son not to probe into the sorrows of his kin, and laments Marcellus’ destiny. The Life of Virgiltells us that when he recited these lines to Augustus and his family, Marcellus’ mother Octavia passed out.16
Aeneas returns to the land of the living, rejoins his comrades and coasts along to the harbour of Caieta. From there the Trojans skirt the uncanny island of Circe, and reach the mouth of the River Tiber. Aeneas’ Odyssey is over; his Iliad is about to begin.
In a new evocation to the Muse Erato, Virgil speaks of a ‘greater work’ that he is now embarking on. This directly echoes the Sibyl’s prophecies of war, battles and princes driven to their deaths, not, incidentally by Fate – this ultimately is a needless, pointless conflict – but by their pride of spirit. Initially, though, all goes well. The ‘prophecy of the tables’ is fulfilled when the famished Trojans have to eat ‘open sandwiches’ and Ascanius quips: ‘Look! We are eating our tables too!’ Their travels are at an end. The next day an embassy is sent to the local King Latinus. He is the son of Faunus, god of agriculture and cattle, and he rules an austere community of farmer/soldiers, very much modelled on the way in which the Romans saw their early society. Straight away Latinus betroths his daughter Lavinia to Aeneas, in accordance with an oracle:
Do not seek to join your daughter in marriage to a Latin … Strangers will come to be your sons-in-law, and by their blood raise our name to the stars. The descendants of that stock will see the whole world turning under their feet and guided by their will.17
However, the happy situation is shattered by Juno, who enlists the Fury Allecto to breathe raging anger into Latinus’ wife Queen Amata – who desperately wants Lavinia to marry the handsome Rutulian warrior Turnus – and then into Turnus himself. Allecto inflames a group of local peasants when Ascanius shoots a stag; they demand revenge; Juno opens the Gates of War; ploughshares are turned into swords; and war begins.
Virgil provides a catalogue of the Italian contingents that rally against Aeneas. They are led by Mezentius from Etruria, a cruel scorner of the gods, and include his son Lausus, a beautiful and much more sympathetic character; Messapus; Clausus, ancestor of the Claudii; Halaesus, one of Agamemnon’s ex-soldiers, and an enemy of all things Trojan; Turnus, the fairest and tallest of them all, wearing a triple-plumed helmet with a Chimaera breathing fire from it; and Camilla, the fleet-footed, battle-hardened warrior-maidenof the Volsci. The list allows Virgil to emphasize the martial spirit of the Italians, for, although they are Aeneas’ enemies, they are also the people from whom the Romans derive their language and institutions: real Romans were far more Italian than Trojan.
The river-god Tiber comes to Aeneas in his sleep, prophesies the fulfilment of the prodigy of the white sow, and tells him to head upstream and seek out the Arcadian King Evander, who is constantly at war with the Latins. Aeneas finds the sow, sails up the Tiber and arrives at Pallanteum (later known as the Palatine, one of the Seven Hills of Rome), where he finds Evander. The king takes Aeneas round his city: it might be unimposing, but it does occupy the future site of Rome. Meanwhile, Venus uses her sexy allure to get her husband Vulcan to make divine weaponry for Aeneas. He goes to his forge under Mount Etna, and addresses the Cyclopes: ‘Give me your attention. We have arms to make for a man, a mortal warrior of high spirit.’18 The emphasis on ‘man’ is striking: Vulcan doesn’t normally work for mortals.
As the Cyclopes warm to their task, Evander promises to assist Aeneas and advises him that the Etruscans, led by Tarchon, have revolted from the oppression of Mezentius:
Why, he would even have live men bound to dead bodies,
Clamping them hand to hand and face to face – a horrible
Method of torture – so that they died a lingering death
Infected with putrefaction in that most vile embrace.19
Finally, Evander tells Aeneas that he will send his son Pallas with him. Aeneas and Pallas head off in a clatter of hooves, and just before they get to the Etruscan camp Venus appears and presents Aeneas with his fabulous armour: a helmet that pours forth flame, a death-dealing sword, a gleaming cuirass, greaves fashioned from gold and electrum, a spear, and a wonderful shield on which are depicted scenes of the story of Italy and the triumphs of the Romans.
Aeneas’ shield takes its inspiration from that of Achilles in the Iliad, but its context and imagery are very different: Achilles needs new armour, but Aeneas does not; when Achilles dons his armour, he goes out to fight for his own glory, whereas when Aeneas dons his, he puts on the future of his people; the scenes on Achilles’ shield are very generalized, those on Aeneas’ illustrate specific historical moments, such as the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, the ‘Rape of the Sabine Women’, the attack of the Gauls on Rome in 390 BCE, Catiline in the Underworld, and, in the centre, the Battle of Actium. These scenes also illustrate significant Roman virtues – faithfulness, worshipping the gods, courage in adversity and the consequences of not adhering to this code.
While all this is happening Juno sends Iris to advise Turnus and his Rutulians to assault the Trojan camp. The Trojans decline open battle, but when Turnus shifts his attention to the Trojan fleet, the goddess Cybele, whose sacred grove had provided the wood for the ships, intervenes, prompting Jupiter to transform the vessels into sea-nymphs. Frustrated and furious, Turnus delivers a speech in which he casts himself in the role of a second Menelaus (both have had their brides ‘stolen’), and practically summarizes theIliad: he has no need of Vulcan’s armour like Achilles wore, no thousand ships, no Trojan Horse. His Italians are a different prospect to Homer’s Achaeans.
During the night the two young men, Nisus and Euryalus (who we met in the foot-race at Anchises’ funeral games) try to establish contact with Aeneas. Although Nisus is older and more sensible, he makes the tragic mistake of allowing the impetuous Euryalus to accompany him. Worse, the plan evolves beyond just getting a message through to Aeneas into an ill-conceived scheme to ambush the Italians and bring back lots of booty. Initially all goes well, as Nisus and Euryalus make the first killings of the war, but, as they are heading back, a stolen helmet that Euryalus is wearing catches the moonlight and alerts a passing cavalry patrol. Euryalus is apprehended and, when Nisus tries to rescue him executed by his captors. Nisus hurls himself into the midst of the group, drives his sword into its leader’s mouth, but he is cut down.
Virgil’s narrative then turns back to the siege of the Trojan camp. Turnus destroys a fortified tower and then nine Trojans in quick succession. His brother-in-law Numanus Remulus delivers a harangue that is ‘both fit and unfit to repeat’: we Italians, he says, are hardy sons of toil, brought up as hunters, farmers and warriors well into old age; you Trojans, with your clothes dyed yellow and purple, delight in dancing and idleness – you are Phrygian women, not Phrygian men!20
Because real Romans are descended from these Trojans, such a slur cannot go unchallenged. So Ascanius shoots Numanus in the head with a Jupiter-guided arrow. Turnus manages to fight his way into the Trojan camp, but, as his victim-count moves well into double figures, he omits to open the gates to allow in his army. He gets isolated and is forced to swim across the Tiber in full armour to escape.
Back on Mount Olympus, Jupiter has summoned a council of the gods. His jealous pro-Italian wife Juno and unruly pro-Trojan daughter Venus are bickering ‘like a pair of rhetorically trained fishwives’.21 Utterly exasperated, the king of the gods declares that from now on he will remain neutral: ‘the Fates will find their way’.
While the Trojans have been fending off Turnus, Aeneas has successfully secured the support of King Tarchon, and together they sail back to the Trojan camp. We get a catalogue of the different Etruscan contingents, including the remarkable Cupavo, who commands the great ship Centaur, which itself becomes a centaur, threatening the waves with a massive rock before reverting to ship shape; Ocnus, the founder of Virgil’s home town of Mantua; and Aulestes whose ship Triton seems to merge into the sea-monster that gives it its name. As Aeneas steers his vessel through the night, the nymphs who used to be his ships appear, and their spokeswoman Cymodocea urges him to hurry back and fight.
Dawn breaks; Aeneas signals his return; the Trojans, like a flock of cranes flying before the storm winds, hurl their spears; and Turnus and the Rutulians see Aeneas with magical fire pouring from his helmet and shield. Turnus is far from overawed, though. He encourages his men to attack, and in one of Virgil’s incomplete lines, he shouts: ‘Fortune favours the bold!’22 Aeneas conducts an orderly disembarkation, but Tarchon crashes his ship and writes it off on a shoal. Turnus takes the opportunity to engage.
Now is the time for Aeneas’ first aristeia. He slaughters a series of strange or exciting ‘B-list’ adversaries, but with the arrival of the ‘A-list’ Italians – Clausus, Halaesus and Messapus – the fighting evens out. Pallas, too, has his aristeia, eradicating a dozen enemies in a variety of brutal ways. Among them were the identical twins Thymber (decapitated) and Larides (hand chopped off), and Halaesus, to whom it had been foretold that he would die by the arms of Evander – which Pallas is wearing.
The Italian Lausus restores the equilibrium, but, though he struggles to confront Pallas, Fate forbids it: both are destined to die at the hands of greater foes. For Pallas this is Turnus, whose goddess sister Juturna tells him to take Lausus’ place. The mighty Rutulian relishes the prospect: ‘Pallas is mine and mine alone. I wish his father were here to see it.’23 Turnus bears down on Pallas; the warriors exchange spear throws; Pallas grazes Turnus; but Pallas’ shield, for all its layers of iron, bronze and bull’s hide, cannot withstand the impact of Turnus’ spear, which penetrates his breastplate and then his breast. Pallas dies as he removes the spear, and the gloating Turnus strips Pallas’ heavy, ornamented sword-belt from him. Virgil intervenes in the narrative to emphasize that Turnus will come bitterly to regret doing this.
Aeneas’ response to the death of Pallas is a mixture of mad anger (furor) and pietas: this was the young man’s first battle, and Aeneas has failed in his duty of care. He engages in a second aristeia, but this time it is an orgy of ruthless, indiscriminate vengeance: he captures eight men so that he can (and will) sacrifice them at Pallas’ funeral; he kills Magus as he begs for mercy; chops down a priest of Apollo and Diana; he hacks off the shield-arm of Anxur; when he slays Tarquitus he declares that his body will remain unburied; he is compared with Aegaeon, the fire-breathing, hundred-handed, mythical adversary of Jupiter; he spears Lucagas in the groin, and then dispatches his brother Liger with the words: ‘Die now. A brother’s place is with his brother’. His onslaught lifts the siege.
The carnage makes Juno suffer a failure of nerve. She creates a phantom Aeneas, which runs away when Turnus attacks it. Turnus pursues it on to an Etruscan ship, Juno breaks the mooring ropes, the ship floats out to sea, the phantom disappears, and Turnus is left to make a despairing speech as he drifts back to his home town of Ardea. His place in the battle is taken by Mezentius. For this impious warrior his right hand and spear are his god, but his missile glances off Aeneas’ shield and kills one of the other Trojans; when pius Aeneas hurls his spear, he hits Mezentius in the groin. As the Trojan moves in for the kill, Lausus intervenes to save his father, and although a protective hail of Italian spears allows Mezentius to retreat, Aeneas buries his sword in Lausus’ chest. This seems to shock Aeneas, particularly when he recalls his love for his own father, and he is moved by an uneasy admiration for his victim. When Mezentius hears that Lausus has died, he mounts his horse Rhaebus and seeks combat, despite being so badly wounded as to stand no chance. He rides round Aeneas, showering him with missiles, until Aeneas drives his spear through the horse’s temples. When Rhaebus falls on top of Mezentius and pins him to the ground, the warrior deliberately offers his throat to the sword, and Aeneas obliges.
The Trojans now have possession of the battlefield. They erect a trophy, begin the funeral procession of Pallas, and agree to a twelve-day truce with the Italians. Rumour makes its way to Evander’s palace with the news of his son’s death. Both sides perform the due funeral rites, with the bereaved women and children cursing the war that had brought them ruin, and the betrothal of Turnus that had caused it.
The idea of resolving the war by a duel between Turnus and Aeneas had been gathering momentum since the Italians sought the truce, and now Drances, the Italian who led that embassy, but who is no friend of Turnus, tries to make it happen. Latinus, who neverwanted the war in the first place, is more conciliatory: we have land, he says, that we could give the Trojans; or we could help them to rebuild their fleet; we should send 100 envoys
holding out the branches of peace in their hands and bearing gifts, talents of gold and ivory, and the throne and robe which are the emblems of our royal power.24
But this would be tantamount to surrender, and it gives Drances, who is a typical politician, his opportunity. His argument is essentially: yes, things are bad; we all know what really needs to be done, but no one is saying it openly; the real problem is the proposed marriage of Lavinia to Aeneas, which is why Turnus started the war – so Turnus himself must force the issue in single combat with Aeneas. Turnus responds angrily: he is a soldier; he distrusts politicians; he thinks the war can still be won; but if a duel must be fought, so be it: ‘Does Aeneas challenge me alone? I accept and welcome his challenge.’25 However, the Trojans have started advancing again. The duel will have to wait.
As Turnus arms himself, Camilla arrives. This lovely, impulsive, warrior-maiden agrees to take command of the Latin cavalry while Turnus prepares an ambush against the main Trojan force. Surrounded by her beautiful companions, who are compared with the original Amazons, Camilla kills a dozen warriors in fewer than eighty lines. However, unaware that she is being shadowed by the sinister religious fanatic Arruns, and ‘burning with all a woman’s passion for spoil and plunder’, she tries to track down the glamorous ex-priest Chloreus. She doesn’t even hear the arrival of Arruns’ spear. The nymph Opis, Diana’s sentinel, then shoots Arruns, but Camilla’s death results in a full-scale Italian retreat. Those inside the city shut the gates on their own men, and the area outside becomes a killing field. Turnus (in a frenzy – another ‘furor moment’) foolishly abandons his ambush, allowing Aeneas to return unscathed, and, as night draws in, both sides encamp on the plain.
Turnus, who is distraught with love, then sends a message to Aeneas that he wants to confront him one-on-one. Turnus equips himself with a sword that Vulcan tempered in the River Styx, and furiously prepares to bring down the ‘effeminate Phrygian’. He is like a bull pawing the ground, whereas Aeneas’ preparations are calm, considered and quietly confident. The Trojans and Latins gather to watch. Virgil, though, makes us wait, by shifting focus back to the divine level. Turnus’ sister Juturna was made immortal by Jupiter in recompense for raping her, and Juno, who is not usually friendly to one of her husband’s erotic conquests, tells her that Turnus is in mortal danger, and asks her either to snatch Turnus from death or to stir up a war and destroy the treaty.
Back in Italy, Aeneas prays to the Sun, Jupiter, Juno (somewhat pointedly), Mars and all the other gods, and asks them to witness this statement: if Turnus wins, the Trojans will withdraw to the city of Evander; if Aeneas wins he will not seek royal power for himself, and both Italians and Trojans shall move forward into an everlasting treaty, undefeated and equal before the law. As the two combatants move into public view the Rutulians are dismayed – Turnus seems boy-like in comparison to Aeneas. But again Virgil sells us a dummy, making Juturna disguise herself as Camers to harangue the Rutulians and persuade them that they should all be fighting, not just Turnus. She sends an omen; Tolumnius the augur interprets it, and then throws a spear at the Trojans that kills one of the nine sons of Gylippos and Tyrrhena; the surviving eight brothers want revenge; and this leads to more slaughter by spear, sword and setting fire to one warrior’s beard.
Aeneas tries to remind his allies about the treaty, but he is hit mid-speech by an arrow, and has to leave the field for treatment. Turnus charges forward, accounting for another thirteen victims. Aeneas is desperate to get back to the battle, and tries to extract the arrowhead himself. When the healer Iapyx is unable to cure his wound, Venus picks some dittany in Crete and secretly tinctures the water with it. Aeneas recovers miraculously. He kisses Ascanius and tells him to remember him and his ‘Uncle Hector’, before entering the fray. This time, however, Aeneas does not kill anyone at first: his focus is solely on Turnus.
The disguised Juturna then knocks Turnus’ driver out of his chariot and takes his place and his physical appearance. As Aeneas tries to follow the chariot, the plumes of his helmet are sheared off by Messapus’ spear. Only after this does he rush into the battle, full of furor. He and Turnus both kill many more men, and Turnus hangs the severed heads of Diores and Amycus on his chariot. Everything is evenly poised.
At this juncture, Venus gives her son the idea of attacking the Latins’ city, and, when Queen Amata sees the enemy approaching, she assumes that Turnus has been killed and hangs herself. In her grief, Lavinia tears her golden hair and rosy cheeks, while Latinus rends his clothes and dirties his hair with handfuls of dust. Turnus, who by this time is running out of energy, hears the wailing coming from the city, and confesses that he has known for some time that his charioteer is actually Juturna. He wants to fight, and is prepared to die, so he leaps from the chariot and rushes towards the city like a boulder crashing down from a mountain. He appeals for an end to the fighting so that the duel can take place between himself and Aeneas. The armies part and leave a space between them.
The two great adversaries start by throwing their spears, then fight with swords and shields, clashing like bulls fighting for mastery of the herd. Jupiter lifts up a set of scales to see who will live and die, but Virgil does not tell us the outcome. Turnus strikes a blow at Aeneas; a great shout arises from both sides; but then they see Turnus’ sword lying in fragments on the sand – in his excitement he has grabbed an ordinary man-made weapon, not the Vulcan-made one that he had been using so effectively before. He runs, and Aeneas gives chase; Turnus keeps having to retrace his steps to avoid a great marsh, the walls of the city and the Trojans; Aeneas cannot press home his advantage because his wounded leg hampers his pursuit; Turnus calls for his divine sword; Aeneas threatens death to anyone who gives it to him; in lines based on Achilles’ pursuit of Hector in the Iliad, they run five times in a circle; it is a crazy race (ludicra) and would be funny in any other context. Then the initiative swings back Turnus’ way. Aeneas runs to where his spear landed when he first hurled it at Turnus, but it has stuck in the root of a wild olive tree sacred to Faunus. While Aeneas struggles to free it, Juturna hands Turnus hismagic sword, and with it the advantage. But Venus frees the spear for her son, and the two warriors stand with their spirits and weapons restored, breathing heavily.
A divine interlude of almost 100 lines now occurs, building the tension, but also resolving one of the key issues of the poem. Jupiter forbids Juno to go on harassing the Trojans. She agrees, but she wants this to be the end of Troy, and will be reconciled with the Trojans only if the Italians become the dominant partners in the alliance from which the Roman people will spring; they must not change their language or native dress; and when the two people unite they must be called ‘Latins’ or ‘Italians’, not ‘Trojans’. Jupiter accepts.
As Aeneas and Turnus confront each other for the last time, Jupiter sends down a Dira, a Fury-like demon that assumes the form of a small owl that sits on tombstones at night. It repeatedly flies screeching into Turnus’ face. He is overwhelmed with fear, and Juturna realizes what it means and backs off, lamenting the fact that Jupiter has granted her immortality, when what she really wants is to die with her brother. Aeneas moves in on Turnus, taunting him as he does so; Turnus sees a huge boundary-stone, put there, ironically, ‘to keep these fields free from strife’ (a dozen of today’s strongest men could not lift it). We expect Turnus to heave it at Aeneas, but it falls short; he is in the middle of what seems like a bad dream, unable to run, weak and voiceless; his wits are scrambled; he is on his own. Aeneas simply bides his time, and, when he does strike, his spear roars louder than a stone hurled by siege artillery or a thunderbolt, and lodges in Turnus’ thigh. The wound forces him to his knees like a suppliant. He admits that he was wrong; foregoes his claim to Lavinia, and pleads for his life in a way that recalls Anchises’ words in Book 6: ‘war down’ the proud, but spare the conquered.
Aeneas hesitates, running his eyes over Turnus as he speaks. The longer this goes on, the more indecisive Aeneas becomes. But then he catches sight of the sword-belt that Turnus captured from Pallas; memories of Pallas and Evander flood back; the passions those memories arouse rise higher; driven by his pietas towards Pallas and Evander, and by terrible furor, Aeneas cries, ‘It is Pallas who exacts the penalty in your guilty blood’, and plunges his sword into Turnus’ breast. There the Aeneid ends.
Did furor win in the end, or pietas? The emotional and moral effects of the ending are highly ambiguous. What Aeneas does is entirely believable, particularly to an audience that had known almost 100 years of civil war. Modern readers are frequently disgusted at Turnus’ death, but the really unsettling thing is that it is very hard to say, hand on heart, that if we had gone through what Aeneas had we might not have done the same in that split second. More prosaically, the death of Turnus was necessary for the plot. Although they are not dramatized in the Aeneid, the subsequent events that led to the eventual foundation of Rome some 400 years later have been prophesied by Jupiter in Book 1. On Aeneas’ death, Ascanius will take over and rule the settlement at Lavinium, and then transfer the seat of power to Alba Longa. Here a series of kings will rule for 300 years until Romulus founds the city of Rome. These Romans, Jupiter said, would not be constricted by time or space, and would wield unlimited power. For Aeneas, it is mission accomplished.
Notes – Chapter 14
1. Routledge, 1946.
2. Juvenal, Satires 7.227. See R. Cavenaile, Corpus Papyrorum Latinorum (1958), 7 ff.
3. Virgil, Aeneid 1.1. The usual rendering of arma as ‘arms’ is misleading: the Latin word has much stronger emotional connotations than the English – ‘war’ or ‘fighting’ is much better.
4. Amartyron ouden aeido: Fragment 442.
5. Virgil, Aeneid 1.278 f., trans. C. Day Lewis, The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.
6. Sunt lacrimae rerum, ibid., 1.462.
7. He actually says, ‘I amafraid of Greeks, particularly when they are bringing gifts’. Ibid., 2.49.
8. Virgil, Aeneid 2. 557 f., trans. Jackson Knight, Virgil: The Aeneid, Harmondsworth: Penguin, rev. edn. 1958. It could be that Virgil is alluding to the death of Pompey the Great, who was murdered and decapitated after the Battle of Pharsalus 49 BCE as he landed in Egypt.
9. Virgil, Aeneid 2.792 ff., tr. C. Day Lewis, op. cit. Cf. Homer Odyssey 11.206 ff. Virgil will use it again at 6.700 ff.
10. Virgil, Aeneid 3.255 ff. trans. D. West, Virgil: The Aeneid, Harmondsworth: Penguin, rev. edn., 2003.
11. Virgil, Aeneid 4.569 f.
12. Virgil, Aeneid 4.628 f., tr. D. West, op. cit.
13. Ibid, 6.721.
14. Virgil, Aeneid 6.791 ff., tr. C. Day Lewis, op. cit.
15. Ibid., 6.847 ff.
16. 32.
17. Virgil, Aeneid 7.96 ff., trans. West.
18. Virgil, Aeneid 8.440 f., tr. W.F. Jackson Knight, op. cit.
19. Virgil, Aeneid 8.485 ff., tr. C. Day Lewis, op. cit.
20. Ibid., 8.614 ff.
21. D. West, op cit., xxxii.
22. Virgil, Aeneid 10.284.
23. Virgil, Aeneid 10.442 f., tr. D. West, op. cit.
24. Ibid. 11.330 ff.
25. Virgil, Aeneid 11.442, tr. W.F. Jackson Knight.