The Aeneid (3 page)

This is to read the interview between them as a comedy of manners, a family squabble in Olympus. But the divine machinery allows us to hold in our minds a different view of Dido’s motivation. The quarrel between the goddesses could be seen as a dramatization of her emotions, the internal turmoil between love for Aeneas, longing for marriage, loyalty to her dead husband and duty to the city of which she is queen.

Be that as it may, the case against her is not strong. We are left bewildered and Virgil means us to be. At line 172 he says explicitly that she is guilty, she ‘called it marriage, using the word to cover her guilt’. On the other hand Juno, showing consideration at last, cuts short Dido’s death agony because her death is undeserved. Virgil knows better than to propose solutions to problems that can never be solved.

Aeneas loved Dido. We have this from Virgil after each of her first two appeals to him. But when Jupiter sends his messenger, Aeneas instantly decides to leave her. Once again the divine machinery provides double motivation. We have heard the voice of Jupiter in all his majesty and seen the brilliant flight of Mercury. At another level we could sense this as a dramatization of a sudden victory of duty over desire in Aeneas’ heart. Modern susceptibilities are offended, not least by his decision not to tell
Dido – yet. This is a shrewd observation by Virgil of the sort of thing men do, and may well increase our sympathy for Dido. Aeneas is condemned also for the cold formality of his response to Dido’s appeals. On this count, however, it is more difficult to fault him. Her speeches are passionate, yet full of tight logic. At their first meeting after Dido divines that he is going to leave her, she hurls argument after argument. Given that he has taken an irreversible decision to leave her, he answers the points to which answer is possible in the best imaginable way. It all comes down to his statement that it is not by his will that he goes to Italy. Modern views of his behaviour tend to be severe. But it does not make sense that Aeneas, founder of the Roman race and ancestor of Augustus, should behave contemptibly in this Roman epic written by Virgil in praise of his patron. True, Aeneas’ decision not to tell Dido the truth immediately, shows him in a moment of weakness, and his replies to her are cold and feeble. But Aeneas is the hero of the poem, and his weakness and misery in this book are a measure of Virgil’s human understanding, not a demolition of the character of the hero of his epic.

These are the problems that linger after a reading of this book. The
Aeneid
would be a weaker poem if they could be solved. Dido’s fault, if fault there was, did not merit the punishment she received. Why then did she receive it? Aeneas put duty before love at the behest of the gods, and Dido and others have despised him for it. Was he then despicable? The goddesses are spiteful and heartless, but can we not imagine that Dido would have behaved as she did in a godless world, and that Aeneas would have left her even if Mercury had never swooped down from Mount Atlas to a roof in Carthage? All these questions are set in the context of Roman history. In one of Dido’s last speeches, for instance, she prophesies the Punic Wars and Hannibal’s invasion of Italy although she could not know the name of the avenger who would arise from her dead bones (622–9). These Roman questions touch upon human life in any era.

On their way to Italy the Trojans are caught in another storm and run before the winds back to Sicily where Anchises had died precisely one year before. Aeneas celebrates rites in his honour and holds funeral games. Weary with their wanderings, the Trojan women fire the ships, and Aeneas decides to leave the women, children and old men in Sicily in a city ruled by Acestes, the Trojan who had been their host in Sicily. Aeneas’ steersman Palinurus is lost overboard on the voyage to Italy
.

The tragedy of Book 4 is followed by the games of Book 5, but first Aeneas looks back at Carthage and sees the flames rising from the pyre on which Dido is dying. None of the Trojans knows what is causing the fire but their hearts are filled with foreboding, soon to be fulfilled by the storm which forces them to return to the place where Anchises had died. Here the piety of Aeneas shows in the scrupulous care with which he performs, for the first time in history, the rites of the
Parentalia
, the Roman festival of the dead, in honour of his father, who now becomes a god. The
Aeneid
is authenticating contemporary Roman religious practice by attributing its origins to the founder of the Julian family, and at the same time authenticating the stress upon the revitalization of Roman religion so dear to the heart of the contemporary Julian, Augustus.

There are tears at the heart of things,
sunt lacrimae rerum
, and for the Victorians Virgil was often seen as a sad presence brooding on the griefs of humanity. On the other hand, throughout these funeral games Aeneas is cheerful, inspiriting, active, efficient, statesmanlike, and a sensitive leader of his men. He sets up the branch on an island to mark the turning point for the boat-race. He gives munificent prizes to every competitor, even to Sergestus when his ship limps home last. He is amused
by the effrontery of Nisus and skilfully defuses a nasty situation when Nisus and Salius squabble over the prizes. He tries with a joke to tempt a challenger into the ring with the formidable Dares. When this fails, he conspires with Acestes to tempt the old champion Entellus to put on his gloves again, and when Entellus is on the rampage in this great boxing match, it is Aeneas who saves the life of Dares and shows supreme tact in consoling him for his defeat. He shows his statesman-like vision in acknowledging the blessing of the gods on his Trojan host, Acestes. When the competitive events are over he allows no gap. He has seen to everything. All he has to do to set in motion the grand cavalry display of the Trojan boys is to whisper a word in the ear of a young friend of Ascanius. Throughout, Father Aeneas cares like a father for his people, grieving when he is persuaded that it is the the will of the gods and the wisest course that he should leave the women and children in Sicily in the new city of Segesta he founds for them under Acestes. Once again, the
Aeneid
looks forward from the legendary past to more recent events. (In the Punic Wars Segesta was to side with Rome.)

Throughout the poem Aeneas is said to be
pius
. But Roman
pietas
is not the same as our piety. It is not simply a matter of respecting the gods. Pietas requires that a man should do what is due and right not only by his gods, but also for his city, his family, his friends and his enemies. Apart from his lapse in Book 4, Aeneas is its embodiment, and it shows vividly here. Perhaps this is part of the explanation of Montaigne’s view that the fifth book of the
Aeneid
seems to be the most perfect (‘le cinquiesme livre de l’Aeneide me semble le plus parfaict’,
Essays
2.10).

Aeneas arrives in Italy at last, landing at Cumae just north of the Bay of Naples. There he consults the Sibyl, begging her to allow him to go down to the Underworld to see his father Anchises. She agrees to escort him on condition that he finds a golden branch in a dark tree and buries the body of Misenus, a comrade who has been drowned. These tasks he achieves and
in the Underworld they meet, in reverse order of their deaths, Palinurus, Dido and heroes who had died at Troy. They proceed to the place of eternal torture of the damned and to the Fields of the Blessed where they find Anchises, who explains the creation of the universe and the origin of life, and takes them to see a parade of great Romans of the future marching up family by family towards the light of life.

Why did Virgil send his hero down into the Underworld? In Virgil there is often more than one answer to a question. The simple explanation is that this allows him the emotional intensity of the scenes where Aeneas meets dead friends and enemies – his pilot Palinurus drowned in the crossing to Cumae, Dido ignoring his tears and words of love, Trojans who had died at the sack of the city, Greeks fleeing at his approach. This episode is also a watershed in the plot. In the Underworld Aeneas faces his memories and is given a view of the future. From this time forth he is looking towards the destiny of Rome. Another factor in Virgil’s decision must have been the Homeric model. Virgil is writing a Latin epic to stand beside the great epics of the Greeks. Odysseus had conversed with the shades over a trench filled with blood; Aeneas, too, will converse with the dead. The resemblances are obvious, but the differences are profound. There are two eloquent silences in classical epic. In the
Odyssey
Ajax, the great rival of Odysseus, stood aloof and would not speak, but went to join the other souls of the dead in Erebus. In the
Aeneid
Dido refuses to speak to Aeneas, but rushes off into a dark wood to rejoin Sychaeus who had been her husband. Virgil plunders Homer, and refashions what he takes.

The descent to the Underworld has also a philosophical dimension. Virgil puts on the lips of Anchises an explanation of the creation of the world and of the nature of life and death. Just as Plato ends
The Republic
with the Myth of Er, who tells how he died in battle and saw the souls of the dead waiting to rise again to rebirth, so Anchises shows to Aeneas the procession of his descendants moving up towards the light of life. The end of Book 6 is philosophy in epic.

It is also politics. Almost nine-tenths of the heroes represented in this parade are members of the Julian family. In a Roman funeral the masks of the ancestors were carried through the streets to their tombs while fathers would retail to their sons the achievements of their forefathers. In Virgil’s pageant of the heroes, the dead go in procession by families, not to their tombs along the Appian Way, but up to glorious rebirth while Anchises predicts their great achievements to his son. This book therefore ends with a funeral in reverse, culminating in a eulogy of the Julian family of Augustus and an obituary of his nephew, son-inlaw and heir designate, young Marcellus; it is so powerful that Marcellus’ mother swooned when she heard Virgil speak it. The
Aeneid
is a poem set in the distant heroic past. To make it a political poem relevant to his own times, one of Virgil’s strategies is to include praise of Augustus in prophecies like the great speeches of Jupiter near the beginning and end of the poem, the history of the wars of Rome depicted on the prophetic shield of Aeneas at the end of Book 8 and here in the Parade of Future Romans, the prophecy which Anchises delivers to embolden his son with this vision of the destiny which lies before his family.

This is all fiction. The pageant is invented by Virgil. We do not know what Virgil’s beliefs were about the creation of the world or the transmigration of souls. Just as Plato’s myths are not meant to be taken as the literal truth but as stories resembling truth, so, after what started as a narrative of a journey and ends as a dream, Aeneas leaves the Underworld not by the Gate of Horn, the gate of true shades, but by the Gate of Ivory which sends up false dreams towards the heavens. At the beginning of the first century
BC
Meleager, in introducing the epigrams included in his
Garland
, had given Plato a golden branch to carry as his emblem. Perhaps the Golden Bough and the Gate of Ivory in the
Aeneid
are there to give us notice that the philosophy at the end of this book and the Parade of Future Romans are, like the Platonic myths, falsehoods resembling the truth.

For an explanation of the details in the Parade of Future Romans in the underworld, see
Appendix I
.

Aeneas and his fleet sail into the mouth of the River Tiber and build a camp on its banks. Latinus, the king of Latium, welcomes them and offers Aeneas his daughter, Lavinia, in marriage. Seeing this, Juno sends down her agent Allecto to stir up resentment against Aeneas. She persuades Queen Amata to oppose Aeneas’ marriage and whips up Turnus, a neighbouring Latin prince, to go to war against the Trojans. She then engineers a skirmish between the local people of Latium and a Trojan hunting party led by Ascanius. War has begun
.

Turnus, prince of Ardea, had hopes of marriage to Latinus’ daughter and succession to his throne, and Queen Amata supported him. But when Allecto, disguised as an aged priestess, visited him in his sleep and urged him to war, he rebuffed her: ‘Leave peace and war to men. War is the business of men’ (444). Enraged, she threw a burning torch into his heart, and he woke sweating with terror and roaring for his armour. So much for the mythical narrative. At another level this could be read as an account of how a man’s rational assessment was overturned in the small hours by patriotic passion and rankling sexual jealousy. The narrative has treble power: as a vision of the supernatural, as an account of an emotional experience and as a dramatic scene between an old woman (who is more than a woman) and a tactless, passionate and impressionable young man.

Just as Homer provides in the second book of the
Iliad
a catalogue of the Greek ships that sailed against Troy, so here Virgil supplies a catalogue of the Italians who fought against the Trojans. To us it may read as an arid, largely alphabetical list of anthropological curiosities and meaningless place names: Caeculus, found as a baby on a burning hearth at Praeneste, Abellans with their boomerangs, a snake-charming priest from
Marruvium, etc. But this list would have struck Virgil’s audience quite differently. Many Romans had ties with the country districts of Italy, and would have been moved by this as a celebration of their local cultures, their links with Greece, the myths of Italy, local dress styles, armour, religion, even landscape, as in the twins of Tibur/Tivoli like Centaurs plunging down a steep forest in Greece, which is not unlike the tree-clad cliff on which their city of Tibur stands.