Fathers and sons in virgils aeneid tum genitor natum

tum genitor natum dictis adfatur amicis.It is Jupiter himself, come to assure his hero-son that every man has his appointed day todie, that even gods have lost sons on the battlefield, t

title: Fathers and Sons in Virgil's Aeneid : Tum Genitor

Natum

author: Lee, M Owen

publisher: State University of New York Press

Fathers And Sons In Virgil's Aeneid: Tum Genitor Natum

M Owen LeeState University of New York Press

ALBANY

Published by

State University of New York Press, Albany

©1979 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without

written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles andreviews

For information, address State University of New York Press,

State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y., 12246

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Lee, M Owen,

1930-Fathers and sons in Virgil's Aeneid: Tum

genitor natum

Includes bibliographical references and index

1 Vergilius Maro, Publius Aeneis 2 Fathers

and sons in literature I Title

PA6825.L37 873'.01 79-15157

ISBN 0-87395-402-5

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

PATRIBUS BASILIANIS

Contents

Indexes 195

presented by a university press But I have not written a work of scholarship I have usedfootnotes mainly to support and in some cases to qualify statements which are likely tostrike the wissenschaftlich Virgilian as strange if not altogether inappropriate I have

touched on subjects which may appear peripheral to my argument until the final chaptersare reached And I have, throughout, been subjective in my response to a poet we havebeen taught of late to read for his subjective responses A recent introduction to the

Aeneid makes a distinction between what a commentator may say and what an individualcan find and respond to I want to cross that line So I have spoken as an individual

A good portion of my text is devoted to a book-by-book narrative summary of Virgil's

poem Something similar has already been done in at least three other volumes written inEnglish on the Aeneid in the last few years I can only say that, like the authors of thosevolumes, I found this the only

convenient way of saying what needed to be said My plot summary is long, because

there are many points to be made in their proper places in the narrative and discussedlater It is also to some extent condensed, as there are numerous events in the plot ofthe Aeneid not necessary to my purposes I make my way through the long story with asingle point of view, and that at least distinguishes my summary from those others havewritten

In reaching my conclusions I have had recourse to some of the insights and terminology

of C.G Jung This requires less apology now, I think, than it might have a generation

back, when Jackson Knight, in the additions made to his Cumaean Gates, predicted thatVirgilian studies would take this turn I am aware that some aspects of Jung are open toquestion At the same time, the importance of his insights for understanding works of art,and in particular those works which deal with mythical subjects in intuitive ways, is

becoming increasingly clear My observations hardly exhaust what Jung can say about theAeneid, and I hope that some Virgilian better qualified than I to deal with the subject willeventually develop the ideas only suggested here

In commenting on Virgil and on the long Virgilian tradition I have also spoken, sometimes

at length, about other poets and about philosophers, artists, composers, and film-makers.The remarks I make about these para-Virgilians may not be helpful to every reader, butthe principle at work is, I think, sound enough Who knows Virgil who only Virgil knows?

I owe a debt of thanks, for stimulating conversations had, to Emmet Robbins in Viennaand again in Toronto, to Michael Masi in Rome, to Robert Barringer in Oxford, and

especially to Ross Woodman in London I must hasten to add that none of them is to beheld responsible for the conclusions reached in this book, and I suspect that all of themwould to some degree

disagree with what I say here But in one way or another they have set me on the path Ihave pursued.

I should also like to thank the University of Toronto for granting me sabbatical time inwhich to write, and Michael O'Brien of the Department of Classics there for his specialefforts on my behalf, and William Eastman of the State University of New York Press forhis encouragement and efficiency Thanks too to Audrey McDonagh and Maria Pezzot fortheir cheerful secretarial assistance

Abbreviations follow the standard usage of the American Philological Association

Quotations from the Aeneid are, with minor exceptions of punctuation and the use of "v"for consonantal "u," from the Oxford text of R.A.B Mynors All translations are my own

Introduction:

The Death of Pallas

I don't suppose Book 10 is anyone's favorite part of the Aeneid I think it is almost mine.There is a passage that begins at line 439 which seems to me symbolically to representwithin its small compass the design of the entire poem We are on the battlefield, and inthe thick of the fighting The Italian hero Turnus spies among the enemy the young

Pallas, who only that day had come to fight for the Trojans, and who has shown himselfthe equal of his elders, with a warrior's taste for blood Turnus calls his own men off

"Pallas is mine alone!" As his men withdraw he says so that the boy can hear, "I wish hisfather were here to see what is going to happen."

The boy is astonished, but not daunted, when he sees the giant Turnus, and he shoutsback at him, "Whether I kill or be killed, my father can take it!"

Turnus leaps down from his chariot, like a lion who has sighted a bull, and Pallas,

knowing well that his own strength is no match for his opponent's, prays for help to

Hercules, who was once received as guest by his father: "By the grace my father showedyou, stand by me now."

But Hercules, on Olympus, knows he cannot help He begins to weep Then suddenly hisfather is there comforting him:

tum genitor natum dictis adfatur amicis.

It is Jupiter himself, come to assure his hero-son that every man has his appointed day todie, that even gods have lost sons on the battlefield, that one of his own sons, Sarpedon,fell at Troy, that Turnus too will soon be called to death

So Hercules is partially consoled, and Jupiter turns his eyes away, and down on the plainyoung Pallas hurls his spear to no avail, and Turnus slays him with no pity, and

Virgilwatching all these happenings and writing them into his hexametersreflects thatTurnus will someday hate the golden belt he has stripped from the boy's corpse So

involved is the poet with his own creation that he speaks to the dead Pallas:

o dolor atque decus magnum rediture parenti,

haec te prima dies bello dedit, haec eadem aufert,

cum tamen ingentis Rutulorum linquis acervos!

As grief and as glory will you return to your father! This one day first gave you to war and takes you away, but

only after you have left in your wake innumerable enemy dead!

This passage seems to me to be important and instructive in a number of ways We have,first, something of Virgil's special use of Homer Readers who know the Iliad are invited,

at the start, to see Pallas as Sarpedon, and Turnus as Patroclus Pallas chides his

auxiliary force of Arcadians for retreating as Sarpedon does his auxiliary Lycians in theIliad (16.422) Pallas' brave little speech in the face of Turnus is a typical expression ofthe hero's code, classically expressed in the Iliad by Sarpedon (12.322-8) The advance ofTurnus against Pallas like a lion after a bull recalls the simile of lion and bull introduced

by Homer when Patroclus slays Sarpedon (16.487-91) Jupiter's words to Hercules, thatthe boy's appointed time has come, are close to those he, as Zeus, hears from Hera inthe Iliad (16.441-9) when he wants to save Sarpedon (Virgil actually introduces a

deliberate cross-reference to Homer's Sarpedon-incident at this point.) When Pallas dies,his blood and soul follow the spear-point from his body, as Sarpedon's phrenes do in Iliad16.504 Turnus places his foot on the corpse of Pallas as Patroclus does to Sarpedon's inIliad 16.503.

But at this moment, Virgil's warrior goes further with his victim than Homer's does withhis: Turnus strips from the corpse beneath his foot the belt that is eventually to destroyhim And all Virgil's Homeric parallels begin to shift Now Pallas, in death, has becomePatroclus, and Turnus has become Hector at that point in Iliad 17.125 when he strips

Patroclus' corpse of the armor that is eventually to destroy him When we re-read Virgil'spassage, we find that the second pair of identifications fits throughout almost as well asthe first: Turnus leaps from his chariot to fight Pallas as Hector leaps from his to fightPatroclus (16.755), and Pallas in death is addressed by Virgil as Patroclus is by Homer(16.843)

What begins as a parallel to a secondary incident in the Iliad passes almost imperceptibly

to a re-enactment of one of the great pivotal moments there Structurally the death ofPallas will be as important to the Aeneid as the death of Patroclus to the Iliad

At the same time, the stature of each of Virgil's combatants grows, as it were, before oureyes Young Pallas in death passes from his relatively minor role as Sarpedon-figure tothe sympathetic and important role of Patroclus-figure, and Turnus' importance comes tomatch that of Hector in Homer's poem There has also been a re-alignment of positions.Each figure has shifted allegiance Pallas, first cast along the lines of a Trojan ally,

becomes a fallen Greek Turnus, first associated with a Greek prototype, becomes thegreatest of Trojans at perhaps his least sympathetic moment So the shifting Homericparallels 1 reflect the poet's, and our, shifting sympathies as we watch

Also Homeric, and also subtly different from Homer, is Virgil's apostrophe to the fallenboy Both poets on occasion address the characters in their poems But the tone is notquite the same from Homer to Virgil When Homer speaks to Patroclus or Menelaus orEumaeus, the effect is that of a bard who sings his verses publicly, and improvises frommemory, placing himself for a moment among his listeners and reacting as they wouldreact A few times Homer actually speaks, not to his characters, but to his listeners,

somewhat as an eighteenth-century novelist addresses his ''gentle reader." With Virgil, it

is quite a different matter He creates alone, with stylus in hand He never addresses hisreader There is a special quality of privacy in his poem, so that when he speaks to one ofhis characers, the effect is of his being for a moment alone and on intimate terms withthat personage And we who overhear note that the sensibilities of the Roman writer arenot those of the Greek singer: Homer understands the world in which his heroic

characters move, and he passes no judgment when his victors bestride their victims anddespoil them; Virgil, about as far removed from his legendary events as we are todayfrom the crusades, does not understand or approve His reactions lie outside the

conventions of the epic he is writing He has just lived through a century of civil war inwhich heroics such as those he is describing have come to have less and less meaning.That brings us to another level The passage on the death of Pallas symbolizes the

deaths of hundreds of promising young Romans in the civil wars of Virgil's recent

experience Pallas dies without fulfilling the promise he showed, and the belt he is

wearing as he falls is fittingly engraved with a depiction of the slaughter of the fifty

youthful sons of Aegyptus If, as has been suggested, Pallas' slayer Turnus functions

throughout the poem as a figure for Mark Antony, 2 then Pallas himself is any one of themany opponents Antony slew, either in his "sympathetic" role as vindicator of Julius

Caesar or in his

"unsym-pathetic" days fighting the forces of Augustus No fixed identifications can or should bemade That is not the way Virgil writes His poem is allusive, but not allegorical We viewits succession of events as a large-scaled, generalized reflection of the history of Rome,and in that overview the death of Pallas sums up and comments on the tragic loss of

young lives on both sides before Augustus brought, or imposed, his peace

The passage contains only one simile, but thatthe lion in his onset against the bullalsofits an overall pattern in the poem 3 Throughout the Aeneid, Virgil uses the lion as anillustration of a warrior's battle-lustNisus' in 9.339-41, Mezentius' in 10.723-9, Turnus' inthe present passage The lion will be Turnus' symbol exclusively in the last book, wherehis death is hinted at from the very start by the simile of the wounded lion Just as

consistently, Virgil uses the bull as a symbol of the sacrificial victim The figure is applied

in the poem to Laocoön (2.220-4), to Pallas in the present passage, to Camilla as shefalls (11.809-13), and in the last book, where Turnus is to meet his fate, it is used of him(12.101-6) In the present context, when Pallas falls as sacrificial victim to Turnus' lust forfighting, the simile helps shift the reader's sympathy away from the sometimes admirableTurnus

Further, the passage is a locus for any of the major interpretations of the Aeneid If onesees the poem, as many modern critics do, as a clash between furor and pietas, one seesTurnus, with his savage onset and his boasting, as embodying the former, and Pallas,with his prayer in the name of the hospitality shown by his father, as a figure for the

latter If the Aeneid is, on the other hand, an epic illustration of fatum, one looks to thepassage for Jupiter's pronouncement on the inevitability of death and for Virgil's own

comment: "O mind of man, so unaware of what will come and what must be!" Or again, ifthe Aeneid is thought above all to raise the tragic question, "Why do the innocent

suffer?", we have in this scene the tragic death

of a young man who showed great promise and who prayed for aid which was not givenhim.

But what I respond to most in the passage are the father-son relationships, which aremany and complex, and reflect one upon the other There are three direct relationships:old Evander, present in the words of slayer and slain, is father to Pallas; Jupiter,

overlooking the action, is father to Hercules on Olympus and again father to Sarpedonlost many years ago in Troy In addition, there are the suggested relationships: Aeneas issurrogate father to Pallas, charged with the care of the boy by his actual father He is notphysically present at the scene, but Hercules is, and in earlier passages in Books 2 and 8Hercules has been established as a mythic type of Aeneas and a pattern for Augustus 4

So, when Hercules sheds lacrimas inanis here, the words remind us of how Aeneas weptover a sculpted depiction of Priam's loss of Hector (1.462-5) and of how Anchises weptover a future vision of Augustus' loss of Marcellus (6.882-5) Finally, there is the design onthe belt which Pallas is wearingthe slaughter of fifty sons who acted in obedience to theirfather This reaches outwards to the larger design of Book 10, where many of the menwho fall in battle are delineated in relation to their fathers (Even the artisan of the belt,Clonus, is called son of Eurytus, while Hercules is identified throughout the passage only

by his patronymic Alcides.)

What we see, as one father-son relationship strikes prismatically against another, is thatnone of the fathers in these situations is able to help his son in a moment of need,

though the son has been conspicuous for his pietas If Goethe5 is right in asking that eachindividual scene in a drama represent the wholeand I suspect he isthen we have in thedeath of Pallas a summary and comment on the Aeneid itself, which is the story of a herowho went to fulfill his destined role in history with his father on his shoulders and his son

at his side, and

whose eventual success, never reached in the compass of the poem, is dependent on thesacrificial deaths of many surrogate sons Aeneas is the loving, suffering son and also theunavailing father in the epic named for him And for all his pietas his father cannot helphim in his final moment of need, nor is he of avail when his many surrogate sons fall totheir fates.

What I propose to do in this book is to tell the story of the Aeneid from this one point ofview, stressing throughout the relationships between fathers and sons, and to draw fromthat consideration some conclusions about Aeneas, about Virgil, and about the long

Virgilian tradition Such an approach far from exhausts the Aeneid But if Virgil's epic is ajustification of fatum, wherein a number of prophecies find their fulfillment; a conflict

between furor and pietas, of the forces represented by Juno struggling with those

furthered by Jupiter; a tragedy in which the innocent must suffer so that good be

accomplished; a celebration of the idea of empire; a symbolic demonstration of the

possibility of rebirth and transformation; a Roman Odyssey completed by a Roman Iliad;

a compendium of Greek and Roman literatureif it is all these, then detailing the son relationships will not contradict but strengthen those other views For whether onebegins his reading with the death of Pallas in Book 10 or the storm sent by Juno in Book

father-1, all of the Virgilian levels are at work The Aeneid is that kind of poem

Augustus in the Aeneid

The Aeneid is popularly thought to be a work of propaganda, a glorification of Octavian,the great-nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar who, when he came into power, wasgiven the title Augustus Like most popular notions, that view is more right than wrong 1When Augustus defeated Antony and Cleopatra in the naval battle of Actium in 31 B.C.,and in effect ended almost a century of civil war in Italy, he wanted, as part of the

business of securing his power, an epic poem to celebrate his res gestae He was an

astute man, and he

realized that the most effective propaganda he could have would be a great work of art,something superior to the ordinary run of eulogistic poems common in his day.

Accordingly he bypassed the professional epic writers 2 (his great-uncle had not, after all,profited much from the epic Furius Bibaculus wrote about him), and had his cultural

minister Maecenas approach three of the promising poets he was supporting Two of

these, the lyricists Propertius3 and Horace,4 were able to decline with some degree oftact Virgil, it seems, was not Perhaps his nature would not let him; he was a deeper andmore diffident man than the other two, and not so capable of graceful evasive tactics.Perhaps too, his work so farlarger-scaled hexameter writing of great musical

subtletymarked him as the logical choice among the three Perhaps considerable pressurewas put on him; the subsequent tragic falls-from-grace of Gallus and Ovid show whatcrossing the powerful Augustus could mean

For whatever reason, Virgil agreed to undertake the task In the middle of the poem hewas working on, the Georgics, he announced his intention to write a large-scale piece onAugustus The language of his declaration (3.8-39) is grandiose and more than a littleobscure But we can read this much in the lines: Virgil intends to challenge Ennius,5 whomore than a century before had pressed the history of Rome into epic form; but his poemwill be more symbolic than realistic, a temple whose doors will bear sculpted depictions

of the exploits of AugustusActium and all the other battles east to Parthia and west toSpain; he will trace the lineage of Augustus back to Troy, and consign the enemies ofAugustus to everlasting torment

The reference to Parthia indicates that at least some of this advance notice of the Aeneidwas added after the original publication of the Georgics, as late in fact as 21 B.C Butwhatever its date, the passage indicates that the Aeneid was

originally planned as a kind of versified chronicle, with historical events duly described inorder.

What eventually appeared, after the death of Virgil in 19 B.C and in sections before that,was a poem that had changed quite radically from this initial conception Virgil decided toplace the whole of his action in the mythic past, to limit himself to the story, touched onlong before by Naevius and Ennius and still current in his day, 6 that Rome owed its

origins to the Trojan hero Aeneas, who led a group of survivors from his fallen city to

Italy As word spread that Virgil's epic in praise of Augustus was turning into somethingother than originally planned, and was in fact wholly mythological in content, one of thetwo poets who had begged off the assignment wrote:

me iuvet hesternis positum languere corollis

quem tetegit iactu certus ad ossa deus,

Actia Vergilium custodis litora Phoebi,

Caesaris et fortes dicere posse rates:

qui nunc Aeneae Troiani suscitat arma

iactaque Lavinis moenia litoribus.

cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Grai:

nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade.

[Propertius 2.34.59-66]

It is my role to languish on yesterday's garlands, for the god of love has pierced me clean to the bone It is Virgil's

to sing of Actium's shore that Apollo guards, and of Caesar's brave shipsVirgil who even now is raising up Trojan

Aeneas in arms, and rearing battlements on Lavinia's shores Give way, you Roman writers Give way, you Greeks SomethingI know not whatis coming to birth, and it is greater than the Iliad.

It is possible to read a similar expression of wonderment in the words of that other

demurrer, Horace We can see his Ode 1.3, prominently placed in his collection and

addressed to the ship that is carrying Virgil on a dangerous voyage to Greece, as

a tribute to Virgil's courage in embarking on the Aeneid Horace uses words and imagesthat recall Books 1 and 3 of Virgil's epicthe "sea books," and very likely the first in order

of composition Further, Horace's cautionary tone, which has puzzled many readers,

becomes less puzzling if we think of his ode as referring not to an actual sea-crossing, but

to the dangers that Virgil faced as he launched out to challenge, not Roman Ennius, butGreek Homer

Virgil's original intention may have been only to challenge Ennius, for the language of theAeneid often suggests and evokes the Annals of Ennius But at some point Virgil decidedthat his poem should be much morea compendium of Greek and Roman literature of allages, a kind of index to the whole civilization of which Augustan Rome was the

culmination So we find in the Aeneid images and phrases and rhythms from such earlierLatin poets as Catullus and Lucretius, passages large and small adapted from Hellenisticwriters like Callimachus and Apollonius Rhodius, even touches of Plato, Pindar, and theAthenian tragediansall of them assimilated into Virgil's own luminous style And above all,Virgil challenged the oldest and greatest poet of the past, Homer himself His Aeneid was

to tell the Odyssean tale of the wanderings of Aeneas from Troy over many seas to Italy,and the Iliadic tale of the many wars he fought after he touched on his promised land.Augustus, asking from his campaigns in Spain and the East for something from the

nascent epic, must have been surprisedand may have been dismayedas he began to

realize that the entire action of the Aeneid would take place long before his recent

victories, and in fact long before the founding of Rome itself When parts of the poemwere read to him, he had to listen long to hear even a brief and indirect reference to

Actium (at 3.280, when Aeneas' fleet puts in at the site and his men hold athletic gamesthere) Augustus could not but have been impressed by the power of Book 2 and the

passion of Book 4 when he heard them read aloud by Virgil himself 7

But in all their length he heard nothing about himself or his victories He must have

followed with growing excitement when at last, in Book 6, he came to the passage whereAeneas is shown a vision of the famous Romans to come after him But for his own figure

in that procession he had to be contented with a mere seventeen lines, and those notnearly the best lines in the book (Augustus' sister Octavia fainted when, some fifty

verses later, she heard read the tender praises addressed to her dead son Marcellus,

which are among the best lines in the book.)

In any case it was clear even in the early stages of composition that Virgil, a painstakingartist and a very sincere one, was not about to devote several years of his life to a large-scale panegyric If he must write an epic, it would be an epic to place beside Homer notonly for scope but for style and subject If he must write propaganda, it would be suchpropaganda as would not betray his artistic instincts or violate his moral sense If he hadeventually to deal with Actium, there would be no glorification of war, no fulsome praisesand half-truths for the victors, no triumphing over the vanquished

There is in fact a full-scale description of Actium in the Aeneid It comes in Book 8 A

depiction of the naval encounter is graven on the shield of Aeneas by the god Vulcan It is

an accomplished piece of writing, and Augustus could not have been displeased when heread it For, though Aeneas is described as ignarus (uncomprehending) as he sees thegraven battle, Augustus would have comprehended, by the time he reached this passage

if not before, that the entire poem was after all about him, that the figure of his ancestorAeneas was meant as a symbol for himselfleading his people out of the flaming

devastation of the fallen republic to the security and promise of the empire, enduringhardships and waging wars of Homeric proportions as he moved into the future Aeneas is

a symbol in the fullest sensea sign of what Augustus had accomplished,

and an ideal of what he might still become Aeneas learns and grows as he passes fromwhat can stand for the fallen Roman republic towards what is very clearly the rising

Augustan age

Augustus may also have noted somewhat ruefully that the reader of the Aeneid finds

himself drawn to the characters Aeneas opposesto the powerful, passionate, exotic queenDido and the handsome, gifted, impetuous captain Turnus Dido, so much like Cleopatra,and Turnus, very like Antony, are sympathetic figures, and each is destroyed on Aeneas'sword They appeal to the reader more than he does In fact, Virgil's hero makes his waytowards his future through the deaths of both friends (Anchises, Palinurus, Misenus,

Nisus, Euryalus, Pallas) and foes (Lausus, Mezentius, Camilla) who are all given specialmoments of sympathy and pathos: in the civil wars through which Rome had just passed,noble, highminded, dedicated men and women had fallen on both sides, and it was

Virgil's intention to celebrate them as well as the man who had led, or opposed, them.And yet, if Augustus was sensitive enough to see all this, he was also conscious that none

of it was spelled out exactly It could not be, for it was not the only historical level in thepoem There was still more of Rome's past, the more distant past, to be called into

playDido had also to embody fallen Carthage, and Turnus the vanquished tribes of Italy,and other opponents had to stand for the rest of Rome's historic enemies The reader'smemory of history was to be stirred as much as his memory of Homer The poem was amassive metaphor Everything meant something else And in all of it Virgil was dividinghis sympathies: both Rome and its enemies are honorable, both Augustus and his

vanquished foes deserve respect Virgil said as much, and in effect asked his Augustus to recognize the truth of it

Aeneas-Virgil's fellow poet Horace knew that this was the main thrust of the Aeneid Horace'slongest ode, 3.4, is the closest he

comes to writing an Augustan epic himself Almost half of it is an elaborate ''psyching up"

to his task; the rest of it is concerned with the battle of Olympian gods (Augustus and hisforces) against the giants (Antony and his) The ode represents Augustus' victory as atriumph for the forces of right, but ends with sympathy for the vanquishedcouched of

course in the symbolic terms of myth And at the center of the ode is a vignette of

Augustus cautioned by the Muse to lene consilium (gentle counsel) 8

So the Aeneid, perhaps undertaken with reluctance as a work of propaganda, became awork of the most persuasive art It did not glorify history, as propaganda does It ratherinterpreted history, showing through mythic figures the complex play of forces in Rome'spast (and, as art deals with universals, in the past of all nations) It did not proclaim thenew Augustan ideals so much as ponder them (and, as some readers of the poem wouldhave it, find them wanting) Above all it persuaded the reader to lene consilium Augustusand the Romans who read it saw, if they read carefully, that there was deep conviction,ennobling passion, and also guilt on both sides in the recent civil wars and the earlierwars Rome had fought, that victor and vanquished alike had bloody hands, that now was

a time, not only for peace, but for pardon

Augustus got what he wanted As Aeneas he appears on virtually every page of the

poem But his res gestae are not uncritically praised, nor are they even depicted

realistically They and he are there in symbol The Aeneid is more than propaganda

The Proscriptions

In his De Clementia, Seneca says of Augustus that "as a young man he was easily

enraged, and flared up in fits of

passion, and did many things which later he did not want to look back upon." (1.11.1)Before we begin a description of the Aeneid that will stress the relationships betweenfathers and sons, we should make ourselves aware of some of the vindictive acts ascribed

to Augustus when he was "young Octavian," and some other incidents which have beenrecorded as taking place during the proscriptions he sanctioned I offer the following

without comment, except to remind the reader that Augustus was acting, in these cases,

to avenge the death of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar

[Octavian] opposed his fellow triumvirs for considerable time in the matter of proscriptions But once the matter

was begun he plied the work with more ruthlessness than either of the other two [Suetonius, Augustus 27]

Cicero's brother Quintus was captured, along with his son He besought the assassins to slay him first, before they slew his son, while the son begged for the reverse The assassins said they would oblige them both They divided themselves into two packs and, at a given signal, killed the two together [Appian, Civil Wars 4.20]

The Egnatii, father and son, died with one blow as they embraced each other Their very heads were lopped off

while the rest of their bodies were still intertwined [Appian, op cit 4.21]

Arrentius with difficulty persuaded his son, who would not flee without him, to save himself because he was still a

young man His wife accompanied the son to the city gates, then returned to bury her husband, who had been

slain in her absence Later she learned that her son had been lost at sea, and she took her own life through

starvation [Ibid.]

[After Philippi, Octavian] raged against some of his most pre-eminent captives in the most insulting language To

one man who asked simply for burial he is said to have

replied, "The birds will settle that matter." When others, a father and a son, begged for their lives, he is said to

have ordered them to cast lots, or play morra, to decide which of the two should be spared, and then to have

watched while both of them diedfor the father offered to die for his son, and when the father was slain the son

killed himself [Suetonius, Augustus 13] 9

After the capture of Perusia, [Octavian] took vengeance on great numbers of prisoners, and he cut short anyone who tried to win pardon or explain his action with one phrase"Moriendum est." Some authorities have recorded that three hundred prisoners, of both equestrian and senatorial order, were chosen from the condemned and slain like sacrificial victimson the Ides of March and at an altar raised to the deified Julius Caesar [Suetonius, op cit 15]10 There were a father and a son named Metellus The father held a command under Antony at Actium and was

taken prisoner but not recognized The son had campaigned with Octavian and held a command at his side at

Actium When the battle was won and Octavian was judging the prisoners at Samos, the son was sitting alongside him, and the old man was brought before them His misery, his filth, and a growth of hair had completely altered his appearance, but when his name was read out in the roll call of prisoners, the son leapt from his seat and,

scarcely recognizing his father, cried aloud and embraced him Then, checking his grief, he said to Octavian, "He

was your enemy, Caesar, I your ally He should be punished, I rewarded But I ask you to spare my father on my account, or else to kill me for what he did." Feelings were strong among all present, but Octavian spared Metellus, though he had been among his worst enemies, and had scorned his many offers to desert Antony and come over

to his side [Appian, Civil Wars 4.42]

There is some reason to credit these reports Octavian vowed to hunt down and kill allwho had a hand in the death of his

adoptive father When this was done, he built and dedicated a temple to Apollo on thePalatine, with sculpted reliefs of the god taking vengeance on the Titans and the sons ofNiobe A generation later, in his own forum, he dedicated a temple to Mars the Avenger.Almost coincident with the first dedication, he was given by a grateful senate the titleAugustus, and with the second, his supreme titlePater Patriae.

One last, pertinent fact about Augustus He lost, not only an adoptive father in Julius

Caesar, but an adoptive son in his nephew and chosen heir, Marcellus, who died of

undiscovered causes at the age of nineteen, while Virgil was at work on the Aeneid

Augustus had no sons of his own

Pietas

One of the pre-Virgilian legends about Aeneas tells how he fought the Greeks fiercely thenight Troy fell, and surrendered only on condition that he be allowed to leave the city.The Greeks were so impressed with him they told him he could take away whatever hevalued most He chose his father More impressed than before, they offered him anotherchoice He chose the statues of his country's gods Overwhelmed, the Greeks restored allhis possessions, equipped him with a ship, and sent him on his way 11

Virgil did not use the story, and very likely could not, as it makes Aeneas too dependent

on the enemy conquerors But is seems clear that it influenced his portrayal of his hero.Virgil's Aeneas escapes from the flaming city with his father on his shoulders The father,

in turn, carries in his arms the images of his ancestral gods Together they lead the fallenpeopleone as commander of the fleet, the other as prophet and patriarchto a new land.Virgil rightly called his hero

the pius Aeneas, for pietas, at least from the generation before his own, had come tomean three-fold devotion to family, country, and gods.

Family and duty are, then, part of Aeneas' make-up in popular legend for several

centuries before Virgil And various representations of Aeneas in artamong them a terracotta group from Veii, and Etruscan amphora from Vulci, a coin from the Macedonian

town of Aineia (all from the fifth century B.C or earlier) 12show the hero carrying his

father on his shoulders

Older than all of these are the passages in which Aeneas figures in the Iliad They arerelatively brief, but they indicate that as early as the Homeric age Aeneas was thought of

as scrupulous in his religious observances, and destined to escape the fall of the city andbeget children to rule all future Trojans.13

Virgil took these strandsfrom Homer, Lycophron, Timaeus, Varro, and othersand

fashioned a hero whose recurrent epithet is pius As Achilles was "swift of foot" and

Hector "horse-taming" and Odysseus "many-wiled," so Aeneas is pius''dutiful" When

Aeneas formally introduces himself in Book 1 of the Aeneid with the phrase sum pius

Aeneas, he is not, as some otherwise perceptive readers seem to feel, proclaiming hisvirtue, but identifying himself, in true Homeric manner, by that for which he is best

knowndevotion to duty.14 The difference between Aeneas and Homer's heroes is thatthey are given epithets to describe their physical or intellectual achievements, while he ischaracterized by a moral quality Pietas will be his lode-star on his journeys, though theclosest Virgil ever comes to defining it is to stress the moral and familial aspects by asound-pattern in his choice of epithets: pater Anchises, pius Aeneas, puer Ascanius

Virgil's dutiful hero is uncommonly tender and affectionate

When he is called on to suffer he bears up stoically, but when, as often happens, he iscalled on to inflict suffering, he is moved to tears This has prompted some writers onVirgil 15 to extend the meaning of pius so that it comes to mean "humane" or even

"compassionate." But this is not a reading that can be sustained with strict reference tothe text Though a given situation will often call for Aeneas to show compassion, and hisevery instinct is to do so, it is fidelity to his mission that ultimately directs his actionas thewords pius or pietas in the passage will indicate That, if we may say it so early in ourconsiderations, is one tragic level throughout the poemthat a man who suffers greatlyand is sensitive to suffering in others is constantly placed in situations where the higherconsiderations of duty cause him and others further suffering Far from pietas meaning

"tenderness" or ''compassion," it often in fact demands that tenderness or compassion beput aside

The meaning of pietas in the first century B.C was delineated, if not quite fully defined,

by three of the foremost literary figures in Rome a generation before Virgil The first ofthese is Catullus "Tenderest of Roman poets" he may, in Tennyson's phrase, have been.But tenderness has nothing to do with pietas as he sees it:

si qua recordanti benefacta priora voluptas

est homini, cum se cogitat esse pium,

nec sanctam violasse fidem, nec foedere nullo

divum ad fallendos numine abusum homines,

multa parata manent in longa aetate, Catulle,

ex hoc ingrato gaudia amore tibi.

nam quaecumque homines bene cuiquam aut dicere possunt

aut facere, haec a te dictaque factaque sunt.

[76.1-8]

If a man finds any satisfaction in calling to mind the good deeds of the past, reflecting that he is after all pius, that

he has not betrayed the trust he has sworn, and that in no

agreement has he taken the name of the gods in vain to deceive his fellow man, then, Catullus, there is great

happiness in store for you in the many years to comehappiness to pay you for the love you gave and never had returned For all the good things that men can say or do to anyone, these have been said and done by you.

Being pius here is adhering strictly to the responsibilities demanded of a man of honor Inhis own eyes, Catullus has lived a life of pietas, evidenced in his fidelity to his fellow man

in all his relationships with them And as a result of this he expects from the gods a quidpro quo:

o di, si vestrum est misereri, aut si quibus umquam

extremam iam ipsa in morte tulistis opem,

me miserum aspicite et, si vitam puriter egi,

eripite hanc pestem perniciemque mihi

o di, reddite mi hoc pro pietate mea.

[76.17-20, 26]

O gods, if it is yours to be merciful, or if you have ever brought anyone assistance on the very brink of death, look

on me in my need and, if I have lived a life that is pure, take from me this infection that is destroying me O

gods, render me this in return for my pietas.

Even when he is shaken by feelings of almost suicidal self-pity, Catullus sees pietas

steadily and clearly It does not mean compassion or tenderness It has nothing to dowith the emotions he feels It is rather a rock of stability to be clung to in the midst of anemotional storm, the only principle in his experience that he thinks will save him from hisemotions By the end of the poem, we have come to an understanding of what pietasmeans to Catullus: that right relationship with one's fellow men which enables a man toask the favors of heaven

Gods more than fellow men are the objects of pietas in our

next author, Lucretius He attacks what must have been a widespread notion of pietas inhis daythe observance of religious rituals:

nec pietas ullast velatum saepe videri

vertier ad lapidem atque omnis accedere ad aras

nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas

ante deum delubra nec aras sanguine multo

spargere quadupedum nec votis nectere vota,

sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri.

communicating with the pii is clear in 6.68-78, where Lucretius encourages his reader toopen his mind quietly to the emissions (simulacra) that the gods, like all bodies in hisatomic universe, are constantly sending forth A man with the clear vision that comesfrom inner peace can actually establish contact with these emanations For Lucretius, truepietas is the clear-minded, unemotional ability to do this

Finally, in a variety of contexts and with a variety of overlapping definitions, there is

Cicero Here pietas becomes threefold It is, first, giving the gods their due:

est pietas iustitia adversus deos.

[De Natura Deorum 1.41.115] 16

It is also a willing service towards parents for what they have done:

quid est pietas nisi voluntas grata in parentes?

[Pro Plancio 35.80]17

Andhere is the natural extension of the term one would expect from the patriotic

Ciceropietas is devotion to country, to patria as well as to pater:

pietatem, quae cum sit magna in parentibus et

propinquis, tum in patria maxima est.

And so it is with Virgil's hero:

at pius Aeneas, quamquam lenire dolentem

solando cupit et dictis avertere curas,

multa gemens magnoque animum labefactus amore

iussa tamen divum exsequitur classemque revisit.

[4.393-6]

But the pius Aeneas, though he longed to comfort the grieving queen and find some words to turn aside her sorrow

(he heaved great sighs, and his very soul was shaken by the force of his love for her), all the same fulfilled the

commands of heaven He returned to the fleet.

The quamquam-clause here does not, as some translators would have it, illustrate pietas.That is hardly how a concessive clause is expected to work It rather describes the humanemotion in Aeneas that hastens to contradict pietas Aeneas is pius outside of the

quamquam-clause, with tamen and the main verb: he fulfills the gods' commands, anddoes his duty despite his contrary feelings That is what pietas means in Virgil 19

The Divine Machinery

Virgil's view of the universe and its laws was summed up by Tennyson in the familiar

phrase "Universal Nature moved by Universal Mind." That phrase, startling as it may be tothose who think of the events in the Aeneid as manipulated by various benevolent andmalevolent gods, is an accurate description Virgil was well acquainted with the

philosophies of his day, which were highly sophisticated systems, and like most Romans

of his generation his convictions were likely to have been culled from a number of thosesystems He has given us no account of his personal beliefs, but his friend and

contemporary Horace provides, in his Satires and Epistles, a fairly detailed, if

unsystematic, account of his own philosophical position That position can best be

described as intelligently eclectic, a personal arrangement of the tenets he found mostconvincing in Stoicism, Epicureanism, and other systems, and it is a fair index to the

convictions held by educated people of Horace's day

Virgil's nature was more staid than Horace's (that is clear

enough from the writings of both), but his philosophical position was as likely to havebeen a mixture of congenial elements in the prevailing systems We are told that Virgilintended, on the completion of the Aeneid, to devote the rest of his life to philosophy 20

In the poem, we can see something of the general outlines of that philosophy: in humannature and in the whole natural order there are constructive and destructive forces; thehuman race and the natural order endure because of the superior power of the creativeforce; despite the sacrifice of some forms of life to the destructive force, there is a distinctpossibility of evolutionary progress

In the poem the two forces are personified The destructive forceirrational, vindictive,relentlessis called Juno The creative forcerational, benevolent, stableis called Jupiter.The superiority of the creative force rests on its being aligned with a power that lies evenbeyond itself, or of which it is a manifestation This Virgil called fatum And as this Latinword comes from the root fari (to speak), one is always inclined to think that Virgil

regarded the ultimate power in the universe as having something of the properties of aperson, that it is a "word" or a "thought" that directs the planets and the minds of men

In the poem Virgil calls the manifestation of fatum Jupiter In his private beliefs he mighthave thought of it as spiritus or mens or deus, for those are the terms he puts in the

mouth of Anchises when, at the end of Book 6, that patriarch reveals the order of theuniverse to his son Aeneas

But Aeneas is granted other views of the reality that lies beyond the senses, and thoseare views of conventional mythological figures: he is visited occasionally by his goddessmother, Venus; when Troy falls he sees Juno, Minerva, Neptune, and Jupiter himself

toppling the city; before his dead father reveals to him the ultimate nature of things, hepasses through an underworld peopled with the Charons and Cerberuses that were

already in Virgil's day the clichés of poetry So one is

bound, even in writing a study of Virgil that will deal with human relationships, to try toaccount for Virgil's use of what has come to be called "the divine machinery"the wholehost of supernatural powers, Olympian and infernal, which appears in the manner of

some mechanized apparatus to set the poem in motion

We need not say that Virgil was bound by epic traditions to use the divine machinery Inwriting the Aeneid, he was reviving a genre which had, to all intents and purposes, beenextinct for centuries He made changes in it, and he could have dispensed with or at anyrate underplayed any feature he found unworkable or uncongenial Three-quarters of acentury later Lucan, a lesser poet and a lesser man, wrote an epic on the civil wars thatdispensed entirely with the gods But Virgil chose to keep the gods, though they very

likely formed no part of his personal beliefs and convictions He actually gave them more

to do in his epic than Homer had given his in the Odyssey, and about as much as Homerhad given his in the Iliad

Virgil chose to keep the gods, I believe firstly, because he wanted to give a mythic,

storybook dimension to his characters Aeneas concealed in a heaven-sent cloud or

invested with divine armor brought by his goddess mother, Turnus enflamed by a spiritfrom hell or given a spear by his goddess sister, Dido visited with passion by the agency

of the god of love himselfthese are characters imbued with the special aura of myth andfolklore not only of Greece but of the world Readers are divided in their judgments onVirgil's sureness of touch in these matters (he is perhaps too sophisticated and

melancholya certain naiveté and sense of wonder seems to be lacking), but there seemslittle doubt that the magical element was a matter of choice on his part

A second reason why Virgil kept the godsand now we come to a more profound

considerationis so that he could suggest the existence of a force, or of forces, over andabove the

"natural" course of events in the poem The divine machinery is a meansgranted an

imaginative means that may not always convince the present-day readerof indicating thatthere is more to the world than we know, more to human life than we will; there is a

reality at work beyond our ken and our power to control Virgil clearly believed this, and

in expounding it he thought he had to make a significant change in the epic tradition Inthe poems of Homer the gods are often, in the best sense of the word, comic They

wrangle, plot, lust, and connive amusingly in heaven, and thus cast into relief the mortalswho suffer and struggle and die on earth Homer's gods laugh with the assurance thatthey will live happily ever after; his mortals weep as they move towards their inexorableand often tragic ends The juxtaposition and interaction and eventual fusion of comic andtragic, which only the greatest of artists can bring off successfully (after Homer, one

thinks of Shakespeare and Mozart and very few others) was not for Virgil But the

impingement of one world on the other he still wanted, and one basic notion of Homer hekept fast to: the characters in Homer do not see the gods as the reader sees them 21Achilles and Hector stand in awe of the gods, worship them dutifully, and welcome theirintervention in their lives The greatest Homeric warriors are proud to be able to say thatApollo or Athena has aided them, for divine assistance raises their stature in their

comrades' eyes and, more than that, raises their own natural strength and courage to asupernatural degree A god comes to a Homeric hero as an infusion of grace comes to aChristian saint

With Virgil, the reader may see the gods as more often than not vindictive and cruel anddeceitful And yet, Virgil's hero does not see them that way To him they are just, helpful,and good He sacrifices to them dutifully in seemingly endless rituals of pietas If ever hewere to see the whole of the invisible forces marshalled against him, he would surelydespair He does, because he is pius, see more of them than other mortals

doindeed more of them than any of Homer's heroes do That is why he must also be

given the revelations, in Books 6 and 8, of other forces marshalled in his favor From

these revelations he receives, not an increase of physical strength as Homer's heroes aregranted, but a moral strengthening, a sense of mission

Perhaps the most important point to be made in any discussion of Virgil's "divine

machinery" is that the entire action of the poem can be accounted for without it, in terms

of ordinary human motivation Virgil could have written his poem without gods, and has

in fact written it so that virtually every event precipitated by divine intervention is alsoaccountable for in human terms The love affair between Dido and Aeneas, to take a

thrice-familiar part of the poem, is carefully prepared in terms of human psychology Each

of the lovers is devoted to the memory of a dead spouse and given the mission to found acity Each is humane and compassionate Even before they meet, he is encouraged by herwords to look to her for sympathy, and she proclaims openly, by a temple frieze, that sheacknowledges the depth of feeling in his background In addition, their falling in love iscarefully prepared in terms of hunting imagery Aeneas' first act when he lands on Dido'sshore is to shoot seven deer to provide for his men The last figure he sees on the templefrieze, just before he sees Dido herself, is that of the warrior maiden Penthesilea Dido,when she appears, looks like Diana the huntress; when she falls in love, she is compared

to a wounded deer The love of Dido and Aeneas is finally consummated in a cave during

a rainstorm which interrupts their royal hunting expedition

With all this subtlety at work, we do not really need the gods of loveVenus disguised as ahuntress and Cupid sinking his arrows into the lovers' hearts Though they, too, fit thepattern of imagery, their intervention seems unnecessary, even unwelcome, in a story soalive with human feeling Some would, if they could, pencil out the substitution of Cupidfor Aeneas' son

in Book 1 But Virgil goes to some pains to include it For it is his imaginative, if not

entirely convincing, way of saying that what is willed by men and women is also willed byforces outside them, that all human actions are seen and felt and supported by a realitybeyond human knowledge Man is the master of his own activity, but that activity is

sustained and complemented by spiritus or mens or deus

Stated in other terms, this is the perennial theological problem of free will vs providence

or predestination Virgil opts for both, for a reality that determines the course of historyover and above the immediate reality of men making their own decisions He has one ofhis characters state the question succinctly In Book 9, the Trojan Nisus asks his youngfriend Euryalus:

'dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,

Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?

[184-5]

Is it the gods who put this passion in our hearts, Euryalus, or does each man's fierce desire become a god for him?The question is never answered Virgil thought both possibilities equally likely, and he putboth into his poem

We may think of Virgil as having three choices, in this matter of "the divine machinery,"

as he began to plot his epic He might, first, have dispensed entirely with the gods, asLucan was later to do, and shown his Trojan hero struggling with human effort againsthuman opponents only But that, he knew, was a limited view of experience, and an

unpoetic one Lucan was to succeed as far as he did because when he dispensed withgods he also dispensed with myth and legend, and peopled his poem on the civil warswith the Pompeys and Caesars who had fought historically But Virgil was casting

those wars in mythic terms His characters are figures to represent the Pompeys and

Caesars Some way had to be found to represent the force of history, the design in

human affairs, the spiritus or mens or deus that sustained the human figures as they

made their decisions and fought their wars

So a second possibility must have suggested itselfto borrow terms from the philosophies

of the day to represent the spiritus or mens Lucretius, an adherent and apostle of one ofthose philosophies, had already blazed a trail here Virgil might then have given us a

poem closer to De Rerum Natura or even La Commedia Divina than to the Iliad This isnot what happened, but it is interesting to speculate what the Aeneid might have beenhad Virgil followed this possibility

In the end, Virgil opted for a more traditional epic view of what lies beyond the senses

He used Homer's gods, but with a difference His Olympians would take sides, as Homer'shad done They would be marshalled for or against the founding of Rome But they wouldnot be permitted the capering and skirmishing of Homer's comic gods They would besolemn and often fearful apparitions, embodying the progressive and rational forces thatguide, or the chaotic and irrational forces that threaten to overwhelm, the world as manexperiences it Some of them would be developed as characters in their own right, but asuggestion of a more philosophical view of the cosmos would be conveyed by keeping thefather-god a figure of aweprovidential, powerful, and aloof

And over them all would be the concept, only vaguely realized, of fatum It is this

ultimate power, and its will for the world, that Virgil's pius hero attempts, in his falteringway, to understand 22

Odyssey will in the poem that follows Pius Aeneas will find in war the true test of hispietas, and will come in the last books of his epic to kill almost indiscriminately; arms willmake him less than a man And conversely, his human qualities, most conspicuously hispietas, will often direct his use of armed might towards civilizing and constructive ends.The seven-line prologue which begins with arma virumque ends with:

inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum

Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae.

He shall being his gods to Latium, and from him shall come the Latin race and Alban fathers, and the walls of

towering Rome.

This man's arms will eventually bring, not just peace, but a peace characterized by

threefold pietas: deos genus/patres Romae

Virgil then invokes the Musein contradistinction to Homer, only after he has stated histheme and spoken in the first person (cano) He asks her for what he cannot himself

providea reason for the injustice in the world Why should a man of such special goodness(insignem pietate virum) be whirled through so much adversity (tot volvere casus)?

Virgil's Muse is asked to answer what has come to be called the epic question, "Why dothe innocent suffer?" 3 And it may be mentioned even this early in our discussion that thequestion is still unanswered when the poem ends: the soul of Aeneas' last victim will flee

to the shadows with a cry that its fate is unjust

The question is immediately rephrased: "Can the gods be so vindictive?" (tantaene

animis caelestibus irae?) And we plunge into the story: we see the vindictive godsor, if

we prefer, the destructive element in the universewhirling a man of goodness throughadversity Juno sends a storm to destroy Aeneas and his ships as they sail from fallenTroy on their providential but still undefined mission She uses a power that belongs, not

to her as sister and wife of Jupiter, but to the "father of gods and men" himself (at theend of the poem he will summon something of her power) The fearsome storm she

sends is eventually calmed by Neptune, described as "the father gazing upon his waters"(aequora prospiciens genitor) It is paternal authority that guides the universal order.This fact of the Virgilian view of things is reinforced in the first simile of the poem:

Neptune calms the seas like "a man honored for his pietas and his good life'' (pietate

gravem ac meritis virum) Further, it