Reading Rome from the Farther Shore: Aeneid 6 in the Augustan Urban Landscape

Vergilius 60 (2014) 85–116

READING ROME FROM THE FARTHER SHORE: AENEID 6 IN THE AUGUSTAN

URBAN LANDSCAPE

Nandini B. Pandey

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I. SURVEYING THE LANDSCAPE

It is a truth universally acknowledged, or at least rarely qualified in the classroom, that Augustus articulated ideological messages to the public via his building projects in the city of Rome.1 Poetic testimony has served as an important complement to archaeological evidence in reconstructing the appearance and impact of this “urban narrative.” However, the assumption that these monuments conveyed a transparent and unitary meaning requires rethinking in light of recent developments in the scholarship. The last few decades have witnessed the reconceptualization of Augustan culture as a decentralized discourse rather than a monolithic emanation of imperial power; exploration of the richly dialogic relations between the visual and literary productions of the age; and attention to their meaning

This article is based on a paper delivered at the Symposium Cumanum on Aeneid 6 in June 2013. I thank my fellow participants, especially Christine Perkell, Alessandro Schiesaro, and Jocelyne Nelis-Clément, for their comments and company; Barbara Boyd, Erich Gruen, Joseph Geiger, and Lauren Curtis for their helpful suggestions on the written version; audiences at the 2014 APA in Chicago and at Illinois Wesleyan University, especially Eric Kondratieff, for much useful feedback; and my editor and reader at Vergilius for all their help. Any errors that remain are mine alone. I also gratefully acknowledge the Fondation Hardt for the idyllic residency in which I developed these ideas as well as Loyola University Maryland for competitive grants covering my travel in Summer 2013.

1 Most influentially, Zanker 1990, but also, e.g., Favro 1998; Rehak 2006; Pollini 2012; and Rutledge (2012), who examines the city as a “master narrative … that enshrined a coherent national identity and was expressive of Roman power” (29).

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in relation not only to authors’ intentions but also to readers’ reception.2 It is therefore time to reexamine Roman audiences’ role in imbuing the text of the Augustan cityscape, too, with meaning—particularly in light of its complex engagement with the written word.

Accordingly, this paper explores some ways in which Vergil’s Aeneid might inform audiences’ responses to Augustan architecture. The sixth book of the epic, in particular, is deeply concerned with issues of interpretation, even as its setting in legendary Cumae evokes and begs reexamination of buildings in contemporary Rome. The vision of history conveyed by Aeneid 6 does not always reinforce, and indeed frequently problematizes, the messages assigned to specific monuments like the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine and the Forum Augustum. More generally, by presenting Aeneas’ own uninformed responses as a foil, Aeneid 6 models ways of reading Augustan monuments against their grain and encourages viewers to adopt an active and critical interpretive role within the Roman urban landscape.3 This, in turn, calls into question the extent to which the princeps was able to render the cityscape into a coherent “urban narrative” that controlled people’s paths and perceptions.

Aeneas’ descent to the Underworld in Aeneid 6 is among the most fantastical passages of an epic already brimming with prophecy, divine intervention, and heroic endeavor beyond ordinary mortal experience. Vergil’s Roman readers might therefore be surprised to encounter some strangely familiar sights within this mythic landscape—the ghosts of two Augustan buildings, one past and one future (completed, respectively, before and after Vergil’s death). These, in turn, have powerful interpretive implications for the elite but important audience who knew both Vergil’s epic and Augustan buildings, whether in Rome or via their copies abroad.4

Aeneas encounters the first of these buildings at the beginning of the book, when he meets the Sibyl at the temple to Apollo at Cumae. In Vergil’s

2 Among the enormous bibliography, most relevant to the present paper are Barchiesi 1994; Galinsky 1996; and Elsner 2007.

3 It will become clear that my argument is informed by “pessimistic” readings of the Aeneid; for a rundown of these views as they apply to Book 6 and especially the parade of heroes, see Feeney 1986, in tandem with West’s 1993 presentation of the opposing case. My own focus, however, is less on specific interpretations of Book 6 than on the interpretive strategies it encourages; this approach is indebted to reader response theorists like Roland Barthes and Stanley Fish.

4 There is evidence that the Forum Augustum inspired copies in Italy and abroad, including Pompeii, Arretium, Aventicum, Aphrodisias, and locations in Spain (see Kockel 1993, 293; Fishwick 2003, 70–74; and Chaplin 2000, 175). This means that audiences well beyond the urbs could perceive intertextual relations between Aeneid 6 and these monuments.

Aeneid 6 in the Augustan Urban Landscape – 87

description at Aeneid 6.9–41, Daedalus constructed this temple in thanks for his safe escape from Crete to Italy, but omitted troubling aspects of his personal story, including his own role in his son Icarus’ death. This fictional building evokes Augustus’ own temple to Apollo on the Palatine Hill (28 BC), dedicated soon after his victory in the civil wars left him sole master of Rome. However, the Vergilian passage highlights the capacity of art to misrepresent and deceive, suggesting in turn that Augustus’ victory monument, too, might suppress the human cost of its builder’s success.

More generally, this passage encourages audiences to read text and topography in light of one another, an interpretive technique that proves fruitful when Aeneas encounters the shade of his father Anchises in Elysium and reviews the unborn souls of future Romans later in this book (Aen. 6.756–892). This “parade of heroes” bears a striking resemblance to the statues of great Julians and other Roman heroes that flank the Forum Augustum (ca. 20–2 BC), with its central temple to Mars Ultor.5 While most previous scholarship on these two “halls of fame” has hinged on the question of direction of influence, this paper asks a new and more productive question: how might readers of Vergil react to this monumental intertext after the Forum’s opening in 2 BC? Joseph Geiger’s recent comprehensive study of this space (2008) reveals some hitherto unrecognized connections with Aeneid 6, which this paper will explore along with their interpretive implications for Roman audiences. Given Book 6’s emphasis on (mis)interpretation, I argue that the discrepancies between Augustus’ and Vergil’s versions of history were as striking as their similarities and likely to inform audiences’ assessments of both. This paper proposes in addition that Augustus, as pater patriae (“father of his country”), assumed an Anchises-like didactic position within the earthly Elysium of his Forum.6 Visitors, on the other hand, occupied the place of Aeneas: their independent, subjective, and far more critically informed gaze played a vital role in constructing meaning around the monument. The charged interpretive connections between the literary geography of Cumae and the urban topography of Rome, moreover, drew them into a transcendent, even heroic, experience of the Augustan cityscape and its representations of the past.

5 See below. The relation between the Forum Augustum and Livy has also been much debated, particularly in light of their mutual interest in exempla; see Luce 1990 and Chaplin 2000.

6 Kondratieff (2012) has also compellingly argued that Anchises becomes a pattern for Augustus in this scene, particularly in conducting “censorial” work in the Underworld that recollects Augustus’ own census and lustrum of 28 BC.


II. INTERPRETING MONUMENTAL ART

The Cumaean and Palatine Temples to Apollo

Daedalus’ temple to Apollo at Cumae, where Aeneas first encounters the Sibyl, bears a striking and often-noted resemblance to Augustus’ temple to the same god on the Palatine. The future emperor vowed this structure in 36 BC, in return for victory against Sextus Pompeius, and built it in 28 BC, soon after his victory at Actium left him sole ruler of Rome but before the so-called first constitutional settlement of 27 BC normalized his status. This temple, closely connected to a portico, library, and Augustus’ own home, seems to belong to a youthful and triumphalist phase of the princeps’ building program.7 It certainly attracted much comment from contemporary poets, including Vergil’s literary evocation at Aeneid 6.9–41. Karl Galinsky has argued that Vergil innovated the detail of Aeneas’ landing and consultation with the Sibyl at the Cumaean temple to Apollo precisely to “cross-pollinate” it with Augustus’ new building on the Palatine.8 Vergil’s allusion frames Augustus’ temple as a belated fulfillment of Aeneas’ vow of thanks to the Sibyl at 6.69–70, adding mythic resonance to the new building (see Galinsky 2009, 74; McKay 1973, 61). Augustus was also responsible for major restorations of both the upper and lower temples at Cumae in the 20s, around the time that Vergil was composing his epic. The already notable architectural similarities between the Palatine and Cumaean temples, particularly their elaborate doors and triple cellas, would have been reinforced by their commanding topographical situations. Both, moreover, had strong connections with Augustus, Apollo, and the Sibyl, particularly after Augustus transferred the Sibylline books to the Palatine upon becoming pontifex maximus in 12 BC.9 James Zetzel (1989, 264) suggests that even Aeneas’ sacrifice at Cumae finds parallels in the Ludi Saeculares

7 See Zanker 1983, 1990; Galinsky 1996, 213–24; and Miller 2009, 185–252, though elsewhere I attempt to complicate this view (2011, 79–118).

8 Galinsky (2009, 74) follows Sandy’s argument that during the 20s Augustus conducted extensive remodeling of the site, including a change in orientation. Zetzel (1989, 280) notes that prior traditions had Aeneas meeting other Sibyls but not the Cumaean one.

9 Though Vergil cannot be assumed to have known Augustus’ plans, Zarker (1985, 205) posits “much discussion” of this move before Lepidus’ death. Galinsky (2009, 78) rightly cautions that the Sibylline books were associated with the Erythraean rather than Cumaean Sibyl. The Sorrento base depicts a Sibyl at the feet of the Palatine triad, further underscoring the connection between Cumae and the Palatine (see Roccos 1989).


celebrated on the Palatine in 17 BC, further drawing the buildings together in the minds of an audience reading shortly after Vergil’s death.

Given these prominent similarities, Vergil’s depiction of Daedalus’ temple doubles as a comment on Augustan architecture and its reception by Roman audiences. Here, Aeneas is interrupted in his attempt to “read” (perlegerent oculis, 34) the frieze on which Daedalus depicts his exploits prior to arriving at Cumae; however, Vergil’s description of these spectacula, analyzed by Eleanor Leach in its difference from other epic ekphrases,10 carries a message about art and interpretation for the epic’s external reader. Scholars have noted that this is the only occasion in ancient literature where we glimpse an artist representing his own story.11 Significantly, though, we also catch Daedalus in the act of misrepresenting that story. The opening phrase ut fama est (“as the story goes,” 6.14) calls on readers to compare their own understanding of the myth with the version that Daedalus proffers (20–33). Yet Vergil’s narrative presents some self-serving choices on the part of the artist. Daedalus depicts Pasiphae’s monstrous copulation with a bull (25–26), but obscures his responsibility for building the wooden cow that enabled it; he similarly omits his own role in constructing the labyrinth where so many innocent victims died (inextricabilis error, 27). The only time the author himself appears as an agent (Daedalus ipse, 29), it is in heroic guise, rescuing Ariadne from his own maze. On the other hand, he is absent where we most expect him: he twice tries and fails to depict the death of his son Icarus (32–33). Though Vergil ascribes this lacuna to grief rather than guilt, Daedalus here again obscures his role in a tragic event, as craftsman of the waxen wings on which they fled Crete.

10 Leach (1999, 111–20) observes that the term spectacula is more commonly used for theatrical actions and discusses this description’s lack of enargeia compared with the other major ekphrases in the epic (the temple to Juno in Carthage in Book 1 and the shield of Aeneas in Book 8), characterizing it as a “failure of mimesis” that creates a “tension between seeing and interpretation.” I suggest it also explores the different emotional responses that art can evoke based on viewers’ level of information. In contrast to his weeping before the pictures of Troy at Carthage, Aeneas does not respond with great emotion either to Daedalus’ frieze, because it depicts a past that is not his own, or to the Underworld parade, because the future is more difficult to comprehend. Roman viewers, however, would have a stronger response to the latter spectacula and to the Forum Augustum due to their closer emotional proximity and familiarity with the events depicted.

11 See Fitzgerald 1984, 53 and Putnam 1987, 174, following an earlier observation of Pöschl. The present analysis pursues Fitzgerald’s observation (1984, 55–56) that Daedalus obscures his own role, as well as useful points in Putnam 1987 and 1998; Casali 1995; and Bartsch 1998.


William Fitzgerald (1984, 56–58) views this ekphrasis and the labyrinth itself as a parable for how people process memories of the past: it is by repeating and re-presenting events, he suggests, that they come to terms with history and confront the future. However, Vergil stages the episode in such a way as to highlight the potentially deceptive nature of monumental art. Aeneas, the “unknowing” (inscius, 6.711) internal audience, can admire it only aesthetically.12 But with a second-person address to the omitted Icarus (Icare, 31), Vergil identifies one of this work’s pregnant silences and makes it speak to his readers:13

tu quoque magnam partem opere in tanto, sineret dolor, Icare, haberes.bis conatus erat casus effingere in auro,bis patriae cecidere manus.

You too, Icarus, would have a large share in such a work, if grief permitted; twice he tried to fashion your fall in gold, twice his hand fell. (6.30–33)

This apostrophe imbues Daedalus’ apparently self-serving omission with greater meaning, even pathos, for an external audience. Vergil’s own narrative therefore becomes the third, and finally successful, attempt to memorialize the dead and process the father’s guilt. Michael Putnam and Shadi Bartsch have shown how readers’ subjectivities here become an important part of the poem’s construction of meaning.14 Crucially, Vergil’s text also distinguishes external readers’ reactions, now informed by what is not depicted, from Aeneas’ uninformed visual pleasure in the aesthetic surface. This episode thus encourages audiences to weave an independent

12 Vergil often emphasizes Aeneas’ level of ignorance about the sights he observes. For examinations of Aeneas’ subjectivity, see Heinze 1903; Otis 1963; Fowler 1990; and O’Hara 1990, 166–67. More recently, Smith (2005) examines Aeneas as a “voyant-visible,” frequently depicted in the act of seeing and motivated by vision to action. In a different vein, Casali (1995, 4–8) argues that Aeneas stops viewing Daedalus’ frieze where its subject might have hit too close to home: he believes the next panel would have depicted Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne, recalling Aeneas’ of Dido. Vergil’s ekphrasis might therefore reveal a tendency toward self-justification or self-defense on the part of internal audience as well as internal author; perhaps it comments more generally on audiences’ tendency not to perceive lessons they do not wish to learn.

13 See also Leach 1999, 119 for the narrator’s takeover from the artist here to make “emptiness an index of emotional content.”

14 See Putnam 1987, 178 and Bartsch 1998, arguing against Anthony Boyle’s 1972 view that this passage depicts the failure of art.


alternate narrative around Daedalus’ selective and self-exonerating version of his past.

Reading Resistance into the Palatine

Such a message, moreover, easily transfers from literature to life, encouraging readers to delve more deeply into Augustan representations of history, including monumental art. In fact, it is clear that Roman viewers could and did explore perspectives that were omitted or marginalized by Augustan architecture. Though it predates Aeneid 6, Propertius’ narration of his own visit to the Palatine in Carmina 2.31 is a prime example.15 Here, the poet ignores the temple’s ostensibly triumphal message in order to reread it from an elegiac point of view.16 For instance, the doors depicted Apollo punishing the boastful Niobe’s children and repelling the Gauls’ attack on Delphi. These stories exemplify the god’s filial piety and his restoration of order, qualities that Augustus claimed for himself after the civil war. Yet Propertius writes that the temple doors, contrary to their celebratory architectural context, “mourn” these victims of the god’s wrath (maerebat, 14). This suggests by analogy that Augustus’ recent acts of violence might also have tragic ramifications, and, more generally, that representations can speak independently from their authors’ presumed intentions. Propertius further hints at the voices that may have been silenced by the Augustan building program when he describes the marble statue of Apollo Citharoedus outside the temple as “gaping out a song with silent lyre” (marmoreus tacita carmen hiare lyra, 6). This recollects Callimachus’ description in Hymn to Apollo 22–25 of Niobe, who ceases her lamentation when she hears Apolline song:

καὶ μὲν ὁ δακρυόεις ἀναβάλλεται ἄλγεα πέτρος, ὅστις ἐνὶ Φρυγίῃ διερὸς λίθος ἐστήρικται, μάρμαρον ἀντὶ γυναικὸς ὀιζυρόν τι χανούσης. ἱὴ ἱὴ φθέγγεσθε: κακὸν μακάρεσσιν ἐρίζειν. 25

15 This poem purports to be written on the occasion of the temple’s dedication, on 9 October 28 BC; it is an interesting possibility that Vergil’s description of Daedalus’ frieze responds to this earlier poem. I offer it merely as an example of the type of regretful rereading exemplified by the Daedalus passage (and, as I argue below, by Aeneas’ encounter later in Book 6 with the ghost of Marcellus, whose death in 23 BC provides a terminus post quem for this book’s composition).

16 Gros (1993), for one, conceives of this temple as “un veritable ex voto de la victoire sur Marc-Antoine”; see also n. 7 above. For Propertius 2.31 as an elegiac response, see Miller 2009, 200–201; Keith 2008, 148–49; and Pandey 2011, 88–92.


Even the weeping rock puts aside its troubles, the glistening stone that is set in Phrygia, a marble rock in place of a woman gaping out a sorrowful sound. Cry ‘hië, hië’; it is wrong to fight with the Blessed Ones.

This intertextual resonance—confirmed by the aural resemblance between Callimachus’ ἱὴ ἱὴ (25) and the Latin hiare (2.31.6)—ostensibly exalts the power of art or song to ease suffering. However, it also rewrites the god of the Palatine into the position of his victim Niobe: he, too, seems to gasp out a sound, suggesting that he is frozen in a similar act of mourning instead of hymning the recent victory at Actium. Moreover, Callimachus’ passage goes on explicitly to link Apollo with the king revered in the hymn, framing a complicity between political and divine power that silences dissent.17 Propertius thereby rewrites Augustus’ epic architectural text on the Palatine as an elegiac poem for Cynthia’s enjoyment, simultaneously showing how readers may reactivate suppressed voices and uncover hidden sorrows behind splendid public surfaces.

III. APPLYING THE LESSON

Vergil’s Parade of Heroes and the Forum Augustum

Vergil’s literary description of the temple to Apollo at Cumae therefore encodes a critical and comparative approach to contemporary monumental architecture: it prompts reflection on the ways in which Augustus’ presentation of history, like Daedalus’, may be selective and self-interested. These issues reemerge at the climax of Book 6, when Aeneas and Anchises meet in Elysium and review an assemblage of future Romans (752–892). This procession not only forms a diptych with the spectacula on Daedalus’ temple, but also closely recalls the twin processions of summi viri and great Julians that flanked the Forum Augustum as reconstructed by Paul Zanker, Valentin Kockel, and Joachim Ganzert, among others (fig. 1).18 In addition

17 The hymn continues, “He who fights with the Blessed Ones would fight with my king; / whoever fights with my king, would fight even with Apollo” (ὃς μάχεται μακάρεσσιν, ἐμῷ βασιλῆι μάχοιτο: / ὅστις ἐμῷ βασιλῆι, καὶ Ἀπόλλωνι μάχοιτο, 26–27). The implication of suppressed speech makes it far from a “covert piece of eulogy, suggesting the equivalence of Augustus and Apollo,” as suggested by Heyworth 1994, 56. The identity of the king in Callimachus’ poem, identified by the scholiast as Ptolemy III Euergetes, is much debated (see Frederick Williams 1978, 36).

18 See Zanker 1970; Kockel 1993; Ganzert and Herz 1996. Also useful for analysis and bibliography are Platner 1929; Richardson 1992; Galinsky 1996, 197–213; and


Fig. 1. Plan of the Forum Augustum with sculpture locations. Drawing by Rodica Reif. © 1996, Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with the permission of

Cambridge University Press and Diane Favro. Note, however, that recent excavations suggest the presence of two symmetrical semicircular exedrae beneath the ones

depicted (see Geiger 2008, fig. 5 and passim)

to these general studies, Joseph Geiger has devoted a monograph specifically to the statue gallery, with interpretive implications for the Aeneid and its Roman audiences that have yet to be explored (2008).

The intertextual relationship between these two parades of heroes has evaded careful critical analysis due to the preoccupation of most prior scholarship with their relative chronology. The dating is complicated by the fact that Augustus is said to have vowed the temple to Mars Ultor while avenging Caesar’s assassination at Philippi in 42 BC; however, he did not

Rutledge 2012, 250–57. The Forum Augustum also bears some resemblance to the hall of Latinus in Aeneid 7, as noted by Rowell 1941 and Zarker 1985; see n. 5 above for parallels with Livy’s historical project. Conversely, Leach (1999, 126) notes parallels between the Underworld parade and collections of statues in the Area Capitolina, the library of Asinius Pollio, and parts of the Campus Martius.


begin it until 20 BC or dedicate it until 2 BC, a full forty years later.19 T. Frank (1938) and H. T. Rowell (1941) argued long ago that the two projects were conceived in tandem, though Augustus’ took longer to execute. More recently, Zanker (1990, 195) has suggested that Augustus “borrowed” his schema from Vergil, and Geiger (2008, 51), that he tried to “outdo” the poet. Despite their divergences, all these scholars share the assumption that Augustus’ and Vergil’s galleries of heroes were mutually reinforcing. We have seen, however, that Daedalus’ doors problematize acts of interpretation in ways that apply to Augustan monuments. Vergil focuses even more squarely on hermeneutics in Elysium, where the plot consists largely of Aeneas’ process of “reading” and “learning” the faces of future Romans under Anchises’ tutelage (aduersos legere et uenientum discere uultus, 755).20 Given the absence of other action, readers’ attention is trained firmly on the acts of selection, omission, and interpretation within Anchises’ narration of the future, as well as its variances from other representations of history, including architectural ones such as the Forum Augustum. This passage of Aeneid 6 thus encourages readers familiar with Augustus’ Forum to contemplate its arrangement, omissions, designs upon its audience, and portrait of its “author” Augustus.

Ordering Principles and Audience Position

Vergil’s and Augustus’ halls of fame show meaningful divergences from each other on several counts, most obviously their spatial arrangement, the position in which they place their viewers, and the judgments they imply regarding both Caesar and Augustus. At the beginning of Vergil’s Heldenschau, Aeneas, Anchises and the Sibyl sit on a tumulus, perhaps reminiscent of Augustus’ mausoleum, and view head-on an assembly (conuentus, 753) and murmuring crowd (turbam sonantem, 753) of future

19 Richardson places the start of construction as early as 25–24 BC, though Kockel and Geiger convincingly argue that it did not commence until 20–19 based on numismatic evidence that the temple to Mars was originally planned as a round building on the Capitoline; see Spannagel 1999, 62–69 and Geiger 2008, 55–60. Macrobius (Sat. 2.4.9) notes the architect’s delays; Suetonius (Aug. 56.2) relates that Augustus could not procure all the land he wanted, though Kockel and Richardson argue this was a later explanation for the Forum’s asymmetry in the northern corners. The vow date, too, is subject to debate. Herbert-Brown (1994, 99–108) suggests, expanding on Weinstock, that the connection between the temple and Philippi was manufactured after 12 BC, when Augustus assumed the title of pontifex maximus. Anderson (1984, 83–85) identifies the return of the Parthian standards in 20 as its primary cause.

20 Servius glosses this striking use of legere at 755 as considerare, relegere.


Romans arrayed in a long line (longo ordine, 754). From this vantage, the imagines they see fall roughly into two sections: one begins with the Alban Kings and culminates in Augustus (760–807), the other includes various figures from the Republic and ends with Marcellus (808–86). In contrast to the strict geometric and chronological organization of the statues in the Forum Augustum, the logic behind Vergil’s list is often associative and elusive, to both ancient and modern audiences.21 Yet this baffling order renders readers themselves the physical and interpretive focal points of Vergil’s passage. Not only do they share in Aeneas’ remarkable glimpse of the Underworld prior to death, joining the few who see it twice (see Leach 1999, 114); they also share his privileged vantage point within the narrative, occupying a raised, central viewing position toward which these great Romans appear to be advancing (aduersos legere et uenientum discere uultus, 755). From here, they watch over the hero’s shoulder to try to discern the larger logical or didactic ordering principle behind the procession.

In the Forum Augustum, in contrast, the commanding lines of sight belonged not to Aeneas or the viewer but instead to Augustus, looking out from his quadrigate statue in the center of the Forum, and the god Mars Ultor himself, surveying the Forum from the temple pediment above. Their view, moreover, was quite different: they looked out over twin columns neatly divided into Julians on the northwest flank and other great Romans on the southeast. This arrangement boldly asserted an equivalence between the gens Julia and all other Roman families combined, as well as the primacy of genealogy and chronology as organizational concepts.22 Augustus’ self-

21 Servius comments at Aen. 6.752 that all Roman history is contained here, albeit in a confused order that must be supplemented by the shield in Book 8: qui bene considerant, inueniunt omnem Romanam historiam ab Aeneae aduentu usque ad sua tempora summatim celebrasse Vergilium. quod ideo latet, quia confusus est ordo … cetera, quae hic intermissa sunt, in aspidopoiia commemorat. He frequently also remarks upon the divergence between these heroes’ chronological order and the order in which Vergil describes them, e.g., in a note on longo ordine at 6.754: non quo nati sunt, sed quo apud inferos stabant: non enim eo quo regnarunt, dicturus est ordine.

22 Most scholars agree the Julii and summi viri formed lines of equal numbers, which Geiger (2008, 120) estimates to total 100–150, on opposite sides of the Forum. Luce (1990, 126) argues against their numerical equivalence out of disbelief that 54 notable Julians could be found, despite inscriptional evidence that some had unexceptional careers (for which, see below). Rowell (1941, 270–71) attempted unconvincingly to square Vergil’s Heldenschau with Augustus’, arguing that Vergil’s falls into two groups with an “obviously intentional” division between family and nonfamily. The first includes the direct descendants of Aeneas (760–805), subdivided into Italic and Trojan branches: his descendants through Silvius (760–87) and through Iulus (788–805). The second comprises heroes outside the family, including kings after


elevation was underscored by his position as the focal point of all these statues’ vision, and, metonymically, of Roman history itself. (The statue of Aeneas stood to the side, in the northwestern exedra, as part of a group containing Anchises and Iulus in flight from Troy.23) Moreover, while Aeneas, Anchises, and the Sibyl had remained unobserved by the passing crowd in the Aeneid, the statue of Augustus entered into a powerful visual relationship with the Forum’s statues and its living visitors: he commanded their gaze while at the same time subjecting them to his own. For that matter, visitors were lower than the statues, which were slightly larger than life-sized and on plinths, and had to walk through the Forum in order to view their faces and tituli. This perspective contrasts with readers’ privileged, stationary position atop the tumulus in Aeneid 6, “reading” the faces before them with the aid of Anchises’ narration (755). The Forum Augustum thus adopts a stronger organizing principle than Vergil’s parade of heroes, in the person of the princeps himself, and appears to assigns its audience a relatively humble position.

Moral Message and Portrayal of Caesar

The two galleries moreover suggest disparate moral messages and place different interpretive expectations upon their audiences. This is particularly evident in the tone and structure of their treatment of civil war and Caesar, which diverge in ways that elicit readers’ critical intervention and prime them to question the Forum Augustum’s relatively positive portrayal of the dictator and of Augustus’ vengeance on his behalf.

In Aeneid 6, Anchises pauses his narrative to emphasize two major lessons from Roman history: the evil of civil war (832–35), and Rome’s mission to rule other nations (847–53). At first glance, Augustus’ Forum appears to reiterate and reinforce these themes, particularly the latter:

“excudent alii spirantia mollius aera

Romulus and the great men of the Republic. However, this does not accommodate the far greater space Vergil assigns to the latter section or the reappearance of some members of the Julian gens (Caesar and Marcellus) in the latter part of Vergil’s list. In his defense of a “panegyrical” reading of Vergil’s parade, West (1993, 284) argues that the speech falls into thirds and that 71 percent of its lines are devoted to the gens Julia. However, the reference to Caesar is decidedly negative and the death of Marcellus strikes an elegiac concluding note, discussed below.

23 For this famous group, see Zanker 1990, 201–3 and fig. 156 (202); the image was so iconic in antiquity that it attracted parody, as at fig. 162 (209). See also Barchiesi 2005, 286.


(credo equidem), uiuos ducent de marmore uultus,orabunt causas melius caelique meatusdescribent radio et surgentia sidera dicent: 850tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento(hae tibi erunt artes) pacique imponere morem,parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.”

“Others (well I believe) will beat out bronze that breathes more subtly, will coax living features from marble, more expertly plead cases and measure the course of the sky with a rod and describe the rising stars; you, Roman, remember to rule the peoples with might (these will be your arts) and impose the way of peace, spare the conquered and beat down the proud.” (6.847–53)

Here Vergil appears to articulate, perhaps even inspire, the governing principles of the Forum Augustum. This structure was built ex manubiis from the spoils of foreign wars, displayed the names of conquered nations, and housed the Parthian standards after they were returned in 20 BC.24 Suetonius (Aug. 29.1) and Cassius Dio (55.10.1–5) underscore the Forum’s military and administrative uses: here boys assumed the toga virilis, commanders set out for foreign assignments, the senate voted on triumphs, and returning generals dedicated the symbols of their power and victories.25 As Steven Rutledge observes (2012, 251), its exotic marbles, displays of art, and other architectonic and iconographical details all combined with these functions in “weaving together a tale of war and empire, and promising the perpetuity of both.”

Augustus’ choice of heroes appears to have emphasized this message. Suetonius reports that the statues were chosen to honor “those who raised the imperium of the Roman people from the least to the greatest” and were depicted in triumphal garb (qui imperium populi Romani ex minimo maximum reddidissent … et statuas omnium triumphali effigie in utraque fori sui porticu dedicavit, Aug. 31.5).26 Some even view the gallery as an attempt

24 Richardson (1992, 160) suggests the Spanish and German wars were major sources of funding. For the conquered nations, see Vell. 2.39.2; CIL VI 31267; Kockel 1993, 291; and Alföldy 1992, 67–75. For the Parthian standards, see especially Rich 1998.

25 See Geiger 2008, 53–115 and Richardson 1992, 162. Suetonius additionally claims that it served legal functions crowded out of the other two fora.

26 Ancient testimony about the statues includes Suet. Aug. 31.5; Ovid, Fasti 5.563–66; Cass. Dio 55.10.3; Pliny, HN 22.13; A. Gellius 9.11.10; SHA Alex. Sev. 28.6; and Degrassi 1937, 13.3.1–36. Though most of these sources suggest they were bronze,


to subject future triumphal honors to imperial control: subsequent statues would be in bronze rather than marble, awarded by the princeps himself to substitute for the triumphal processions now granted only to members of the imperial family.27 Even the Forum’s omission of space for oratory appears in line with Anchises’ proclamation that the rhetorical arts belong to others (alii orabunt causas melius, 849) while suggesting the increasing political irrelevance of such arts under empire.

Despite these apparent congruities, Anchises’ other injunction, against civil war, raises interpretive problems for Vergil’s readers that in turn apply to the Forum Augustum.

“illae autem paribus quas fulgere cernis in armis,concordes animae nunc et dum nocte prementur,heu quantum inter se bellum, si lumina uitaeattigerint, quantas acies stragemque ciebunt,aggeribus socer Alpinis atque arce Monoeci 830descendens, gener aduersis instructus Eois!ne, pueri, ne tanta animis adsuescite bellaneu patriae ualidas in uiscera uertite uiris;tuque prior, tu parce, genus qui ducis Olympo,proice tela manu, sanguis meus!—” 835

“But they whom you see shining in equal arms, souls now harmonious while pressed by night, alas, how much war, what great battles and bloodshed they will incite amongst themselves, if they reach the light of life: the father-in-law coming down from the Alpine hills and the fortress of Monoecus, his son-in-law opposing him with the armies of the East! Do not, my sons, grow accustomed to such war within your hearts, and do not turn the great strength of your country against her own viscera; and you, first desist, who draw your lineage from heaven, my blood, cast your sword from your hand.” (6.826–35)

Anchises’ meaning here would be lost on Aeneas, with his ignorance of Roman history; as it is, this passage forces careful rereading on the part of

the surviving fragments are marble. Not all scholars accept the standard view that the statue plan emphasized military virtus. Anderson (1984, 83–85) argues that the elogia emphasized those aspects of himself that Augustus wished to highlight; Kellum (1985) that they placed an unusual emphasis on domestic and religious matters.

27 See Rowell 1941, 265–69; Chaplin 2000, 184; and especially Geiger 2008, 98 for imperial control over later additions.


Vergil’s external audience. His contemporaries would readily identify the socer (“father-in-law”) and gener (“father-in-law”) as Caesar and Pompey, linked via Pompey’s marriage to Caesar’s daughter Julia.28 However, the warning against civil war at 832–35, primarily aimed at Caesar (tu parce … sanguis meus, 834–35), destabilizes readers’ relationship with Anchises’ exegesis. While Aeneas appears to accept Anchises’ narration as perfect and omniscient, Vergil’s audience, reading in light of recent history, would understand this plea to be futile—it becomes, in effect, a future contrafactual. Here, as in the Daedalus passage, Vergil invites audiences to bring external information to bear on a text; this, in turn, ironizes Aeneas’ uninformed reaction and exposes Anchises’ “authorial” misrepresentation of historical facts.

Anchises’ outcry at 832–35 moreover implicitly condemns Caesar,29 forcing readers to reconsider his earlier pronouncement at 6.789–95:

“hic Caesar et omnis Iuliprogenies magnum caeli uentura sub axem. 790hic uir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis,Augustus Caesar, diui genus, aurea condetsaecula qui rursus Latio regnata per aruaSaturno quondam, super et Garamantas et Indosproferet imperium…” 795

“Here is Caesar, and all Julius’ race, destined to pass beneath the great vault of heaven. This is the man, this is he, whom you have so often heard promised to you, Augustus Caesar, born from a god, who will again set up a Golden Age in Latium amid the fields where Saturn once reigned, and will spread his empire beyond the Garamantes and Indians…”

Upon first reading, hic Caesar (789) appears to refer to Julius Caesar, given its proximity to Iuli in the same line. Following closely along in the procession of Julii is Augustus himself, whose climactic appearance at 791–92 verbally echoes Caesar’s, effectively twinning the two figures: hic uir… / Augustus Caesar, diui genus.30 Servius, for one, reads the passage this way, taking hic Caesar at 789 to refer to the dictator (ut “Iulius a magno

28 Catullus 29.24 also employs these terms.29 West (1993, 292–93) offers a rare dissenting view, trying to detect here praise of

Caesar’s clementia.30 The description divi genus further links Augustus with Caesar; for the


demissum nomen Iulo”). Troubled by the (re)appearance and implicit blame of Caesar later in Anchises’ narrative, some modern commentators have insisted instead that it refers to Augustus.31 However, James O’Hara has persuasively countered such attempts to explain away the ambiguities of Vergil’s text, instead showing how its inconsistencies produce meaning and demand interpretation.32 The treatment of Caesar and civil war in Aeneid 6 is a case in point. Anchises’ narrative, despite its unidirectional progression and the authority Aeneas assigns it, urges Roman readers to double back and reinterpret elements in light of emergent inconsistencies. Here, specifically, the passage against civil war at 6.826–35 draws a moral line between Augustus’ foreign conquests and Caesar’s condemnable civil strife, despite the spatial and familial linkage between the two suggested at 789–95. This casts a retroactive pall over Anchises’ initial prefiguration of Julian glory. More generally, it enlists readers in a process of active critique and comparison that informs their subsequent encounters with political texts.

One such text is the Forum Augustum, which appears to contest or correct Anchises’ condemnation of Julian factionalism at 6.826–35 by valorizing not only Caesar but also Augustus’ vengeance in his name. In fact, as Diane Favro argues, “Octavian may have initially conceived the entire Forum Augustum as an homage to Caesar” (1998, 96–97). While

problematic relationship between the two in literary and visual culture, see Pandey 2013.

31 For example, R. D. Williams (1972) comments ad loc., “It is impossible to maintain that this is Julius, because he occurs later in the pageant (826–27)”; Austin (1986), that “the reference in Caesar below is clearly to Augustus … and Iulius has his place in 830 ff., where Vergil’s unhappiness concerning him is plain.” However, illustrating my point that the latter passage forces retroactive reinterpretation, Austin admits that it revises his earlier understanding of Aen. 1.286 as referring to Julius (nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar). This line’s similar ambiguity has attracted considerable debate. Attempts to prove that 1.286 refers exclusively to Augustus, especially by analogy with the already contentious Aeneid 6 passage, are unconvincing (see Harrison 1996, expanding on Kraggerud 1992, and, contra, Dobbin 1995). The apotheosis at 1.288–89 is clearly Caesar’s; such a certain prediction of Augustus’ deification would be premature at this time. Moreover, this reading upsets the temporal procession implied by the passage, from Caesar’s birth, victory, and deification (286–89) to Augustus’ ending of civil war and containment of Furor (290–96). This latter would, incidentally, recall the painting by Apelles displayed in the Forum Augustum (Pliny, NH 35.27, 35.93; Serv. Dan. on Aen. 1.294), which in turn comprises part of an imaginative geographical ‘tour’ of the Forum Julium and Augustum, perhaps also the Temple of Divus Julius, analogous to the one I discuss at the end of this paper.

32 See O’Hara 2007, 91–95 for Aeneid 6 and, for the parade of heroes specifically, 1990, 163–72; see also Mackie 1988, 127–28.


Caesar may not have ranked among the Julians who flanked the Forum, visitors would readily find the dictator elsewhere: at the very heart of the temple, as a cult statue, and perhaps also as a separate colossus.33 For that matter, they likely entered Augustus’ forum via Caesar’s with its temple to Venus Genetrix, dedicated by Caesar in 46 and again by his heir two years later.34 This spatial arrangement expresses a biographical logic: it was Augustus’ love for his genitor Caesar that inspired his vengeance at Philippi, where he first vowed the temple to Mars the Avenger.35 Only twenty years later, around the time that construction commenced, did this vengeance gain an external object with the Parthians’ return of the legionary standards they captured from Crassus during his humiliating defeat at Carrhae in 53 BC.36 This diplomatic victory figured prominently in Augustan iconography and the recovered standards were displayed in the temple itself. But it did not quite erase the building’s original association with civil war, as Ovid reminds us at Fasti 5.567–78:

spectat et Augusto praetextum nomine templum, et uisum lecto Caesare maius opus.uouerat hoc iuuenis tum cum pia sustulit arma: a tantis princeps incipiendus erat. 570ille manus tendens, hinc stanti milite iusto, hinc coniuratis, talia dicta dedit:“si mihi bellandi pater est Vestaeque sacerdos auctor, et ulcisci numen utrumque paro,Mars, ades et satia scelerato sanguine ferrum, 575 stetque fauor causa pro meliore tuus.templa feres et, me uictore, uocaberis Ultor.”

33 Geiger (2008, 98) does not number Caesar among the exterior statues. Mars, Venus, and Divus Iulius are accepted as the cult group by Zanker, Galinsky, Geiger, Richardson, et al., though note Kockel’s caution (1993, 292). Only a finger and part of an arm survive of the colossus, whose identification is more hotly debated; here, again, Kockel rightly expresses skepticism. Geiger argues passim that it represented Divus Iulius, following Spannagel 1999, 303–6. Others hold, based on Martial 8.44.5, that it depicted Divus Augustus, though this would have been inappropriate at the time of the temple’s dedication and would seem a Claudian addition (see Ungaro and Vitali 2003).

34 Dio Cass. 43.22.2, 45.6.4; RG 20; for the entrances, see Kockel 1993, 292.35 For skepticism about the date of this vow, see n. 19 above. 36 For which see Rich 1998. Erich Gruen points out to me that the return of the

standards could be seen as retaliation for losses incurred not only by Crassus in 53 BC but also by Antony between 40 and 33. If the Forum seemed to celebrate both, it might frame Augustus as an avenger of even his erstwhile enemy Antony’s defeats, helping to lay to rest the ghosts of civil war and suggest the new unity of the Roman state.


uouerat, et fuso laetus ab hoste redit.

He [Mars] sees the temple inscribed with the name of Augustus, and the work seems greater once he reads Caesar’s name. He had vowed it as a young man, when he took up pious arms: from such great deeds must the princeps begin his reign. Stretching his hand out, with the just army on one side and the conspirators on the other, he spoke these words: “If my father and the priest of Vesta are the cause of my going to war, and I prepare to avenge the divine might of both, Mars, be at hand and glut my sword with accursed blood, and may your favor stand on the better side. You’ll have temples and be called Avenger, if I win.” After vowing this, he returned joyous from the routed enemy.

Though Ovid describes Augustus’ vengeance against the Parthians in detail at 5.579–94, it is clearly a secondary cause for the temple’s foundation: “it is not enough for Mars to have deserved his epithet [of Avenger] once” (nec satis est meruisse semel cognomina Marti, 579). Ovid himself points out this Augustan overdetermination at 595–96:

rite deo templumque datum nomenque bis ulto, et meritus uoti debita soluit honor.

By right the god, twice avenged, was given both his temple and his name, and the well-earned honor discharges the debt of the prayer.

This passage exaggerates, almost to the point of parody, Augustus’ portrayal of the civil wars as righteous revenge within his early coinage, the Forum Augustum, Res Gestae 2, and elsewhere.37 In Aeneid 6, through retrospective qualification of his praise for hic Caesar (6.789–95), Vergil had asked readers to distinguish Augustus’ praiseworthy external conquest from Caesar’s impious civil strife. As Ovid points out, however, the Augustan temple to Mars Ultor once again collapses external and internal enemies: its celebration of double vengeance, against the Parthians and Caesar’s murderers, unravels the more nuanced message of Aeneid 6.38

37 Augustus frames Philippi as a war of vengeance against Caesar’s murderers at RG 2, but does not specifically name Actium among the “wars domestic and foreign” at RG 3. For filial piety as a reason for Augustus’ civil wars, see also Fast. 2.144 and Met. 15.746–51, and, on coins, Gurval 1997, 40.

38 Geiger (2008, 128) argues that the Forum Augustum included even Pompey, also nameless in Aeneid 6, by virtue of his marriage connection with the Julii. Here careful readers could catch the princeps rewriting recent history in order to appropriate Caesar’s great rival in service of an orderly Augustan vision. An audience


Meaningful Omissions from the Forum Augustum

The temple’s emphasis on vengeance might seem to accord with Anchises’ famous injunction to spare the conquered and beat down the proud (6.853). However, this message becomes notoriously problematic in the Aeneid, particularly at the end of the epic, and the same holds true for the Forum. As a repository for public memory, this monument not only exalted but also enacted Augustus’ vengeance against Caesar’s assassins through damnatio memoriae.39 Sometimes this damnatio took overtly political form. In Geiger’s analysis, Augustus certainly excluded Antony, Brutus, Cassius, and probably also Cicero and Cato, from his gallery of heroes.40 Years later, Tacitus would say that Brutus and Cassius were conspicuous for their absence from Junia’s funeral in AD 22 (Ann. 3.76): one wonders if anyone said the same for their omission from the Forum Augustum. Other exclusions, however, were more subtle and subjective. By displaying great Roman heroes opposite his Julian forefathers in the statue gallery, the princeps represented his own ancestry as the state’s and the state’s as his own. As others have noted, this would mean that the Forum Augustum became a vast public atrium or living funeral procession for all Rome.41 It would also allow even plebeian visitors to share in the illustrious ancestry of the aristocratic families represented. But how might these families feel about the displacement of some of their relatives in order to equalize the numbers of summi viri and Julii? The two members of that family for whom inscriptional evidence survives were fairly small fry: Gaius Julius Caesar Strabo, who reached the curule aedileship in 90, and the

viewing the Forum after Aeneid 6 might therefore see Augustus correcting Vergil, the future revising the past. In fact, in an interesting echo of Pompey and Caesar’s anonymity within Aeneid 6, the Res Gestae refers to Brutus and Cassius merely as qui parentem meum trucidauerunt (“those who murdered my father,” 2). Where Vergil had condemned both sides of civil war at 6.826–35, Augustus, years later, seems to silence just one.

39 For the concept in general, see Flower 2006. 40 Despite Kockel’s assertion that the Forum united even Augustus’ former rivals

under a common banner symbolizing Rome’s unity and peace (1993, 293), it seems clear he left out at least some (see Geiger 2005 and 2008, 98 and 158). Of these, Antony and Cato are in the Aeneid, while Brutus, Cassius, and Cicero are not. It should, however, be noted that Vergil’s discussion of Brutus the tyrannicide at 6.817–23 also strongly recalls Caesar’s murderer, in what even West, in his self-avowedly pro-Augustan reading, cannot cast in negative terms (1993, 289–90).

41 See Flower 1996, 86 and 109–14; Burke 1979; and West 1993, 289, with attention to its familial and didactic nature.


dictator’s father, praetor in 100.42 Yet more accomplished members of other families were clearly omitted in their favor.

It is impossible to determine how elite visitors would have responded: with a swell of pride at Roman achievement, or resignation and resentment at the slight to their own ancestors. Yet later senatorial writers like Tacitus suggest at least the possibility of the latter, and Aeneid 6 itself models a regretful way of responding to such omissions. Aeneas’ path through the underworld is punctuated by sorrow as he recognizes the ghosts of Palinurus (6.337–83), Dido (450–76), and Deiphobus (494–534). Moreover, as Jay Reed points out (2001, 146–47), Aeneas interrupts Anchises’ proud narrative to notice a sad figure on the sidelines:43

atque hic Aeneas (una namque ire uidebat 860egregium forma iuuenem et fulgentibus armis,sed frons laeta parum et deiecto lumina uultu)“quis, pater, ille, uirum qui sic comitatur euntem?filius, anne aliquis magna de stirpe nepotum?qui strepitus circa comitum! quantum instar in ipso! sed nox atra caput tristi circumuolat umbra.” 866

And then Aeneas (for he saw accompanying him a young man of outstanding beauty and brilliant arms, but with sad face and downcast eyes) said: “Who, father, is that man who attends him on his way? A son, or one of the great stock of grandsons? What a murmuring in the crowd! How great a counterpart in himself! But black night circles his head with mournful shadow.” (6.860–66)

This is, of course, Augustus’ nephew and presumed successor Marcellus, whose tragic death in 23 BC at the age of nineteen frustrated the princeps’ hopes for an heir. At the beginning of this passage, Anchises appears on the verge of omitting Marcellus from his account of Roman history; Aeneas, however, always attuned to melancholy, prompts him to revise his narrative to include the luckless youth. This ends the triumphal procession on an elegiac but emotionally compelling note,44 culminating in a collaborative

42 Luce (1990, 126) and Chaplin (2000, 177 n. 3) also observe their relative obscurity. For the inscriptions see Degrassi 1937, D6/D7.

43 Reed finds this representative of Aeneas’ tendency to brood and question, in contrast to Anchises’ optimistic certitude.

44 For scholarly thought on this much-discussed “gloomy final note,” see Burke 1979, 228 n. 36. O’Hara (1990, 168) points out that this is the only place in the Aeneid


act between internal reader and author when Anchises asks Aeneas and the Sibyl for lilies to scatter over Marcellus’ shade (manibus date lilia plenis, 883).45 Here, they finally break the fourth wall to engage with the procession as more than mere spectators, providing external readers, too, with an emotional entrée into the poem: Augustus’ sister Octavia was famously said to have fainted upon recognizing her son as Vergil recited these words.46

This passage, as West has noted, places Anchises in the position of Augustus, who had himself recently delivered a funeral oration for Marcellus (Cass. Dio 53.30); indeed, this must have been an obvious comparandum for Vergil’s passage.47 Marcellus was interred in Augustus’ new Mausoleum and his statue was subsequently included in the Forum Augustum.48 But in contrast to Augustus, Octavia, and their relations, many elite viewers’ paths through the Forum must have been punctuated by nonrecognition and grief: the failure to see their own ancestors and loved ones amidst a procession that Augustus offered to the Roman people as comprehensive and authoritative.49 Nonetheless, just as Aeneas brought the ghost of Marcellus back into Anchises’ narrative, so too might these viewers revise Augustus’ monumental text—by mentally repopulating it with the memories of loved ones who fought on the wrong side at Philippi or Perusia, or who were excluded due to its privileging of the gens Julia. Moreover, just as Vergil’s invocation of the missing Icarus at 6.30–33 adds poignant meaning to Daedalus’ artistic silences, so too could Roman viewers apply their own family mythologies, knowledge of history, and personal experiences to Augustus’ architectural text. In doing so, they would imbue this triumphal space with private elegiac meaning, creating a range of “hidden transcripts”

where a prophet answers a follow-up question, and even here, Anchises displays his usual tendency to suppress the negative side of things.

45 As Burke notes (1979, 223), this offering is reminiscent of the ceremony of the Rosalia or Violaria, when flowers were scattered on the graves of the dead. Austin (1986, 272) writes that Anchises issues the imperative date “as if servants were present to hand him the flowers”; however, it seems more natural to me to understand Aeneas and the Sibyl as Anchises’ addressees.

46 See Donatus, Life of Vergil 32, though Servius’ account (at Aen. 6.861) differs somewhat. For rightful doubts about the anecdote’s veracity, see Horsfall 2001.

47 West (1993, 294–96) assumes, without apparent evidence beyond an earlier speculation of Norden’s, that “some of what he [Augustus] said was not unlike what Virgil says here.”

48 In fact, Skard (1965) regards the Heldenschau as a transfiguration of Marcellus’ funeral procession, though Burke (1979, 225) regards it as Aeneas’.

49 As is the scholarly consensus (see, e.g., Geiger 2008, 72). Hofter (1988) additionally argues that the Forum was designed to heal wounds after the civil war.


behind this monumental public expression of Augustan power.50 In a sense, just as the Sibyl’s silent presence in Elysium had implicitly authorized Anchises’ prophetic account of Rome’s future, here Mnemosyne—historical, personal, even artistic memory—steps into her place as an unseen but more critical judge of the Forum Augustum’s historical authority.

IV. AUTHORS AND AUDIENCES IN THE CITY OF ROME

Anchises and Augustus

If the many differences between Anchises’ narration and the Forum Augustum highlight the constructedness of each version of history, Vergil, in turn, points out problems with accepting such constructions at face value. Anchises’ enumeration of Roman heroes is motivated by his desire to teach and inspire Aeneas (expediam dictis, et te tua fata docebo, “I will explain this [glorious future] with my words, and teach you your destiny,” 759). But Aeneas is Anchises’ ideal reader without being ours. Deprived of information or opportunity to doubt the value of his mission, he is indeed kindled by famae uenientis amore (“love of fame to come,” 889) after his father’s speech.51 A better-informed audience, however, might question many of Anchises’ narrative choices. For instance, he sandwiches Augustus (788–807) between Romulus (777–87) and Numa (808–12), echoing the princeps’ own self-representation as a second founder of Rome but placing him squarely among the kings. He depicts the republic through exempla that are selective at best and problematic at worst.52 History sometimes refuses to serve Anchises’ argument about the indisputable value of Aeneas’ mission (806–7), especially but not only with the death of Marcellus. Interpretive problems multiply when we remark, with Denis Feeney (1986), upon the contradiction between Anchises’ love of glory and this book’s devaluation of worldly pursuits; or, with James Zetzel (1989), upon the many factual

50 To draw on concepts developed by Scott (1990) regarding disprivileged groups’ relation to dominant discourse.

51 Even this phrase, with its verbal recollection of souls waiting to cross over the Acheron (tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore, 6.314), may hint at the ultimate futility of the love of glory as described by Feeney (1986). O’Hara (1990, 166–67) discusses whether and how Anchises’ desire to inspire Aeneas should affect interpretations of his prophecy, especially in light of the knowledge differential between Aeneas and Roman readers. Leach (1999, 125) also notes Anchises’ mediation of Aeneas’ understanding.

52 Reed (2001) points out that even Anchises cannot make this list entirely positive and analyzes some of its most problematic moments, especially regarding father/son relations.


discrepancies between this and other books of the Aeneid.53 Thus Vergil puts readers in a position to reject not only Anchises’ authorial version of history but also Aeneas’ blind acceptance. They may well feel troubled by Anchises’ disordered account, which fails to fit the facts of Roman history within a unified interpretive framework and frequently undermines the patriotic lesson he seeks to impart to Aeneas. This is amplified by the condemnation of Caesar at 826–35, the death of Marcellus at 860–86, and Aeneas’ exit through the notorious gates of ivory at 893–99—all devices that force readers to revise their understanding of prior passages in more negative light.54

As suggested above, the Augustan Forum defines a very different set of relationships among author, audience, and content. Ancient and modern writers alike assign Augustus a high level of personal control over the selection and presentation of heroes. Suetonius reports that he conceived, designed, and built the Forum with self-professed moral intentions (Aug. 31.5, discussed below); Pliny even credits him with writing the elogium for Scipio Aemilianus, suggesting a remarkable concern for details on his part (NH 22.6.13).55 In taking this didactic authorial position within the Forum Augustum, the pater patriae thereby assumed an Anchises-like role toward its Roman visitors, with a similar goal of informing and inspiring them via exempla. This complements Eric Kondratieff ’s attractive argument (2012, 134) that Anchises’ didacticism in Aeneid 6 parallels that of Augustus in

53 See also, more generally, O’Hara 2007, 91–95.54 Zetzel (1989, 274) similarly argues that Vergil uses obscure or anomalous

versions of myth and history in order to “insist that the reader apply critical intelligence to the facts of his narrative” and consider “problems of historical knowledge and interpretation.” The Daedalus frieze also forces readers to become architects of image and meaning. Leach (1999, 119) points out that phrases like crudelis amor tauri (6.24) leave visualization unclear to readers; I read this less as a “failure of mimesis” than as a prompt for readers to imaginatively supply details withheld by the author, culminating with the empty panel that would have included Icarus’ death.

55 Pliny notes, “Varro writes that Scipio Africanus was presented with the siege crown in Africa during the consulship of Manilius after rescuing three cohorts with the same number led out to rescue them, a fact which Divus Augustus also inscribed on Scipio’s statue in his forum” (Aemilianum quoque Scipionem Varro auctor est donatum obsidionali in Africa Manilio consule, III cohortibus seruatis totidemque ad seruandas eas eductis, quod et statuae eius in foro suo diuus Augustus inscripsit). Luce (1990, 123) compares the Forum’s schema to Livy’s and argues that the Forum “expresses forcibly how the emperor wanted his countrymen to view the sweep of Roman history and his place in it.” Frisch (1980, 91–98) argues for stylistic parallels between the elogia and the Res Gestae. Geiger (2008, 94) rightly deems these “rather trivial and not very convincing,” though he does not take a firm stand on whether “one can detect Augustus’ views and ideology in the remains of the inscriptions.”


his censorial activities.56 But Anchises’ examples, as discussed above, bear complex and ambiguous relations with their supposed messages and their various inscribed and actual audiences. Augustus’ gallery, on the other hand, includes only positive examples, packaged with tituli and elogia to explain and disambiguate their meaning (fig. 2).57 Some information was imparted even to the illiterate by means of onomastic tokens such as a raven (in Latin, corvus) on the statue of M. Valerius Corvus.58 And of course, the whole gallery was far more clearly organized, codified, and closed off than Anchises’ narrative, which along with the Aeneid itself is framed as incomplete.59 As mentioned above, new statues could be added, but in bronze not marble, and only by the princeps himself. This made the central figure of Augustus the focal point around which space, time, and honor itself revolved. Even all interpretation was meant to flow through and reflect upon the person of the emperor. As Suetonius reports it, Augustus’ authorial goal in setting up the gallery of heroes was not to educate his audience, but rather, “to lead the citizens to require him, while he lived, and the rulers of future ages as well, to follow the example of those worthy men of old” (professus et

56 Leach (1999, 126), among others, compares Anchises and Aeneas’ interaction in the Underworld scene to father-son discussions of heroic portraiture in Rome (1999, 126); see also Favro (1998, 126–28) for the didactic function of the summi viri in the architectural context of the Forum Augustum.

57 For a new study of Augustan inscriptions and their points of contact with Latin poetry, see Nelis-Clément and Nelis 2013.

58 This was evidently a detail that tour guides pointed out (see Jones 2001, 33–39). The tituli are also unusual in reporting the honorand’s entire cursus honorum rather than merely his highest office attained, as per tradition. Eck (1999, 31–55) argues that this decision influenced the subsequent style of Roman inscriptions; see also Geiger (2008, 188). Independently and without reference to the Forum, West (1993, 291) suggests some punning “etymological play” surrounding figures in Vergil’s parade, including C. Fabricius Luscinus, perhaps dressed as a faber or workman at 843–44; C. Atilius Regulus Serranus, who “sows” seeds at 844 (uel te sulco, Serrane, serentem?); the Scipios, perhaps carrying thunderbolts in connection with the Greek word σκηπτός, and Q. Fabius Maximus Cunctator, dragging his feet (fessum, 845) in accordance with his honorific name. Leach (1999, 126) also notes Anchises’ fixation on iconographical details that are signs of honor. It is a fascinating possibility that Vergil’s parade and Augustus’ Forum shared this tendency toward visual punning.

59 Vergil builds an ellipsis into Anchises’ narrative at 6.886–92, writing that Anchises and Aeneas survey all of Elysium together, with Anchises leading his son through every scene (sic tota passim regione uagantur / aeris in campis latis atque omnia lustrant. / quae postquam Anchises natum per singula duxit / incenditque animum famae uenientis amore…, 886–89). He thus frames his own poetic transcription of this episode as incomplete. The story of the Aeneid’s own incompletion upon Vergil’s death, as transmitted, e.g., by Donatus, Life of Vergil 40–41, is an important part of its reception.


Fig. 2. Fragmentary statue with inscription for Drusus, Museo dei Fori Imperiali, Rome. Photograph by the author. Reproduced with permission of the

Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali di Roma Capitale.

edicto: commentum id se, ut ad illorum uitam uelut ad exemplar et ipse, dum uiueret, et insequentium aetatium principes exigerentur a ciuibus, Aug. 31.5). While this language envisions a triangular relationship between emperor, exempla, and citizenry, it also appears to conceptualize the latter as little more than passive witnesses to the princeps’ behavior, with no independent critical role in evaluating the yardstick by which he wished to be judged. In other words, Augustus selected these particular statues to reflect his wishful self-projection back to himself, via the mirror of his subjects’ gaze.


Audience as Aeneas

But, if Augustus was an Anchises, then every visitor was an Aeneas. And Aeneid 6 equipped them to resist or supplement the Forum’s presumed “ideal message” by reading sorrow into its silences.60 Unlike inscius Aeneas, they could compare it with their knowledge of history, the rest of Roman topography, the masks in their own atria, and the Aeneid itself.61 In fact, the Daedalus episode suggests that art alone cannot convey history; rather, history arises from a creative collision between authorial and audience subjectivity.62 Moreover, real visitors to the Forum, unlike the textually embedded Aeneas, were not rooted to one spot as passive spectators or forced to follow a paternally prescribed itinerary. However Augustus and his architects may have attempted to structure visitors’ responses, their mobility and freedom of thought gave them considerable leeway to interpret, critique, and reassemble this architectural text. Pompeian wax tablets, for instance, show that they picked out certain statues for meeting places: the two attested are the statue of Ti. Sempronius Gracchus (father of the tribunes) and a post-Augustan bronze statue of Cn. Sentius Saturninus, only a relatively short time after it was erected in AD 44.63 This suggests that people kept abreast of iconographic changes and may have chosen favorite spots based on loyalty or patronage. Moreover, unlike Aeneas, whose path is always controlled by the Sibyl, Anchises, and of course Vergil, visitors

60 I treat this “ideal message” as a literary construct and do not suggest it was ever fully recoverable by real audiences or even consciously articulated by Augustus, though Suetonius Aug. 31.5 may provide some indication of his intentions.

61 Roman audiences, of course, knew well that laudationes funebres, statuary inscriptions, and other ways of remembering the dead tended to distort and glorify family history: Burke (1979, 228 n. 24) cites warnings of this tendency in Cicero, Brutus 16.62 and Livy, 4.16.4, 8.40.4–5, and 22.31.11. The Forum Augustum’s dual status, however, as both a family funerary monument and a purported representation of all of Roman history makes this all the more problematic. This is particularly interesting in light of the Aeneid’s exploration of memory’s power to spur action. Most (2001) points out that Aeneas seems to retain no memory of the underworld and Anchises’ narrative; at the end of the epic, however, he is spurred to kill Turnus by the memory of Pallas, prompted by a glimpse of his belt. Might the Forum Augustum similarly prompt some elite visitors to remember their recent losses and react with passion?

62 As Zetzel well puts it, “the poet seems to place almost equal weight on the possibility and impossibility of true historical knowledge, on the uses of memory and on its limitations” to demonstrate the “impossibility of complete factual accuracy” (1989, 264, 274).

63 Rowell (1941, 272) points out that Ti. Sempronius Gracchus is one of five people attested both in Vergil and in the Forum (Aen. 6.842; Degrassi 1937, no. 82); see also Austin 1986, 258, and, for the statues, Camodeca 1999 and Geiger 2008, 182.


could change their gaze or location at will. This allowed them to reconnect the Forum’s visual elements into alternate narratives, using their power of reader response to rewrite elements of Augustus’ urban text. Ovid does just this in Fasti 5.545–98 when he looks down on the Forum from the viewpoint of the god Mars himself and admires the size, not the quality, of its art—perhaps slyly confirming Anchises’ statement that others would sculpt more beautifully than the Romans (847–48).

Hermeneutic Heroism in the Augustan Cityscape

So, with the encouragement of Aeneid 6, Roman audiences were able to resist the implicit power dynamic of Roman imperial architecture—substituting, for lost Republican arts like oratory, that of active and critical viewership. For that matter, they could even usurp from Augustus, and his ancestor Aeneas, the role of hero within this urban landscape. Aeneas’ path in Book 6 is, first and foremost, grounded in the topography of Cumae.64 But in response to the architectural ghost-presences discussed above, readers could also very loosely map Aeneas’ route onto the city of Rome itself, thus sharing in the singular journey that marked him and his progeny for greatness.65 This imaginative itinerary begins at a topographical high point with the temple of Apollo at Cumae, whose elevation, architectonics, and association with Apollo and the Sibyl closely align it with Augustus’ Palatine. From there it proceeds downhill, past a Forum Romanum that looks suspiciously like Tartarus in its high level of urban development and association with discord and punishment.66 We then arrive in the Forum

64 McKay (1973) discusses the physical realities of the site; Galinsky (2009) attempts to square these with the topography of Aeneid 6.

65 Kondratieff (2012, 129) makes some compelling and complementary suggestions. In his argument, the Sibyl asks directions of Musaeus at 670 in terms resonant of Roman street indications; her answer conjures “a vista of Rome’s pristine, extra-urban landscape before it was built up with temples, theaters, and porticoes.” He also links the summa cacumina from which Aeneas and the Sibyl descend at 678 with the Capitoline’s twin peaks, and connects the valley where they review the future Romans with the physical topography of the Forum basin, adding that the mound upon which they stand resembles a primitive suggestum or speakers’ platform (132–33). I thank the author for his helpful conversation and correspondence.

66 Before Kondratieff ’s recent work (2012), Rebert (1930 and 1931) had glanced at some correspondences between the Aeneid and the Forum Romanum, but without specific attention to Aeneid 6 or interpretive matters. Berry (1992) posits some references to recent history though not topography in the description of Tartarus, most notably Antony and Cicero. There is still need for a full study of the correspondences between Tartarus, the Forum Romanum, and nearby locations in Rome. Tartarus, like the Forum, is the region of the underworld that has experienced the most urban


Augustum as Elysium, seeing the ghosts of great Romans now in the past rather than future tense. But a funny thing happens there due to the latent reversibility of both Vergilian and Augustan parades of heroes.67 What began in Vergil as a triumphal parade metamorphoses into a funeral procession with the vision of Marcellus at 860–86. Anchises describes this ceremony with great geographical specificity at 872–74:

“quantos ille uirum magnam Mauortis ad urbemcampus aget gemitus! uel quae, Tiberine, uidebisfunera, cum tumulum praeterlabere recentem!”

“What great lamentation from the people will the Campus Martius send up to the great city! What a funeral, Tiber, will you see as you flow past the fresh-built tumulus!”

With this mention of the tumulus in the Campus Martius, readers are mentally transported out to the Augustan Mausoleum where, with

development (539–43), and its moenia (541) anticipate those of Rome to come (see altae moenia Romae, Aen. 1.7). It is a place of trial, punishment, and imprisonment, just as the Roman Forum was with its Curia, carcer, and spaces for trial and oratory. The legal language and emphasis on sound, speech, and discord throughout Vergil’s description (e.g., at 557–58, 560–61, 573–74, 590–91, 607, 617–20, 625–27), combined with specific reminiscences of Cicero and Antony that Berry has observed (esp. at 608–15 and 621–24), further underline Tartarus’ similarity with the proverbially noisy, clamorous, and contentious Forum. Aside from these thematic connections, Tartarus bears a few topographical resemblances to the region around the Forum, though the correspondence is by no means exact. Thus the sheer cliff of Tartarus (sub rupe, 548) might recall, to some readers, the Capitoline and the Tarpeian rock—especially given the warnings against selling one’s country for gold (621–22). Its entrance is guarded by an immense iron gate (552–56) that only Tisiphone can open (570–74), recalling the gates of the Temple of Janus, opened in times of war. Tartarus itself is in a deep valley (577–79), as the Forum itself appears to be with the Palatine and Capitoline hills towering above, further heightened and adorned by edifices such as Augustus’ Palatine temple. Moreover, after Aeneas and the Sibyl deposit the golden bough and hurry along the path toward Elysium, there is a palpable sense of release once they escape these claustrophobic environs (633–36). One wonders whether exiting the crowded Forum Romanum into the relatively spacious, well-organized, and fresh Julian and Augustan fora might evoke a comparable feeling for Romans of the time. All these resemblances are, of course, glancing and momentary; taken together, however, and in combination with the other topographical resonances in this book, they might well recall the Forum Romanum to readers in Rome.

67 See Beard for the role reversibility of triumphal captive and victim (2009, 133–42) and the similarity between triumphs and funerals (284–86).


Anchises, we scatter lilies on Marcellus’ tomb (883) before exiting Rome through the mysterious gates at 893–98.68 Thus, despite the sacred and supernatural nature of Aeneas’ journey to the Underworld, its connections with the contemporary urban landscape enabled every Roman reader to share in his heroic adventure and (re)read Rome as a participant in its visual construction of meaning.

I do not wish to claim that this parallel between life and text was a conscious construction of Vergil’s or a necessary effect on his readers—just one imaginative possibility raised by these architectural ghosts. I would, however, suggest that readers who remembered Aeneid 6 as they walked through Rome might experience themselves as heroes of their own intellectual katabasis: a mission, in the footsteps of pius Aeneas, to recover the silences, suppressed memories, and alternate interpretations behind Augustus’ monumental text.

University of Wisconsin-Madison [email protected]

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Reading Rome from the Farther Shore: Aeneid 6 in the Augustan Urban Landscape

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