The Aenied Response

Table of Contents Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

BOOK ONE – Safe Haven After Storm

BOOK TWO – The Final Hours of Troy

BOOK THREE – Landfalls, Ports of Call

BOOK FOUR – The Tragic Queen of Carthage

BOOK FIVE – Funeral Games for Anchises

BOOK SIX – The Kingdom of the Dead

BOOK SEVEN – Beachhead in Latium, Armies Gather

BOOK EIGHT – The Shield of Aeneas

BOOK NINE – Enemy at the Gates

BOOK TEN – Captains Fight and Die

BOOK ELEVEN – Camilla’s Finest Hour

BOOK TWELVE – The Sword Decides All

NOTES

THE ROYAL HOUSES OF GREECE AND TROY

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

VARIANTS FROM THE OXFORD CLASSICAL TEXT

NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION

PRONOUNCING GLOSSARY

Other Books by Robert Fagles

Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays (Co-ed. with George Steiner, and contributor)

The Twickenham Edition of Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey (Assoc. Ed. among others under Maynard Mack)

I Vincent: Poems from the Pictures of Van Gogh

TRANSLATIONS

Bacchylides: Complete Poems (with Adam Parry)

Aeschylus: The Oresteia (with W. B. Stanford)

Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays (with Bernard Knox)

Homer: The Iliad (with Bernard Knox) Homer: The Odyssey (with Bernard Knox)

Other Books by Bernard Knox

Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time Sophocles, Oedipus the King (Trans.) The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater Essays Ancient and Modern The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics

The Norton Book of Classical Literature (Ed.) Backing Into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal

VIKING Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Translation copyright © Robert Fagles, 2006

Introduction and notes copyright © Bernard Knox, 2006 All rights reserved

An extract from Book Two (under the title “The Death of Priam”) and two extracts from Book Six (“Dido in the Underworld” and

“Aeneas and His Father’s Ghost”) originally appeared in The Kenyon Review, Fall 2006.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

“Secondary Epic” from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Copyright © 1960 by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

The Georgics by Virgil, translated with an introduction and notes by L. P. Wilkinson (Penguin Classics, 1982). Copyright © L. P. Wilkinson, 1982. Used by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Illustrations by David Cain. Copyright © David Cain, 2006.

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For Lynne

tendimus in Latium

INTRODUCTION

ROME

When Publius Vergilius Maro—Virgil in common usage—was born in 70 B.C., the Roman Republic was in its last days. In 71 it had just finished suppressing the three-year-long revolt of the slaves in Italy, who, organized by Spartacus, a gladiator, had defeated four Roman armies but were finally crushed by Marcus Crassus. Crassus celebrated his victory by crucifying six thousand captured slaves along the Appian Way, the road that ran south from Rome to the Bay of Naples and from there on to Brundisium. In 67 B.C. Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) was given an extraordinary, wide command to clear the Mediterranean, which the Romans claimed was “our sea”—mare nostrum—of the pirates who made commerce and travel dangerous. (The young Julius Caesar was captured by pirates and held for ransom around 70 B.C.; he paid it but came back at once with an armed force and crucified them all.) In 65 B.C. Catiline conspired against the Republic but was suppressed in 63 through the action of the consul, Cicero. From 58 to 51 B.C. Julius Caesar added what are now Switzerland, France, and Belgium to the Roman Empire, creating in the course of these campaigns a superb army loyal to him rather than to the Republic, while in 53 B.C. Crassus invaded Parthia, a part of modern- day Iraq, but was killed at Carrhae, where many of his soldiers were taken prisoner and the legions’ standards displayed as trophies of the Parthian victory. From 49 to 45 B.C. there was civil war as Caesar crossed the Rubicon River into Italy with his victorious army, which defeated Pompey’s forces in Greece at Pharsalus in 48 B.C. Pompey escaped by sea and took refuge on the shore of Egypt, the only country on the Mediterranean not yet part of the Roman Empire, but he was killed by the Alexandrians and his head taken to Alexandria to be given to Caesar when he arrived. Caesar went on to defeat another republican army in Africa at Thapsus, and in the next year vanquished the last republican army at Munda in Spain. Back in Rome he appointed himself dictator, a position that had always been held for a short term in an emergency, for ten years.

But on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., Caesar was assassinated in the Senate House by conspirators led by Brutus and Cassius. However, Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony), Caesar’s right-hand man in Gaul as in Rome, and young Octavian, great-nephew and adopted son of Caesar, soon drove the republicans to Greece and defeated the republican army at Philippi. Brutus and Cassius subsequently committed suicide. Antony took over the pacification of the eastern half of the Empire, making Alexandria, where he became the lover of the Hellenistic queen Cleopatra, his base, while Octavian, making Rome his headquarters, dealt with problems in Spain and the west.

Tension between Antony and Octavian grew steadily over time, in spite of attempts at reconciliation, and in 31 B.C. Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet was defeated by Octavian and his admiral, Agrippa, off the Greek promontory of Actium. Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide in Alexandria rather than walk to execution in Rome in Octavian’s triumph, and Egypt became a Roman province. Virgil died in 19 B.C. Octavian, who assumed the title of Augustus in 27 B.C., ruled what was now the Roman Empire until his death in A.D. 14, when he was succeeded peacefully by Tiberius.

In his comparatively short life Virgil became the supreme Roman poet; his work overshadowed that of his successors, and his epic poem, the Aeneid, gave Homeric luster to the story of Rome’s origins and its achievement—the creation of an empire that gave peace and the rule of law to all the

territory surrounding the Mediterranean, to what are now Switzerland, France, and Belgium, and later to England. Yet when Virgil was born in the village of Andes, near Mantua (Mantova), he, like all the other Italians living north of the Po River, was not a Roman citizen.

Full Roman citizenship had been gradually conceded over the centuries to individuals and communities, but in the years 91 to 87 B.C. those communities still excluded fought a successful civil war against Rome, which ended with the grant of full Roman citizenship to all Italians living south of the Po River. The territory north of the river continued to be a provincia, ruled by a proconsul from Rome, with an army. Full Roman citizenship was finally granted to the inhabitants of the area by Julius Caesar in 49 B.C., when Virgil was already a young man.

Virgil was an Italian long before he became a Roman, and in the second book of the Georgics he follows a passage celebrating the riches of the East with a hymn of praise for the even greater riches of Italy:

But neither Media’s land most rich in forests, The gorgeous Ganges or the gold-flecked Hermus Could rival Italy . . . the land is full Of teeming fruits and Bacchus’ Massic liquor. Olives are everywhere and prosperous cattle . . . And then the cities, So many noble cities raised by our labors, So many towns we’ve piled on precipices, And rivers gliding under ancient walls . . . Hail, mighty mother of fruits, Saturnian land And mighty mother of men . . . The same has bred a vigorous race of men, Marsians, the Sabine stock, Ligurians Inured to hardship, Volscians javelin-armed.

(2.136-69, trans. L. P. Wilkinson, et seq.)

And in the Aeneid, Virgil’s poem about the origins of Rome, though his hero, Aeneas, and the Trojan invaders of Italy are to build the city from which Rome will eventually be founded, there is a constant and vibrant undertone of sympathy for and identification with the Italians, which becomes a major theme in the story of the Volscian warrior princess Camilla.

Biographical information about Virgil is scant and much of it unreliable, but we learn from Suetonius’ “Life” of the poet, written probably in the early years of the second century A.D., that Virgil “was tall . . . with a dark complexion and a rustic appearance” and that “he spoke very slowly and almost like an uneducated man.” Yet when he read his own poems, his delivery of them “was sweet and wonderfully effective” (pp. 467-73, trans. J. C. Rolfe, et seq.). And we learn from the same author that when he read to Augustus and his sister Octavia the second, fourth, and sixth books of the Aeneid, when he reached in the sixth book the lines about her son Marcellus, who had died young, she fainted, and it was difficult to revive her. We know too that Virgil and his father somehow

escaped the fate of so many of the landowners in the area that Virgil refers to as Mantua—“but Mantua / Stands far too close for comfort to poor Cremona” (Eclogues 9.28, trans. C. Day Lewis, et seq.)—confiscation of the land to reward the veterans of the armies of Octavian and Mark Antony after the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 B.C. We know this mainly by inference from Virgil’s first poems, the Eclogues, published around 39 to 38 B.C.

THE ECLOGUES

Like most Roman poems, the Eclogues (a word that means something like “Selections”) have a Greek model. In this case it is the poems of Theocritus, a resident of the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily who, writing in the Doric dialect of the western Greeks, invented a genre of poetry that used the Homeric hexameter for very un-Homeric themes: the singing contests, love affairs, and rivalries of shepherds and herdsmen who relieved the boredom of their lonely rural life by competing in song accompanied by pipes and pursuing their love affairs and rivalries far from the city and the farmlands, in the hills with their sheep, goats, and cattle. Their names, and the names of their lady loves—Lycidas, Daphnis, Amaryllis—have become famous through the long tradition of pastoral poetry that began with Theocritus, flourished in Virgil, and had a splendid rebirth in the Italian Renaissance and in Elizabethan England; Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender was published in 1579, and Milton’s Lycidas (written in 1637) is a masterpiece of the genre. It reached what might well be considered its end in the parodic performance of Marie An toinette, queen of France, and her court ladies playing the role, at the Petit Trianon palace, of simple milkmaids.

Not all of Theocritus’ poems feature shepherds; one of them, for example, is a delightful dramatic sketch of two light-headed, gossipy housewives on their way to the festival of Adonis in Alexandria, and another is a hymn of praise to Ptolemy II, the ruler of Alexandria and Egypt. Similarly, one of Virgil’s ten Eclogues, the fourth, has nothing to do with shepherds; it prophesies the birth of a son who will bring back the Golden Age on earth. Many Christians, from Lactantius on, later took this to be a prophecy of the birth of Christ, but it seems clear that Virgil was referring to the expectation that Octavian’s sister, married to Mark Antony and pregnant by him, would bear a son, and that this would heal the growing breach between the two leaders. But the child turned out to be a daughter, and in any case, Cleopatra’s hold on Antony was permanent.

But Virgil differs from his model in one significant particular: he makes two of the Eclogues that are dialogues of shepherds, the first and ninth, reflect the sorrows and passions of the real world of 41 B.C.—the confiscation of land in the area north of the river Po, to reward the veterans of the armies of Octavian and Antony. The first Eclogue features Tityrus, who, as a result of a visit to Rome, has been granted, by a “young man”1 whom he will always worship as a god, a favorable response to his plea: “‘Pasture your cattle, breed from your bulls, as you did of old’” (1.45). But the speaker, Meliboeus, must go on his sad way,

“To Scythia, bone-dry Africa, the chalky spate of the Oxus, Even to Britain—that place cut off at the very world’s end . . . To think of some godless soldier owning my well-farmed fallow, A foreigner reaping these crops!”

(1.64-71)

And in the ninth Eclogue, Moeris laments his eviction from his land, the day

“. . . that I should have lived to see an outsider

Take over my little farm—a thing I had never feared— And tell me, ‘You’re dispossessed, you old tenants, you’ve got to go.’ ”

(9.2-4)

It seems clear from all this that somehow Virgil, or rather Virgil’s father, escaped the fate of

Meliboeus and Moeris. Either his farm was exempt from confiscation or he was given another in exchange. The “young man” can only have been Octavian, and somehow Asinius Pollio, who is mentioned in Eclogue 4, and who was a patron of poets and the arts, sensing the young Virgil’s talent, brought him to Octavian’s notice and secured his future education in the capital of the province, Mediolanum (Milan), at Rome, and later at Naples and at nearby Herculaneum, where his name appears on a burned papyrus as a student of Epicurean philosophy. At some point he was brought to the attention of Maecenas, who was Octavian’s friend and another benefactor of poets. We have from Virgil’s friend and fellow poet Horace an account of their meeting on the way to Brundisium (Brindisi) with Maecenas on his mission to Greece to negotiate with Antony in 37 B.C. In his fifth Satire of the first book, written in hexameter verse, Horace describes the journey from Rome with Maecenas; at Sinuessa they meet with another group, of which Virgil is part. O qui complexus et gaudia, “Oh what embraces and joy!” And later at Capua they stay for the night at an inn. Lusum it Maecenas, writes Horace, “Maecenas goes off to exercise,” dormitum ego Vergiliusque, “and Virgil and I to bed” (1.5.43, 48, trans. Knox).

Virgil’s Eclogues were an immediate success and soon gained all the trappings of general approval—some of the dialogues of shepherds were performed in theaters, quotations and parodies abounded. But what made them a landmark in the history of Latin poetry were the music and elegance of the hexameter verse, the exquisite control of the rhythmic patterns.

The Latin hexameter, modeled on Homer’s, had been used by Latin poets ever since Quintus Ennius (239-169 B.C.) had adapted it to celebrate in his Annales the history of Rome from the founding by Aeneas down to his own day. Virgil knew and often used phrases of this poet; he also knew the great hexameter poem of his older contemporary, Lucretius, whose De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) celebrated the Epicurean philosophy of which Virgil was a devotee: Virgil’s lines often show the influence of Lucretius’ poem. But only Virgil’s own poetic genius can explain the lightness, the dexterity, the rhythmic music of the Eclogues, and this is even truer of his next, and most perfect, poem, the Georgics.

THE GEORGICS

This poem, of more than two thousand lines in four books, was first read to Octavian soon after the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra in 30 B.C., which made him sole ruler of the Roman world, at Atella near Naples by Maecenas and Virgil in 29 B.C. It is, like the Eclogues, modeled on a Greek poem, Hesiod’s Works and Days, but whereas Hesiod writes of farming from firsthand experience, Virgil has to draw on a prose work written on the subject, the De Re Rustica of Varro, which had been published in 37-36 B.C. Of Virgil’s four books the first is on field crops, the second on trees, the third on herds, and the fourth on bees. The only source of sweetness available to the ancient Western world was honey—hence the importance of bee-keeping. Virgil’s poem, with its devotion to the land, the crops, and the herds, fits admirably into the old Roman ideal: the Roman farmer is equally adapted to work on the land and to do the work of a soldier in the legion in time of war. The model was the legendary figure Cincinnatus, who in 458 B.C. was called from his farm and given dictatorial power; he rescued the state by defeating the Aequi and, after holding supreme power for sixteen days, resigned it and returned to his plow. But the Georgics is no more a real manual for the soldier turned farmer than the Augustan ideal of the Roman soldier-farmer was realistic; as a manual for farmers the Georgics has huge omissions and as a practical handbook would be as useless as Augustus’s program of re-creating the Roman farmer-soldier was impractical. Most of Italy was cultivated by slave labor on land owned by absentee landlords who lived in Rome. The Georgics is a work of art—as Dryden declared, “the best Poem by the best Poet”—on which Virgil worked for seven years; he compared his work on it to that of a mother bear licking her cubs into shape.

In the opening lines of the poem, addressed to Maecenas, he announces the subject of the four books:

What makes the corncrops glad, under which star To turn the soil, Maecenas, and wed your vines To elms, the care of cattle, keeping of flocks, All the experience thrifty bees demand— Such are the themes of my song.

(1.1-5, trans. Wilkinson)

With an invocation of the country gods, Virgil proceeds to describe the farmer’s life of hard work as in his model, Hesiod. Later he writes about the weather signs that the farmer must recognize as prophecies of what is to come, sometimes evil, as he ends the book with memories of the recent civil wars, of Roman blood shed on the fields of Greece, and with a finale that is a prayer and a dark vision of the future:

Gods of our fathers, Heroes of our land . . . Do not prevent at least this youthful prince From saving a world in ruins . . . For right and wrong change places; everywhere So many wars, so many shapes of crime

Confront us; no due honor attends the plow. The fields, bereft of tillers, are all unkempt . . . . . . throughout the world Impious War is raging.

(1.498-511)

Book 2 is concerned with trees and vines, principally with the olive and the wine grape. There is

much good advice here for the farmer, but the book is notable not only for the hymn of praise for Italy already quoted, but also for its praise of the happy life of the farmer as compared to that of the city dweller:

How lucky, if they know their happiness, Are farmers, more than lucky, they for whom, Far from the clash of arms, the earth herself, Most fair in dealing, freely lavishes An easy livelihood . . . . . . Peace they have and a life of innocence Rich in variety; they have for leisure Their ample acres, caverns, living lakes, . . . cattle low, and sleep is soft Under a tree . . .

(2.458-70)

Book 3 is concerned with the breeding and raising of farm animals: horses and cattle in the first

part and sheep and goats in the later section. After an exordium in which Virgil promises to celebrate the victories of Octavian, a promise fulfilled in the Aeneid, he proceeds to his subject. His discussion of farm animals contains the famous lines that apply equally to the human animal:

Life’s earliest years for wretched mortal creatures Are best, and fly most quickly: soon come on Diseases, suffering and gloomy age, Till Death’s unpitying harshness carries them off.

(3.66-68)

Virgil ends this book, as he did Book 1, on a sad note: an account of a plague that struck cattle in the northern region of the Alps, in which he draws much from Lucretius’ portrayal of the plague that struck humans in the Athens of Pericles, described in exact detail by Thucydides.

In his introduction to Book 4, about bee-keeping, Virgil assures Maecenas that he will describe

. . . a world in miniature, Gallant commanders and the institutions

Of a whole nation, its character, pursuits, Communities and warfare.

(4.3-5)

And this theme, of the hive as a community, in harmony or dissension, is a constant in the book.

A great deal of misinformation about bees is conveyed to the reader. Bees were not properly observed in the hive until the invention of the glass observation hive, and until the seventeenth century it was believed that the leader of the hive was the king, not the queen. But what has made Book 4 famous is the end—the long tale of Aristaeus and his bees and of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Virgil first describes the process of bougonia (the Greek word means something like “birth from a steer”), for re-creating the hive of bees in case the original bees die. A two-year-old steer is brought to a specially constructed hut that has windows facing in all four directions. The animal is then beaten to death and the remains left in place through the spring. Suddenly, in the rotting flesh a whole cluster of bees is born. This is not true, but it was widely believed in the ancient world (except by Aristotle) and appears also in the riddle Samson asked the Philistines to answer: “out of the strong came forth sweetness” (Judges 14:14).

Virgil’s account of the origin of this method is told through the story of the farmer Aristaeus, whose hive of bees has died. He goes to his mother, the nymph Cyrene, and she tells him to find out what has gone wrong from Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, who “knows / All that has been, is now, and lies in store” (4.392-93). Aristaeus must seize Proteus as he comes out of the water with his seals and hold him tightly as he changes shape, “for suddenly / He’ll be a bristly boar or a savage tiger / or a scaly serpent or a lioness” (4.407-8). But he must be held fast until he gives up and resumes his own shape, and then he will answer questions. (This scene is adapted from Menelaus’ similar interrogation of Proteus in the Odyssey 4.428-641.)2 Aristaeus follows directions faithfully, and finally Proteus, back in his own shape, tells Aristaeus what is wrong. “Piteous Orpheus / It is that seeks to invoke this penalty / Against you” (4.454-55). It is revenge for the death of his wife, the nymph Eurydice, who, fleeing Aristaeus’ advances, ran along the banks of a river where she was killed by a serpent. After mourning for her, Orpheus decided to seek her in the land of the dead.

And entering the gloomy grove of terror Approached the shades and their tremendous king . . . [Orpheus’] music shook them . . .

(4.468-71)

And Virgil goes on to describe the dark kingdom and its denizens in lines that foreshadow his more detailed description of the Underworld later, in Book 6 of the Aeneid. Orpheus’ music wins him his Eurydice.

She is allowed to follow him back to the land of the living, but on condition that he does not look back at her until they reach the light of the upper world. But Orpheus,

. . . on the very brink of light, alas, Forgetful, yielding in his will, looked back At his own Eurydice. . . .

(4.490-91)

And as she reproached him bitterly, she

. . . suddenly Out of his sight, like smoke into thin air, Vanished away . . . For seven whole months on end, they say, he wept . . . Alone in the wild . . . And sang his tale of woe . . .

(4.499-510)

And finally, wandering in Thrace in the north, he was torn to pieces by Bacchantes in their Dionysiac frenzy, his limbs were scattered far and wide, and his head was thrown into the Hebrus River. And there,

His head, now severed from his marble neck, “Eurydice!” the voice and frozen tongue Still called aloud, “Ah, poor Eurydice!”

(4.523-26)

So Proteus departed and Aristaeus, instructed by his mother Cyrene, made sacrifices to the shade of Orpheus and to the nymphs, the sisters of Eurydice, and then left for his bougonia for the regeneration of his bees. And the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, in Virgil’s musical verse, has inspired poetry and song ever since.

In the final lines of the Georgics, published probably in 29 B.C., two years after the battle of Actium, which made Octavian master of the Roman world, Virgil tells us that he finished the poem at Naples (to which he gives its Greek name, Parthenope), while Octavian, soon to be given the title Augustus, was making a triumphant progress through the East.

This song of the husbandry of crops and beasts And fruit-trees I was singing while great Caesar Was thundering beside the deep Euphrates In war, victoriously for grateful peoples Appointing laws and setting his course for Heaven. I, Virgil, at that time lay in the lap Of sweet Parthenope, enjoying there The studies of inglorious ease, who once

Dallied in pastoral verse and with youth’s boldness Sang of you, Tityrus, lazing under a beech-tree.

(4.559-66)

That last line is a quotation, slightly adapted, of the opening line of his first book, the Eclogues.

THE AENEID

Near the opening of the third book of the Georgics Virgil speaks of what will be his next work:

Yet soon I will gird myself to celebrate The fiery fights of Caesar, make his name Live in the future . . .

(3.46-47)

This promise would be kept by the writing of his last and most grandly ambitious poem, the Aeneid, which he never finished to his full satisfaction. After reading Books 2, 4, and 6 to Augustus and Octavia and completing his work on Book 12, he decided to visit Greece in 19 B.C. and spend three years on correction and revision. But he met Augustus in Athens on Augustus’ return from the East and was persuaded to return to Italy with him. However, passing from Athens to Corinth, at Megara Virgil contracted a fever, which grew worse during the voyage to Brundisium, where he died on September 21. He was buried near Naples, and on his tomb were inscribed verses that he is said to have composed himself:

Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope. Cecini pascua, rura, duces.

Mantova gave me life, the Calabrians took it away, Naples holds me now; I sang of pastures, farms, and commanders.

(trans. Knox)

There is a report that he had ordered his literary executors, Varius and Tucca, to destroy the unfinished manuscript; if so, these orders were immediately canceled by Augustus. Imperfections remain: some incomplete hexameters, which Virgil would certainly have tidied up, and several minor contradictions, which he would certainly have dealt with. One passage (2.702-28), which is not in the oldest manuscripts, was removed, according to the much later commentator Servius, by Varius and Tucca. (In the most recent editions of Virgil’s text, for example that of Fairclough, revised in 1999- 2000 by George P. Goold, the passage is marked as spurious. Other recent commentators, however, notably R. G. Austin and R. D. Williams, consider it genuine.) The passage pictures Helen as seeking sanctuary at the shrine of Vesta, fearing the vengeance of the Trojans for the ruin she has brought on them, and Aeneas’ angry decision to kill her. This passage contradicts a long and intricate story of Helen triumphantly welcoming the Greeks and organizing the mutilation and death of Deiphobus, the Trojan whom she had married after the death of Paris (6.573-623). But however it may complicate the narrative, and however Virgil might have revised it later, one may still be impressed by its strong Virgilian style and the effectiveness with which it suits its context, setting the scene for Venus, who redirects Aeneas’ energies to the rescue of his family. So we have bracketed the passage and kept it

in the translation.

The Aeneid, of course, is based on and often uses characters and incidents from the Homeric epics. In the Iliad Aeneas is an important warrior fighting on the Trojan side. He is the son of the love- goddess Aphrodite (Venus in the Roman pantheon) and Anchises, and he is often rescued from death at the hands of Greek warriors by divine intervention: from Diomedes by Aphrodite (Iliad 5.495- 517), and from Achilles by Poseidon (Neptune) at Iliad 20.314-386. On this occasion Poseidon comments on Aeneas’ piety toward the gods: “He always gave us gifts to warm our hearts, / gifts for the gods who rule the vaulting skies” (20.345-46). He also says something else about Aeneas:

“He is destined to survive. Yes, so the generation of Dardanus shall not perish . . . Dardanus, dearest to Zeus of all the sons That mortal women brought to birth for Father.” (20.349-53)

Dardanus was the founder of the race of Trojan kings, ancestor not only of Priam and Hector but also of Anchises and Aeneas. And Poseidon goes on to say: “and now Aeneas will rule the men of Troy in power—/ his sons’ sons and the sons born in future years”

(20.355-56).

Poseidon’s mention of Aeneas’ insistence on gifts of sacrifice to the gods anticipates the adjective that Virgil often attaches to him—pius, and its abstract noun pietas. He is called in the early lines of the poem (1.10) “a man outstanding in his piety,” insignem pietate virum, and in 1.457 he introduces himself to his mother, Venus (whom he has not yet recognized), with the words “I am pious Aeneas,” sum pius Aeneas (trans. Knox). The adjective and the abstract noun occur often in the poem and are attributed to its hero. Virgil’s mastery of the hexameter line rules out the Homeric reason for the repetition of such modifiers—metrical necessity; in Virgil the frequent reappearance of these words in connection with the hero has a meaning and an emphasis, though not those of Yeats’s sailor who told him Aeneas sounded more like a priest than a hero.

The word pius does indeed refer, like its English derivative, to devotion and duty to the Divine; this is the reason cited by Poseidon in the Iliad for saving Aeneas from death at the hand of Achilles. And in the Aeneid he is always mindful of the gods, constant in prayer and thanks and dutiful in sacrifice. But the words pius and pietas have in Latin a wider meaning. Perhaps the best English equivalent is something like “dutiful,” “mindful of one’s duty”—not only to the gods but also to one’s family and to one’s country.

Aeneas’ devotion to his family was famous. Book 2 describes how, after realizing that fighting was no longer of use, that Troy was doomed, he carries his father, Anchises, on his shoulders out of the burning city, holding his son Ascanius by the hand, with his wife, Creusa, following behind. But she is lost on the way, and he arrives at the rendezvous outside the city with only his father and son. In desperation he rushes back into the burning city to find her, but finds only her ghost, which tells him what his future and his duty are now:

“‘A long exile is your fate . . .

the vast plains of the sea are yours to plow until you reach Hesperian land, where Lydian Tiber flows with its smooth march through rich and loamy fields, a land of hardy people. There great joy and a kingdom are yours to claim, and a queen to make your wife . . . And now farewell. Hold dear the son we share, we love together.’”

(2.967-80)

He tries to embrace her only to find

“. . . her phantom sifting through my fingers, light as wind, quick as a dream in flight.”

(2.984-86)

But pietas describes another loyalty and duty, besides that to the gods and to the family. It is for the

Roman, to Rome, and in Aeneas’ case, to his mission to found it in Hesperia, the western country, Italy. And it is noticeable that this adjective is not applied to him when, in love with Dido, in Book 4, he actually takes part in helping to build her city, Carthage, “founding the city fortifications, / building homes in Carthage” (4.324-25). Jupiter in heaven, enraged that Aeneas has forgotten his mission, sends his messenger, Mercury, down to him with the single-word command Naviget! “Let him set sail!” (4.296). Only when Aeneas realizes he must leave Dido, and suffers from her rage as he makes his reply to her accusations, only when he leaves for the shore and gives his fleet the order to set sail, is he called pius again (4.494-95). He has given up her love, and left her to die, as he fulfills his duty to his son—for as Mercury reminds him, “you owe him Italy’s realm, the land of Rome!” (4.343)— and his own duty to found the western Troy that is to be.

But pietas is not a virtue confined to Aeneas; it is also an ideal for all Romans. Unlike the Greeks whom they added to their empire, and admired for their artistic and literary skills, but who never acted as a united nation, not even when invaded by the forces of the Persian Empire in 480 B.C., the Romans had a profound sense of national unity, and the talents and virtues necessary for a race of conquerors and organizers, of empire-builders and rulers. One of the virtues besides pietas that they admired was gravitas, a profound seriousness in matters political and religious, in which they distrusted attempts to change; they deferred on these and other matters to auctoritas, the power and respect won by men of experience, of successful leadership in war and peace. They admired discipline, the mark of their legionary soldiers who conquered and held for centuries an empire that included almost the whole of western Europe and much of the Middle East.

Many of these Roman characteristics appear early in Virgil’s poem in the simile that describes how Neptune restored order to the chaos created by Juno, who had loosed all of the Aeolian winds against the Trojan fleet:

Just as, all too often, some huge crowd is seized by a vast uprising, the rabble runs amok, all slaves to passion, rocks, firebrands flying. Rage finds them arms but then, if they chance to see a man among them, one whose devotion and public service lend him weight [pietate gravem], they stand there, stock-still with their ears alert as he rules their furor with his words and calms their passion.

(1.174-81)

Here pietas, gravitas, and the auctoritas conferred by his public service (meritis) are enough to calm the mob and restore order.

The continuation of the Iliad, the Iliou Persis (The Sack of Troy), exists now only in fragmentary quotations, but it records Aeneas’ exit from the burning city and his stay with his family and followers on Mount Ida, near Troy, before departing on his travels to the West. These are mentioned by the Greek writer Hellanicus of Lesbos as early as the fifth century B.C., and the final object of his travels was established as Italy perhaps as early as the fifth century but certainly by the third. As the Romans in that century began to find themselves opposed by Macedonian and Greek powers in the East, the legend of Rome’s Trojan ancestry became increasingly popular; it was eagerly embraced when in 280 B.C. Pyrrhus of Epirus invaded Italy, claiming descent from Achilles and labeling Rome a second Troy. He defeated several Roman armies, with increasing losses—hence the phrase Pyrrhic victory—but finally left Italy in 275 B.C. and was killed soon afterward. In Rome the legend of Aeneas’ arrival in Italy and the founding by his son Ascanius of Alba Longa, where many centuries later, Romulus, founder of Rome, would be born, was celebrated in the Annales of Ennius, written in hexameter verse, which carried on the history of Rome from its founding until Ennius’ own time—the second century B.C.

The first six books of the Aeneid contain many references to and imitations of incidents and passages found in the Homeric Odyssey. Aeneas’ stay at Carthage with Dido corresponds to Odysseus’ stay (much longer and against his will) with the nymph Calypso, and his account of his wanderings from Troy, told to Dido in Book 3, to Odysseus’ long account of his wanderings told to the Phaeacians in Books 9 through 12 of the Odyssey. Aeneas encounters and rescues one of Odysseus’ sailors who has been left behind on the island of the Cyclops, where Aeneas too encounters Polyphemus and his Cyclopean relatives. The funeral games for Anchises in Book 5 of the Aeneid are modeled on those for Patroclus in Book 23 of the Iliad, except that a ship-race in the Aeneid replaces a horse race in the Iliad. And of course Aeneas visits the land of the dead in Book 6 of the Aeneid to see his father, just as Odysseus goes there to meet his mother in Book 11 of the Odyssey. Yet these correspondences are of quite different episodes: the stay with Calypso is long and uneventful, that with Dido is short and tragic; the encounters in the lower world are very different in length as in nature. And many correspondences in the later books, such as the shield made for Achilles by Hephaestus and that made for Aeneas by Vulcan are superficial resemblances between

entirely different objects. As for the fact that the last six books of the Aeneid resemble the Iliad more than the Odyssey, because they deal with war not voyaging, this is not their only resemblance. In both epics an older man has entrusted to the hero a companion to fight with him and sustain his cause. In the Iliad Achilles’ father gives him an older companion, Patroclus, and in the Aeneid Evander gives his young son Pallas to fight at Aeneas’ side. In both cases this man is killed by the enemy chieftain, and in both cases that killing is avenged by the hero’s killing of the enemy champion, of Hector in the Iliad, and in the last lines of the Aeneid, of Turnus.

The Aeneid is to be Rome’s Iliad and Odyssey, and it derives also from Homer its picture of two different worlds, each with its own passions and actions. One is the world of heaven above, in Homer the world of Zeus, the supreme god, his wife and sister, Hera, the love-goddess Aphrodite, the smith-god Hephaestus, the sea-god Poseidon and the others; and below, on earth, the world of Achilles, Patroclus, Diomedes and of Hector, his wife Andromache, and his father Priam. In the Aeneid the heavens are the home of Jupiter (or Jove) the supreme god, his wife and sister Juno, the love-goddess Venus, the smith-god Vulcan, the sea-god Neptune, and the minor gods. They preside over the world of the heroes—Aeneas, Turnus, Evander, Pallas, and Camilla down below. As in Homer, the passions and actions of the gods affect the actions and passions of the heroes on earth.

Jupiter knows what the Fates have decreed, what will happen in the end—that Aeneas will reach Italy and found Lavinium, the beginning of the process that over the centuries will lead to the founding of Rome. But Juno is bitterly opposed to this vision of the future; she hated Troy while it stood, and all Trojans since with a vicious aversion, and she is determined that Aeneas will not reach Italy. This hatred of Trojans has many causes: the fact that their ancestor was Dardanus, the son of Zeus and Electra, daughter of Atlas—“the Trojan stock she loathed” (1.35); the fact that Ganymede, a beautiful boy whose father was Laomedon, a Trojan prince, had been carried up to Olympus by Zeus, who assumed the shape of an eagle, to be his cupbearer—“the honors showered on Ganymede” (1.35)— and lastly the so-called Judgment of Paris, delivered while Troy still stood secure at peace behind its walls. Three goddesses, Juno, Athena, and Venus, disputed which was the most beautiful and finally decided on a beauty contest to be judged by Paris, a son of Priam, king of Troy. As he surveyed their charms, each one offered him a bribe to win his vote. The virgin goddess Athena offered him success in war, Juno success in every walk of life, but Venus offered the love and the hand of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta in Greece. He judges Venus the most beautiful, goes to Sparta, runs off to Troy with Helen, and the ten-year war begins. Juno never forgot this insult; it is mentioned at the beginning of Virgil’s poem, “the judgment of Paris, the unjust slight to her beauty” (1.34). And this is one of the reasons why she

drove over endless oceans Trojans left by the Greeks . . . Juno kept them far from Latium, forced by the Fates to wander round the seas of the world, year in, year out. Such a long hard labor it was to found the Roman people.

(1.37-41)

NARRATIVE

After this line the narrative begins. It is the opening of an epic poem, divided into twelve books containing roughly ten thousand lines. The story plunges, in Horace’s famous phrase, in medias res, into the middle of events. Aeneas’ fleet is just off Sicily when Juno arrives, bribes the divine keeper of the winds, Aeolus, to let them loose in a storm that scatters Aeneas’ fleet and lands him, with only seven of his ships, on the African shore. But Neptune suddenly realizes that a vast storm has raged without his permission; he rebukes Aeolus and calms the weather, and the rest of Aeneas’ fleet re- forms in quiet waters.

On the African shore Aeneas tries to cheer his despondent crews in words that summarize their hard lot and their final reward promised by Fate:

“A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this. Through so many hard straits, so many twists and turns our course holds firm for Latium. There Fate holds out a homeland, calm, at peace. There the gods decree the kingdom of Troy will rise again. Bear up. Save your strength for better times to come.”

(1.239-44)

Meanwhile there are fresh developments in heaven above. Venus reminds Jupiter of his promises about Aeneas’ future and complains of Juno’s interference. Why is Aeneas kept away from the Rome he was promised? Jupiter’s reply is long and favorable: “the fate of your children stands unchanged,” he reassures her, and “unrolling the scroll of Fate” (1.308-13) he tells her that

“Aeneas will wage a long, costly war in Italy . . . and build high city walls for the people there . . . But his son Ascanius, now that he gains the name of Iulus . . . [will] raise up Alba Longa’s mighty ramparts.”

(1.314-25)

There, after three hundred years, the priestess Ilia will bear to the Roman war-god Mars twin sons; one of them, Romulus, will build Rome’s walls and call his people Romans. Jupiter goes on: “On them I set no limits, space or time: / I have granted them power, empire without end” (1.333-34). And he concludes with a vision of the future, the Roman conquest of Greece, the coming of a Trojan Caesar, Julius, “a name passed down from Iulus, his great forebear” (1.344). This is Augustus, under whom “the violent centuries, battles set aside, / [will] grow gentle, kind” (1.348-49).

Below, on earth, Aeneas, who now sets out with one companion, Achates, to explore the territory,

has landed in the area where Dido, an exile from Tyre, is building her new city, Carthage. His mother, Venus, disguised as a girl huntress, tells him the story of Dido, and he eventually comes to the city that is being built, to find the rest of his surviving crews being welcomed by the queen. She realizes who he is and invites him to a banquet, at which, in Books 2 and 3, he tells her the story of the fall of Troy, his escape with his father and young son, and the long voyage west with his Trojans toward their destined home. Meanwhile, not without the intervention of Venus, Dido has fallen madly in love with Aeneas, and on the next day, in Book 4, at a hunt Juno sends down a storm that drives the pair to take refuge in a cave, where their love is consummated. Dido regards this as a marriage, and Aeneas seems to agree, since he takes part in the building of her new city. But Jupiter soon sends his messenger, Mercury, to remind Aeneas of his duty, and in spite of Dido’s appeals and denunciations, he sets sail with his fleet. Dido curses him and all his race and calls for an avenger to arise from her bones as she commits suicide. In Book 5, Aeneas in Sicily organizes the funeral games for Anchises. Juno attempts, unsuccessfully, to burn his ships. In a dream he sees his dead father, Anchises, who tells him he must go to the land of the dead, guided by the Sibyl, to meet him in Elysium, “the luminous fields where the true / and faithful gather” (5.814-15). His guide to the Underworld will be the Sibyl whom he will find in Italy. And in Book 6, after his journey with the Sibyl through the darker regions of the world below, he meets Anchises and is shown a pageant of the great Romans, who in future days will establish the Roman Empire and the peace of the world.

In Book 7 Aeneas finally reaches the Tiber River, and the second part of the Aeneid starts: the wandering is over and the wars begin. Virgil invokes the Muse Erato to tell “who were the kings, the tides and times, how stood / the old Latin state” (7.40-41). He asks the goddess

“inspire your singer, come! I will tell of horrendous wars . . . all Hesperia called to arms . . . I launch a greater labor.”

(7.45-50)

Erato is the Muse of lyric poetry and love; she seems an unusual Muse to call on for inspiration in a tale of “horrendous wars.” Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry, might seem more appropriate, but these wars are waged because of a marriage contested between the two champions, Aeneas and Turnus. Since there is no Muse specifically associated with war, Erato is the natural choice.

In Book 7 Aeneas establishes a fortified camp on the shore by the river Tiber,

And Aeneas himself lines up his walls with a shallow trench, he starts to work the site and rings his first settlement on the coast with mounds, redoubts and ramparts built like an armed camp.

(7.180-83)

The words used—fossa, pinnis, aggere, castrorum—identify it with the camps (castra) that in the

future Roman legionary soldiers will build at the end of the day’s march—castra, which will be built all over Europe and have often left their mark on the names of the cities that occupy those sites— Lancaster, Manchester, Worcester. From this camp Aeneas sends an embassy to King Latinus, asking for a grant of land and the hand of his daughter Lavinia in marriage. The king has been warned of such an approach by visions and seers, and is agreeable. But Juno intervenes again—this is where she makes her famous proclamation: “if I cannot sway the heavens, I’ll wake the powers of hell!” Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo (7.365). (Many centuries later these words would appear on the title page of Sigmund Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams, a clear announcement that he is drawing some sort of analogy between the psychic and the infernal, and the dark energies of both.) Juno sends the Fury Allecto to rouse against the marriage first Lavinia’s mother Amata, and then the Rutulian leader Turnus, who presumes that Lavinia will become his bride. Both are filled with furious rage against the new proposal, and Turnus (and Juno) stir Italy against its terms. War against the intruders is declared, and Book 7 ends with a long catalog of the Italian forces and leaders, prominent among them Mezentius, the Etruscan king whose own people (who eventually fight on the Trojan side) had driven him out because of his cruelty; and Turnus, the leader of the fight against Aeneas, and the virgin cavalry leader Camilla, the Volscian.

As Book 8 opens, the god of the river Tiber appears to Aeneas in a dream, explains to him that Evander, whose kingdom lies upriver, is an enemy of the Latins and will help Aeneas. The river-god himself will help him on his way in his ships. Aeneas chooses a pair of galleys and sets off for Evander’s town, which is on the site, with its hills, where Rome will one day rise. They are hailed by Pallas, Evander’s son, and welcomed by the king. He has been celebrating their liberation by Hercules from the fire-breathing monster Cacus, which lived in a cave on what later, in Roman times, was named the Aventine hill. And Evander tells the long story of Hercules’ ultimate destruction of Cacus. He then shows Aeneas all around his kingdom, the places that will in later times be famous, the future sites of the Capitol—“they saw herds of cattle . . . / in the Roman Forum and Carinae’s elegant district” (8.423-24). That night, as they sleep, Venus persuades her husband, the smith-god Vulcan, to make arms and a shield for Aeneas. Meanwhile Evander tells Aeneas of certain allies for him—the Etruscans, who have expelled their cruel king, Mezentius, and burn to fight the Rutulian forces of Turnus but have been told by a seer to await a captain from overseas. Aeneas and Pallas ride for Etruria with their cavalry, meet the Etruscan forces and, as the “weary troops take rest” (8.716), Venus gives her son his new arms and shield. And on the shield “There is the story of Italy, / Rome in all her triumphs” (8.738-39). Across its surface is pictured the whole history of Rome, from the she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus to the battle of Actium, which made Augustus master of the world. Aeneas

knows nothing of these events but takes delight in their likeness, lifting onto his shoulders now the fame and fates of all his children’s children.

(8.856-58)

Back at the seashore Turnus, spurred on by Juno, leads his troops against the Trojan camp, but

unable to breach the walls, attacks with fire the ships of Aeneas, moored by the camp. But these ships

were built outside Troy from trees in a wood sacred to Jupiter’s mother, Cybebe (Cybele), and she now calls on her son to save them. He changes them into sea-nymphs, and Turnus calls off the attack on the camp until the next day. One of the Trojans, Nisus, proposes to steal at night through the sleeping enemy contingents to go and warn Aeneas of the danger to his base, and his young lover, Euryalus, insists, in spite of Nisus’ protests, on accompanying him. They carry out a wild slaughter among the sleeping Italians but as they move off, toward the river perhaps, they are intercepted and killed by a fresh enemy contingent just arriving. The next day Turnus renews the attack on the camp and even manages to get in alone through a gate that has been opened by overconfident Trojans. He creates great slaughter among the Trojans as he fights his way to the water and swims to safety.

At the beginning of Book 10, which follows, Jupiter calls together an assembly of the gods at which both Venus and Juno make their long complaints, but Jupiter declares neutrality. He will leave the outcome to the champions themselves:

“How each man weaves his web will bring him to glory or to grief . . . The Fates will find the way.”

(10.135-38)

The attack on the camp resumes, while far upriver, Aeneas joins the Etruscan leaders, who combine their fleet with his to sail down to the relief of the Trojan camp. At this point (10.202ff.) Virgil names and describes the Etruscan leaders, another of those catalogs in which he lovingly recites the various parts of Italy from which they come . . . Pisa, Caere, Liguria, Mantua—part of that hymn of praise of Italy that is a main feature of the Aeneid. As Aeneas sails down the river, the nymph Cymodocea, who had been one of the nymphs that had been changed into a ship outside the camp, warns him that the camp is under attack by Turnus, and as Aeneas comes in sight of it he raises the shield his mother had made for him, and the signal is greeted with joy and relief by the Trojans in the camp. There follows a vivid account of an opposed landing and an equally fierce battle afterward “on Italy’s very doorstep” (10.420), in which, as young Pallas’ troops begin to fall back, he rallies them and kills one enemy chieftain after another, until Turnus comes to the rescue and routs the Arcadians, killing Pallas and taking from him as a trophy Pallas’ engraved sword-belt, which will turn out to be his own death warrant.

Aeneas hears the news and comes on, slaughtering enemy champions right and left as he looks for Turnus. But Juno obtains from Jupiter a respite, no more, for Turnus, and full of grief she spirits him out of the fighting to his home. Book 10 ends with an account of the many successful duels of Mezentius, the Etruscan king fighting on the Latin side. He kills one Trojan champion after another until he meets Aeneas, who wounds him and then kills his son Lausus, as he comes to his father’s aid. Aeneas, thinking no doubt of Pallas, is sorry for him, but goes on to kill his father, Mezentius. In Book 11 Aeneas, his camp no longer besieged, proceeds to the burial of the dead. He mourns over the body of Pallas and sends it off with his arms, his warhorse, and a huge escort, to his father. He gives envoys from the Latin city permission to bury their dead, and Drances, an enemy of Turnus, announces his intention to seek peace. Evander mourns over the body of Pallas and sends word to Aeneas that his “right arm / . . . owes . . . the life of Turnus / to son and father both” (11.210-12).

Now, as the Latins bury their dead, the discontent with the war, fanned by Drances, grows and is increased by bad news that arrives from the city that Diomedes the Greek champion was building in Italy, and whom the Latin envoys had counted on for support against the enemy he had fought at Troy. But Diomedes’ answer is negative: he advises them to make peace with Aeneas, whose bravery he praises. Latinus offers to give the Trojans the territory they ask for, and Drances proposes that the king give his daughter Lavinia to Aeneas in marriage. Turnus makes a long and furious reply, urging continuation of the war, and offering, if it comes to that, to fight Aeneas man to man as Drances has proposed. But the council is interrupted by the news that Aeneas with all his troops is advancing on the city. The citizens man the walls, and Turnus orders his captains to their stations and rides off himself to meet, at the head of her cavalry, Camilla the Volscian. He arranges for her to engage the Trojan cavalry, while he hopes to ambush Aeneas and his troops, who are attacking the city from a different direction. The rest of Book 11 is mainly concerned with the feats and fate of Camilla, who, after killing many adversaries, is brought down by the Etruscan Arruns, who has stalked her all over the battlefield. Her death is avenged by that of Arruns at the hand of the nymph Opis, sent down by the goddess Diana, who loves Camilla, her devotee. And now, in the last book, Turnus sends the challenge to Aeneas, to fight him man to man. As all the preparations are made, the dueling ground paced off, Juno intervenes. She tells Turnus’ sister, Juturna, a river-nymph, “Pluck your brother from death, if there’s a way, / or drum up war and abort that treaty they conceived” (12.187-88).

And she does. Disguised as Camers, a famous Italian warrior, she begins to stir discontent among the Rutulians, and soon fighting breaks out. Aeneas, as he vainly tries to stop it, is hit by an arrow and retreats from the lines. Turnus attacks, the war resumes. Aeneas and his friends try to pull the broken arrowhead out of the wound; their efforts and those of the old healer Iapyx are unsuccessful until Venus intervenes and supplies Iapyx, without his knowledge, with herbs that restore Aeneas to health. Venus also inspires Aeneas to put Latinus’ city to the torch, and the Trojan attack is successful enough to cause the queen, Amata, to hang herself as the walls are breached. The news is brought to Turnus, and abandoning his chariot, which, he now realizes, is driven by his sister Juturna the nymph, who is trying to save him, he comes to meet Aeneas and settle the issue man to man.

As they fight, Venus and Juturna both intervene to help their relatives, and finally Jupiter forbids any further interference by Juno or her helper. And reluctantly Juno yields. But she makes a request:

“never command the Latins, here on native soil, to change their age-old name, to become Trojans, called the kin of Teucer, alter their language, change their style of dress. Let Latium endure. Let Alban kings hold sway for all time. Let Roman stock grow strong with Italian strength. Troy has fallen—and fallen let her stay— with the very name of Troy!”

(12.954-61)

And Jupiter grants her wish:

“Latium’s sons will retain their fathers’ words and ways. Their name till now is the name that shall endure. Mingling in stock alone, the Trojans will subside. And I will add the rites and the forms of worship, make them Latins all, who speak the Latin tongue.”

(12.967-71)

Juno accepts, with joy. But Jupiter must now deal with Juturna. He sends down one of the Furies, who assumes the form of an owl that flutters in Turnus’ face, screeches, drums Turnus’ shield with its wings. Juturna recognizes the signal and, lamenting, leaves Turnus to face Aeneas. In the end, Turnus, helpless, lies at Aeneas’ feet and begs for his life. Turnus’ pleas begin to sway him, when suddenly he sees “the fateful sword-belt of Pallas, / swept over Turnus’ shoulder . . . like a trophy” and “plants / his iron sword hilt-deep in his enemy’s heart” (12.1098-1110).

HISTORY

All this intervention of gods in human affairs to advance their own interests and satisfy their own passions is Homeric, but what is not Homeric is the constant reference to history, in particular to Roman history, which is a recurring feature of the Aeneid. The Homeric epics have no historical background to speak of—as C. S. Lewis puts it, “There is no pretence, indeed no possibility of pretending, that the world, or even Greece, would have been much altered if Odysseus had never got home at all” (Preface, p. 26). But the Aeneid is always conscious of history, Roman history, many centuries of it. Very often this reference is explicit, as in the long list and description of great Romans not yet born, whose spirits are shown to Aeneas by his father in Elysium in Book 6. But often the allusion is not explicit, and though it was obvious to Virgil’s Roman readers, it may not be so without explanation today.

For example, in Book 2, Aeneas’ account to Dido of the sack of Troy by the Greeks, the final disposition of the corpse of Priam, king of Troy, slaughtered in his palace by Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, is described by Virgil in these words:

“Such was the fate of Priam . . . the monarch who once had ruled in all his glory the many lands of Asia, Asia’s many tribes. A powerful trunk is lying on the shore. The head wrenched from the shoulders. A corpse without a name.”

(2.686-92)

Any Roman who read these lines in the years after Virgil’s poem was published or heard them recited would at once remember a real and recent ruler over “the many lands of Asia,” whose headless corpse lay on the shore. It was the corpse of Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey), who had been ruler of all the lands of Asia; from 67 to 62 B.C. he had been given a wide and extended command to settle the Middle East, had defeated the army of Mithridates, king of Pontus, and reorganized the whole area, adding new provinces to the Empire. But many years later, after his defeat by Caesar at Pharsalus in 48 B.C., his body lay headless on the Egyptian shore.

But this is far from being the only such reference to Roman history. Dido’s last words, in which she curses Aeneas and predicts eternal war between her people and his, reminded Roman readers of the three wars the Romans had to fight against the Carthaginians: the Punic Wars, they called them, a word formed from their name—Poeni—for the settlers from Tyre, who had founded the great commercial and naval power of Carthage.

As she prepares to kill herself after Aeneas leaves her, Dido curses him, foretelling a sad end for him and commanding her people to wage endless war on Aeneas’ descendants:

“And you, my Tyrians, harry with hatred all his line, his race to come . . .

No love between our peoples, ever—no pacts of peace! . . . Shore clash with shore, sea against sea and sword against sword—this is my curse—war between all our peoples, all their children, endless war!”

(4.775-84)

The Phoenicians, inhabitants of two cities, Tyre and Sidon on the Pales tinian coast, were the great sailors, traders, and explorers of the ancient world. They provided, for example, the fleet that backed the Persian king Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in 480 B.C. They also, from their colony at Carthage, founded, probably in the second half of the eighth century B.C., colonies in western Sicily, which regularly fought against the Greek colonies in the east of that island. And they colonized southern Spain, from which they exported those metals that were so rare in the eastern Mediterranean area. Their relations with Rome were friendly at first but soon, as Rome began to intervene in Sicily, degenerated, and in 264 B.C. the First Punic War began, to end in 241 with a hard-won Roman victory and the annexation of Sicily as Rome’s first province.

But the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.) was an entirely different matter; it saw the fulfillment of another part of Dido’s curse:

“Come rising up from my bones, you avenger still unknown, to stalk those Trojan settlers, hunt with fire and iron, now or in time to come, whenever the power is yours.”

(4.779-81)

This was the Carthaginian Hannibal, whose feats are also predicted by Jupiter in Book 10:

“one day when savage Carthage will loose enormous ruin down on the Roman strongholds, breach and unleash the Alps against her walls.”

(10.15-17)

Hannibal moved from his base in Spain north to what is now the French coast and then, war elephants and all, crossed the Alps and came down on Italy. He defeated the Roman troops in one battle after another, at the Trebia River, at Lake Trasimenus, and in 216 at Cannae he annihilated a superior Roman force with tactics that were carefully studied by the German general staff in 1914. But though he remained in Italy until 202, he was unable to break the loyalty of the Latin cities to Rome’s federation and was gradually confined to a small area in the South of Italy. Meanwhile the Roman general Scipio took southern Spain from the Carthaginians as Hasdrubal made his way over the Alps with a relief force to join Hannibal. Hasdrubal’s army was defeated in northern Italy in 207; Scipio crossed to Africa in 204, and Hannibal was recalled to defend Carthage. He was defeated by Scipio in 202 B.C. at Zama, and Carthage made peace with Rome on very harsh terms.

But Carthage, with its superb harbor and trading contacts, soon began to revive, and the Roman senator Cato became famous for ending every speech he made in the Senate, no matter what the subject under discussion happened to be, with the words: “And furthermore, my opinion is that Carthage should be destroyed—delendam esse Carthaginem.” Finally, in 149 B.C., the Romans took his advice; the Third Punic War came to an end in 146 B.C. with the total defeat of Carthage and the destruction of the city.

But of course it was eventually rebuilt, to become the heart of Rome’s North African province, and in Virgil’s lifetime the emperor Augustus established a Roman colony on the site, and it flourished as a commercial and cultural center well into the Christian centuries. St. Augustine as a young man went to the university there in the fourth century A.D., and it was in Carthage that he fell in love with Virgil, yet he later ascribed that love to sins of youth. He says of his school days there in his Confessions: “The singsong One and one makes two, two and two makes four was detestable to me, but sweet were the visions of absurdity—the wooden horse cargoed with men, Troy in flames, and Creusa herself ghosting by” (1.IV.22, trans. Garry Wills).

ANCHISES’ PAGEANT

But the most copious rehearsal of Roman history occurs in Book 6, when in Elysium Anchises shows Aeneas the spirits of the great Romans to come, a pageant of Roman history from the earliest, legendary times right up to Virgil’s own day. Following the instructions given him by Anchises in a dream in Sicily, Aeneas sails to Cumae in Italy, to meet the Sibyl who will be his guide for his visit to the land of the dead. He begs her to take him to his father and receives the famous reply:

“the descent to the Underworld is easy. Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide, but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air— there the struggle, there the labor lies.”

(6.149-52)

She tells him he must have the golden bough as a gift for the goddess Proserpina. He goes to get it and soon they are on their way “through gloom and the empty halls of Death’s ghostly realm” (6.308) to the river Acheron and its ferryman Charon. By the river there is a huge host of souls stretching out their arms in longing toward the farther bank, but Charon will take only those who have been properly buried; the others must wait on the bank for a hundred years. Here they see the shade of Palinurus, Aeneas’ pilot on the way to Italy, who was put to sleep by the god Somnus and fell overboard. He now lies unburied on the shore, but the Sibyl tells him he will be buried soon by the local people. As Aeneas and the Sibyl approach Charon, he refuses to take living passengers, but the Sibyl shows him the bough and he takes them aboard. On the other side they pass the hell-hound Cerberus as the Sibyl gives him the proverbial “sop,” “slumbrous with honey and drugged seed” (6.483).

Now they see the ghosts of those who died in infancy, of those condemned to death on a false charge, of suicides, and lastly, in the Fields of Mourning, of those who died of love. And here Aeneas sees the ghost of Dido. He approaches her, full of remorse, and makes his excuse: “I left your shores, my Queen, against my will” (6.535), but—in what T. S. Eliot calls “perhaps the most telling snub in all poetry” (What Is a Classic? p. 62)—she tears herself away, “his enemy forever” (6.548). Next they meet the “throngs of the great war heroes” who “live apart”—the Trojans who come “crowding around him” and the Greeks who “turn tail and run” (6.556-69). It is here that he meets the ghost of Deiphobus and hears the dreadful story of Helen’s treachery and his ghastly death. Soon they reach the place where the road divides; on the left lies a fortress surrounded by Tartarus’ River of Fire and guarded by Tisiphone, a Fury. It is the place, the Sibyl tells him, where the great sinners for whom there is only eternal punishment are confined. Besides the great sinners of the remote, mythical past— Salmoneus, Ixion, Tityos—are the human sinners, the parricides, the tyrants, the traitors . . . “No,” she says,

“not if I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths . . . I could never capture all the crimes or run through all the torments.”

(6.724-26)

And now they hurry away, and after Aeneas dedicates the golden bough to Proserpina, they come at

last to the Elysian Fields, “the land of joy . . . / . . . where the blessed make their homes” (6.741-42). Aeneas sees them exercising or feasting as he goes to meet the ghost of his father, Anchises. There are the founders of the line of Trojan kings—Ilus, Assaracus and Dardanus—and Aeneas sees also

troops of men who had suffered wounds, fighting to save their country, and those who had been pure priests while still alive, and the faithful poets whose songs were fit for Phoebus; those who enriched our lives with the newfound arts they forged and those we remember well for the good they did mankind.

(6.764-69)

In this paradise Aeneas finally meets the ghost of his father, who explains to him the workings of this spiritual world and in particular the nature of the spirits who throng the banks of the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. They are the souls of those, who after many years of punishment for their sins in life, are destined to return to the world after drinking the water of the Lethe and forgetting their previous existence. The spirits he sees are those of the great Romans to come and Anchises will “reveal them all” (6.878).

The background of this doctrine, of purgatorial suffering followed by rebirth, seems to be a purely Virgilian invention. It is, as one critic, R. G. Austin, puts it, “a poetic synthesis, blending the Stoic doctrine of the anima mundi [the spirit or mind of the universe] with Platonic and Orphic- Pythagorean teaching of rebirth.” He also adds: “The manner is constantly and pointedly Lucretian; the matter would have excited Lucretius’ disdain” (Sextus, 1977, note 724-51). What this religio- philosophical mélange enables Virgil to do is to display the future descendants of Aeneas who will one day rule the world. Virgil’s whole picture of the lower world, with its separation of the great sinners, for whom there is no forgiveness, from those who, through many years of punishment, win some kind of redemption, and those who are immediately admitted to heaven, reappears in many ways in Dante’s Divina Commedia.

The first spirit waiting to be reborn is Silvius, the first king of Alba Longa. He will be of half Italian blood, the child of Aeneas in his old age by Lavinia. The “tipless spear of honor” (6.879) that Silvius holds is the Roman award given to a young warrior for his first success in battle. There follow the names of “brave young men” who will build the towns near Rome, “famous names in the future, nameless places now”—Nomentum, Gabii, Fidena, Collatia, and many others (6.893-96). Next comes Romulus, son of the Roman war-god Mars (like him, he wears a helmet with twin plumes), who is to found Rome, which will one day rule the world. But now Anchises goes across the centuries to “Caesar and all the line of Iulus,” and Caesar Augustus who “will bring back the Age of Gold” and “expand his empire past the Garamants and the Indians” (6.911-17). Anchises now moves back from the glories of Augustan Rome to the history of Roman kings after Romulus: Numa the

lawgiver, next Tullus, a king “who rouse[s] a stagnant people / . . . back to war again” (6.937-38), and Ancus who was “too swayed by the breeze of public favor” (6.940). Next the expulsion of the last Roman king, Tarquin, by Brutus, who reclaims those symbols of power, the fasces—bundles of rods wrapped around an axe—and as the first consul of the new Republic sets a dreadful example by executing his own two sons for treason against the new Roman state. Next are the spirits of famous republican heroes; the Decii, father and son, who each in turn won a battle for Rome with a victorious but suicidal charge; the Drusi, another great patrician family, which gave Rome many victorious generals (and incidentally, was the family of Augustus’ wife). Torquatus was another stern Roman father who executed his son for disobedience. Camillus brought home the standards taken by the Gauls when they occupied Rome in 387 B.C. Other sources say that he took back from the Gauls not the standards but the gold they had taken. Virgil obviously preferred his version because it would remind readers that in 20 B.C. Augustus had recovered from the Parthians (by negotiation, not by war) the legionary standards lost by Crassus in his ill-fated expedition of 53 B.C.

Anchises makes another historical jump—to 49 B.C., when Julius Caesar was about to cross the Rubicon and start civil war against Pompey. Anchises points out that they are

“equals now at peace . . . but if they should reach the light of life, what war they’ll rouse between them! . . . Caesar, the bride’s father, marching down from his Alpine ramparts . . . Pompey her husband set to oppose him.”

(6.952-56)

Caesar’s daughter had been married to Pompey in a vain attempt to reconcile them; Virgil’s words recall the contemporary lines of Catullus: socer generque, perdidistis omnia—“Son and father-in- law, you have ruined everything” (29.24, trans. Knox). Anchises begs them not to start civil war and particularly appeals to Caesar: “born of my blood, throw down your weapons now!” (6.961).

But after this dramatic outcry Anchises returns to his catalog of Roman conquerors, this time of some of those who will avenge Troy by subduing Greece: Lucius Mummius, who sacked Corinth in 146 B.C., and Aemilius Paullus, who defeated Perseus, king of Macedon, who claimed descent from Achilles, at Pydna in 168 B.C. He briefly mentions Cato, known as the Censor, who strongly disapproved of the new Greek cultural influences on the Romans and insisted on the destruction of Carthage. Cossus was the second Roman commander to win the spolia opima, the “rich spoils,” an award given to the general who killed the opposing general in single combat. The Gracchi were a family that produced many famous Romans, among them the two tribunes who attempted the reform of the Roman landholding system in favor of the small farmers and were both killed and their movement suppressed. The elder Scipio defeated Hannibal at Zama, and the younger defeated the Carthaginians in the battle that was followed by the total destruction of Carthage. More great republican heroes are invoked as Anchises sweeps on—Fabricius, who conquered Pyrrhus and was known for his austere integrity, Serranus (the Sower), who was called to the consulship from work on his farm, and the great family of the Fabii, of whom Anchises mentions only one, Fabius Maximus, the consul who after the terrible Roman defeat at Cannae denied battle to Hannibal in order to defeat him, harassing him

but always refusing major engagement. He was known as Cunctator, the Delayer—“the one man / whose delaying tactics save our Roman state” (6.974-75), a phrase in which Virgil quotes the words of his forerunner Ennius, adding honor and antiquity to Fabius Maximus’ exploit.

Anchises suddenly changes tone: he gives us no more great Romans for the moment but rather the moral of all these tales—the Roman character and the Roman mission in the world. But first he tells us what the Romans are not, listing the achievements of “others,” by which he means the Greeks:

“Others, I have no doubt, will forge the bronze to breathe with suppler lines, draw from the block of marble features quick with life, plead their cases better, chart with their rods the stars that climb the sky and foretell the times they rise.”

(6.976-80)

But the Roman arts are different:

“But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power the peoples of the earth—these will be your arts: to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace, to spare the defeated, break the proud in war.”

(6.981-84)

And then Anchises introduces another Roman hero, Marcellus, who won the spolia opima at Clastidium in 222 B.C. by killing the chief commanding the Insubrian Gauls. And Aeneas, who sees a handsome but sad young man walking by Marcellus’ side, asks who he is, to receive the answer that he is also named Marcellus but is destined, after a short but brilliant career, to die young. He is the son of Octavia, Augustus’ sister, and when he died suddenly, perhaps at age twenty, in 23 B.C. he had been considered a likely successor to Augustus. “Oh, child of heartbreak! If only you could burst / the stern decrees of Fate!” (6.1017-18).

There is no more to be seen, and Anchises, after warning Aeneas of hard wars to come in Italy, ushers his son and the Sibyl out of the land of the dead by the ivory gates along which the dead “send false dreams up toward the sky” (6.1033). And Aeneas heads for his ships and his waiting men.

The Gate of Ivory is adapted from the Odyssey (19.634-38), where Penelope speaks of the two gates for our dreams:

“one is made of ivory, the other made of horn. Those that pass through the ivory cleanly carved are will-o’-the-wisps, their message bears no fruit. The dreams that pass through the gates of polished horn are fraught with truth, for the dreamer who can see them.”

There has been much discussion of the passage in Virgil. Aeneas and the Sibyl are not dreams to start with; and why must they go out of the land of the dead through the gate of false dreams? The obvious answer is that since the other party, the shades of noble Romans to come, must go through the Gate of Horn, which “offers easy passage to all true shades” (6.1031), Aeneas and the Sibyl must go out through the Gate of Ivory. But the real question is: why did Virgil use the Odyssean gates of dreams for the two exits from the land of the dead, one for the living, one for the Roman spirits, back to temporary oblivion? The answer is suggested by Goold in his revision of Fairclough’s Virgil (1999, note 6.57), where he writes: “By making Aeneas leave by the gate of delusive dreams Virgil represents his vision of Rome’s destiny as a dream which he is not to remember on his return to the real world; the poet will have us know that from the beginning of Book 7 his hero has not been endowed with superhuman knowledge to confront the problems which face him.”

This interpretation is strengthened by the passage in Virgil’s poem that deals with the other display given to Aeneas of Roman history and Roman heroes and villains to come: the pictures on the shield that Vulcan at the request of Venus makes for him in Book 8. After the long recital of the pageant of Roman history right up to Virgil’s own day, that Aeneas sees on the shield, we are told:

He fills with wonder— he knows nothing of these events but takes delight in their likeness.

(8.855-57)

Once again, as in Book 6, he has seen the future, but will not remember it.

THE SHIELD OF AENEAS

The vision Aeneas sees, the pictures on the shield, is another image of Rome’s future. The incident is clearly modeled on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad (Book 18.558-709). Both shields were made by the smith-god at a mother’s request, but they could not be more different. Aeneas’ shield is decorated with the deeds and names of those who through the ages have brought Rome to its position of world mastery, but the shield made for Achilles has no names but those drawn from myth, no history; it is a picture of the world and human life. On it the smith-god Hephaestus makes the earth, sky, and sea, the sun, moon, and constellations and two cities “filled / with mortal men” (18.572-73). One is at peace and celebrates a wedding, “choir on choir the wedding song rose high” (18.576). And elsewhere, in the marketplace a quarrel breaks out and is to be settled by a judge. The other city is attacked and the horrors of wounding and killing on the battlefield parallel the wedding songs in the city at peace.

The god made also a broad plowland, a king’s estate where harvesters are working, a thriving vineyard, a herd of longhorn cattle, and a dancing circle on which young boys and girls “danced and danced” (18.694). And round it all “he forged the Ocean River’s mighty power girdling / round the outmost rim of the welded indestructible shield” (18.708-9). It is a whole world and it has no history.

On the shield of Aeneas, however, the smith-god forged

. . . the story of Italy, Rome in all her triumphs . . . all in order the generations born of Ascanius’ stock and all the wars they waged.

(8.738-42)

Vulcan forged the mother wolf, with Romulus and Remus, “twin boys at her dugs . . . suckling”

(8.744), and newly built Rome and the Circus games there at which the Romans carried off the Sabine women to marry them—the so-called Rape of the Sabines—and the reconciliation with the Sabine tribe afterward. There was Mettus, king of Alba Longa, who broke his word to Tullus, third king of Rome, who tore him apart as punishment. Then Lars Porsenna, the Etruscan commanding the Romans to take back their banished king, Tarquin, and attacking the city from across the Tiber. But Cocles (better known to English-speaking readers by his other name, Horatius) tears the bridge down and swims to safety, as does the maiden Cloelia, who has been taken as a hostage. Next Manlius, who when the Gauls invaded Rome by night in 390 B.C. was awakened by the cackling of the sacred geese and saved the Capitol. And Vulcan forged the Salii, the dancing priests of Mars and the “chaste matrons . . . [who] led the sacred marches through the city” (8.779-80). And “far apart . . . he forged the homes of hell” with the great criminal Catiline “dangling from a beetling crag” and “the virtuous souls, with Cato giving laws” (8.783-85). This is not Cato the Censor but his great-grandson, the Cato who, defeated by Julius Caesar at Utica in Africa, committed suicide rather than live under Caesar’s dictatorship, after reading Plato’s Phaedo.

But the rest of the shield is devoted to the decisive victory of Augustus at Actium, the naval defeat

of Antony and Cleopatra, their suicides, and the great triumph of Augustus, master of the Roman world, at Rome. The Roman fleet, led by Augustus on one flank and Agrippa on the other, faces and defeats Antony, and Cleopatra, “that outrage, that Egyptian wife!” (8.808), who eventually leads the flight of the Eastern fleet—“pale / with imminent death” (8.831-32), commits suicide, accompanied by Antony’s, in Alexandria. And lastly the vision of Augustus’ great triumph in Rome. Augustus The battle of Actium is shown to the Roman reader as the victory of Italy and the West over the barbarous tribes of the East.

leading on the riches of the Orient, troops of every stripe— . . . all the might of the East

(8.803-6)

reviews the gifts brought on by the nations of the earth . . . as the vanquished people move in a long slow file, their dress, their arms as motley as their tongues.

(8.844-47)

In the Aeneid Virgil combines mythological epic with themes from Roman history. But there is one field of Roman history where Virgil’s material is mythological rather than historical, and that is his account of the Etruscans. In Book 8 (575ff.) he describes them as “Lydian people . . . / brilliant in war” (8.565-66), who inhabit the city of Agylla (now called Cervetri). They have recently expelled their king, Mezentius, for his oppression and atrocities, and he has found refuge with Turnus, “his old friend” (8.580). The Etruscans are eager to fight against him and his allies, but they have been told by “an aged prophet” that they must “choose leaders from overseas” (8.585-92). They are the perfect ally for Aeneas; after his meeting with their leader, Tarchon, they sail down the river with Aeneas’ ships to relieve the beleaguered camp and fight with him to the end.

This has little to do with history. About the only detail that may be authentic is the adjective Lydian, since Lydia in Asia Minor was thought to be the original home of the Etruscans, a belief mentioned by Herodotus. Their language, recorded in a script based on the Greek alphabet, still defies attempts to decipher it; the buildings of their many cities, from the Arno to the Tiber and farther south, have vanished. But we know them from the large tombs, built below ground in the rock, where the bones of their upper classes rested, with frescoes painted on the walls, and from their treasures, bronze metalwork and imported painted Greek vases from the great periods of the black- and red- figure vases, which now, as a result of excavations both legal and illegal, adorn the museums of Europe and America.

Excavation has also confirmed that Rome too was for some time under Etruscan occupation or domination, a fact acknowledged by the legends of early Rome and the items of Etruscan origin in Roman religion and especially divination. Among the early kings of Rome, the fifth and the last were called Tarquin, an Etruscan name, the second of whom was expelled and whose reimposition was attempted by Lars Porsenna (an Etruscan name if ever there was one) of Clusium (Chiusi), an important Etruscan city. The attempt was foiled by Horatius’ stand while the bridge over the Tiber

was destroyed.

Nonetheless, Virgil (who knew less about the Etruscans than we do) gives us in Book 10 (202-60) a list of the Etruscan chieftains who came “speeding to rescue Troy” (10.259). They all come from cities that we know were Etruscan—Clusium, Cosae, Populonia, the source of the copper from which they made the bronze for weapons and statues, the island of Ilva (Elba), their source of iron, and Pisa, Caere, Pyrgi, and Graviscae. And Virgil includes his own hometown, Mantua. But the catalog of the Etruscans was another opportunity to do what he does so well—to recall in his lines the glories of the Italian countryside, its towns and its history, to celebrate Elba, “the Blacksmiths’ inexhaustible island rife with iron ore” (10.210) or Mantua’s own river, “the Mincius, / son of Father Benacus gowned in gray-green reeds” (10.248-49).

VIRGIL’S AFTERLIFE

Even before it became generally available as a written text, Virgil’s Aeneid was famous. A younger poet, Propertius, wrote in elegiac verse an announcement:

Give way, you Roman writers, give way, Greeks. Something greater than the Iliad is being born.

(2.34.65-66, trans. Knox)

As copies appeared and multiplied, the Aeneid became the textbook for the Roman school and the medieval school after that. The Roman satyric poet Juvenal, writing in the second century A.D., describes, in Satire 6 (434-35), among the many intolerable wives he catalogs, the one “who as soon as she’s taken her place at dinner is praising Virgil and forgiving [Dido] on her deathbed” (trans. Susanna M. Braund, et seq.). In Satire 7 (226-27) he speaks of schoolboys thumbing a Horace that “gets totally discolored and the soot sticks to your blackened Virgil.” And the poor schoolteacher is liable to be asked questions that eventually a reader of the Aeneid might be able to answer: who was “Anchises’ nurse and . . . the name and birthplace of the stepmother of Anchemolus and how long Acestes lived and how many jars of Sicilian wine he gave to the Trojans” (234-36). And Juvenal is not alone in his knowledge and citation of Virgil. As J. M. Mackail put it in his edition of the Aeneid, published in 1930 (two thousand years after Virgil’s birth; it is dedicated, Principi Poetarum Natalii MM): “The whole of post-Virgilian Latin literature, in prose as well as in poetry, is saturated with Virgilian quotations, adaptations, and allusions, as much as English literature for the last three hundred years has been with Shakespeare, and even more” (Introduction, p. lxx).

But in addition to its literary supremacy, the Aeneid acquired a semi-religious stature. It became an oracle known as the Sortes Virgilianae, the Virgilian lottery: you took a passage at random and it foretold your future. Often it was consulted in temples, as it was regarded as an oracle; Hadrian and other men who became Roman emperors first learned of their future eminence from this source. And when the English monarch Charles I, barred from London by revolutionary parliamentarians, made Oxford his headquarters during the civil war, he consulted the Virgilian lottery in the Bodleian Library and put his finger by chance on Dido’s curse on Aeneas:

“. . . let him be plagued in war by a nation proud in arms, . . . let him grovel for help and watch his people die a shameful death! And then, once he has bowed down to an unjust peace, may he never enjoy his realm . . . let him die before his day. . . . ”

(4.767-73)

When the Roman world became Christian, Virgil remained as its classic poet, not only because of

the fourth Eclogue, which many Christians regarded as a prophecy of the birth of Christ, but also

because of a recognition of a fellow spirit—anima naturaliter Christiana, a naturally Christian spirit he was called by Tertullian, the great Christian figure of second century Carthage. And Virgil’s significance in the European Christian tradition is emphasized by the important part he takes, both in the many borrowings from his work and also in the prominent role he plays himself in the Divina Commedia of Dante (1265-1321).

Not only are there striking resemblances between Dante’s account of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso and Book 6 of the Aeneid, not only does he choose Virgil as his guide through the first two countries of the next world, he thanks him also for the gift of bello stilo, which Virgil had given to the Latin language, and which Dante has re-created for the Italian. And recalls of Virgil’s language occur at once as he recognizes the figure before him; he addresses him in a reminiscence of his own Aeneid, “Or se’tu quel Virgilio . . . / che . . . ?” (Inferno 1.79-80), “Are you that Virgil who . . . ?” It is a recall of Dido’s question as she realizes who her visitor must be: “Tune ille Aeneas quem . . . ?” (1.617). And the reminiscences are not just verbal; subject matter and character are borrowed too. The same Charon ferries spirits across the same river and refuses again to take a living passenger at first. Minos judges the dead; Cerberus must have his “sop.” And there are even wider resemblances —the special place in both poems for suicides, and for those who died for love. And on a broader scale between Elysium and Paradiso, between Purgatorio and Virgil’s “souls” who are “drilled in punishments, they must pay for their old offenses” (6.854-55), with the difference that in Dante the souls who have finished purgation drink the water of Lethe and go to Paradise, where in Virgil, except for those who go to Elysium, they go, after drinking the water of Lethe, back to life in a fresh incarnation to become the Romans.

And there is one reference to Virgil in Dante that echoes down the centuries to the twentieth. It is the passage in Canto I of Inferno (106-8, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander):

Di quella umile Italia fia salute per cui morì la vergine Cammilla, Eurialo e Turno e Niso di ferute.

“He shall be the salvation of low-lying Italy for which maiden Camilla, Euryalus, Turnus, and Nisus died of their wounds.”

Why Italy is lowly and who her savior is are matters still disputed by scholars, but the phrase “umile Italia” is obviously a memory of Aeneid 3.522-23: “umilemque videmus / Italiam”—“and low-lying we see / Italy” (trans. Knox). It is Aeneas’ first sight of Italy, as indeed it looks still to the traveler coming from Greece—a low line on the horizon. And the heroes who have laid down their lives for this Italy fought on both sides. This ter cet of Dante’s, among the most copious of his references to Virgil’s text, was destined to echo down the ages until its appearance in a remarkable twentieth-century context in the Italy of Mussolini, who was trying to restore the warlike image of Roman Italy and make the Mediterranean once more mare nostrum, “our sea.”

In this endeavor he made opponents and enemies whom he silenced and punished in various ways.

One of his critics and opponents, Carlo Levi, was sent into a sort of exile in a small poverty-stricken town in Calabria, a town so poor that its inhabitants claimed that Christ, on his way through Italy, had stopped at Eboli, and never reached them. In Levi’s somber and beautiful account of his life there, published under the title Christ Stopped at Eboli (trs. 1947), he tells how the local Fascist official came to see him, and asked him why on earth he, an educated, talented man, did not support Mussolini’s regime, which aimed at restoring Italy to its old eminence as master of the Mediterranean. His reply was to say that his idea of Italy was different; it was

“Di quella umile Italia . . . per cui morì la vergine Cammilla, Eurialo e Turno e Niso di ferute.”

Carlo Levi’s reply brought Virgil through Dante into the realities of the modern world, and to

compare small things to great, I too brought Virgil back to life in Italy some years later. I consulted the Virgilian lottery in April 1945. The year before, while a captain in the U.S. Army, I had worked with French partisans behind the lines against German troops in Brittany, and after a leave I was finally sent to Italy to work with partisans there. No doubt the OSS moguls in Washington figured that since I had studied Latin at Cambridge I would have no trouble picking up Italian. The partisans this time were on our side of the lines; things had got too difficult for them in the Po Valley and they had come through the mountains. The U.S. Army, very short of what the soldiers called “warm bodies,” since so many of its best units had been called in for the invasion of southern France, armed them and put them under the command of American officers to hold sections of the mountain line where no German breakthrough was expected. I had about twelve hundred of them, in various units ranging from Communist to officers of the crack corps of the Italian army, the Alpini; but they had two things in common—great courage and still greater hatred of Germans. For several months we held the sector, which contained the famous Passo dell’ Abettone, then impassable for wheeled vehicles since the German engineers had blown its sides down. We made frequent long patrols into enemy territory, sometimes bringing back prisoners for interrogation, sometimes passing civilian agents through the lines. In April we were given a small role in the final move north that brought about the German surrender of Italy. The main push was to the left and right of us, where tanks and wheeled vehicles could move—on the coast road to our left and on our right through the Futa Pass to Bologna. We were to attack German positions on the heights opposite us, take the town of Fanano, and then go on to Modena in the valley.

We killed or captured the German troops holding the heights without too many losses, liberated Fanano, and started north on the road to Modena. As we marched along I could not help thinking that the legions of Octavian and Mark Antony had marched and countermarched in these regions in 43 B.C. Like them, we had no wheeled transport; like them, we had no communications (our walkie- talkies had a very short range); like them, we hoisted our weapons onto our shoulders when we forded the Reno River with the water up to our waists.

Every now and then we met a German machine-gun crew holed up in a building that delayed our passage. Usually we too occupied a building to house our machine guns and keep the enemy under fire while we sent out a flanking party to dislodge them. On one of these occasions we occupied a villa

off the road that had evidently been hit by one of our bombers; it had not much roof left and the inside was a shambles, but it would do. At one point in the sporadic exchanges of fire I handed over the gun to a sergeant and retreated into the debris of the room to smoke a cigarette. As I looked at the tangled wreckage on the floor I noticed what looked like a book, and investigation with my foot revealed part of its spine, on which I saw, in gold capitals, the letters “MARONIS.” It was a text of Virgil, published by the Roman Academy “IUSSU BENEDICTI MUSSOLINI,” “By Order of Benito Mussolini.” There were not many Italians who would call him “blessed” now; in fact, a few weeks later his blood-stained corpse, together with that of his mistress, Clara Petacci, and that of his right- hand man, Starace, would be hanging upside-down outside a gas station in Milan.

And then I remembered the Sortes Virgilianae. I closed my eyes, opened the book at random and put my finger on the page. What I got was not so much a prophecy about my own future as a prophecy for Italy; it was from lines at the end of the first Georgic:

. . . a world in ruins . . . For right and wrong change places; everywhere So many wars, so many shapes of crime Confront us; no due honor attends the plow. The fields, bereft of tillers, are all unkempt . . . . . . throughout the world Impious War is raging.

(1.500-11)

“A world in ruins.” It was an exact description of the Italy we were fighting in—its railroads and its ancient buildings shattered by Allied aircraft, its elegant bridges blown into the water by the retreating Germans, and its fields sown not with seed by the farmers but with mines by the German engineers.

The fighting stopped; it was time to move on. I tried to get the Virgil into my pack, but it was too big, and I threw it back to the cluttered floor. But I remember thinking: “If I get out of this alive, I’ll go back to the classics, and Virgil especially.” And I did. My first scholarly article, written when I was an assistant professor at Yale, was about the imagery of Book 2 of the Aeneid, entitled “The Serpent and the Flame.”

BOOK ONE

Safe Haven After Storm

Wars and a man I sing—an exile driven on by Fate, he was the first to flee the coast of Troy, destined to reach Lavinian shores and Italian soil, yet many blows he took on land and sea from the gods above— thanks to cruel Juno’s relentless rage—and many losses he bore in battle too, before he could found a city, bring his gods to Latium, source of the Latin race, the Alban lords and the high walls of Rome. Tell me, Muse, how it all began. Why was Juno outraged? What could wound the Queen of the Gods with all her power? Why did she force a man, so famous for his devotion, to brave such rounds of hardship, bear such trials? Can such rage inflame the immortals’ hearts?

There was an ancient city held by Tyrian settlers, Carthage, facing Italy and the Tiber River’s mouth but far away—a rich city trained and fierce in war. Juno loved it, they say, beyond all other lands in the world, even beloved Samos, second best. Here she kept her armor, here her chariot too, and Carthage would rule the nations of the earth

if only the Fates were willing. This was Juno’s goal from the start, and so she nursed her city’s strength. But she heard a race of men, sprung of Trojan blood, would one day topple down her Tyrian stronghold, breed an arrogant people ruling far and wide, proud in battle, destined to plunder Libya. So the Fates were spinning out the future . . . This was Juno’s fear and the goddess never forgot the old campaign that she had waged at Troy for her beloved Argos. No, not even now would the causes of her rage, her bitter sorrows drop from the goddess’ mind. They festered deep within her, galled her still: the Judgment of Paris, the unjust slight to her beauty, the Trojan stock she loathed, the honors showered on Ganymede ravished to the skies. Her fury inflamed by all this, the daughter of Saturn drove over endless oceans Trojans left by the Greeks and brute Achilles. Juno kept them far from Latium, forced by the Fates to wander round the seas of the world, year in, year out. Such a long hard labor it was to found the Roman people.

Now, with the ridge of Sicily barely out of sight, they spread sail for the open sea, their spirits buoyant, their bronze beaks churning the waves to foam as Juno, nursing deep in her heart the everlasting wound, said to herself: “Defeated, am I? Give up the fight? Powerless now to keep that Trojan king from Italy? Ah but of course—the Fates bar my way. And yet Minerva could burn the fleet to ash and drown my Argive crews in the sea, and all for one, one mad crime of a single man, Ajax, son of Oileus! She hurled Jove’s all-consuming bolt from the clouds, she shattered a fleet and whipped the swells with gales. And then as he gasped his last in flames from his riven chest she swept him up in a cyclone, impaled the man on a crag. But I who walk in majesty, I the Queen of the Gods, the sister and wife of Jove—I must wage a war, year after year, on just one race of men! Who will revere the power of Juno after this— lay gifts on my altar, lift his hands in prayer?”

With such anger seething inside her fiery heart the goddess reached Aeolia, breeding-ground of storms, their home swarming with raging gusts from the South. Here in a vast cave King Aeolus rules the winds, brawling to break free, howling in full gale force as he chains them down in their dungeon, shackled fast. They bluster in protest, roaring round their prison bars with a mountain above them all, booming with their rage. But high in his stronghold Aeolus wields his scepter, soothing their passions, tempering their fury. Should he fail, surely they’d blow the world away, hurling the land and sea and deep sky through space. Fearing this, the almighty Father banished the winds to that black cavern, piled above them a mountain mass and imposed on all a king empowered, by binding pact, to rein them back on command or let them gallop free.

Now Juno made this plea to the Lord of Winds: “Aeolus, the Father of Gods and King of Men gave you the power to calm the waves or rouse them with your gales. A race I loathe is crossing the Tuscan sea, transporting Troy to Italy, bearing their conquered household gods— thrash your winds to fury, sink their warships, overwhelm them or break them apart, scatter their crews, drown them all! I happen to have some sea-nymphs, fourteen beauties, Deiopea the finest of all by far . . . I’ll join you in lasting marriage, call her yours and for all her years to come she will live with you and make you the proud father of handsome children. Such service earns such gifts.” Aeolus warmed to Juno’s offer: “Yours is the task, my queen, to explore your heart’s desires. Mine is the duty to follow your commands. Yes, thanks to you I rule this humble little kingdom of mine. You won me the scepter, Jupiter’s favors too, and a couch to lounge on, set at the gods’ feasts— you made me Lord of the Stormwind, King of Cloudbursts.”

With such thanks, swinging his spear around he strikes home at the mountain’s hollow flank and out charge the winds

through the breach he’d made, like armies on attack in a blasting whirlwind tearing through the earth. Down they crash on the sea, the Eastwind, Southwind, all as one with the Southwest’s squalls in hot pursuit, heaving up from the ocean depths huge killer-breakers rolling toward the beaches. The crews are shouting, cables screeching—suddenly cloudbanks blotting out the sky, the light of day from the Trojans’ sight as pitch-black night comes brooding down on the sea with thunder crashing pole to pole, bolt on bolt blazing across the heavens—death, everywhere men facing instant death. At once Aeneas, limbs limp in the chill of fear, groans and lifting both his palms toward the stars cries out: “Three, four times blest, my comrades lucky to die beneath the soaring walls of Troy— before their parents’ eyes! If only I’d gone down under your right hand—Diomedes, strongest Greek afield— and poured out my life on the battlegrounds of Troy! Where raging Hector lies, pierced by Achilles’ spear, where mighty Sarpedon lies, where the Simois River swallows down and churns beneath its tides so many shields and helmets and corpses of the brave!” Flinging cries as a screaming gust of the Northwind pounds against his sail, raising waves sky-high. The oars shatter, prow twists round, taking the breakers broadside on and over Aeneas’ decks a mountain of water towers, massive, steep. Some men hang on billowing crests, some as the sea gapes, glimpse through the waves the bottom waiting, a surge aswirl with sand. Three ships the Southwind grips and spins against those boulders lurking in mid-ocean— rocks the Italians call the Altars, one great spine breaking the surface—three the Eastwind sweeps from open sea on the Syrtes’ reefs, a grim sight, girding them round with walls of sand. One ship that carried the Lycian units led by staunch Orontes— before Aeneas’ eyes a toppling summit of water strikes the stern and hurls the helmsman overboard, pitching him headfirst, twirling his ship three times, right on the spot till the ravenous whirlpool gulps her down.

Here and there you can sight some sailors bobbing in heavy seas, strewn in the welter now the weapons, men, stray spars and treasures saved from Troy. Now Ilioneus’ sturdy ship, now brave Achates’, now the galley that carried Abas, another, aged Aletes, yes, the storm routs them all, down to the last craft the joints split, beams spring and the lethal flood pours in. All the while Neptune sensed the furor above him, the roaring seas first and the storm breaking next—his standing waters boiling up from the sea-bed, churning back. And the mighty god, stirred to his depths, lifts his head from the crests and serene in power, gazing out over all his realm, he sees Aeneas’ squadrons scattered across the ocean, Trojans overwhelmed by the surf and the wild crashing skies. Nor did he miss his sister Juno’s cunning wrath at work. He summons the East- and Westwind, takes them to task: “What insolence! Trusting so to your lofty birth? You winds, you dare make heaven and earth a chaos, raising such a riot of waves without my blessings. You—what I won’t do! But first I had better set to rest the flood you ruffled so. Next time, trust me, you will pay for your crimes with more than just a scolding. Away with you, quick! And give your king this message: Power over the sea and ruthless trident is mine, not his—it’s mine by lot, by destiny. His place, Eastwind, is the rough rocks where you are all at home. Let him bluster there and play the king in his court, let Aeolus rule his bolted dungeon of the winds!”

Quicker than his command he calms the heaving seas, putting the clouds to rout and bringing back the sun. Struggling shoulder-to-shoulder, Triton and Cymothoë hoist and heave the ships from the jagged rocks as the god himself whisks them up with his trident, clearing a channel through the deadly reefs, his chariot skimming over the cresting waves on spinning wheels to set the seas to rest. Just as, all too often, some huge crowd is seized by a vast uprising, the rabble runs amok, all slaves to passion, rocks, firebrands flying. Rage finds them arms

but then, if they chance to see a man among them, one whose devotion and public service lend him weight, they stand there, stock-still with their ears alert as he rules their furor with his words and calms their passion. So the crash of the breakers all fell silent once their Father, gazing over his realm under clear skies, flicks his horses, giving them free rein, and his eager chariot flies.

Now bone-weary, Aeneas’ shipmates make a run for the nearest landfall, wheeling prows around they turn for Libya’s coast. There is a haven shaped by an island shielding the mouth of a long deep bay, its flanks breaking the force of combers pounding in from the sea while drawing them off into calm receding channels. Both sides of the harbor, rock cliffs tower, crowned by twin crags that menace the sky, overshadowing reaches of sheltered water, quiet and secure. Over them as a backdrop looms a quivering wood, above them rears a grove, bristling dark with shade, and fronting the cliff, a cave under hanging rocks with fresh water inside, seats cut in the native stone, the home of nymphs. Never a need of cables here to moor a weathered ship, no anchor with biting flukes to bind her fast.

Aeneas puts in here with a bare seven warships saved from his whole fleet. How keen their longing for dry land underfoot as the Trojans disembark, taking hold of the earth, their last best hope, and fling their brine-wracked bodies on the sand. Achates is first to strike a spark from flint, then works to keep it alive in dry leaves, cups it around with kindling, feeds it chips and briskly fans the tinder into flame. Then, spent as they were from all their toil, they set out food, the bounty of Ceres, drenched in sea-salt, Ceres’ utensils too, her mills and troughs, and bend to parch with fire the grain they had salvaged, grind it fine on stones. While they see to their meal Aeneas scales a crag, straining to scan the sea-reach far and wide . . . is there any trace of Antheus now,

tossed by the gales, or his warships banked with oars? Or Capys perhaps, or Caicus’ stern adorned with shields? Not a ship in sight. But he does spot three stags roaming the shore, an entire herd behind them grazing down the glens in a long ranked line. He halts, grasps his bow and his flying arrows, the weapons his trusty aide Achates keeps at hand. First the leaders, antlers branching over their high heads, he brings them down, then turns on the herd, his shafts stampeding the rest like rabble into the leafy groves. Shaft on shaft, no stopping him till he stretches seven hefty carcasses on the ground—a triumph, one for each of his ships—and makes for the cove, divides the kill with his whole crew and then shares out the wine that good Acestes, princely man, had brimmed in their casks the day they left Sicilian shores.

The commander’s words relieve their stricken hearts: “My comrades, hardly strangers to pain before now, we all have weathered worse. Some god will grant us an end to this as well. You’ve threaded the rocks resounding with Scylla’s howling rabid dogs, and taken the brunt of the Cyclops’ boulders, too. Call up your courage again. Dismiss your grief and fear. A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this. Through so many hard straits, so many twists and turns our course holds firm for Latium. There Fate holds out a homeland, calm, at peace. There the gods decree the kingdom of Troy will rise again. Bear up. Save your strength for better times to come.” Brave words. Sick with mounting cares he assumes a look of hope and keeps his anguish buried in his heart. The men gird up for the game, the coming feast, they skin the hide from the ribs, lay bare the meat. Some cut it into quivering strips, impale it on skewers, some set cauldrons along the beach and fire them to the boil. Then they renew their strength with food, stretched out on the beachgrass, fill themselves with seasoned wine and venison rich and crisp. Their hunger sated, the tables cleared away, they talk on for hours, asking after their missing shipmates—wavering now

between hope and fear: what to believe about the rest? Were the men still alive or just in the last throes, forever lost to their comrades’ far-flung calls? Aeneas most of all, devoted to his shipmates, deep within himself he moans for the losses . . . now for Orontes, hardy soldier, now for Amycus, now for the brutal fate that Lycus may have met, then Gyas and brave Cloanthus, hearts of oak.