Virgil’s Aeneid

Nov. 11, 2015

“Give way, you Greeks!Something greater than the Iliad is coming to birth!”

Etruscan,5th C BCE

Relief, 2nd C BCE

“Aeneas flees burning Troy,” Federico Barocci, 1598

“Creüsa spoke, and then left me there,Weeping, with many things yet to say.She vanished into thin air. Three timesI tried to put my arms around her; three timesHer wraith slipped through my hands”

(934-938)

Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland “The Meeting of Dido and Aeneas,” 1766.

Homer & Virgil

Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Grai!nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade

Give way, writers of Rome, give way, you Greeks!Something greater than the Iliad is coming to birth.

-Sextus Propertius

First lines, Homer & Virgil

The Aeneid:“I sing of arms and of the man”

• points to The Iliad (arms) and The Odyssey (the epic wanderer).

The Iliad:“Rage:Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage”

The Odyssey:“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns”

Echoes of Homer in Virgil

• Aeneid, Books 1, 3-6 (The Odyssey) Book 2 (The Iliad + The Odyssey)

• Book 2: Aeneas recounts multi-year wandering to Dido and Carthaginians, as Odysseus does when he is hosted by the Phaeacians.

• Homeric technique: embedded storytelling

Sinon’s stories

Aeneas’s story

Virgil’s story

Virgil against Homer

• Virgil emphasizes ethnic and national difference. • War is won through deceit rather than noble combat (Ulysses’s

rather than Achilles’s war).

• The Greeks exploit and dishonor the codes of xenia.

• The Trojans (the losers) emerge as the moral winners.

“The Ancient City Fell”

• Greek invasion as a crime against civilization

• Connection: city and “civility”Latin: civis: citizen

civilis: polite

“May the gods treat you as you deserve For making me watch my own son’s murder And defiling with death a father’s face. Not so was Achilles, whom you falsely claim To be your father” (627-631).

Competing Heroic Virtues (Homeric and Roman)

• Roman pietas: duty to the family, the city, the empire; selfhood subordinated to the collective good.

• Virtús (virtue)

– Vir: “man”

– manly conduct, defined by self-restraint, suppression of emotions, stoicism

• Contest between pietas and furens (fury).

Competing Heroic Virtues (Homeric and Roman)furens vs. pietas

“Out of my mind, I took up arms—no battle plan, But my soul burned to gather a war party And storm the citadel. Rage and fury Sent my mind reeling, and my only thought Was how glorious it is to die in combat” (370-374)

“May the gods treat you as you deserve For making me watch my own son’s murder And defiling with death a father’s face. Not so was Achilles, whom you falsely claim To be your father, in the face of Priam his foe But honored a suppliant’s rights and trust, And allowed the bloodless corpse of Hector Burial, and sent me back to my own realm” (627-634).

• Aeneas faces this kind of test at the end of the epic and fails.

“…Although there is no heroic nameIn killing a woman, no victory,I will be praised for snuffing out evil…I was carried away by this frenzy” (683-685, 688).

• Venus intervenes to stop Aeneas in this expression of and attack on private passion.

• In the Aeneas/Dido episode, romantic love is both essential and an impediment to Aeneas’s destiny.

• He can’t win: He chooses pietas, and brings a curse on the future Rome.

Pietas vs. Private Passion

The Aeneid as Double-Voiced

Imperial/Public Voice

• voice of the imperial encomium (poem in praise of empire)

• voice of official optimism

Private/Tragic Voice

• voice of individual desire and suffering

• unofficial voice of critique, skepticism, and melancholy.

Prophetic History

• Focus: the final or ultimate meaning of history (for example: Augustan Rome)

• The result: the future echoes the past and the past (seemingly impossibly) echoes the future.

• Example: Aeneas—in his full or final historical importance—is descended from Augustus!

Prophetic History“O the happy ones, whose walls are already rising!”

• Aeneas witnessing the walls of Carthage being built prefigures:

1. Aeneas building the walls of Rome.

2. Rome rebuilding Carthage.

Historical repetition or an end of history?

Aren’t the Trojans the Greeks (the foreign invaders) in Italy?

Aren’t the Trojans the Greeks in Italy?

-No! Virgil depicts the Trojans’ arrival in Italy not as an invasion but a homecoming. It turns out Aeneas is both from the east (Troy) and not from the east!

Aren’t the Trojans the Greeks in Italy?

-No! Virgil depicts the Trojans’ arrival in Italy not as an invasion but a homecoming. It turns out Aeneas is both from the east (Troy) and not from the east!

But what’s the difference between arrival ata promised land and military conquest?