The Aeneid Read online

  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 aveng
er 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, “fa
mous 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.