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Sorry... this answer kept getting longer, so I'm just going to whack it down. In general, shall we stifk to one bok a week, by the way?
2. Is Juno's fondness for Carthage and Samos perhaps a hangover from old cults there? (I meant by this, is Virgil using these cities partly because there were once cults of Juno or Hera there - or have I imbibed too much Golden Bough recently?)
Oooh – I answered a question about this in the Temple a month or so ago… short version, the Carthaginians, IIRC, worshipped a modified version of the Semitic/Phoenician/Graecised pantheon – westward ho! Baal-Ammon was at its head –the Juno equivalent was a form of Ishtar/Astarte, who was indeed known to the Romans as Juno Caelestis. Samos is called “Juno’s Samos” in Metamorphoses, I think – it was claimed variously as the site of her birth and her marriage to Zeus, and there was a sacred precinct to Hera (the Heraion, now Iraio) there. I think it was a tourist attraction by Virgil's time...
4. I also like the writing very much. The description of what the winds can do if unbound by Aeolus, the description of the storm, and a lot of the stuff later on in Book 1. How accurate is this translation - how much of the feeling of the original does it capture?
I’ll pop out and get the West to compare, hopefully this evening.
5. Aeneas seems to have undergone some of the same experiences as Odysseus - Scylla, the Cyclopses - is this another way of tying the Aeneid to the Homeric epics? (Like the descriptions of the battles of Troy shown on the brazen doors of the temple at Carthage, etc. etc.)
Very definitely – some of these are referred to here, and also related in his stories in the upcoming books, which I won’t spoil for those who are going book-by-book.. actually, that’s a good question – is anyone going book-to-book? Or not wanting to be spoiled? Or can we skitter about a bit?
Anyway, temple. The stories we “see” on it are Troilus (from the Cypria, I think), The dedication of the robe to Pallas (Iliad), Achilles and Hector (Iliad), Priam and Achilles (Iliad again), Memnon (Aethiopis) and Penthiselia (also Aethiopis). The last two of the cyclic epics, covering the wooden horse and the sack of Troy, are covered in the upcoming books, along with the difficult journey of Aeneas through territory covered by the Odyssey. So, by the end of Aeneas’ story, we are “caught up” – we’ve gone through the entire epic narrative of Troy, and the tale of Aeneas has been located as its next step – it is picking up precisely where the Greek epic cycle left off, just as Rome takes up the baton of civilising force from Greece.
Anyway, Odyssey stuff. The opening books are often seen as the Odyssean section, and the later books Iliadic, but that’s not entirely true – we get the Troy section in the next book, and then bits of the later books are quite Odysseyan… but yes – Aeneas is travelling in the same geographical milieu as Odysseus. It’s also a way to identify that he is travelling in the same literary milieu – he is a weary traveller who has encountered many places he really did not want to go to on the way to his destination. Like Homeric similes, though, references in the Iliad bring out the differences as well as the similarities. Aeneas’ destination has been trailed at some length – we hear and see many prophecies – we already have one in this book, although it is one that he does not get to hear. However, whereas Odysseus is trying to get home, Aeneas is a refugee. Odysseus is trying to get back to his wife – Aeneas has lost his. Once Odysseus gets home, everything is finished (Telegony notwithstanding) – the story is over. When Aeneas arrives in Italy, it is only the beginning of a story of war and toil, and one, Jupiter tells us straight off, that he will not really get to enjoy it – three years and then he dies. Odysseus is living out an intensely personal story – a lone man trying to get home to his wife and child. Aeneas is playing out a part in a vast history, and not a part, it seems, that he is actually going to enjoy very much.
Sorry, back to the Odyssey as novel. I think Virgil is playing with the Odyssey here, and specifically with Nausicaa. Aeolus here attacks the Trojan fleet, whereas Aeolus in the Odyssey tries to help Odysseus by binding the unfavourable winds in a bag – it is human weakness (Odysseus’ comrades deciding that the bag must contain treasure and opening it) that does for his ships. Here, Aeneas is the victim of the divine, but, as happens often, divinity cancels itself out – they can affect the time at which things happen, but not the ultimate workings of fate. And, just like in the Iliad, when they do interfere people die.
Sorry, Nausicaa. In the Odyssey, Odysseus is shipwrecked and found on the beach by Nausicaa, the young princess of the Phaeacians. She has gone to the beach under the pretext of washing her brothers’ clothes, but marriage is on her mind. She speaks to Odysseus and takes her to the palace, where he relates his tales, competes in games and sails off, with the magical best wishes of the Phaeacians behind him. The Phaeacians are a happy people – they have no natural enemies, and, although it seems Nausicaa does imagine what it might be like to marry Odysseus, they leave with courtly, polite farewells – it’s a light, emotionally adult moment. She wishes him luck, he promises to think of her as a god, he goes. Neptune, who here restores calm, punishes the Phaeacians for giving him safe passage, and that is the end of their giving of free passage to all men – they pass into myth, but they are not destroyed, just cut off.
Now, the arrival of Aeneas is similar and different. Like Odysseus, he is washed ashore, but with a ship and a crew – he arrives with responsibilities, and as a leader, not a traveller. Odysseus meets Athene in disguise, who cloaks him in a mist as he travels to the court of King Alcinous. Aeneas meets Aphrodite in disguise, who cloaks him in a mist. But Dido is not a young daughter, but a queen – a sexually mature woman, and a widow. It’s worth noting for the next books along that Aeneas and Dido are both widows – what they are doing is not actually by the standards of Rome’s time wrong, just unfated, but we’ll come back to that.
Meanwhile, back at the beginning – the other thing about Odysseus and the Phaeacians is that that is the end of his journey –he meets the Phaeacians, he tells them his story, competes in their games, gets on a boat, falls asleep, is put ashore on Ithaca and awakes there, as if it had all been a dream. In fact, the beginning of Odyssey book 6 always reminds me of nothing so much as Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death. Aeneas, on the other hand, has arrived at the land of his equivalent to the Phaeacians and we know that he is about to enter a world of hurt.
6. The stuff about the lineage of the Romans - hello, Caesar Augustus (but it's actually not too obtrusive, I think). Saying that there will be an end to war under the Julians seems a bit optimistic, but that's hindsight for you... Is there an element of legitimisation going on here as well?
Very good question… note that Augustus is not mentioned by name here – we are told that when Julius Caesar dies the age of peace will begin. I think it’s actually very slightly backhanded as a statement… the attitude Vergil has to Augustus is probably going to be a bit of a recurring motif, though, so plenty of time for that.
7. Interesting that Aeneas still carries his household gods with him - I suppose he is pious.
Also interesting because there is no suggestion that the Trojans had household goods. I don’t have the text with me, but IIRC the word Vergil uses is “lares” – a specifically Roman term for the occupants of the small shrines to the household gods that Roman houses had. It’s an anachronism, I think, and quite a telling one.
8. I liked Aeneas's reproach to Venus for never letting him talk to her as she really is. The gods do seem different (though I don't have my Iliad or Odyssey translations here for comparison, and it might just be the lack of epithets e.g. 'ox-eyed' which makes it feel different, I'm not sure).
Again, I think we’re going to be doing a lot of gods stuff, but it is sad, isn’t it? Also, Aeneas wishes that he could embrace her – One of the saddest things, for me, about the Aeneid is that Aeneas really wants a hug, and he doesn’t get any.
Oh, another thing about Venus – her short skirts and attractive knees. I think Verg. Is doing something a bit clever, and slightly sinister, here, to highlight the gods’ inhumanity. Venus is the goddess of love, and so Aeneas, when he sees her, sort of fancies her because that’s what you do in the presence of the divine embodiment of love. In the same way, Cupid’s interaction with Dido seems oddly inappropriate – she has only just met the boy’s father, but is fondling and caressing him in what sounds like a rather sympotic fashion… the gods cannot help, I think, but affect the people around them, and they don’t really get how this can damage people; there’s still something of the divine frivolity we come across in the Iliad, although much less – the gods in general I think are less prominent, because of Fate (see below), which also has an impact. I find the bit where Cupid is laughingly imitating Ascanius’ walk, practising deceit before he goes off to infect Dido with love, deeply sinister.
9. How old exactly is Ascanius? Dido apparently dandles him on her knee...
Matter of some debate. I think the easiest way to get round is to accept that Ascanius is “a boy” – his age changes over the course of the book, and he seems to be growing faster than is logically sensible… the dandling, I think, is partly because, while he is Ascanius, he is also Cupid, who is a child proper. I’ll check the Latin for dandling when I get home – I suspect she is actually embracing him.
10. Obvious parallels between the sufferings of Dido and Aeneas - do these deepen the sorrow of the subsequent betrayal of Dido?
Well, we’ll get onto whether it is a betrayal or not, but you’re right, the parallels are obvious. Dido and Aeneas are both ktistic heroes (heroes in epics about the foundation of a city) – her misfortune is that this isn’t her book, so her epic story is sideswiped and spins off into the barriers – Carthage is still built, but she is screwed over, and ultimately so is Carthage, by the enmity it is fated to have with Rome. I reckon Vergil is getting a point in early here – everybody has stories, and every victory for the epic destiny of Rome means another set of casualties. Possibly I’m just reading too much into Vergil.
Couple of other things
Much mention is made in part 1 of the fate decreed for Aeneas, which I thought kind of gives away the ending.
This I think is pretty much key. We’re used to stories in which our motivation is to discover the ending – who dunnit, whether they escape from the burning building, that sort of thing. Any Roman reading the Aeneid would already know how it ends, more or less – Aeneas reaches Italy, Rome happens. The question is instead firstly how he goes about it, and also why the things that are described happen, and are written about as they are. In fact, the question of why a book that is trailed extensively as being about the foundation and destiny of Rome ends as it does is a question I think we are going to find very important. We already know that Rome was founded and came to greatness, because we are reading it in 2004, but so did the Roman reading it in, say, 15 BC. Rome is a bit kinky, though, because it has two foundation myths – one involving Aeneas and one involving Romulus, which have to be reconciled. But the fate that drives Aeneas is there right from the start, and, as you say, none of the gods have the power to change that. Except maybe Jupiter, but Jupiter is Rome’s god- the divine embodiment of the manifest destiny of Rome. Arguably, fate and the will of Jupiter are the same thing – there’s discussion of this in the Iliad thread that might be worth looking at. |
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