Fathers and sons in virgils aeneid tum genitor natum

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Fathers and Sons in Virgil's Aeneid : Tum Genitor
Natum
Lee, M. Owen.
State University of New York Press
0873954513
9780873954518
9780585067995
English
Virgil.--Aeneis, Aeneas (Legendary character) in
literature, Epic poetry, Latin--History and criticism,
Fathers and sons in literature, Rome in literature.
1979
PA6825.L37eb
873/.01
Virgil.--Aeneis, Aeneas (Legendary character) in
literature, Epic poetry, Latin--History and criticism,
Fathers and sons in literature, Rome in literature.

Page iii

Fathers And Sons In Virgil's Aeneid: Tum Genitor Natum
M. Owen Lee
State University of New York Press
ALBANY


Page iv

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 and
reviews.
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, 1930Fathers 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


Page v

PATRIBUS BASILIANIS


Page vii

Contents
Preface

ix

I Introduction: The Death of Pallas

1

II Some Preliminary Considerations

8

Augustus in the Aeneid

8

The Proscriptions

14

Pietas

17

The Divine Machinery

23

III The Poem

30

Arma virumque

30

Conticuere omnes

36

Postquam res Asiae

46

At regina gravi

50

Interea medium Aeneas

55

Sic fatur lacrimans

59

Tu quoque litoribus

68

Ut belli signum

72

Atque ea diversa

77

Panditur interea domus

81

Oceanum interea surgens

93

Turnus ut infractos

96

IV Some Further Considerations

105

V Homer's Poems

119

VI The Failure of Aeneas

140

VII The Failure of Virgil

157

VIII The Undoing of Virgil's Failure

168


Notes

177

Indexes

195

Page ix

Preface
Virgil is a writer the Latinist reads early, lives his life with, and often comes late to love.
Through the years I have read him for myself far more than I have read him with or
written on him for others. These are in fact the first pages I have ever published on the
Aeneid, and the tone throughout them is personal. In the first sentence I speak in the
first person. This is unusual and perhaps will be thought unacceptable in a book
presented by a university press. But I have not written a work of scholarship. I have used
footnotes mainly to support and in some cases to qualify statements which are likely to
strike the wissenschaftlich Virgilian as strange if not altogether inappropriate. I have
touched on subjects which may appear peripheral to my argument until the final chapters
are reached. And I have, throughout, been subjective in my response to a poet we have
been 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 individual
can 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 in
English on the Aeneid in the last few years. I can only say that, like the authors of those
volumes, I found this the only


Page x

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 discussed
later. It is also to some extent condensed, as there are numerous events in the plot of
the Aeneid not necessary to my purposes. I make my way through the long story with a

single point of view, and that at least distinguishes my summary from those others have
written.
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 that
Virgilian studies would take this turn. I am aware that some aspects of Jung are open to
question. 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 the
Aeneid, and I hope that some Virgilian better qualified than I to deal with the subject will
eventually 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, but
the 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 Vienna
and 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 be
held responsible for the conclusions reached in this book, and I suspect that all of them
would to some degree


Page xi

disagree with what I say here. But in one way or another they have set me on the path I
have pursued.
I should also like to thank the University of Toronto for granting me sabbatical time in
which to write, and Michael O'Brien of the Department of Classics there for his special
efforts on my behalf, and William Eastman of the State University of New York Press for
his encouragement and efficiency. Thanks too to Audrey McDonagh and Maria Pezzot for

their 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.


Page 1

I
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 represent
within its small compass the design of the entire poem. We are on the battlefield, and in
the 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 himself
the 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 his
father were here to see what is going to happen."
The boy is astonished, but not daunted, when he sees the giant Turnus, and he shouts
back 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 showed
you, stand by me now."
But Hercules, on Olympus, knows he cannot help. He begins to weep. Then suddenly his
father is there comforting him:


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tum genitor natum dictis adfatur amicis.

It is Jupiter himself, come to assure his hero-son that every man has his appointed day to
die, 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 plain
young 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 that
Turnus 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 the
Iliad (16.422). Pallas' brave little speech in the face of Turnus is a typical expression of
the hero's code, classically expressed in the Iliad by Sarpedon (12.322-8). The advance of
Turnus 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, that
the boy's appointed time has come, are close to those he, as Zeus, hears from Hera in
the Iliad (16.441-9) when he wants to save Sarpedon. (Virgil actually introduces a


Page 3

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 Iliad
16.504. Turnus places his foot on the corpse of Pallas as Patroclus does to Sarpedon's in
Iliad 16.503.
But at this moment, Virgil's warrior goes further with his victim than Homer's does with
his: Turnus strips from the corpse beneath his foot the belt that is eventually to destroy
him. And all Virgil's Homeric parallels begin to shift. Now Pallas, in death, has become
Patroclus, 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's
passage, we find that the second pair of identifications fits throughout almost as well as
the first: Turnus leaps from his chariot to fight Pallas as Hector leaps from his to fight
Patroclus (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 of
Pallas 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 our
eyes. Young Pallas in death passes from his relatively minor role as Sarpedon-figure to
the sympathetic and important role of Patroclus-figure, and Turnus' importance comes to
match 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 the
greatest of Trojans at perhaps his least sympathetic moment. So the shifting Homeric
parallels 1 reflect the poet's, and our, shifting sympathies as we watch.


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Also Homeric, and also subtly different from Homer, is Virgil's apostrophe to the fallen
boy. Both poets on occasion address the characters in their poems. But the tone is not

quite the same from Homer to Virgil. When Homer speaks to Patroclus or Menelaus or
Eumaeus, the effect is that of a bard who sings his verses publicly, and improvises from
memory, placing himself for a moment among his listeners and reacting as they would
react. 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 his
reader. There is a special quality of privacy in his poem, so that when he speaks to one of
his characers, the effect is of his being for a moment alone and on intimate terms with
that personage. And we who overhear note that the sensibilities of the Roman writer are
not 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 and
despoil them; Virgil, about as far removed from his legendary events as we are today
from 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 in
which 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 the
many opponents Antony slew, either in his "sympathetic" role as vindicator of Julius
Caesar or in his "unsym-


Page 5

pathetic" days fighting the forces of Augustus. No fixed identifications can or should be
made. That is not the way Virgil writes. His poem is allusive, but not allegorical. We view
its 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 bullalso
fits an overall pattern in the poem. 3 Throughout the Aeneid, Virgil uses the lion as an
illustration of a warrior's battle-lustNisus' in 9.339-41, Mezentius' in 10.723-9, Turnus' in
the present passage. The lion will be Turnus' symbol exclusively in the last book, where
his 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 she
falls (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 for
fighting, the simile helps shift the reader's sympathy away from the sometimes admirable
Turnus.
Further, the passage is a locus for any of the major interpretations of the Aeneid. If one
sees the poem, as many modern critics do, as a clash between furor and pietas, one sees
Turnus, 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 the
passage 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, if
the Aeneid is thought above all to raise the tragic question, "Why do the innocent
suffer?", we have in this scene the tragic death


Page 6

of a young man who showed great promise and who prayed for aid which was not given
him.
But what I respond to most in the passage are the father-son relationships, which are
many 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 Sarpedon
lost many years ago in Troy. In addition, there are the suggested relationships: Aeneas is
surrogate father to Pallas, charged with the care of the boy by his actual father. He is not
physically present at the scene, but Hercules is, and in earlier passages in Books 2 and 8
Hercules 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 wept
over a sculpted depiction of Priam's loss of Hector (1.462-5) and of how Anchises wept
over a future vision of Augustus' loss of Marcellus (6.882-5). Finally, there is the design on
the belt which Pallas is wearingthe slaughter of fifty sons who acted in obedience to their
father. This reaches outwards to the larger design of Book 10, where many of the men
who 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 that
none 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 each
individual scene in a drama represent the wholeand I suspect he isthen we have in the
death of Pallas a summary and comment on the Aeneid itself, which is the story of a hero
who went to fulfill his destined role in history with his father on his shoulders and his son
at his side, and


Page 7

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

What I propose to do in this book is to tell the story of the Aeneid from this one point of
view, stressing throughout the relationships between fathers and sons, and to draw from
that 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 a
justification 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 fatherson relationships will not contradict but strengthen those other views. For whether one
begins his reading with the death of Pallas in Book 10 or the storm sent by Juno in Book
1, all of the Virgilian levels are at work. The Aeneid is that kind of poem.


Page 8

II
Some Preliminary
Considerations
Any discussion of the Aeneid must take a stand on the perennial questions asked about
the poem: is it a work of art or of propaganda? what does its hero mean when he calls
himself pius? what are we to think of the gods who intervene so constantly in the action?
The remarks in this section are an attempt to answer those questions in fairly general
terms. There is nothing new here, nor can these comments be thought at all to be the
last word on their respective subjects. This is an attempt to clear the ground.
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, was
given the title Augustus. Like most popular notions, that view is more right than wrong. 1
When 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


Page 9

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 of
tact. Virgil, it seems, was not. Perhaps his nature would not let him; he was a deeper and
more 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 pressure
was put on him; the subsequent tragic falls-from-grace of Gallus and Ovid show what
crossing the powerful Augustus could mean.
For whatever reason, Virgil agreed to undertake the task. In the middle of the poem he
was working on, the Georgics, he announced his intention to write a large-scale piece on
Augustus. The language of his declaration (3.8-39) is grandiose and more than a little
obscure. But we can read this much in the lines: Virgil intends to challenge Ennius,5 who
more than a century before had pressed the history of Rome into epic form; but his poem
will 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 to
Spain; he will trace the lineage of Augustus back to Troy, and consign the enemies of
Augustus to everlasting torment.
The reference to Parthia indicates that at least some of this advance notice of the Aeneid
was added after the original publication of the Georgics, as late in fact as 21 B.C. But

whatever its date, the passage indicates that the Aeneid was


Page 10

originally planned as a kind of versified chronicle, with historical events duly described in
order.
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 to
place the whole of his action in the mythic past, to limit himself to the story, touched on
long 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 something
other than originally planned, and was in fact wholly mythological in content, one of the
two 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


Page 11

a tribute to Virgil's courage in embarking on the Aeneid. Horace uses words and images
that 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, but
Greek Homer.
Virgil's original intention may have been only to challenge Ennius, for the language of the
Aeneid often suggests and evokes the Annals of Ennius. But at some point Virgil decided
that his poem should be much morea compendium of Greek and Roman literature of all
ages, 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 earlier
Latin poets as Catullus and Lucretius, passages large and small adapted from Hellenistic
writers like Callimachus and Apollonius Rhodius, even touches of Plato, Pindar, and the
Athenian 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 poem
were 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 games
there). 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


Page 12

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 where
Aeneas 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 not
nearly 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 painstaking
artist and a very sincere one, was not about to devote several years of his life to a largescale panegyric. If he must write an epic, it would be an epic to place beside Homer not
only for scope but for style and subject. If he must write propaganda, it would be such
propaganda as would not betray his artistic instincts or violate his moral sense. If he had
eventually to deal with Actium, there would be no glorification of war, no fulsome praises
and 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 he
read it. For, though Aeneas is described as ignarus (uncomprehending) as he sees the
graven 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 ancestor
Aeneas 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, enduring
hardships 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,

Page 13

and an ideal of what he might still become. Aeneas learns and grows as he passes from
what 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 queen
Dido 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 way
towards his future through the deaths of both friends (Anchises, Palinurus, Misenus,
Nisus, Euryalus, Pallas) and foes (Lausus, Mezentius, Camilla) who are all given special
moments 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 the
poem. 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's
memory of history was to be stirred as much as his memory of Homer. The poem was a
massive metaphor. Everything meant something else. And in all of it Virgil was dividing
his 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 AeneasAugustus to recognize the truth of it.
Virgil's fellow poet Horace knew that this was the main thrust of the Aeneid. Horace's
longest ode, 3.4, is the closest he


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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 his
forces) against the giants (Antony and his). The ode represents Augustus' victory as a
triumph 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 a
work of the most persuasive art. It did not glorify history, as propaganda does. It rather
interpreted history, showing through mythic figures the complex play of forces in Rome's
past (and, as art deals with universals, in the past of all nations). It did not proclaim the
new Augustan ideals so much as ponder them (and, as some readers of the poem would
have it, find them wanting). Above all it persuaded the reader to lene consilium. Augustus
and 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 earlier
wars 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


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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 between
fathers 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 been

recorded 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


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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 all
who had a hand in the death of his