Aeneid I A (to 295) ~ Thomas Fleming

POUSSIN, Nicolas
Venus Presenting Arms to Aeneas
1639

Aeneid I A (to 295)

Thomas Fleming
May 17, 2010

For those of you who have never before read the Aeneid, let me give a brief sketch of the background, without giving away too much of the story. The book tells the story of Aeneas, a Trojan prince and son of Anchises and the goddess Venus. The first 4 books are told by way of a flashback. The Trojans are landing in a storm on the coast of Africa. They are separated and only find each other at the court of Queen Dido, a Phoenician princess who is establishing a city called Carthage. Impressed by the handsome stranger whose story she has already heard of, she invites the Trojans to a banquet, where Aeneas tells his tale: how he escaped from the falling Troy, carrying his father on his back and leading his son by the hand, how he and the Trojans, carrying their penates with them, have unsuccessfully tried to establish a new Troy, knowing that it is their destiny to found a city in the West–in the land of Hesperia (Italy).

Without going into too much detail, I should make some comment on its historicity or rather on the traditions. Aeneas is, certainly, an important Trojan hero in the Iliad, though not quite first class. His family appear to be portrayed as a rival branch of the ruling family, though there is not much evidence of tension in the text. Many of the Greek (Diomedes) and Trojan (Antenor, Acestes, and Aeneas himself) heroes who survived the war had interesting after-lives in which they are supposed to have founded cities. Aeneas case is most interesting in that he was connected, early on, both with Sicily and Italy and with the Troad, where his supposed descendants ruled the area in the post-Homeric age. Aeneas was certainly connected, lately, with the founding of Latin cities and tied in with the founding of Rome, though his identity as ancestor of Julius Caesar appears rather late and is sometimes supposed (not by me) to have been invented by Julius himself, though such an invention would, I believe, have brought ridicule. Aeneas was connected in legend with the early days of Carthage, though in the earliest form of the tale it is Dido’s sister Anna (note the nice Semitic name!) who is infatuated and ends up in Latium as the goddess Anna Perenna (according to Ovid).

Enough of this. We can deal with details in response to questions. For now let us look at the beginning of the poem.

Arms and the man I sing who forced by fate

And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate;

Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore

Long labors, both by sea and land he bore

And in the doubtful war, before he won

The Latian realm, and built the destin’d town;

His banish’d gods restored to rites divine,

And settled sure succession in his line,

From whence the race of Alban fathers come,

And the long glories of majestic Rome.

Note the key words; arma (defensive arms), the man, fate, divine hostility and “the long glories of majestic Rome.” Rome and the man, in other words, are virtually identical, thus Aeneas is the Ur-Roman much as Adam and the Patriarchs are the Ur-Man and Ur-Jews.

From the beginning we can see that the poem does have religious dimensions: Juno hates the Trojans both because of the Trojan war–and the beauty award to Aeneas’ mother Venus–and for what the Romans will do to Carthage in the future. Vergil himself was a serious student of philosophy of a mystical bent and obviously does not take such stories literally: They are mysteries in which truth is lurking. Indeed, he goes on, describing Juno’s resentment for “her form disdain’d”, concluding: “Such time, such toil required the Roman name.” In other words, part of the divine plan is for greatness to come out of suffering–a theme he had taken up in the Georgics. Man has to labor and even suffer to achieve greatness.

One cardinal aspect of the Roman character, expressed both in religion and in Roman politics before corruption set in, is summed up by the word pietas, which means fidelity, and not just in a religious sense. Aeneas exemplifies pietas–fidelity to family, to Trojan people, and to the gods. While Homeric heroes go by such expressions as swift-footed Achilles, lord of men Agamemnon, much-devising Odysseus, Aeneas is know as pius Aeneas–Aeneas the true. Romantic critics found him to be a stuffed shirt and even a hypocrite, but he is a character too complex for them, capable of being a romantic hero but keeping pietas uppermost.

Aeneas’ arrival on the dramatic scene is most unusual. When we first glimpse Achilles, he is starting the quarrel with Agamemnon that will lead to his menis, wrath, and when we first spy Odysseus, he is longing for home, while living with the divine sex-pot Calypso, who wants to make him her immortal bed-companion. But Aeneas? We see him entirely at the mercy of the elements that have been stirrup up by Juno and her ally Aeolus, the god of the winds. His opening speech can be boiled down to, “I wish I were already dead, killed at Troy, where I could be buried with my friends.” This is truly a different kind of hero.

This opening is brilliant in so many ways. First off, while it is natural in effect, it is actually against nature. Juno has stepped outside her proper sphere. She is rebelling against her brother-husband Jupiter and transgressing on the territory of her other brother Neptune. Thus when Neptune rises up to calm the storm–perhaps the most majestic literary depiction of an ancient pagan god–he is compared with the statesman who calms an angry mob, the sedition of the ignobile volgus. While great-uncle Julius pandered to the populares, such is not the intent or style of Augustus.

Neptune is reasserting his proper authority with a minimum of violence–a threat about the future is enough. Note, too, that the statesman-Neptune is commended for his pietas in quelling the furor of the mob with his words. We shall soon see that too-passionate natures are constantly the source of misery, while gravity and pietas are the forces that can repress savagery.

The fleet has been dispersed, and Aeneas has no idea of how many of the ships and crews have survived. As a responsible leader, he takes a look-see and discovers a herd of deer and kills seven of the biggest, one for every ship that is with him. The brief description of the hunt shows the poet’s art. Aeneas shoots at the leaders (ductores) a word that might suggest human military leaders, then the mere vulgus or mass and with his aggressive weapons (telis) he drives them through the woods until he is victorious (victor). Even here at the very beginning, where Aeneas’ fortunes are at the lowest, he foreshadows, with this mini-epic narrative, his future victories. This art of beast-allegory he mastered in the Georgics, especially Book IV.

Now that the men have dried themselves out and drunk some Sicilian wine, Aeneas encourages them: You’ve suffered worse than this and the god will put an end to these toils as well. Man up, as we might say today,”Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.” (293) This is among my favorite tag-lines of Latin verse. Perhaps even these things we shall some day enjoy recalling.” Perhaps it is not accidental that the primary meaning of iuvare is not give pleasure to, but to help or avail. Memory, of course, was the mother of the Muses, and Vergil’s creative memory, I think he is suggesting, will provide moral and political help to future generations who reread the poem. Be tough, Aeneas says (207), and preserve your selves for favoring circumstances. Secundis, here, favoring is typically used of winds. Though deeply grieving over his lost men and ships, he feigns hope, as any good leader would.

At v. 223, the scene is shifted artfully to the divine plane. With the somewhat ambiguous “Et iam finis erat” (the end of what–their grieving, their troubles), we now look at the Trojans’ miseries from Jupiter’s perspective. Venus shows up to complain, much as Athena complains to Zeus near the beginning of the Odyssey.

It should be noted that it is conventional to divide the Aeneid into two halves. The first six books, which recount Aeneas’ wanderings, are “Odyssean” and thus we find many echoes of the Odyssey, while the last six books, as the plot moves forward, more and more resemble the Iliad, a fact of which even the characters are aware. This overall plan, while it does not prevent Vergil from borrowing from other works or echoing the Iliad in the Odyssean part or vice versa, does allow him to challenge both epic masterpieces. Of course, this is not servile imitation: educated readers were expected to recognize the parallels and appreciate them. Bu nota bene: This is a far cry from the technique of modernists like Joyce and Pound, whose works are often unintelligible to anyone not familiar with their sources. The Aeneid can be read with pleasure and understanding by people who scarcely have heard of Homer.

Venus is an interesting character who deserves some comment. While some Greek and Roman gods are parallel in character and functions, some are not. Jupiter is clearly Zeu-Pater, [*Diu Pater], the sky-father who rules his divine family and the world, but Venus and Mars, while they have some equivalent functions, are not originally very much like Aphrodite and Ares. While the two Greek gods incarnate the passions of sex and violent war, Mars is also a fertility god who brings prosperity and Venus as much associated with motherhood as with sex. Thus Venus is a special protectress of Rome, revered in a way that Aphrodite was hardly revered (except by Greeks infected with Middle-Eastern sex obsessions.) Naturally Vergil accepts the equation of Venus=Aphrodite, but he gives her much greater dignity and a touching concern for her son and his people.

Venus complains that while other Trojan leaders have been able to found cities for their people, Aeneas has been blocked by the wiles and hatred of Zeus’s wife. With a sweet Olympian grandeur, Jupiter reassures the grieving mother, and the promise or covenant implied in the opening lines–that the Romans will be a great nation–is here reaffirmed more strongly and detail. Here for the first time we learn that Ascanius, to be called Iulus, will be the Romans’ ancestor, and, in particular, the progenitor of the Caesars. Even Juno will relent and become a patroness of the gens togata.