Anchises Reading Aeneas Reading Marcellus

Anchises Reading Aeneas Reading Marcellus Jay Reed

Syllecta Classica, Volume 12 (2001), pp. 146-168 (Article)

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Anchises Reading Aeneas Reading Marcellus

Jay ReedCornell University

Two currents, of hope and of disappointment, seem to run side by sidethrough Anchises’ prophecy in Book 6 of the Aeneid and Aeneas’ whole journeyin the Underworld, without diluting each other’s power. We are here concernedwith the way this dual current is manifested in Aeneas’ own thoughts and ac-tions, and particularly with his change of course from melancholic doubt toenthusiasm. How does his father “kindle” Aeneas’ spirit with love of his Romanmission (incenditque animum famae venientis amore, 6.889)? This question isinvolved with the episodes that precede and follow that verse—the lament forMarcellus and the departure through the Gate of False Dreams—and with all ofAeneas’ spiritual negotiations with the realities he meets in the Underworld. It isalso involved with his father’s insight into and response to Aeneas’ state of mind,and indeed with each character’s own constantly evolving consciousness.

Let us start with how Aeneas reads Marcellus.1 It is he who singleshim out (6.860–66):I wish to thank the Editor and referee of Syllecta Classica for their comments andsuggestions and Kirk Freudenburg for his.

1 I press the metaphor at 6.754–55 et tumulum capit [Anchises] unde omnis longoordine posset / adversos legere et venientum discere vultus.

REED: ANCHISES READING AENEAS … 147

atque hic Aeneas (una namque ire videbategregium forma iuvenem et fulgentibus armis,sed frons laeta parum et deiecto lumina vultu):“quis, pater, ille, virum qui sic comitatur euntem?filius, anne aliquis magna de stirpe nepotum?qui strepitus circa comitum! quantum instar in ipso!sed nox atra caput tristi circumvolat umbra.”

Here Aeneas said (for he was observing a youth going along together[with the elder Marcellus], extraordinary for his beauty and flashingarmor—but far from happy were his brow and the eyes in his down-cast face), ‘Father, who is that who accompanies the hero as he goes?Is it his son, or one of the grand stock of his descendants? What aclamor his companions make! What quality there is in him! But blacknight swirls around his head with a mournful shadow.’

These are Aeneas’ last words in Book 6, his last until he finds himself onItalian soil at 7.120, and they sum up his mood in this book, his hypersen-sitivity to the sufferings of others. What has attracted his attention? SurelyMarcellus’ intriguing combination of evident promise and mysterious gloom.Aeneas’ final metaphor expatiates on his trepidation beyond his feelingsabout the boy in front of him. The phrase nox atra he seems to borrow from270–72 (the phrase is closural in both passages), as if that simile had regis-tered his own feelings about the fading light as he entered the Underworld(though there is no overt sign of his focalization there):

quale per incertam lunam sub luce malignaest iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbraIuppiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem

… as under an uncertain moon, beneath its grudging light, a pathgoes through the forest, when Jupiter has buried the sky in shadowand black night has stolen the color from all things.

The parallel is pregnant: so too Marcellus’ coming doom, “black night,”steals from him something like his “color”—the splendor predicted byhis beauty, his flashing arms, the obvious acclamation of his compan-ions—and represents Aeneas’ vague dread about the youth in terms ofthe dread he has felt since coming down here. Add to these associationshis memories of his doomed defense of Troy at 2.358–60, which echoeseven more fully in 6.866:

148 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001)

… per tela, per hostisvadimus haud dubiam in mortem mediaeque tenemusurbis iter; nox atra cava circumvolat umbra.2

… through the weapons, through the enemy host we go towardsindubitable death and make our way through the middle of thecity; black night swirls around with an enclosing shadow.

Reusing his own words, Aeneas seems sorrowfully to identify with themysterious boy, and to reverse in hindsight the import of “dark night,”whose shadow in Book 2 was protective. The phrase now carries forhim connotations of the loss of loved ones and the wreck of a nation(not an inept connection, as Anchises’ answer will show). The infernalsetting nicely picks up the touches of “death” and a “journey” in theearlier passage. We have in Aeneas’ last spoken line in the Underworldan allusive summary of the particular anxiety that has dogged him sincehe entered, and a reawakening of old anxieties, which he now reads intoMarcellus.

Yet more of Aeneas’ attitude can be read here. He seems to focalizethe parenthetical introduction of Marcellus (860–62), which structur-ally parallels his ensuing words (note, in each passage, the initial sed inthe last line and the focus on Marcellus’ head); Aeneas is after all theexplicit viewer, the subject of videbat. Line 861, however, complicatesthis attribution of viewpoint: what he first notices is Marcellus’ beautyand flashing arms, details that pick up Anchises’ foregoing account ofthe older Marcellus’ warlike splendor and particularly his capture of theGallic commander’s arms at Clastidium. For a moment we seem to becontinuing the pageant in the bellicose vein in which Anchises has beenpresenting it, encountering a new member of the same martial line,when the ominous, transforming sadness enters: sed frons laeta parum etdeiecto lumina vultu (862). The question that follows repeats the se-quence of national interest and personal sadness. Conditioned to theimportance of lineage in this parade, and perhaps alerted by a familyresemblance between the older and younger Marcelli (which instar may

2 The verbal model of both 2.360 and 6.866 may be Hor. S. 2.1.58 (seu Mors atriscircumvolat alis; C. 20.351–2 provides the idea of a doomed head enveloped in night.Antip. Sid. AP 7.713.3–4 uses a similar image for the oblivion of death.


imply), Aeneas translates his observation of the youth’s martial poten-tial into a guess about his genealogical place and relation to the otherspirits. Yet—and now he translates his observation of the youth’s “sadbrow” and “downcast face” into the symbolism of his own apprehen-sion—black night swirls her mournful shadow around his head. Wecatch Aeneas in the process of being reconstructed by his father’s words,assimilating a certain viewpoint with certain aims, yet asserting his ownpreoccupations too. Lines 860–62 imbricate contrasting viewpoints,the narrative reveals Aeneas’ attitude in its present, antithetical form;we see his feelings as fluid, and as he speaks they change.

The dualism here concentrates an antinomy between Aeneas’ mel-ancholy and a more accepting view of things (here that of Anchises).Long before he meets his father, Aeneas proceeds through the Under-world bemused, bewildered, unhappy with the explanations given himfor what he sees. When the Sibyl expounds the rule that the unburiedflutter and wander for a full century before gaining admission to thelands of the dead, he stops in his tracks, “pondering much,” and pitiesthis condition as an “unjust lot” (6.332 multa putans sortemque animomiseratus iniquam). When later, noticing the comforts of Elysium, heasks Anchises what “terrible desire” drives the spirits back to “the light”(721), his devaluation of life runs counter to the terms set by the Sibyl,when she chides Palinurus for his “terrible desire” to get into the Un-derworld (373, with the same phrase—tam dira cupido—in the samesedes). The encounters with Dido and Deiphobus and the survey ofTartarus do nothing to relieve his doubts about the ultimate goodnessof the arrangements he observes. We can trace the development of thismelancholy from the disappearance of Palinurus, which leaves him, sorecently buoyed by the hopeful reenactments of Trojan festivities andthe promising departure (5.827–8), “groaning much” (5.869) and “weep-ing” (6.1). The supposition with which he ends Book 5 sets the stagefor an anxiety that will abide for a thousand more lines (5.870–71):

o nimium caelo et pelago confise sereno,nudus in ignota, Palinure, iacebis harena.

Oh Palinurus, having put too much trust in the serenity of heavenand sea, you will lie naked on an unknown beach.


His gloomy underestimation of Palinurus, who had in fact refused to trustthe good weather (5.848–51), disguises a misplaced optimism, insinuatinghis own wishful confidence that care will see one through; he deliberatelysuppresses the possibility of an unpreventable tragedy, let alone the actionof a malevolent god. No wonder the revelations of the Underworld depresshim, contradicting this apotropaic bromide by urging him to accept hu-man unhappiness as final, and actually part of a divine plan.

Elysium at first gives comfort, but the meeting with Anchises itself, sostructured as firmly to deflate Aeneas’ hopes, briskly ends it. The scenecorresponds verbally to his recognition of his mother at 1.407–09:

quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsisludis imaginibus? cur dextrae iungere dextramnon datur ac veras audire et reddere voces?

Why do you so often tease your son—you cruel, too!—with false disguises? Why may we not join hand to hand,and hear and exchange sincere speech?

For a moment in the Elysian Fields it seems that his other parent willfulfill this wish (6.687–89):

venisti tandem, tuaque exspectata parentivicit iter durum pietas? datur ora tueri,nate, tua et notas audire et reddere uoces?

Have you come at long last—has that piety of yours, expected byyour father, overcome the hard journey? May I look into yourface, my son, and hear and exchange familiar speech?3

As if cued by these words, yet made apprehensive by the experiencewith Venus, Aeneas fatally completes the wish thus (697–702; he isrepeating the plea from 5.742):

“ … da iungere dextram,da, genitor, teque amplexu ne subtrahe nostro.”sic memorans largo fletu simul ora rigabat.ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum;

3 The substitution of notas for veras warns us to suspect the veracity of Anchises’subsequent voces; on this see below.


ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno

“Let me join hands, let me, father, and do not withdraw fom myembrace.” Speaking thus, he simultaneously drenched his face withcopious tears. Thrice there he tried to put his arms around hisneck; thrice the simulacrum, grasped in vain, evaded his handslike sporting winds or a fleeting dream.

Twice now he has been deluded of the parental touch he craves (add toothe meeting with the ghost of Creüsa at 2.792–94 from which 700–02are repeated). His father characteristically offers no explanation (con-trast his Homeric model, Anticlea’s shade, at Odyssey 11.215–24). Justas after 1.409, the narrative picks up without giving Aeneas’ reaction;but it is here that, appalled by the sight of the ghosts along Lethe, heasks what terrible desire drives them to go back to the light and “torevert again to slow bodies” (720–21). His own body must now befeeling unbearably slow.

Aeneas is evidently struggling with a kind of mistrust in the realgood of all he sees, which his father’s exposition will have to anticipate,absorb, or dodge. Anchises, who accounts for the Elysian spirits’ desirein exuberantly materialist terms, in the quasi-parodistic Lucretian lan-guage for which Virgil had already showed his facility at Eclogues 6.31–40, at first fails to address the anxiety that underlies his son’s question at719–21. If Aeneas’ ingenuousness is thus blunted in part, it neverthe-less cuts through Anchises’ optimism and elegant philosophizing to posedeeper questions.4 His words on Marcellus, which reveal Aeneas to haveassimilated waveringly his father’s vision, provide Anchises with a newopportunity to resolve his son’s lingering conflict between acceptance ofthat vision and the persistence of his own skeptical melancholy. He firstaddresses the gloom that evidently surrounds the boy (867–74):

tum pater Anchises lacrimis ingressus obortis:“o gnate, ingentem luctum ne quaere tuorum;ostendent terris hunc tantum fata nec ultraesse sinent. nimium vobis Romana propagovisa potens, superi, propria haec si dona fuissent.

4 cf. Otis 300: “The ‘answer’ is in one sense disappointing.”


quantos ille virum magnam Mavortis ad urbemcampus aget gemitus! vel quae, Tiberine, videbisfunera, cum tumulum praeterlabere recentem!”

Then his father Anchises began, with tears welling: “Oh my son,do not inquire after the immense grief of your kindred. The fateswill only show this young man to the world, and let him stay nolonger. Too powerful, O gods, would the stock of Rome haveseemed to you had this gift been hers to keep. What great lamen-tations of men the Campus will send up to the great city of Mavors!And what funeral rites you will see, god of Tiber, when you glidepast the new tomb!”

Suggesting that this is a descendant he would have preferred to passover, Anchises nevertheless extends this near-praeteritio into a run ofloci on the brevity of Marcellus’ life and the grief it brings to Rome.5His impressionistic but crystalline vision of the state funeral, completewith details of Roman geography, contextualizes his son’s vague impres-sions of grief as a very specific event with public, national implications(still fresh for the poet’s first audience).

He dilates upon the future loss (875–86):

nec puer Iliaca quisquam de gente Latinosin tantum spe tollet avos, nec Romula quondamullo se tantum tellus iactabit alumno.heu pietas, heu prisca fides invictaque bellodextera! non illi se quisquam impune tulissetobvius armato, seu cum pedes iret in hostemseu spumantis equi foderet calcaribus armos.heu, miserande puer, si qua fata aspera rumpas!tu Marcellus eris.

No boy of the Trojan race will exalt his Latin ancestors so high byhis promise, nor will the land of Romulus ever glory so in any ofher nurslings. Alas for the piety! Alas for the old-time trustinessand the right hand unvanquished in war! When he was in armorno one would ever have come against him without paying a price,either when he went against the enemy on foot or when he spurredhis foaming horse’s forequarters. Alas, pitiable boy, if only youcould somehow break through harsh fate!6 You will be Marcellus.

5 Details and parallels in Norden 341–45; cf. Brenk.


Anchises is still teaching, teaching. As he stressed in his very firstwords to Aeneas at 688, in a slightly tendentious question, that itwas pietas that had brought him safely through the shades, so herehe reminds him of the necessity of that quality, together with fidesand above all prowess in war, by mourning their loss in a paragon ofthe nation that Aeneas will soon found (Iliaca, Latinos, and Romulacombine the dual past and unified future of Aeneas’ people in a singleglorious line). Of the traits noticed by Aeneas, Anchises’ epicediumdoes not pick up his beauty, but only the military prowess it em-blematizes; this not only resumes the projected warlike nature ofRome from 851–53, but also anticipates Anchises’ instructions con-cerning the war in Italy (890). Anchises curiously emphasizes theelement of vengeance (879 non … impune) in Marcellus’ repulsionof attacking foes—a lesson from which Aeneas will profit when deal-ing with oath-breaking Rutulians. In this line of exempla, from whomand for whom Aeneas paradoxically must become the exemplum, themerely potentially great Marcellus becomes even more parodoxicallythe supreme exemplum, ending the list and receiving Anchises’ long-est accolade, even longer than the fifteen lines on Augustus (791–805).

Augustus’ nephew and son-in-law, groomed to follow an illus-trious cursus toward the principate, Marcellus died at nineteen inthe autumn of 23, just a few months after Augustus’ own recoveryfrom an illness that had threatened to leave Rome leaderless, and indying recalled all the perils to the Roman state that Augustus wassupposed to have laid to rest. Anchises’ epicedium blurs the distinc-tion between the Julian line and the other Roman families, makingMarcellus, who appears beside other Claudii Marcelli, a sort of uni-versal Roman heir (and Augustus a sort of universal paterfamilias).The “recent tomb,” Augustus’ newly completed mausoleum in theCampus Martius, becomes generally Roman, accessible to the mourn-ing of a mighty nation.7 The archaic name “Mavors,” which appearsfor the first time in the poem here, makes the evocation of national-

6 On the si-clause here, representing an unfulfilled wish, see Goold 121.

7 Dio 53.30.5 implies that the tomb was still under construction at Marcellus’ death.


ity more emotional (and also reinforces Anchises’ martial concerns).Marcellus is a gift to the whole Roman people, conceived as a greatfamily (870 Romana propago); lines 875–76 most poignantly sumup the concerns for family, nation, and succession: “No boy of theTrojan race will exalt his ancestors so high in hope.” These themespermeate the whole poem, of course—Palinurus, for example, knewto beseech Aeneas “by your father, by the hope of rising Iulus”(364)—and particularly furnish the vehicle for Anchises’ instruc-tion, in which family is metaphorical for nation and succession isparamount. Marcellus, the terminus (whether intended or not) ofthat instruction, becomes the ultimate synecdoche for the pageantof Rome. Anchises’ lament has transfigured his son’s melancholy intoan encomium of the Romanness he has been expounding all along.

The tactics of Anchises’ answer are comparable to the way hisexposition of the heroes manipulates hope and disappointment toanticipate and absorb any objections his account of Roman historyand Roman virtues may inspire in his son. The early part of thepageant, to be sure, glosses over various disasters and dynastic snagsand culminates in a uniformly glorious account of Augustus (al-though the omission of Remus at least is more honest than Jupiter’sastonishing lie that Romulus and he will “give laws” together: 1.292–93). Yet the presentation encompasses both good and bad in Romanhistory and reaffirms Anchises’ earlier lesson that emotional distur-bances of all kinds are necessarily a part of earthly existence (hincmetuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque, 6.733).8 After Numa, thingstake a distinct turn for the worse, as Anchises describes the reigns ofthe early kings in increasingly distressed terms (Tullus Hostilius at813 is otia qui rumpet patriae; Ancus Marcius at 815–16 is iactantior… nimium gaudens popularibus auris). Hastening us past the unno-ticed fifth king to the expulsion of the Tarquins and the establish-ment of the Republic, Anchises can now find almost nothing pleas-ant to say (817–23):

8 cf. O’Hara 166 (in his study of deceptively optimistic prophecies in the poem):“Anchises’ speech to Aeneas speaks more honestly than most prophecies of thedifficulties that the future will bring.” O’Hara goes on to emphasize the “gap be-tween what Aeneas can understand and what the reader is reminded of.”


vis et Tarquinios reges animamque superbam9

ultoris Bruti, fascisque videre receptos?consulis imperium hic primus saevasque securisaccipiet, natosque pater nova bella moventisad poenam pulchra pro libertate vocabit,infelix, utcumque ferent ea facta minores:vincet amor patriae laudumque immensa cupido.

Do you wish to see the Tarquin kings and the proud soul of Brutusthe avenger, and the rods of magistracy that he took back? Thisman will be the first to receive the power of a consul and the sav-age axes, and as a father will call his sons, for urging rebellion, topunishment for the sake of fair liberty—unhappy, no matter howposterity will judge this deed. Love of his country will prevail, andimmense desire for praise.

Instead of extolling Brutus’ patriotism or wisdom, Anchises lets Aeneashear of the “savage axes” in whose authority he had his sons put todeath. His judgement is excruciatingly balanced here: pulchra implies atleast a hard choice, probably the right one; utcumque (“no matter how”)shifts the verdict to Brutus’ infelicitas and even casts doubt on theprotreptic value of this vision, opposing to happiness the very values tobe instilled. The next remarks swerve from this dilemma only to runback into it (824–25):

quin Decios Drusosque procul saevumque securiaspice Torquatum et referentem signa Camillum.

But why not look at the Decii and the Drusi over yonder, andTorquatus, savage with his axe, and Camillus bringing back thestandards.

Quin is abrupt, adversative, indicative of a turn; but before we reach theend of the line we find another axe (and the epithet saevus again) wieldedby another father in the name of some virtue: as consul, Titus ManliusTorquatus had his own son executed for insubordination in battle (doeshe appear in Elysium actually carrying the axe?).

9 The avenger has received Tarquin’s fatal epithet along with the fasces. The readingadvocated by Servius, which makes the anima superba Tarquinius’ by hendiadys in817, rests not on the Latin (-que in third place in 818 would be very strained), but ona prejudged notion of whose soul Anchises should call proud.


After these miseries the movement to civil war feels natural. “No,my children, do not habituate your spirits to such great wars!” is theodd way Anchises admonishes Pompey and Caesar (832 ne, pueri,ne tanta animis adsuescite bella), as if they were simply to commit acrime of excess against the civilizing bellicosity Anchises means toenjoin as the supreme Roman art (851–53). The strained admoni-tion embarrasses his precepts by pointing up the ease with whichthey defeat the Roman ideals they should support. There is no waycleanly to separate the values of Anchises’ protreptic from theinfelicitas he deplores in Brutus, the impiousness of Caesar andPompey, and, by implication, the deplorable side effects of some ofthe other heroes’ loyalty to Roman principles. Some of Anchises’warnings are visible both to Aeneas and to us; some just to us. Butplainly Aeneas, who came down to the Underworld eager above allto see his beloved father again (see 108 and that whole speech), findshimself charged with the task of founding a nation whose moralprinciples lead to human misery and whose father-son relationshipsend in execution or civil war. Aeneas does not speak again, after theLethe question, until he has reviewed those Roman descendants andheard their histories, and then it is to pick out of the crowd forexplanation the one sad face. His flashing arms (fulgentibus armis,861) are ominous after those of Pompey and Caesar (quas fulgerecernis in armis, 826)—does Aeneas notice them for this very reason?Is it the very gloom on Marcellus’ brow that suggests to him a son ofthe older Marcellus (filius … ?, 864), in view of Brutus’ sons?

Here, then, is the background to Aeneas’ question and Anchises’answer: the father has taken care to warn about the troubling aspects ofthe future, while the son has remained sensitive to those aspects aboveall others. Even as Aeneas stepped into the Elysian fields, a discordantnote had sounded underneath all the felicity, raising suspicions that theinjunctions he would receive there would have a negative side—oursuspicions, since it is an intertextual signal I mean, unreadable by Aeneas.Ennius’ Annales of course provide a model for much in Elysium: in theencomium of Augustus, where heaven receives the Ennian formula “stud-ded with burning stars” (stellis ardentibus aptum, 797); perhaps inAnchises’ account of the metempsychosis, where Wigodsky (73–74)


discerns the influence of the epic-founding proem to the Annales.10 Inthe section on the heroes of the Punic Wars both the Hellenism Scipiadasand the learned pun in fulmina are probably Ennian, and unus qui nobiscunctando restituis rem (846), the capsule summary of Fabius Maximus,closely adapts (and makes even more Ennianically spondaic) unus homonobis cunctando restituit rem (Annales 363 Skutsch).11 Ennius’ tale ofRoman origins becomes a template for Virgil’s—and Anchises’—owninterpretation. Yet this pattern is signalled long before, if we take 179itur in antiquam silvam (“there is a procession into an ancient forest”),which introduces the Annales-derived wood-gathering scene for Misenus’funeral pyre, as metaphorical for Virgil’s and his reader’s progress.12 Onewould have thought this scene, derived by Ennius himself from Homerand applied to the aftermath of Pyrrhus’ defeat of the Romans atHeraclea, already instinct enough with Roman anxiety reverberating inthe parallel tales of history and poetry; Virgil’s metaphor beckons usinto a richly cullable forest of old material simultaneously historical andpoetic.

Within this programmatic network of allusions is one to the rape ofEnnius’ Ilia, transformed at 6.637–39 into the descent to “the pleasantassemblies of the pious and Elysium” (amoena piorum concilia Elysiumque,5.734–35) where Anchises had promised their meeting:

his demum exactis, perfecto munere divae,devenere locos laetos et amoena virectafortunatorum nemorum sedesque beatas

These rites performed and their duty to the goddess fulfilled, theywent down to happy places and the pleasant greeneries of grovesof the fortunate and the blessed abodes.

10 Wigodsky’s summary is suggestive (74): “Vergil in his parade of heroes has thusin a sense put the contents of Ennius’ later books into the form of his proem.”For stellis ardentibus aptum see Ann. 348 Skutsch (cf. stellis fulgentibus aptum in27 and 145).

11 Wigodsky 72–3. On the pun see O’Hara (1996)179–80.

12 cf. Enn. Ann. 175–9 Skutsch. The metaphor is most recently dealt with byHinds (10–14) in a discussion of literary echoes that signpost their own allusive-ness.


The new scenery, a pleasing change for Aeneas and the Sibyl (who havejust been perusing the horrors of Tartarus), echoes Annales 38–40(Skutsch), Ilia’s dream:

nam me visus homo pulcer per amoena salictaet ripas raptare locosque novos. ita solapostilla, germana soror, errare videbar …

For it seemed that a handsome man carried me away across pleas-ant willow-groves and riverbanks and places strange to me. After-wards it seemed, sister, that I wandered alone….

Recollection not just of the rape, but of the troubles between the result-ing twins (retailed in the Annales, but omitted from Anchises’ version ofhistory), should lend irony to the notes of relief and promise. The simi-larity between Ennius’ and Virgil’s passages hinges on the compounddescription of the scene: the “strange, or new, places” become “happyplaces” (in contrast with the Mourning Fields where Dido abides, aswell as with Tartarus), and amoena virecta echoes amoena salicta. Onewould like to know whence Virgil replaced Ennius’ “willow-groves” withvirecta, presumably meaning “green places” or the like, a word unat-tested before this passage.13 Austin (ad loc.) calls it “a Virgilian coinage”;if so, Virgil will have modeled it directly on salicta, introducing thenotion of “greenery” (from vireo, connoting refreshment and new vigor)in the first syllables. Ilia’s “riverbanks” are lost from Virgil’s wording,but if our literary memory provisionally supplies them, it will not havetoo long to wait for them to resonate: his father’s instruction will beginwith Aeneas’ troubled questions about the souls gathered around thebanks of Lethe some 60 lines later.14 All this makes for just a passingecho, yet it rings true: both Ilia and Aeneas are unwitting conduits ofthe Roman race. Aeneas’ passage through the scene of his indoctrina-tion is momentarily likened to a ktistic rape.

13 Unless, as is most unlikely, Dirae 27 (optima silvarum, formosis densa virectis) isearlier. Later Apuleius uses it at Met. 4.2, 8.18, and 10.30.

14 One also remembers the passage at 305–14 on the unburied souls on the banks ofAcheron, which is also followed by a troubled question from Aeneas.


Yet it is impossible to suppress here all memory of him as thepursuer, the role of Ennius’ Mars and the one that Aeneas had inDido’s nightmare at 4.465–68, which also is modeled on Ilia’s dream.The replacement of raptare by devenere clouds the decision, and ofcourse this whole episode (not to say the whole poem) casts him asancestor of Rome, like Mars in the Annales. Amata, for one, mightnot hesitate to characterize Aeneas as a ktistic rapist, a violent seizerof the ancestorship due another; but the characterization need notbe definitively negative, in so far as the outcome can be thoughthappy (how are we to think of Ennius’ Mars?). Aeneas, passivelyimpregnated with prophecies of Rome, from this perspective is alsothe aggressive enabler of those prophecies that Anchises would makeof him, and that he in fact becomes in the remaining books of theAeneid. This reworking of Ennius heralds both the foundational pithand all the ambivalence of Anchises’ teaching in Elysium.

Critics rightly home in on the “waste and futility” of Marcellus15

at the end of the history lesson, and seek to explain their effects onthe vision of Rome that precedes, the way in which the possiblefrustration of generations yet to come modifies our reading (and hisown) of Aeneas’ mission. Marcellus’ early death, as Anchises pre-sents it, may be held either to depress—even undercut—the glori-ous achievements foretold, or to complement, perhaps even aug-ment them. Johnson (106–07), noting especially the pathetic un-real conditions at 870–71 and 879–81, hears in the speech “a trag-edy, indeed a bitterness, that threatens to overwhelm the magnificenceof the Roman achievement.” Putnam’s formulation (95) recalls theimplications of the deaths of Dido and Turnus: “It is as if the poetwere saying that the Roman mission cannot go forward without lossof life, that the reality of death ever looms as a counterbalance toprogress.” To Otis (303) lines 870–71 (nimium vobis Romana propago/ visa potens, superi, propria haec si dona fuissent) communicate anavoidance of destructive pride, affirming the necessity of sacrifice,“especially sacrifice of the young,” on which “the ordeal of empire”is based; but he accepts this as a complicating tragedy of Aeneas’

15 Feeney (1986) 15.


mission, through which Marcellus “prefigures the similar heroes ofthe last six books: Pallas, Lausus, Euryalus, Camilla.” For the moreoptimistic Glei (122–25), not only does that sentiment warn Aeneasagainst hybris, but the death of Marcellus itself providentially fore-stalls a case of destructive superbia in theodical terms, and in practi-cal politics spares Augustus conflict with Livia on the one hand andwith Agrippa on the other.

Grief over Marcellus can subvert or support the Roman program,depending on the consciousness that frames the grief, and we see therhetoric of these characters doing both. What is true of Marcellus istrue also of the other heroes in the episode, the negative connotationsof whose deeds and natures are framed variously enough to suggest boththe failure of the ideals Anchises makes them represent, or a necessaryprice for the glory toward which he leads Aeneas through them. Adefinitive message would be hard to pin down, because these less pleas-ant details of Roman history are by no means immanently negative orunnegotiable; they are always caught up in a dialectic of viewpoints. Apessimistic perspective on them is always available to a skeptical melan-choly such as that of Aeneas, but that itself is an ever-changing mood,influenced by his father’s exhortations and explanations. Aeneas’ mel-ancholy eventually finds its own resolution: into his reaction to Marcellusruns his whole experience of the Underworld, and Anchises channelsthat experience to his own uses. Constantly correcting his own approachin response to his son’s reactions, Anchises embeds in the pathos of hislament the same lessons as in the rest of his commentary, and the pa-thos itself subtly welds to them his son’s melancholy, redirecting towardnational concerns his sensitivity to personal tragedy. One should notmisunderstand the teary quietism of the Marcellus episode as undercut-ting the pro-Augustan tenor of Anchises’ commentary. Empson (1) sawin the “dreamy, impersonal, universal melancholy” of the Aeneid as awhole “a calculated support for Augustus”—never more calculated thanin this lament for Augustus’ heir. On the other hand, Anchises has notdisguised the down side of Roman history. He must only neutralize thedoubts it raises in his son.

His gorgeous offering of a futile, proleptic floral tribute completesthe transformation (883–86):


manibus date lilia plenis,purpureos spargam flores animamque nepotishis saltem accumulem donis, et fungar inanimunere.

Give lilies in armloads; I will strew crimson flowers16 and heapover the soul of my descendant these gifts at least, and fulfill theempty duty.

The flowers that will cover Marcellus, a sensuous image of beauty cutdown in its prime, perform by metonymy the same function as will theflower-similes of Euryalus and Pallas. Onto each of these dead princesone might project one’s own false hopes, unmet expectations, and bro-ken promises of the past, and in indulging grief take comfort in thebeauty that surrounds him. The imagery is crucial to the rhetoric ofAnchises, whose armfuls of lilies adorn and hide the coming tragedy: ithelps divert true indignation at the cost of Rome’s success into tolerablesadness for one who is said to be simultaneously a sacrifice for thatsuccess (870–71) and Rome’s would-be champion. His offering cathar-tically involves Aeneas and the Sibyl in the ritual (date),17 taking theedge off Aeneas’ melancholy and cleansing him of his misgivings. Allthat beauty and voluptuous grief compensate him for the human com-fort missing from the destiny he has witnessed, and help reconcile himto the sly demands of his father’s mourning.

As after the futile embrace, the narrative picks up at line 886 with-out giving Aeneas’ reaction to Anchises’ account of Marcellus:

sic tota passim regione vaganturaeris in campis latis atque omnia lustrant.quae postquam Anchises natum per singula duxitincenditque animum famae venientis amore,exim bella viro memorat quae deinde gerenda,

16 The reading that takes spargam as a subjunctive dependent on date (“Grant that Imay strew lilies, crimson flowers, with full arms …”), with no stop after 883, pro-duces a jejune apposition; and Anchises should not be asking anyone’s permission,but rather inviting his guests to join in.

17I cannot agree with Tiberius Donatus ad loc. that the plural date represents only atrope, “since there was no one around who could give” (cum non essent praesto quidarent). Anchises is addressing two people (cf. 854).


Laurentisque docet populos urbemque Latini,et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem.

So they wander everywhere around the whole place, on the broad,airy plains, and look over everything. And after Anchises led his sonthrough all these things, one by one, and kindled his spirit with loveof the coming fame, he speaks to the hero of the wars that mustthereupon be waged, teaches him about the Laurentian peoples andthe city of Latinus, and how he is to avoid or endure each task.

The crucial line is 889. The tense of incendit, parallel to duxit, is perfect(lacking the merely conative force of an imperfective aspect that thepresent tense might hold): Anchises did kindle Aeneas’ spirit with loveof Roman glory, presumably by means of the Roman descendants andhis glosses on them. The phrase recalls 4.232, where Jupiter wonders iffuture glory has failed to kindle the dilatory hero (si nulla accendittantarum gloria rerum …), and answers Anchises’ rhetorical question at6.806–07 as to whether fear or doubt still keep Aeneas from translatinghis fine qualities into action.18 Line 889 implies that Aeneas has lost hisdoubtful mood, and indeed we do not see it again. When did this hap-pen? Apparently during Anchises’ epicedium, the rhetoric of which hassuccessfully united Aeneas’ melancholy to Anchises’ precepts, dissolv-ing the former into the latter.

The insight that the Underworld prophecies change Aeneas ethi-cally, which goes back to Heinze, was formulated for recent generationsof critics by Otis: “Aeneas has been finally brought out of the past, tomoral duty and his future.”19 Yet commentators have noticed that Aeneasdoes not seem to remember any of the prophecy of Elysium; at least, hedoes not repeat it to anyone, clearly act on any part of it, or permit it toclear his mind of all remaining hesitation.20 Only at 12.111—where hespeaks consolingly to Ascanius and his comrades of what is to be, “teach-ing them destiny” (fata docens)—is there a hint that he might be passingdown the specific precepts of his father (although there he may just be

18 Servius on 889 makes the connection with 806.

19 Otis 303 on lines 806–07; cf. 307: “But of course we do not realize this newAeneas in action until the books to come.” cf. Heinze 271–80.

20 See especially Michels 140–43.


addressing his chances against Turnus).21 It is hard to decide whetherhis slaying of Turnus shows that he has learned to debellare superbosor whether, regardless of Anchises’ words at 6.853, he kills in mereanger. So what of the prophetic scene does remain to effect a changein Aeneas’ attitude? Can we assume that a general love of fame (famaevenientis amor) persists in him, though memory of the particularsevanesces as he departs?

There is evidence, in fact, that Aeneas has not only absorbed thelesson, but remembered its words. Anchises’ epicedium is the fulleststatement in the Aeneid on the tragedy of young death, the precedentthat prepares us for the celebrated fallen youths of the Italian war. Whatdoes Aeneas say at the sight of the slain Lausus (10.825)? “Quid tibinunc, miserande puer ….” What does he say at the sight of the slainPallas (11.42)? “Tene” inquit “miserande puer ….” He echoes his fathercontemplating the future corpse of Augustus’ would-be heir: heu,miserande puer … (6.882). In the case of Pallas, lacrimis ita fatur obortisat the end of 11.41 echoes the opening of Anchises’ speech, lacrimisingressus obortis, at 6.867: Aeneas over Pallas telescopes his father’s la-ment over Marcellus.22 It is as if, along with information on the cominggenerations of Albans and Romans, along with the love of coming fame,Anchises had taught his son the proper reaction to the death of a youngRoman (the hope of his people) and the proper use for sadness. Implic-itly Aeneas recognizes in both Lausus and Pallas scions of races that willhave a part in Rome, though themselves fated not to share in that achieve-ment and that lineage. At 11.43–44 he suggests as much over Pallas,who, more obviously than Lausus, might have taken part in the Trojansettlement: has Fortuna begrudged him Pallas, that he might not seeAeneas’ reign? (ne regna videres nostra). His vision of the future, to besure, still does not stretch further than vague glimmerings of his ownregime, but these two youths who might have shared it he has learnedto pity in his father’s terms. Their aura of lost promise is calqued on thatof Marcellus, and his conflicting connotations of national greatness and

21 cf. 6.759 (Anchises) et te tua fata docebo.

22 Note also that at 11.53 (infelix, nati funus crudele videbis) he gives Evander theepithet his father gave Brutus (6.822).


dynastic anxiety resonate in them. Anchises’ message about nationhoodand generational succession, his interpretation of the perils that bestrewthe road to glory, seems to have reached Aeneas specifically through thelament for Marcellus.

For us the dual stream of hope and disappointment persists even inthe kindling, whose closest verbal parallel is 4.196–97. There Iarbashears of Dido’s affair with Aeneas:

protinus ad regem cursus detorquet Iarbanincenditque animum dictis atque aggerat iras

Forthwith [Fama] bends her course to King Iarbas, kindles hisspirit with her words and piles up his anger.

The echo recalls us to the treachery of fama (the subject of 4.197, theobject of Aeneas’ love at 6.889), whose hideous personification at 4.173–88 climaxes with “as tenacious a messenger of the invented and thedepraved as of the truth” (188 tam ficti pravique tenax quam nuntiaveri).23 To be sure, we can balance the description preceding Iarbas’ prayerwith a detail of Jupiter’s response to it. He looks toward Carthage andsees “the lovers, who had forgotten their better fame” (oblitos famaemelioris amantis, 221): there must be a fama appropriate for Aeneas, atleast in the eyes of Jupiter; and that at 6.889 will echo in the fama et fatanepotum that Aeneas hoists with the shield at 8.731. Yet the parallelwith 4.197 likens Roman fama to the multi-tongued demon in Book 4,and recalls the duplicity of the “fame” for which Anchises kindles Aeneas’love (compare Fama’s dicta with those of Anchises at 6.898). The meta-phor in amore is also pregnant with ambivalence. When at 721 Aeneasasks what dira cupido drives the souls back to the light, it is curious,especially in view of the Lucretian model, that Anchises’ immediateresponse (his account of the progress of souls at 724–51) makes no useof a like metaphor. Instead, his answers first replace the cupido of thequestion with the forgetfulness of Lethe and then (in the pageant ofheroes) with the drive for Roman glory that Aeneas is meant to share.The erotic trope of the question at 721 is only directly answered at 889,when that “dire love” at which Aeneas shuddered is transfigured as the

23 On the ambivalence of fama in the Aeneid see Michels 140 n. 2.


force that fires him to return to the light full of high enthusiasm. Bythen, of course, the ambivalence of Anchises’ whole presentation hasaccrued to the metaphor, particularly through his verdict on Brutus(823): “Love of his country will prevail, and immense desire for praise.”Amor, immensa cupido: the infelicity that necessarily follows from Brutus’“loves” will accompany Aeneas out of the Underworld and through thejourneys and battles of the rest of the poem.

Anchises now sends his son and the Sibyl back up through the Gatesof Sleep (6.893–99):

Sunt geminae Somni portae, quarum altera ferturcornea, qua veris facilis datur exitus umbris,altera candenti perfecta nitens elephanto,sed falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia Manes.his ibi tum natum Anchises unaque Sibyllamprosequitur dictis portaque emittit eburna,ille viam secat ad navis sociosque revisit.

There are two Gates of Sleep, of which one is said to be made of horn,through which true shades are given an easy egress; the other shines inits perfection with gleaming ivory, but the ghosts send false visions tothe sky [through it]. Then and there Anchises follows his son and theSibyl with these words and sends them out the ivory gate. He makeshis way to the ships and rejoins his companions.

No challenge will be offered here to the opinion that Virgil’s Gates ofSleep defy simple understanding, nor will the present interpretationseek to stave off future controversions of their meaning, to which onelooks forward. Dense with mystery and contradictions, the passage begsthe questions of what metonymy permits Aeneas himself to exit by theseGates (sent out, as if a dream, by his father’s Manes), or by what meta-phor false dreams (or any) can be said to pass out by the Gates withhim. Solutions to the whole complex founder against one or more of itsparts. The explanation (which begins with Servius24) that the meaningof the Ivory Gate speaks over the poem to its readers, signalling thepoet’s intention to calibrate his vision’s degree of veracity, occludes theimplications of the passage for the characters and their actions. Critical

24 Serv. on 893 et poetice apertus est sensus: vult autem intellegi falsa esse omnia quaedixit.


observations, on the other hand, that the predictions or the whole Un-derworld episode is dreamlike fail to account for the relevance of “false”(versus the other gate), while efforts to cast the proceedings as somehowfalse (ethically, if not literally) must leave aside the designation “dream”:a case of Feeney’s Binoculars, and so perhaps indicative of a permanentVirgilian enigma.25 Zetzel’s suggested treatment of the image as “an ex-tended form of enallage” (275) perhaps offers the best hope for tenta-tiveness and subtlety.26

Without aiming, then, for a complete interpretation, we are con-cerned here with how the exit through the Gate of False Dreams com-ments on the change that we have been tracing. The prophetic functionof the Gates of Sleep (here as in Odyssey 19.562–67) tempts one tointerpret the choice of the Ivory Gate as acknowledging some falliblecomponent in the prophecies Aeneas has just heard, some major part ofthem that will not come true.27 This makes psychological sense in viewof the personal cost of the virtues exemplified in the Pageant of Heroes:they can bring you laudes, but they can make you infelix. When Anchises,after teaching Aeneas what he must be, sends him out of the Under-world through the Ivory Gate, he is affirming the disappointment thatthis fama brings to one who seeks a more than national and posthu-mous felicity.28 The first of that long line of Roman heroes, Aeneas car-ries up to the light virtues and values incapable of bringing about thehappiness that he has now learned not to yearn for. At 719–21 it wasunthinkable to him that the souls should wish ever to leave “the blessedabodes” (639); now he himself willingly leaves them, imbued and al-tered by a persuasion as potent as Lethe. The death of Palinurus hadexposed Aeneas’ delusion, on the eve of his descent, that true endeavor

25 Feeney (1991, 168) compares trying to understand definitively the Allecto-Amataepisode in Book 7 to “looking at an object through a pair of binoculars with incom-patible lenses.” cf. Hexter 122–24.

26 Zetzel gives bibliography on the passage up to his publication. On the complexitiessee also Bray at 57.

27 cf. O’Hara 170–72. -

28 cf. Goold 245 n. 36: “In verse 896 falsa does not mean exactly ‘false,’ but rather‘delusive’ ….”


brings fortune; by the end of the poem he will disavow somethinglike the felicitas that escaped Brutus when he tells his own son at12.435–36:

disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,fortunam ex aliis

My child, learn valor and true toil from me, fortune from others.

His very commendation of fortuna to Ascanius, of course, reveals thathis dialogue with Anchises has not quite ended; yet for his own life thelesson has stuck. This abnegation of felicitas or fortuna, the flip side ofhis pietas (in that “happiness” comprehends, at an extreme, those per-sonal aims for which men had destroyed the Republic), makes him aworthy Roman ancestor. It is not that Aeneas is taught by Anchises totrust destiny. He goes from incorrectly trusting destiny at the end ofBook 5 to properly mistrusting it after Book 6, in accepting the amorvenientis famae and dropping hope of happiness as a necessary conse-quence or even a likelihood. When he passes under the gleaming ivory,the mood is somber, but his action is unsentimental. He has made peacewith deception.

Was not Elysium like a dream from the very beginning? In theseamoena virecta Aeneas has met prophecies as true as those dreamt byIlia, none more so than Anchises’ account of the death of Marcellus—which in fact, by Virgil’s economy of allusion, refers us back to thatprophetic dream. The riverbank from Annales 39 reappears as the site ofMarcellus’ tomb at 872–74, where the designation of Rome as the “cityof Mavors” also recalls Ilia’s homo pulcer. At 875–77 Anchises callsMarcellus a puer Iliaca de gente, from the Romula tellus: a “boy from therace of Ilium”—or “ … of Ilia,” from a country named for Ilia’s son.When Aeneas finally exits the Ennian forest that he entered at line 179,he bears within him duplicitous visions of a splendid but uneasy future.


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Anchises Reading Aeneas Reading Marcellus

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