The Aeneid Read online

  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 gr
eat 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.