Virgil Aeneid, trans by Frederic Ahl

  Aeneid

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V I R G I L

Aeneid

  

Translated with Notes by

  

With an Introduction by

  

1

  

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Virgil.

  

[Aeneis. English]

The Aeneid / Virgil ; translated with notes by Frederick Ahl ; with an introduction

by Elaine Fantham.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

  

1. Epic poetry, Latin--Translations into English. 2. Aeneas (Legendary character)--Poetry.

  

3. Legends--Rome--Poetry. I. Ahl, Frederick, 1941– II. Title.

  

PA6807.A5A38 2007 873´.01--dc22 2007014605

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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 For Elaine and Nicola

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  M people helped me in many ways to bring this work to completion, but none more than Elaine Fantham and Nicola Minott-Ahl, to whom I dedicate this volume. Dealing with an absent-minded recluse cannot have been easy. Judith Luna really belongs in the dedication too; her wisdom and clear judgement saved me from many errors. Elizabeth Stratford has also helped me catch many slips and infelicities.

  I am deeply grateful to John and Marie Corbin of the University of Kent, who so often shared their home with me, and to Martin Winkler of George Mason University, a dear friend over many years, who main- tained unflagging support. Thanks also to some other Ahls: Kate, Sid, and Mary, for their tolerance and encouragement. Then there are those who introduced me to Virgil’s epic: T. A. Williams, Malcolm Wilcock, and J. P. Sullivan; Archie Ammons, who gave me the courage to write poetry; Virgil Espino of the Texas Military Institute, who helped me grasp how much I needed to learn. Many colleagues (some now deceased) at various institutions have, over many years, taken time to discuss and dispute ideas (often hotly) with me: R. D. Armstrong, Rhiannon Ash, R. G. Basto, Martin Bernal, Max Brecher, Jonathan Culler, Michael Davies, Martha Davis, John Fitch, G. Karl Galinsky, John Garthwaite, G. K. Gresseth, Brent Hannah, Robert Helbling, Roald Hoffmann, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Thomas Hubbard, Pat Johnson, Jane Wilson Joyce, Ian Kidd, Douglas Little, Don Maguire, Martha Malamud, Gordon Messing, Katrina Neff, S. Georgia Nugent, Peter Kuniholm, Dolores O’Higgins, Kerrill O’Neill, Bill Owens, Douglass Parker, Michael Paschalis, Sue Payne, Arthur Pomeroy, Pietro Pucci, Michael Putnam, Andrew Ramage, Nancy Ramage, Jay Reed, Hanna Roisman, Joseph Roisman, Jeffrey Rusten, Janice Siegel, Victoria Surliuga, Christiana Sogno, Michael Stokes, Lynette Thompson, Tobias Torgerson, Giannis Tsiogas, Michael Vickers, Raina Weaver, Winthrop Wetherbee, and Frederick Williams. I am especially grateful to Mike Black of Hobart and William Smith Colleges who made it pos- sible to record excerpts of the translation for the Oxford University Press website. A word of thanks also to my colleagues at College Year in Athens and the Athens Centre, especially Steve Diamant, Rosemary Donnelly, Kimon Giokarinis, John Raisch, Rhea Scourta, viii  and Sally Tong; and to friends now gone: Alan Ansen, Carol Buckley, Dan Booth, Robert Farrell, Lucianne Katzenberger, David Keller, and David Wyatt. Last, but not least, I thank Clayton and Lucia Minott, for whom this translation has a special importance, and Jordan and Olivia Cruger who, I hope, will some day read it.

  Folkestone, Kent January 

  

CONTENTS

Introduction xi

Translator’s Note xlvi

Select Bibliography liii

A Chronology of Virgil lvi

Maps lviii

  AENEID                                    

  

Ancestral Chart 

Explanatory Notes 

Index and Glossary 

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INTRODUCTION

The Aeneas Tradition

  W the poet Propertius heard the anticipatory excitement about Virgil’s forthcoming Aeneid, he hailed the news: ‘something is coming to birth greater even than the Iliad’ (..). What sort of poem would Romans expect when they heard that Virgil was composing an epic about Aeneas? (Aeneid, like the title Odyssey, announces itself as a poem about a hero — the man whom Virgil himself introduces in his fi rst line ‘Arms and the man I sing . . .’)

  Unless they were educated, Romans would have had little reason to know the name of Aeneas. Certainly they might have handled the silver denarii of  or   on which Caesar displayed Venus Genetrix (founder of the Julian clan) on the obverse with Aeneas on the reverse, carrying his father Anchises and the sacred image of Pallas Athena (known as the ‘Palladium’) from Troy; again, primitive terracottas of Aeneas carrying his father have been found in Etruria, as near to Rome as Veii. But it would be from literature, not religious cult, that they would know of this hero. Fragments of Rome’s first historical poet, Naevius, speak of Aeneas and his father leaving Troy with heads cov-

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  ered, and someone asks Aeneas to tell the story of his escape. And Ennius’ more celebrated Annales speak more than once of Anchises’ ancestry and prophetic wisdom: although Aeneas is not named, Ennius has made him father of Ilia, and grandfather of Rome’s legendary founder, Romulus. Later poets like Accius and Lucretius would call the Romans ‘Children of Aeneas’. But if they knew of Aeneas it would be as an ancestor of the Julian clan or a Homeric founder of their city.

  Educated Romans would have met Aeneas far earlier in life and more directly when they learned to read the Iliad with their elemen-

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  tary teacher, the grammaticus. It is from the Greek text of Homer that they would have formed their ideas of Aeneas as a prince and a warrior. Because Homer’s Aeneas is so different from Virgil’s, an outline of his ₁ Naevius, Punic War, lines –  and  – , in Remains of Old Latin, vol. ii, ed.

  ₂ This man would be expected to teach both reading (of Greek and Latin) and the

interpretation of the poetic texts from which his pupils learned to read. Hence the discipline called grammatice covers both language and literature. xii  role in Homer’s battles provides a point of departure and shows just what Virgil chose to leave behind and what to develop. While Roman readers would have been embarrassed by any impression of weakness or vulnerability in their ancestral hero, Virgil could stress that the gods favoured Aeneas and destined him to become the founder of a mighty dynasty: he could replace mere prowess in battle with the long-term endurance and commitment of a national leader, and honour qualities that would implicitly honour Aeneas’ descendant Octavian, Rome’s powerful ruler and Virgil’s patron, soon to be the first citizen and commander-in-chief ( princeps and imperator) Augustus.

  Aeneas is prominent in two widely separated books of the Iliad, book  and book , both exceptional in the extent to which the gods participate in the combat: some gods support the Trojans, others the Greeks. When the Greek Diomedes enters battle in book  Athena (who is Pallas or Minerva in Virgil) breathes into him strength three times greater than his own. Aeneas urges the Trojan archer Pandarus to help him attack this unknown warrior. Fighting from Aeneas’ chariot, Pandarus challenges Diomedes and casts a spear at him, but Diomedes’ counterthrust is more deadly and he kills Pandarus effortlessly. When Aeneas dismounts to defend his friend’s body he is seriously wounded by a rock cast by Diomedes and falls to the ground. Only the instant inter- vention of his mother Aphrodite (Virgil’s Venus) saves him from death. Diomedes takes possession of Aeneas’ horses, then chases Aphrodite and wounds her arm. Aphrodite drops her son, who is snatched up and covered in a dark cloud by Apollo. Even under Apollo’s charge Aeneas is not out of range; three times Diomedes leaps at Aeneas in rage, and three times Apollo repels him, but the fourth time Apollo rebukes him for trying to fight with a god. He raises Aeneas up to his sanctuary in Troy’s citadel where Aeneas is healed and made more splendid by Apollo’s divine mother, Leto (Virgil’s Latona), and sister Artemis (Virgil’s Diana). As a distraction Apollo creates a phantom Aeneas (a device which Virgil will adapt in Juno’s attempt to rescue Turnus in

  

Aeneid ), which becomes the target of the fighting for Trojans and

  Greeks alike. Aeneas makes one more appearance in this battle, when the Greek commander-in-chief Agamemnon kills one of his companions. Aeneas retaliates by killing two Greeks. When Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus is about to fight Aeneas and is joined by another warrior, Aeneas feels he cannot confront both men together.

  Homer’s Aeneas is a warrior praised by the poet for his ancestry, but xiii  measured against the greatest Greek warrior, Achilles. Again, the gods are involved. Apollo, in disguise, prompts Aeneas to challenge Achilles and suggests that Aeneas’ divine mother is a reason for him to expect victory, since Achilles’ mother is only a minor goddess. When Aeneas and Achilles approach each other, Aeneas offers the first challenge, but Achilles speaks first. He jeers at Aeneas for daring to meet him. Is he prompted by ambition to take over Priam’s kingdom? Achilles reminds Aeneas that he had put Aeneas to flight once before, when Aeneas was herding on Mount Ida, and had only been rescued by Zeus (Virgil’s Jupiter) and the other gods (.–). When Achilles pierces Aeneas’ shield with a spear and draws his sword to finish him off, Aeneas is saved by divine decision. Although Poseidon (Virgil’s Neptune) is ghting against Troy, he urges the other gods to rescue Aeneas, for a fi mixture of moral and prudential reasons; Aeneas has a moral claim because he is without guilt and always makes the gods welcome offerings.

  And the gods must save him in their own interest, so as to avoid Zeus’s anger if Achilles should kill him. Poseidon swoops down and casts a mist before Achilles’ eyes, uproots the spear from Aeneas’ shield, and lifts Aeneas above the battle, then scolds him for challenging a superior fi ghter. (Homeric warriors are rated and handicapped like sporting champions.) Apollo now tells Aeneas he should not have challenged Achilles, but once Achilles has been killed he will be able to fight in the front ranks, for no other Greek will be able to kill him.

  The outcome of the encounter between Aeneas and Achilles is in some ways less important than what we are told of Aeneas’ genealogy. Before they join combat, Aeneas says he is the son of Anchises and Aphrodite and traces his descent from Zeus through Dardanus and Erichthonius. Erichthonius was father of Tros, who had three sons, Ilus, Assaracus, and Ganymede. The eldest son, Ilus, was father of King Laomedon, and grandfather of King Priam, the ruler of Troy during the Trojan War. Assaracus, as father of Capys, was grandfather of Anchises. Later, as Achilles is about to kill Aeneas, Poseidon observes that he must be saved, ‘because he is fated to escape, so that Dardanus’ race shall not die out. For Zeus loves Dardanus above all his children by mortal women, but he has come to hate the descent of Priam and the mighty Aeneas will now become king of the Trojans, as will the sons of his sons who shall be born hereafter.’ Aeneas, then, is to be the restorer of the dynasty. And it is that dynasty that later Greek and Roman tradi- tion moves to Italy. Significantly, Aeneas’ first adversary, Diomedes, is xiv 

  As Roman boys read or heard their Iliad they would receive the mixed message of Aeneas as a warrior less skilled than brave, who was saved from defeat at the hands of better fighters because the gods either loved him or recognized his destiny; defeated, he was nonethe- less spared the imputation of cowardice by the same divine concern which also gave him merit as a future leader, the man destined to revive Troy. Perhaps they understood Aeneas’ career as encourage- ment to go on fighting even in defeat, as Rome had fought on despite the victories of Hannibal in the Second Punic War. But when they read Poseidon’s argument they surely thought that Aeneas had the power of the gods behind him because he was to be the founder of Rome — or the Latin city from which Rome was settled.

  From the lost cycle of epics composed by Homer’s successors, only Arctinus’ Sack of Troy mentions Aeneas, and that incidentally, when his followers retire from Troy after the serpents have killed Laocoön and his sons and the Trojans decide to bring the treacherous horse

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  inside their city. The Greek world knew many variants on the tale of Aeneas before and after the city’s fall: it was commonly said that when Paris had abducted Helen from her husband Menelaus and brought her to Troy, Aeneas and Antenor, the future founder of Padua men- tioned as Aeneas’ peer by both Virgil and Livy, had recommended returning Helen to the Greeks, and some versions even saw them as collaborators, even traitors, who had been allowed by the Greeks to leave Troy laden with treasure. Other versions had celebrated Aeneas as founder of various communities in the Troad, and across the Aegean, as also in Sicily. There were so many self-interested local traditions that when Virgil came to make this Trojan prince the hero of his poem he had numerous, often conflicting, myths to adapt to shape his hero’s westward journey and ultimate reception in Latium.

Of Rome, Virgil, and his Times

  Two generations before Virgil’s birth Rome was becoming a sophisti- cated metropolis, commanding an empire which her senatorial govern- ment was no longer equipped to rule. The influx of wealth from conquered Asia Minor had swollen the discrepancy between the riches of the elite and the endangered farmsteads of the peasants who made ₃ See Proclus’ summary in the Loeb volume, Hesiod and the Homeric Poems (Cambridge, Mass., ). xv  up Rome’s citizen army. In Virgil’s youth the older generation (we may take Cicero as representative) saw the beginning of the threat to tradi- tional government with the Gracchus brothers, idealists from the heart of Rome’s aristocracy. First, Tiberius Gracchus tried to use the office of tribune to legislate redistribution of public land; ten years later his brother Gaius extended his proposals to embrace social legislation including colonies. Each time a combination of property owners and politicians who saw them as aiming at tyrannical power used violence to bring down each brother, massacring or prosecuting their supporters.

  When Rome was fighting off a Gallic invasion of north Italy the short- age of yeoman soldiers led Marius to open the ranks to propertiless men who would henceforth depend on their commander for their liveli- hood. Backed by their armies, Marius and his younger rival Cornelius Sulla would each ruthlessly turn his forces against their own city and its civilian inhabitants. The generation of Virgil’s father did not forget Sulla’s proscriptions, which outlawed first political antagonists, then anyone whose property was coveted by kin or neighbours. In the eyes of the governing class Sulla was an ambiguous figure: he had restored senatorial control (without remedying the economic plight of the under- privileged) but there was no one who did not recall the loss of friends or family among his victims.

  About the time of Virgil’s birth in  , it seemed that the two most successful generals, Crassus and Pompey, were prepared to accept the restored control of the Senate, at least until Pompey was offered legitimate commands, first against the rampant piracy infecting all the Mediterranean, then to carry through the war against Mithridates. In his absence, a corrupt aristocrat, Sergius Catilina, twice rejected in elections for the consulship, began to prepare for a coup at Rome and uprisings both in Etruria and southern Gaul against the elected consul Cicero. While Cicero may have exaggerated the danger to excuse the Senate’s unconstitutional decision to execute Catilina’s elite allies, Virgil himself makes a villain of Catilina when he places him among the great sinners of Hades (Aeneid .–) and sets in judgement over him Cato, the fiercest of Rome’s conservatives. What Sallust and Cicero tell us, but Virgil has no reason to mention, is that Caesar may have sympathized with the Catilinarians (he certainly spoke against their execution), and Cato was the most passionate and principled opponent of Caesar, dying by his own hand at Utica when Caesar’s victory was assured.

  After his decisive defeat of Pompey and the Republicans at Pharsalus xvi  and Varro, and actively promoted younger ex-Republicans like Brutus and Cassius. When Caesar assumed the unlimited role of dictator for life, shortly before he planned to lead his expedition against Parthia in March , it was these men who killed him at the foot of Pompey’s statue in the Senate room of Pompey’s theatre. This was the state of Rome when Virgil was .

  How, then, did Virgil come to contemplate writing an epic on the Trojan hero? This was not anything that could have been anticipated by those who knew the young Virgil or read his early poetry. According to the chief sources for his early life, the biographies attributed to

  farmer near Mantua, Virgil had been sent first to Milan, then to Rome for his education: we should bear in mind that the poems of Catullus and Lucretius would have begun to circulate about the time he came of age. We know that he was delicate, and continued his studies at Naples, where the Epicurean poet and critic Philodemus was teaching, as were Roman critics Siro and Valerius Cato. If there was money (and his health did not fit him for a military career or an active public life), he could have stayed on in Naples when Julius Caesar made himself master of Italy in  and even after Caesar’s assassination. As a self- governing city, Naples would have been a safe place for neutrality.

  In fact, Caesar’s assassination only led to political confusion. Mark Antony as consul was the chief source of authority at Rome when Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian acted to obtain public confirmation of his adoption as Caesar’s heir, and came south to Campania to rouse the support of the legions his great-uncle had planned to lead against the Parthians. The following year, , with the support of Caesar’s veter- ans, Octavian was first endorsed by the Senate with praetorian status as its champion against Mark Antony, then forced the Senate to recog- nize him as consul, turning around from his victory at Mutina to join with Antony and demand their recognition (with Lepidus) as triumvirs with power to reorganize the state. Brutus and Cassius had been amass- ing legions and finances in Syria and Asia Minor, but in  the new triumvirs met and defeated them in two battles spread over three weeks at Philippi in Macedonia.

  In Italy, Octavian’s legates Pollio and Varus were sent to take over lands for veteran colonies from cities such as Cremona. Virgil’s first ₄ Both lives are printed in the Oxford Classical Text of the Vitae virgilianae;

  

Suetonius’ life, from his lost collection of Lives of the Poets, is translated in the second Loeb volume of Suetonius. xvii  poetry book, the Eclogues, on which he spent three years, includes poems dedicated to and praising Pollio and Varus (Eclogues , , and ),

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  and two poems ( and ) honouring his friend the elegist Gallus. We seem to see the reflection of the land displacements of the late s in the laments of Virgil’s shepherds in two other poems. Both the rein- statement of the slave-shepherd Tityrus by the young leader at Rome in Eclogue , and the failure of the singer Menalcas to recover the expropriated land for his friends in Eclogue  must be evocations rather than literal reports of what happened in Virgil’s neighbourhood, but the divine young leader who restored Tityrus’ pastures is surely Octavian, and it is most likely that Virgil paid him this honour because of favour he extended to Virgil directly or through his subordinates.

  The defeat of Brutus and Cassius did not end Octavian’s difficulties in maintaining relations with Mark Antony or opposing Pompey’s son Sextus Pompeius, who now controlled Sicily and the seaways for the supply of grain for the million people of the metropolis. With the aid of his great friend Agrippa, Octavian would finally defeat Sextus Pompey in the naval battle off Naulochus (off northern Sicily) in , but rela- tions with Antony had not yet come to a crisis. It was about this time that Virgil began his Georgics.

  The opening of this poem in four books proudly invokes Octavian as Caesar, destined to become a god, urging him to help the poet bring comfort to the farmers, and the internal proem of book  speaks of setting Caesar in his own temple in the midst of Virgil’s poetic celebra- tions and incorporates references (.–) to present and future imper- ial victories. Is this an undertaking to compose a poetic celebration of Caesar himself? The last lines of the poem, as Virgil signs off (.–), contrast the heroic Caesar flashing thunder by the Euphrates and bestow- ing justice on the nations, with the poet’s own inglorious leisure in peace- ful Parthenope; it seems, then, that he has kept his home at Naples.

  Locating Caesar in the far East dates the closing lines of Georgics to  –  , after Octavian’s great naval victory at Actium over Antony and Cleopatra, and we should place the conception of the Aeneid no later than this time. This would also fit the biographers’ claim that when the poet died in  , he had devoted eleven years to the poem’s twelve books. ₅ Gallus was also a successful soldier, and would become Octavian’s first Prefect of

  

Egypt after the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra in . He was later disgraced for boasting of his military feats, and committed suicide. xviii 

  What kind of pressure did Virgil feel to honour the victorious Caesar — soon to be renamed Augustus — with an epic? It had become a Roman tradition that poets composed epics around the victorious campaigns of generals; even Cicero, for example, had set to writing an epic on Caesar’s invasion of Britain. Dealing with contemporary warfare, such assignments left little room for inspiration, however. The fourth-

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  century critic Servius says Virgil’s object was to praise Augustus through his ancestry. It might be better to say that by choosing to construct a narrative of questing and struggle around the Roman ancestor who was known from Homer, but not known in too much detail, the poet gave himself the scope to construct an idealized founder and leader whose sufferings and moral decisions would be both a model to Augustus and to some extent a model of Augustus, suggesting to the Roman public an interpretation of their young leader’s achievements. Something of the same shift in emphasis can be seen in Caesar Octavian’s own choice of title, since Augustus combined a quasi-religious reverence with an altogether new kind of authority — the more powerful because it was not constitutionally defined.

  Yet although the immediate popularity of the Aeneid (it was used in schools a few years after its release was authorized by Augustus) was certainly fostered by the model it offered to the sons of the elite as future leaders, the epic would not have absorbed and kept the interest of even disillusioned generations like our own if it had not been rich with both moral and aesthetic complexity, with depth of implications and beauty of expression. Nor would it have much claim on our hearts and minds if its theme were limited to the destiny of Rome and its once and future leader. Certainly our age can no longer, as Roman boys and British nineteenth-century schoolboys did, read Virgil with confidence that Fate—or God—is on our side, because we use our power justly and benevolently. But the poem shows a concern for all humanity and its

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  struggles to combine virtue and happiness. As for the ‘man of destiny’, the charmed conduit of history, the chief undercurrent of Virgil’s narrative seems to be the cost of success, not just the cost of national ₆ On Servius and his commentary on the Aeneid, see Don Fowler, ‘The Virgil

  

Commentary of Servius’, in C. R. Martindale, The Cambridge Companion to Virgil

(Cambridge, ),  – . ₇ Two critics half a century apart, Richard Heinze (Virgil’s Epic Technique (), trans.

  

H. and D. Harvey and F. Robertson (Berkeley, ) ) and Brookes Otis (Virgil: A Study

in Civilized Poetry (Oxford, ) ), offer the best introduction to the psychological dimensions of Virgil’s narrative. xix  victory in casualties, the lives of officers and men, but the personal self- denial and hardship required of any leader, whether pioneering a new community or simply maintaining morale in an existing one.

The Aeneid

  Before turning to analysis of Virgil’s epic something should be said about the first Roman epics, and the rival claims of Aeneas and Romulus in Rome’s ostensibly double-foundation legend, which came from early ignorance of chronology and from the competing claims of Latin cities to have given Rome its founder. Naevius, the first poet of Roman history, made his focus the first war against Carthage, in which he is believed to have fought. To readers familiar with the Aeneid, a single fragment of Naevius’ retrospective narrative of Aeneas’ adventures suggests he too may have brought Aeneas to Carthage and had him converse with Dido, its queen, but it does not name the person who ‘with charm and

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  learning asks how Aeneas had left the city of Troy’. Scholars who are not prepared to speculate that this was Aeneas’ Carthaginian hostess make the speaker Latinus or an unidentified host.

  The chief obstacle to introducing Dido into Naevius’ tale of Aeneas would be chronology, if Hellenistic Greek chronology had not been unknown to both Naevius and his close successor Ennius. The third- century chronographer Eratosthenes calculated the place of events in history in relation to the Trojan War, reckoning that Troy fell early in the twelfth century , but dated the foundations of both Rome and Carthage four centuries later: Carthage to   and Rome either at the same time or two generations after. By the time Virgil was a young man, however, his older contemporaries Atticus and Varro had stabilized the foundation date of Rome to   (the date still used by historians). So how could Aeneas share in the foundation of Rome? For Ennius, he was father of Ilia (and presumably ruler of Lavinium), grandfather of her sons Romulus and Remus. Once Romans realized the chronological gap between the Homeric age of Troy and Rome’s foundation, they needed king-lists to fill it, and so the tradition arose, fostered by the Julii and other families from Alba, that there were fourteen generations of Alban kings between Aeneas’ son and Numitor, the father of Romulus. ₈ Naevius  –  (ed. Warmington). The subject is not named, nor is the gender

  

specified, but the adverbs blande and docte may encourage thinking that a woman, and a

well-informed woman like Dido, whose temple shows knowledge of the Trojan War, is the speaker. xx 

  Hence Virgil needed to give due importance to both Lavinium and Alba in his prologue (Aeneid . and .); hence Jupiter allows three hundred and thirty-three years in all from Aeneas’ foundation of Lavinium to the birth of Romulus (.–). Even so the numbers fall short! In teaching the Aeneid in both Latin and English, I have found that the complexity of the epic causes students and other readers to pass over many details both of narrative continuity and of characterization. For this reason I have tried to combine three functions in the book-by- book summary that follows. Besides stressing where and how Virgil has shaped his narrative to recall the world and actions of Homer’s

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  epics I have aimed to provide a summary of events that traces the interweaving threads of divine and human action; at the same time I have tried to bring out consistently aspects of the behaviour of Aeneas and others which seem to ask to be judged by different standards from our own. Scholars have long debated the apparent conflict between

  

10

Virgil’s public and his private voice. Perhaps the humane poet recog-

  nized the necessity for public figures to take actions that go against their private principles and personal choice.

  If the proem of Book  opens by setting its theme in the longue durée of human history, ‘the man . . . of Troy, who . . . suffered profoundly in war to establish a city, | Settle his gods into Latium, making this land of the Latins | Future home to the Elders of Alba and Rome’s mighty ramparts’ (. and –), it swiftly moves beyond the human Aeneas to

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  the divine instigator of his sufferings, the anger of savage Juno. Virgil is setting both hero and goddess against a huge canvas of history: Juno is not, like Poseidon in the Odyssey, angry with Aeneas over any act he has committed—as Odysseus blinded Poseidon’s son Polyphemus— but has gathered her resentment against his race over past generations and many generations to come. Juno is angry because of what will happen after almost a thousand years: she loves Carthage above all ₉ Such intertextual allusion may work with Homer’s text as a model (of language, of

  

imagery, etc.) or as generic norm for types of scene and action. See G. B. Conte, The Rhetoric

of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets (Ithaca, NY, and

London, ). ₁₀ The pioneering study is A. Parry, ‘The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid’, in

S. Commager, Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, ),

• – ; see also R. A. O. M. Lyne, Further Voices in Virgil’s Aeneid (Oxford, ). 

₁₁ On the role played by Juno, Venus, and other gods see D. C. Feeney, Gods in Epic

(Oxford, ),  – : his chapters on earlier epic add further understanding of the gods in the Aeneid. xxi  cities, and has learned it will be overthrown by the descendants of this man. And she is angry because she hates the descendants of Dardanus, child of Jupiter’s mistress Electra, and Ganymede, his boy-favourite, and of Paris, who preferred Venus/Aphrodite’s beauty to her own.

  When the action begins it is already seven years after the fall of Troy: tossed over land and sea Aeneas is beginning the relatively short voyage from western Sicily to Latium, when Juno provokes a violent storm that blows his fleet off course. Just as we first meet Odysseus in the despair of shipwreck when Poseidon sends the storm against him, so as its full force strikes the ship Aeneas wishes in his heart he was dead (and recalls to Virgil’s readers his Homeric defeat and escape): ‘O Tydeus’ son, Diomedes | Bravest Danaän of all, why could I not have fallen on Ilium’s | Plains, spilled forth my soul under your right hand?’ (.–). The divinely roused storm will be divinely calmed, and Virgil shows here and throughout the book how gods skew the human narra- tive. Aeneas is saved when Neptune observes the havoc Aeolus king of the winds has created to oblige Juno, and puts an end to it, restoring the ships, just as the authority of a wise citizen quells an incipient riot. Cast up on land Aeneas forces an expression of hope on his features, giving his men reassurance he does not himself feel.

  Crewmates, by now we are hardly strangers to evil and hardship.

We’ve suffered worse. God will grant us an end to these sufferings also. . . .

  Take heart once again and dispel your fears and depression. Maybe the day’ll come when even this will be joy to remember.

  (. – , – )

  As the castaways share a makeshift feast from the deer which Aeneas has shot, Virgil moves to the divine level, and with Jupiter’s words of reassurance to Venus (. – ) introduces the first of three great panoramas that reach across Roman history to Augustus and the pres- ent age (the others come from Anchises’ survey of the parade of heroes in Book  and from the shield designed by Vulcan for Aeneas in Book ). Aeneas will win through and reign three years in Latium, then his son Ascanius will rule thirty years, transferring his city from Lavinium to Alba, then will come three hundred years of Alban kings before Romulus

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  will found the city and Juno relent. Agamemnon’s city of Mycenae will be subdued, and Aeneas’ descendant, Trojan Caesar, will create an ₁₂ See D. C. Feeney, ‘The Reconciliation of Juno’, in S. J. Harrison, Oxford Readings in Virgil’s Aeneid (Oxford, ). xxii  empire limited only by the ocean and the stars. His era will bring justice and end all warfare, imprisoning savage fury within the gates of war.

  Is this Caesar, who is also called Iulius (the Julian), meant for the man we call Julius Caesar? More likely Virgil is evoking not the Julius who died with wars still to fight, but Caesar Augustus, the ‘son’ who took his name.

  Narrative on the human level is blended with further divine inter- vention as Mercury flies down to win over the hearts of Dido and her Carthaginians, for fear that, ‘not knowing what’s fated’ (.) she should drive off Aeneas and his men. In fact, Aeneas will openly declare to Dido his mission to Italy (. – , . – , etc.), but she blinds herself to his fate, and Venus intervenes so as to aggravate her self-deception. To accost her own son, the goddess disguises herself as a young virgin out hunting. It is Venus who provides our introduction to the tragic pre- history of Dido, widowed of a beloved husband, Sychaeus, and leader of a bold new colony grudgingly tolerated by the aboriginal Africans. And Venus’ speech should alert the readers to Dido’s susceptibility, stressing the details of her loving anxiety when her wicked brother conceals the killing of her husband (. – ). But it is his mother’s

  13

  disguise that troubles Aeneas. Reticent as he is, he gives a good account of himself and his mission to seek a homeland in Italy aided by his divine mother, but the goddess does not reveal her divine person before she has left him. We share his indignation that she will not let him clasp her hand, but why does he accuse her of so often deceiving him with disguises? She has not done so before, and when Aeneas as narrator of the fall of Troy in Book  describes his mother’s previous appearance to him she holds nothing back in revealing herself, and the divine agency behind the city’s downfall.

  From now on the human narrative which brings Aeneas to Carthage and its queen is infused with divine meddling. Venus conceals Aeneas and Achates in a mist while they observe and envy the newly founded city, until Dido herself appears and receives Ilioneus and other Trojans kindly. Through Aeneas’ eyes the readers see the story of Troy retold on the walls of Juno’s temple, chiefly in terms of Greek triumph, but with Aeneas himself depicted fighting in a kind of visual Homeric

  14

  cycle. The warrior who greets the queen is already celebrated, and ₁₃ Aeneas is characterized throughout the epic as speaking only what is necessary: see ibid. ₁₄ On this and other ekphrases (descriptions of visual narrative art works), see A. Barchiesi, ‘Ekphrasis’, in Martindale, Cambridge Companion. xxiii  the affinities between these two colonists with their personal bereave- ments are great enough to have generated love without Venus’ gratu- itous intervention, as she substitutes the contagious Cupid for Aeneas’ little son, and infects the hospitable queen with the affliction that will destroy her.

  I have surveyed the first book at some length so as to convey the

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  different levels of narrative. Aeneas begins shipwrecked and despairing like Odysseus in Odyssey , and is kindly received just like Odysseus in Phaeacia (Odyssey  – ). But as with Odysseus’ inset reminiscences in

  

Odyssey  – , the next books do not move forward in time but go back

  to the crisis that drove Aeneas from Troy (Book ) and the years of wandering that he has endured since (Book ). In Book  the hero who is so sparing of personal response elsewhere in Virgil’s narrative tells his own version of the fall of Troy, and one which seems to show the mature man as aware of his past youthful blunders. It may be helpful to read the book of Troy as in part an apology for Troy’s defeat, in part for his own flight. Repeatedly, Aeneas stresses Greek deceit, over the horse (. – ) and the lying tale of Sinon (. – : ‘Mark how Danaäns set traps. From this one criminal instance | You’ll learn them all’, and more fully . – ), but Sinon’s tale seems to be confirmed by the mon-

  16

  strous serpents which strangle Laocoön and his sons. Aeneas’ people, whom neither Diomedes nor Achilles could overcome, were betrayed by deceit. But when he is warned by Hector’s ghost (. – ) Aeneas is too loyal and proud to take flight and squanders time in a useless guerrilla action. It is after this failure that Aeneas leaves his narrative to swear to his ancestral shades that: ‘Had my death been fated | My deeds done would have earned it’ (. – ). This is not just the self- questioning of the survivor; it is necessary to obliterate any echoes of hostile tradition.

  After Aeneas has described the brutal end of Troy’s king as the palace is sacked, he reaches the turning point with Venus’ epiphany. This may have been the stimulus for a passage which many scholars reject as post-Virgilian (in part because it is preserved only in Servius’ commentary), the so-called ‘Helen episode’, where Aeneas sees Helen lurking in sanctuary and longs to kill her as cause of Troy’s ruin. ₁₅ On Virgilian variations of ‘order duration and frequency’ see Don Fowler, in Martindale, Cambridge Companion,  – . ₁₆ On the interweaving of serpents and flame in the narrative and imagery of Book ,

see B. W. Knox, ‘The Serpent and the Flame: The Imagery of the Second Book of the

  Aeneid ’, in Commager, Virgil. xxiv 

  Certainly Venus opens her rebuke to her son by insisting that Helen is not to blame, but the gods themselves. In order to convince her son it is his duty to flee, she now strips the mist of human ignorance from his eyes to show him the forces of the gods (Neptune, Juno, Athena, Jupiter himself ) in battle array physically destroying the city. Lucretius had praised Epicurus for lifting the mist from men’s eyes to show them the true serenity of the gods, and their freedom from intervention in human affairs. Venus affirms the opposite, stressing with a rare word,

  inclementia, the ruthless nature of the gods.

  The vision is unforgettable:

  

. . . in her place, there appeared the appalling faces and mighty

Forces divine that detested Troy. That’s when my eyes really saw all Ilium slowly subsiding Into the fires. . .

  (. – )

  But when Aeneas obeys her command to escape (.) and seeks out his family, a new obstacle arises as Anchises, who also tells his son to fl ee (. – ), refuses to go with them. It takes a divine portent — the harmless flame crowning young Iulus — to change his mind and release them. In one last episode, as he carries Anchises and leads little Iulus, his wife Creusa is lost. (In Naevius’ epic she had left Troy safely, but she needed to die for Aeneas to be free for his destined wife Lavinia and his undestined lover Dido.) Creusa is the source of Aeneas’ last authorization to escape: she has been taken up to heaven by Cybele, the Mother Goddess, but he will finally reach Hesperia and the river Tiber where royal power and a royal wife await him. Grieving, he joins his followers as they retreat to Mount Ida and prepare a fleet.