CHAPTER FIVE

Vergil’s Roman

J.D. Reed

I

Vergil’s Aeneid is an etiology, a story explaining how something came into being. It is specifically a ktisis, a story of how a nation arose. Its narrative aims at a Roman nation distinct from other nations, particularly from the Trojans with whom it originated, the Greeks whom the Trojans had fought and whom the Romans were to conquer, the Carthaginians who threaten Roman ascendancy, and the Italian peoples among whom Rome arose. Yet as an etiology, and especially as one whose fulfillment is not part of the narrative, the Aeneid must speak of Rome proleptically, as a future entity. One effect of this narrative condition is that Rome typically comes into the poem at second or third hand in speeches by its characters, and is subject to the vicissitudes of those discourses. Of the great prophetic tableaux of the poem, the “pageant of heroes” in book 6 is couched within Anchises’ tendentious, sharply purposed exposition, and the elaborate designs worked onto the golden shield of Aeneas in book 8 represent Vulcan’s interpretation of the events of Roman history, which he has learned from vates – “seers” or “inspired poets” (8.626).

Even when the narration itself takes responsibility for speaking about Rome there tends to be a distancing, as when the city is first described (1.19–22):

progeniem sed enim Troiano a sanguine duciaudierat, Tyrias olim quae verteret arces;hinc populum late regem belloque superbumventurum excidio Libyae: sic volvere Parcas.

Yet [Juno] had heard that a lineage was being drawn forth from Trojanblood to overturn that Tyrian citadel one day; that hence to Libya’sdestruction would come a people widely sovereign and proud in war: thatthe goddesses of fate so unwound their tale.

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Rome’s destiny as a world empire is framed within Juno’s anxieties for Carthage and borrows its terms from the way the narrative has characterized Carthage at line 14, “a city rich in material resources and most fierce in zeal for war” (dives opum studiisque asperrima belli), reinforced by Juno’s own intention that Carthage should “be a king-dom over the nations” (regnum…gentibus esse). The narrator’s introductory progres-sion from Troy to the promised land at lines 1–7 (through Italian shores, Latium, and the city of Alba Longa) had stopped with a mere glimpse of the “ramparts of high Rome”; when our view is next satisfied, it is through a double scrim of hearsay, gram-matically signaled by a series of infinitives dependent on audierat, “she had heard” what the fates foretold. Vergil as narrator characterizes Carthage, by contrast, directly (1.12–18). In between, what breaks off his account of Rome’s rise is his appeal to the Muse for memory of the causes of Juno’s anger (cf. Putnam 2005, 462–3): the etiol-ogy, or its trajectory, is diverted from Rome to her hostility toward Rome.

Later in book 1 Jupiter prophesies about the Romans to a worried Venus: “I set them no spatial or temporal limits of power; I have given them empire without end” (his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono, / imperium sine fine dedi, 1.278–9). And ultimately Juno too, he reassures her, “will cherish and foster the Romans, lords of empire, the nation that wears the toga” (fovebit / Romanos, rerum dominos gentemque togatam, 1.281–2). Unexpectedly problematic is Jupiter’s characterization of “the nation that wears the toga” – seemingly so clear and distinctive, but one that the rest of the poem ignores. On Aeneas’ shield Augustus is seen receiving “the nations” in triumph, “as various in their tongues as in their apparel and armor” (gentes / quam variae linguis, habitu tam vestis et armis, 8.722–3): the distinction from the unity of the Romans is plain. But togas are mentioned nowhere else in the Aeneid, which clothes its Romans – or at least their forerunners and models, like Aeneas – in every-thing else, especially the gorgeous purple dye of the Orient, in such forms as chlamydes and leaenae. According to Suetonius (Aug. 40.5), Augustus once quoted Vergil’s line on the toga-clad nation in reproach of those he spied in the forum wearing less tradi-tional garb: an earthly Jupiter, enforcing the teleology of the Aeneid. But there is a long way to go to reach that telos from the national configurations depicted in Vergil’s poem, and Jupiter’s prophecy offers no clear roadmap.

The ethnopoetics of the Aeneid are inextricable from other aspects of its deeper semantics, especially its narratology and intertextuality, and like them are fundamen-tally based on metaphor. As in Juno’s musings, only through a play of likeness to and contrast with other national unities (indicated by the terms gens and populus or by national names) can the poem give existence to Roman identity. Its basic formula – implied, if not actually compelled, by the myth of Aeneas’ foundation – would seem to be Trojan plus Italian: some refugees from the fall of Troy settled in Italy and joined with the Latin people there, and their descendants founded Rome. The Aeneid, however, complicates this equation. Often the Roman self is cleanly opposed to an Oriental “other” – suggesting a Carthaginian identity narrowly avoided, an Egyptian identity rejected along with Antony’s alliance with Cleopatra, or a Trojan identity left behind. This opposition is implicit, for example, in Anchises’ prophecy about Augustus (“the realms of the Caspian Sea and the land of Maeotia already tremble at the oracles of the gods in anticipation of [Augustus’] coming, and the sevenfold mouths of the

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Nile are in a turmoil of fear,” 6.798–800) or in the Battle of Actium on the shield of Aeneas (“on one side Augustus Caesar leading the Italians into battle…on the other side Antony with a barbaric host and motley arms, a conqueror from the nations of the Dawn and the ruddy shore,” 8.678–86), as well as in the triumphal scene quoted above. After being visited by Mercury in Carthage, Aeneas seems to get the message that Troy is finished, and that the future lies with something new (see especially his speech to Dido at 4.340–50); the pathetic simulacrum of Troy contrived by Helenus and Andromache in book 3 furnishes a negative example of his intended restoration.

Yet the Aeneid also constantly assimilates Troy to Rome; the separation is never clean. The god of the Tiber, for example, addresses Aeneas as “you who bring back to us the city of Troy from its enemies and preserve its citadel forever” (Troianam ex hostibus urbem qui revehis nobis aeternaque Pergama servas, 8.36–7). Perhaps this is to make the Roman future easier for its human vehicle to understand, as when in his “pageant of heroes” Anchises emphasizes the Roman conquest of Troy’s enemy, Greece (6.836–40). But this consideration is no mere solution to a textual problem, an “argument from the persona of the speaker” (cf. O’Hara 1990, 93, 123–7) – or from that of the addressee. When Augustus on the shield receives the “gifts of the nations” in triumph and affixes them to the “proud doors” of the temple of Apollo (8.720–2), he emerges like Priam, whose palace doors were “proud with barbarian gold and war-spoils” (2.504). In him recrudesces the Troy that Aeneas sought to preserve; its essence here turns out to be imperium, regained in grander form.

The final prophecy of Rome in the Aeneid seems to predict an end to Troy once Aeneas’ mission is accomplished. At 12.834–40 Jupiter promises Juno, to ensure her acquiescence in the death of Turnus, that

“sermonem Ausonii patrium moresque tenebunt,utque est nomen erit; commixti corpore tantum 835subsident Teucri. morem ritusque sacrorumadiciam faciamque omnis uno ore Latinos.hinc genus Ausonio mixtum quod sanguine surget,supra homines, supra ire deos pietate videbis,nec gens ulla tuos aeque celebrabit honores.” 840

“The Ausonians will retain their ancestral language and culture, and theirname will be as it now is; commingling no more than physically, theTeucrians will sink away. The custom and rites of religious practice I shalladd, and I shall make them all Latins with one voice. You will see thenation that arises hence, mixed with Ausonian blood, surpass the gods inpiety, and no people will celebrate your honors as much as they.”

“Troy has died; let it be dead together with its name,” Juno demanded (occidit, occideritque sinas cum nomine Troia, 12.828). Jupiter seems to predict the transition that is fulfilled on Aeneas’ shield, when Augustus leads the “Italians” to war against an eastern horde whose very opposition lends them unity. “The Teucrians” are corpo-real vessels of ideas that are lost, utterly replaced by “Ausonian.” But prophecies in the Aeneid are often misleading, or of dubious veracity, customized to the perceived

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hopes of the addressee (O’Hara 1990). Does Jupiter mean that the Trojans will “sink away” entirely (as I have translated), or “sink in and remain at a lower, hidden level”? Does he mean to add Italian religious rites to Trojan practice, or Trojan to Italian? In any case, the narrative has often etiologized Roman usages from Trojan – for example, the family names in the boat race at 5.116–23:

velocem Mnestheus agit acri remige Pristim,mox Italus Mnestheus, genus a quo nomine Memmi.…Sergestusque, domus tenet a quo Sergia nomen,Centauro invehitur magna, Scyllaque Cloanthuscaerulea, genus unde tibi, Romane Cluenti.

Mnestheus steers the swift Seabeast with avid crew, soon to be ItalianMnestheus, from whose name comes the genus of Memmius.… AndSergestus, from whom the house of the Sergii has its name, rides in thegreat Centaur, and in the blue Scylla Cloanthus, from whom your genuscomes, Roman Cluentius.

That the Trojan spectators of the “Troy Show,” which the poem presents as one of of the most conspicuous of these survivals, in applauding its youthful participants “take joy as they watch, recognizing the faces of their ancient forebears” (gaudentque tuentes / Dardanidae, veterumque agnoscunt ora parentum, 5.575–6) implies a persistence of Trojan looks – perhaps beauty, characteristic expressions, a familiar responding gaze – in their Roman descendants, including especially those of Iulus, the Iulii (another ono-mastic survival). Does this contradict Jupiter’s uno ore Latinos, which could mean not “Latins with one voice (language)” but “Latins with one unmixed facial appearance”? Or can Jupiter’s promise of no more than bodily mixture accommodate that joy?

The poem’s “Roman” has an equally fraught relationship with its “Italian.” An ancient commentator notifies us that “it is evident from many passages that Vergil was extremely interested in the whole of Italy” (Servius Auctus Aen. 1.44, totius autem Italiae curiosissimum fuisse Vergilium multifariam apparet), and this interest indeed takes on multifarious appearances on the antiquarian level of his poem: Italian indi-viduals and nations are repeatedly traced back to origins elsewhere (cf. Zetzel 1997: 190–6). A particularly insistent example comes at 8.600–2, the description of the grove near Caere where Venus gives Aeneas his prophetic shield:

Silvano fama est veteres sacrasse Pelasgos,arvorum pecorisque deo, lucumque diemque,qui primi finis aliquando habuere Latinos.

There is a tale that both the grove and the festal day were consecrated toSilvanus, the god of farmlands and flocks, by the Pelasgians of old, whowere once the first occupants of Latin territory.

This tale, fama, confects a blatantly artificial unity: Caere is an Etruscan city (and Etruscans in this poem have Asiatic origins); a grove in its vicinity was consecrated by

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Pelasgians, or early Greeks; these Greeks were the first to occupy Latium. The cult and its etiology bridge national divisions as Rome must do. Versions of this pattern are widespread in the Aeneid: Evander’s Arcadian-Italian settlement comes to mind, as well as Turnus’ Argive-Italian ancestry. Sometimes divisions are starker: Italians are often oddly Orientalized, as when a simile compares the Rutulian armies to the Ganges and Nile (9.30–2; Reed 2007, 57); the symbolism seems to estrange them from their own land in favor of the formerly Trojan “self.” At 12.503–4 the poet’s own anguished voice casts the war of the last four books as a proleptic civil war, characterizing its bel-ligerent parties as “nations destined to be everlastingly at peace” (aeterna gentis in pace futuras) – but when? That depends on who exactly the anti-Trojan is: if Latin, then upon Aeneas’ settlement and – much later – the ascendancy of Rome over Latium; if generally Italian, then not until after the Social Wars of the early first cen-tury BCE and the “pan-Italian” Roman ideology that crystallized in the Augustan period. And why “nations at peace,” rather than “one single nation,” as Jupiter prom-ises? When Augustus’ leadership of “the Italians” against Antony and Cleopatra on the shield makes us think of Rome as Italy and Italy as Rome, we must remember that the poem as a whole makes neither a definitive unity. Any element of any compound as easily falls away from the others as coheres with them.

The narrator too is a persona contesting authority for Romanness with the charac-ters (it is significant that the different authorities for the poem’s “Roman” present different configurations of sameness and difference: we keep getting different perspec-tives on the national unity at which it aims). In a prophetic intervention by his own voice into Evander’s tour of the future site of Rome, the founding of the city is repre-sented by Romulus’ asylum (8.342). The term is Greek, meaning a sanctuary, and comes from Greek negative a- plus suláo,̄ to tear away or strip off (as of armor from a slain enemy). So Romulus’ asylum is implicitly a place of refuge for people from diverse directions, but also a permanent gathering from which they cannot be removed, a place guaranteed against any further alienation – in contrast to the sequence of imper-manent settlements on the site (including, evidently, his own Pallanteum) recounted by Evander. When the narrative finally takes us to Rome, it is a not-yet Rome, a series of gaps between settlements that have little to do with each other. Even Romulus’ final settlement on the spot, from different perspectives, is either a vacuum given shape by external forces, or a unity – each idea contains the other within it.

II

The Aeneid’s very justification of Aeneas’ mission – and ultimately of the existence of Rome – is not only inextricable from prophecies and report, it also both deeply prob-lematizes and is deeply problematized by them. I am thinking in particular of the signifi-cance of Corythus and Lavinia, two coinvolved phenomena whose mysteries baffle our complacency with the overt teleology of the poem. Corythus is the Etruscan city where Dardanus, ancestor of Aeneas and the other Trojan rulers, is said to have originated; it is this origin that directs Aeneas to Italy. That the significance of Corythus depends on the authority of words embedded within multiple narrative frames (particularly the Penates’

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interpretation of the oracles of Apollo at 3.163–71 and the history attributed by Latinus to “Auruncian elders” at 7.205–11) gives a fraught perspective on the place, involving problems with authority and the trustworthiness of all the speakers involved. Though Aeneas’ ancestral origin in Corythus wins him a claim to Italian land, it should deny him one to leadership over the Etruscan armies, which according to another oracle (retailed by Evander at 8.499–503) can only be led by a non-Italian. More fundamentally, the divide between origins and historical outcome poses a conundrum: why should an Etruscan city justify the foundation of Rome? Aeneas does not, in fact, settle in this place, but rather in Latium, where Rome will indeed arise. The poem’s constant use of the term Teucri for the Trojans raises a further puzzle: if they are as much Teucrian, named for their Cretan ancestor Teucer, as Dardanian, named for their Italian ancestor Dardanus, why does fate send them to Italy rather than permit them to remain in Crete? Either land, after all, is their “ancient mother” (3.96 with 164, 131). If origins matter, as they should in a ktisis, the search for Roman identity ends in aporia (Reed 2006).

Aeneas’ divinely appointed marriage to Lavinia, the basis for the joint Trojan–Latin heritage of Rome, poses similar riddles. If Turnus’ family origin is Greek (7.371–2), he would seem to have less of a claim to Latin land than Aeneas, the descendant of the reportedly Italian Dardanus. On the other hand, if he is Latin, he is not qualified to marry Lavinia, according to the oracle given to King Latinus, which said that he is to find a son-in-law among “foreign bridegrooms,” not Latins (7.96–101). Turnus loses either way, and Aeneas wins – but at a price for Roman identity. If origins matter, Aeneas has a right to settle in Italy, but no right to marry Lavinia, which is also necessary for the Roman future. Or else the Etruscan location of his ancestral home makes him eligible to marry Lavinia, leaving the gap between Corythus and Rome, and leaving in doubt his suitability to lead the Etruscans in war. Or else the oracles are wrong – or wrongly reported.

It is worth paying attention to our method here. We provisionally accept some claim as true, and then ask: what else in the text needs to be accepted as true for this to be true? What fictive world does this acceptance entail, and how does it resonate with the other data of the poem – or against them? If Aeneas’ destined settlement requires that Latium and Etruria be treated as a unity, how does that comment on the national boundaries that other claims in the poem require? It is easy enough to explain away the poem’s conflicting messages as references to Vergil’s differing sources (or putative sources), but to stop there, without asking about their meaning within the poem, leaves the Aeneid a mere collage. (On this problem in general, see the chapter by Casali in this volume.) Another temptation is to assume that Vergil would have reconciled these inconsistencies in a revision (see O’Hara 2007, 77–8 on this critical refuge). But nothing is gained by bulldozing across the ambages through which Vergilian ethnopoetics uneasily thread; the puzzles we have looked at tend uniformly to problematize Romanness in a way con-sistent with other aspects of the poem. Feeney, comparing a “pair of binoculars with incompatible lenses,” refuses to resolve scenes in the Aeneid where irreconcilable inter-pretations seem equally compelling (Feeney 1991, 168). A similar example is Anchises’ adversion to the future Caesar and Pompey, fated to fight a civil war (6.828–31):

“heu quantum inter se bellum, si lumina vitaeattigerint, quantas acies stragemque ciebunt,

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aggeribus socer Alpinis atque arce Monoecidescendens, gener adversis instructus Eois!”

“Alas! What a war, what mighty armies and slaughter they will rousebetween themselves should the light of life touch them! The father-in-lawbearing down from Alpine heights and the citadel of Monoecus, the son-in-law supported on the opposing side by nations of the Dawn!”

What kind of a civil war is this? Pompey is likened to an eastern conqueror threatening Rome; Caesar, sweeping down upon Italy from the Alps, is likened to Hannibal (Reed 2007, 159–62). No matter which side “we” are opposed to, “we” are constructed as Roman against a symbolic non-Roman – at the expense of estranging either Caesar or Pompey, or both.

Is there no touchstone by which we can decide these problêmata? It is tempting to seek an essence of Romanness in pietas, the devotion to right principles – here specifically to Roman destiny – attributed to Aeneas qua model Roman. Jupiter predicts to Juno at 12.838–9, “You will see the nation that will arise hence…surpass the gods in piety.” And yet Aeneas’ pietas boils down to devotion to the fata that he knows of through report – and that thus reduce to their cognate fama, retailed (often at second or third hand) by a variety of seers, storytellers, revenant deceased kinsfolk, and the occasional, usually doubtfully sincere god. Anchises, too, presents the essential qualities of the future nation in a peculiarly evasive way: of Marcellus at the climax of his lesson he says (6.875–7),

“nec puer Iliaca quisquam de gente Latinosin tantum spe tollet avos, nec Romula quondamullo se tantum tellus iactabit alumno.”

“No boy of the Trojan race will exalt his Latin ancestors so high by hispromise, nor will the land of Romulus ever glory so in any of hernurslings.”

Marcellus, who binds within himself the ethnic components of Romanness (“Trojan” and “Latin”), will be a model Roman – but only potentially, since he will emphatically die before realizing any of his exemplary qualities (cf. lines 878–81). Anchises’ famous unfulfilled wish emblematizes this: “Alas, pitiable boy, if only you could somehow break your harsh destiny!” (heu, miserande puer, si qua fata aspera rumpas, 6.885; cf. Goold 1992, 121). The “ideal Roman” is perpetually deferred.

III

The invocation of Erato at the beginning of book 7 recasts the Aeneid as love poetry: the poet’s prayer for memory of the events of the Italian war (tu vatem, tu, diva, mone, 7.41) transfigures the fight for a settlement in Latium into the armed rivalry of Aeneas and Turnus over the same woman. Yet we do not see any signs that Aeneas

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loves Lavinia, or even wants her in any way. She emerges as an unmediated object of desire only in the case of the would-be founder, Turnus, especially in his vehement reaction to her famously mysterious blush, which makes him “burn the more with passion for combat” (ardet in arma magis, 12.71). Since the end of his affair with Dido, personal satisfaction seems to have become moot for Aeneas: felicitas or for-tuna is implicitly to come some time in the future, if at all, not to Aeneas himself, as he indicates to his son before heading into battle: “My child, learn valor and true toil from me, fortune from others” (disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem, / for-tunam ex aliis, 12.435–6). In this regard there is as deep irony as anywhere in the poem’s climax when Aeneas, spying Turnus’ vulnerable spot, “chances upon fortuna” (sortitus fortunam oculis, 12.920): this is the fortune the poem allots him. Words change meaning to redirect Aeneas’ fulfillment, just as his “founding” of Rome (as at 1.33, Romanam condere gentem) amounts at 12.950 to his slaying of Turnus, in whom he “buries” his sword: ferrum…condit (James 1995). The ultimate ends of his mission are satisfied for Aeneas himself only metaphorically and punningly.

Erato represents a more figurative form of desire, which the Aeneid incessantly directs toward national foundation – not inappositely in a story whose presiding deity is Venus and whose goal, Roma, is an anciently recognized anagram of amor (cf. Reed 2007, 42–3, 149–50). What Aeneas must learn to desire, apparently, is the Roman future. Jupiter tries to ensure this sublimation by sending a warning through Mercury, contriving that Aeneas “burns with passion” to leave Carthage for Italy (ardet abire, 4.281); Aeneas suggests that this ktistic passion replaces his love for Dido when he characterizes his Italian destination to her: “this is love, this is home” (hic amor, haec patria est, 4.347). Anchises apparently completes the task in his presentation of the Roman future, “igniting” his son’s spirit with “love for coming fame” (incenditque animum famae venientis amore, 6.889). But in this case too, desire is always unful-filled: the poet’s wording forbids the tight bond between desire and its object at which Aeneas’ metonymy aims. The Golden Age, which Anchises foretells will return under Augustus (6.792–3), is another ungraspable ideal of Romanness, far in the future for Aeneas – and perhaps always just out of reach for Vergil’s contemporaries, too (cf. Putnam 1965, xiii–xiv). Even the age of Augustus provides no firmer a telos than does pietas. The invocation of the Muse of erotic poetry emblematizes the poem’s sense of infinite deferral.

In the Aeneid, moreover, desire can suggest a figure for imperial subsumption – a gathering-in under a single national identity. Dido, even before she is made to fall in love with Aeneas, speaks of melding their incipient nations into one (1.572–4):

“vultis et his mecum pariter considere regnis?urbem quam statuo vestra est; subducite navis;Tros Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur.”

“Would you, moreover, like to settle with me in these realms on equalterms? The city that I am establishing is yours: draw up your ships. Trojanand Tyrian will be treated with no distinction between them on my part.”

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Their love comes to figure this melding, which – as Jupiter indicates to Mercury and Mercury to Aeneas – threatens Roman destiny. And yet the mirror-quality that obtains between Rome and Carthage – not least in the surprising image of Carthaginian coloni, magistracies, consecrated Senate, and so on (1.12, 426) – ends up rather by conceptually subsuming Carthage into Rome. Empire, the Aeneid tells us, is compa-rability between peoples, places, things: that gives control. The characteristic play of assimilation to and differentiation from other nations can produce a capacious, accom-modating sense of nationality that is suitable to an empire, and particularly to the imperium that the Aeneid desiderates. The diverse nature of the opposing armies in the Italian war, overlapping each other’s ethnic boundaries, and the general sense of a convergence of immigrants in Italy, is a confusion that prepares for empire. The very oracles that keep prescribing outsiders – as a husband for Lavinia, as a leader for the Etruscan armies – guarantee the multiethnic reach of Rome even as they confound the origins of Roman identity.

In defining (etiologically and teleologically) an ethnic identity within a multiethnic world empire, the ktistic component of the Aeneid is different from the Greek ktiseis Vergil could draw on. Its model of a divinely favored nation with a universal mission is most comparable to Eastern Mediterranean examples – notably the Hebrew Bible, in which, as in the Aeneid, a national hero leads his people back to a former homeland with much trouble from the indigens, stimulated by the divine injunction to kindle a light unto the nations – or at least impose civilized values on a pacified world (cf. Weinfeld 1993, 1–21). A more recent parallel is the universalist program of Cleopatra, who coopted for Egypt, and as a foil to Rome, Eastern Mediterranean hopes and memories of a world empire – and whose program was then itself selectively coopted for Rome by Augustus (cf. Kleiner 2005). The consequence of this program or mission is a syncretistic embrace. Rome’s very status as “widely sovereign” emerges from a contrast with Juno’s model of Carthage as “a kingdom over the nations.” Ultimate Romans, like Augustus emulating and surpassing the Orientalized Antony’s patron gods, Hercules and Bacchus, do not so much defeat their rivals as best them on their own terms (6.801–5):

“nec vero Alcides tantum telluris obivit,fixerit aeripedem cervam licet, aut Erymanthipacarit nemora et Lernam tremefecerit arcu;nec qui pampineis victor iuga flectit habenisLiber, agens celso Nysae de vertice tigris.”

“Truly, neither Alcides covered so much country, for all that he shot thebronze-footed deer or pacified the woods of Erymanthus and made Lernatremble at his bow, nor Liber, who steers his chariot with vine-leaf-covered reins, driving tigers down from the high peak of Nysa.”

Anchises there is prophesying Augustus’ command of East and West, which takes the form of an appropriation; the acceptance of the other’s terms both transforms the self and absorbs and obliterates the other. If “the Roman” happens only in between other national definitions, this can be a paradoxically satisfying form of deferral. Centered nowhere, the Roman can find a center anywhere: Romanness potentially takes in all the world.

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This potential is realized again in Anchises’ comparison of Rome to the goddess Cybele (6.781–7):

“en huius, nate, auspiciis illa incluta Romaimperium terris, animos aequabit Olympo,septemque una sibi muro circumdabit arces,felix prole virum: qualis Berecyntia materinvehitur curru Phrygias turrita per urbes 785laeta deum partu, centum complexa nepotes,omnis caelicolas, omnis supera alta tenentis.”

“Look, my son: by [Romulus’] auspices that renowned city, Rome, willmake its empire equal to the whole earth, its spirit to heaven, and withinits wall it will encircle seven citadels as one city, blessed with manlyoffspring: like the Berecyntian Mother as she is conveyed in a chariotthrough the cities of Phrygia, crowned with towers, blessed with thegenerations of the gods, embracing one hundred grandchildren, all of themheaven-dwellers, all of them possessing the realms above.”

The viewpoint is calculatedly Asiatic, again for the sake of Aeneas’ still Trojan (or “Phrygian”) standpoint, though again it has deeper consequences. Rome is like Cybele because Rome is an ancient Oriental city – insofar as Rome is Troy: that is the identification Anchises urges us to accept in order to accept his analogy (the official worship of Cybele at Rome since 204 BCE helps reinforce this assimilation). Her embrace of offspring bizarrely reverses the reality, in which Rome is the youngest of cities (at least in this poem), the “offspring” of older nations: mainly “ancient Troy” (2.363) and “ancient Italy” (3.164).

Here is a different kind of embrace from that figured by amor on the poem’s ktistic level, but related to it. Anchises’ image of Rome as Cybele has to do with posterity: itself another aspect of desire, especially as concerns the rivalry for Lavinia, which in a sense is a contest for ancestorship. Cybele is felix prole, “blessed with offspring”: con-versely Dido is infelix (1.712, 749, etc.) as much for her loss of posterity as for other reasons (O’Hara 2007, 50). At 4.83–5 she seems to sublimate her desire to hear Aeneas’ story (already a sublimation of her love for him) into a maternal desire – that is, a ktistic desire (compare her wish for a “little Aeneas,” parvulus Aeneas, at 4.328–9):

illum absens absentem auditque videtqueaut gremio Ascanium genitoris imagine captadetinet, infandum si fallere possit amorem. 85

Apart from him, she sees and hears him apart from her, or detainsAscanius on her lap, captivated by his father’s likeness, in the hope thatshe could fool her unspeakable love.

The hope is vain, of course; the metaphor fails. One recalls her nightmare at 4.465–8, which, in alluding to the prophetic dream of Ilia from Ennius’ Annales (38–40 Skutsch), replaces the conception of a Roman founder with barren loneliness. At 6.822

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Anchises calls Brutus, executor of his own sons, infelix – an exchange for the “love of country” and “desire for praise” (amor patriae, laudum cupido) that motivated his action. Felicitas, deferred by Aeneas on one level, turns out itself necessarily to signify a deferral: a perpetual biological handing-down of self.

IV

Historical epic, both Greek and Latin, is commonly concerned with defining a national self against an Oriental other, making epic poetry a place for establishing or experi-menting with national identity. The tradition begins for us with the woefully fragmen-tary Persica of Choerilus of Samos, on the Persian Wars (which he seems to have treated as a self-defining struggle between Greeks and motley easterners), but it may well have a background in the martial foundation-elegies of the archaic period. In its long reception, Homeric poetry was taken this way (Hall 1989); the Iliad suggested a template for the “otherness” of the Trojan versus the Greek, and the Odyssey is full of cultural antitypes. The age of Hellenistic expansion prompted a fresh wave of ktiseis from such poets as Apollonius of Rhodes, and a poetics that often tendentiously maps Greek and “barbarian” onto each other; outside of literature, Macedonian or Greek names are given to places in the newly conquered East, producing suggestive, readily mythopoeic doublets (Stephens 2003, 91–5). This is the poetics out of which Latin epic grew. After Livius Andronicus’ translation of the Odyssey (itself on different levels a confrontational engagement with a Greek construction of identity), Latin epic is about empire: Naevius’ Bellum Punicum founded the Roman struggle with Carthage in the ktistic past, and Ennius’ Annales traced the development of Rome through its wars against, and absorptions of, a widening circle of neighboring peoples. The Aeneid adds to a tradition of defining a national self against an other (cf. Quint 1993 on Vergil and Lucan, Hardie 1993 on post-Vergilian epic).

All the interpretive tools developed for (especially) Hellenistic and Latin poetry can serve to articulate a play of identity and alterity, involving all the devices that we have learned to recognize in ancient poets – mythological references, meaningful allusion, significant names of characters, and so on. Lineages, for example, sometimes seem to lead back into nothing, to evaporate, as we have seen with Dardanus and Corythus – or to run into unwelcome or contradictory associations. The narrator at 7.49 calls Saturn the “ultimate founder,” ultimus auctor, of Latinus’ race – but he notoriously had a father (Ennius’ Caelus, the Greek Ouranos), whom he deposed: how does Saturn put a halt to the genealogical regression and fix the authenticating moment? In her dying curse upon Aeneas and his posterity, Dido invokes Sol, the all-seeing Sun god, in addition to Juno and various deities of vengeance (4.607): a common motif, as when Aeneas invokes the Sun in his oath at 12.276. But the Sun was evidently an ancestor of Latinus: his daughter Circe was the wife of Latinus’ grandfather, Picus (7.189–91), and Latinus is able to give Aeneas horses derived from Circe’s own herd, descended from the divine horses of the Sun (7.274–85). Insofar as it is indeed the Sun who fulfills Dido’s curse – which envisions something very much like the Punic Wars and especially Hannibal’s war on Rome (4.625–9) – does it mean that he, as well

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as Juno despite her pact with Jupiter (cf. Feeney 1984), remains not wholly reconciled to a Trojan (by now Roman) presence in Italy even at the end of the third century?

“exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor 625qui face Dardanios ferroque sequare colonos,nunc, olim, quocumque dabunt se tempore vires.litora litoribus contraria, fluctibus undasimprecor, arma armis: pugnent ipsique nepotesque.”

“Arise from my bones, unknown avenger, to harry the Dardanian settlerswith torch and sword, now, in the future, whenever strength lends itself! Ipray for shore to be set against shore, sea against sea, weapons againstweapons! Let them fight, themselves and their children’s children!”

Nationalities depend on these genealogies, which were an important feature of ktistic literature; but as we have seen, national origins tend to disappear into a fog of unknowns. The poem’s ekphrases sometimes mirror this art of aporia. Trained to peruse visual representations of origins on objects like Dido’s golden dishes at 1.640–2 (engraved with the heroic deeds of her Tyrian ancestors) and Turnus’ golden shield at 7.789–92 (depicting his ancestress Io), we are frustrated if we try to peer at Inachus’ carven urn as depicted on that shield at 7.792 (Reed 2007, 70), or at the shield dedicated by Aeneas at Actium at 3.287–9, which is theoretically still visible on the door of Apollo’s temple there, rendered in minute detail by Vulcan on Aeneas’ golden shield at 8.704 (Hannah 2007, 125–6). These teasing mises-en-abyme manquées bring to life Hexter’s description of the Aeneid’s conundrums as highly polished surfaces in which readers see only their own desire for a solution (Hexter 1990, 121–2).

Complications spring out in the poem’s announcement of its theme (1.1–7):

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab orisItaliam fato profugus Laviniaque venitlitora, multum ille et terris iactatus et altovi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram;multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem 5inferretque deos Latio, genus unde LatinumAlbanique patres atque altae moenia Romae.

I sing of arms and of a man, the first one who came from the shores ofTroy to Italy and the Lavinian beaches, exiled by fate, much buffeted bothon land and on the deep by the force of the gods above, because of theremembering anger of savage Juno; and enduring much in war as well,until he could found a city and introduce his gods to Latium: and from thiscame the Latin race, the elders of Alba, and the ramparts of high Rome.

The sentence leads from Troy to Rome, as Aeneas’ mission ultimately will. But the intermediate stages mix things up. Why is it significant that he was the first to come from Troy to Italy? Why are the shores already called “Lavinian,” before Aeneas founds Lavinium and names it for his bride? Why is Aeneas’ foundation only a

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stepping-stone to another – itself a stepping-stone? Why will the Trojan gods come generally “to Latium,” rather than particularly to Rome? Why is the Latin nation said to spring from Aeneas’ settlement, when “the Latins” are evidently on the spot before he arrives? All of these places and peoples are folded into Rome with much straining of geographical and chronological seams. The following twelve books of ktistic poetry will exacerbate these questions rather than resolve them. The “Roman” of the Aeneid is a rhetorical entity, founded not on antiquarian certainties, but on tropes that threaten to dissolve and realign under different perspectives – on the variegated lies in which poetic truth reposes.

Ultimately the problem is not just with Roman identity, but is even more radically undecidable: how can the poem fix what “Greek,” “Oriental,” “Italian,” and so on mean? Every definition of the Roman depends on an opposition to another unity, but every other unity too is provisional. The basic problem is how the “Roman” is identi-fiable with the self – the reader’s subject position, which itself is problematically bound up with the poet-narrator’s and with any character’s (the various personae of earlier literature, too, are intertextually made over into this entity). Any identity is a trope that coheres from some perspectives, not from others. It is hard to go further than to say that the Aeneid makes room for a subject that is metaphorical with “the Roman.” Yet this indeterminacy is not evidence of weakness or inadequacy to achieve a thorough image of Roman nature, or of a basic meaninglessness; nor may we dismiss the poem’s ambiguities as a mere function of poetic language. The Aeneid rather exploits the nature of poetic language to win for its readers a compellingly adaptive self.

We are never there; we are never done with this poem. The polycentrism of the Vergilian ktisis permits one to read a new Aeneid every time – or to become a new subject; Vergil gives his reader no boundaries of place or time. The identity that the poem lends us can be construed as that of an apologist for Roman imperium of the subsuming type discussed above. It impersonates conquered peoples; it pretends that the Roman is no one else but his own conquered opponents; it erases boundaries by making every “other” identical with the self. But the poem also lets us analyze that totalization. The incompatibilities and gaps within Anchises’ account of metempsy-chosis on the banks of Lethe (Feeney 1986; Zetzel 1989) encourage us, at least, to inquire into the ontology of those future Romans: who have they forgotten they once were? What identities have they drunk away, like new Roman citizens wiped clean of their former selves (one cannot ignore the curiosity about Italian localities that Vergil insinuated multifariously into his poem)? This question arises most acutely as an antithesis to the climax of Anchises’ protreptic, “you, Roman, remember to rule the nations with imperium” (tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento, 6.851); his admonition enforces a contrast between “you” (immediately, and proleptically, Aeneas, but metaphorical with any addressee, including the reader) and “others” (alii, 6.847), defining each in an imperial hierarchy (Putnam 2005, 459–60). The memory that Anchises’ teleology depends on is disturbed by the Lethean subtext of his exposition. And memory is what the poet prays for: empire shares a language with poetry; both have the same terms, the same possibilities, the same problems.

The poetic language that perpetually defers and mediates a Roman identity is, indeed, that same fama that is “as faithful a messenger of the invented and the

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depraved as of the true,” as the poem says of personified Fama, and thus of itself (tam ficti pravique tenax quam nuntia veri, 4.188), a creature that can motivate dire acts on the strength of fiction. Anchises, after narrating the Roman future, sends Aeneas out through the Gate of False Dreams: whatever the complexities and ambiguities in this image (Zetzel 1989, 275), it is a reminder of what poetry can be, as Servius con-fidently says in his note on 6.898: “The poetic sense is plain: [the poet] wishes for everything he has said to be understood as deceptive” (et poetice apertus est sensus: vult autem intellegi falsa esse omnia quae dixit). The prophetic shield, with its scenes of Roman history, is described as showing Aeneas “the fame and fate of his descendants” (fama et fata nepotum, 8.731): as often, the two collapse into each other. And the object of Aeneas’ unfulfillable desire, as the poem phrases it, is not exactly Rome or its essential qualities, but rather the glorious rumor of Rome: famae venientis amore (6.889).

FURTHER READING

Although many excellent suggestions are to be found in the vast literature on the poem, and detailed information in the relevant articles of the Enciclopedia Virgiliana, there is little criti-cism on the Aeneid’s picture of the Roman per se. Reed (2007) discusses how the poem con-structs a Roman identity out of oppositions to other nationalities. Syed (2005) identifies the self offered by the poem with an image of a Roman male, especially as against Dido and Carthage; for detailed studies of Dido’s Carthage as an antitype in the poem see also Hexter (1992) and Starks (1999). On the construction of Roman versus Italian identity in the Aeneid see especially Toll (1991, 1997), Henderson (2000), and Johnson (2001). Hardie (1986) and the first two chapters of Quint (1993) connect Vergilian epic with constructions of empire; see also Hardie (1993) for Vergilian influence on later epic constructions of Roman imperial iden-tity. On the way Roman writers, including Vergil, adapted or even created myths of national origins for their own purposes see Bickerman (1952), Malkin (1998), Erskine (2001), Hannah (2004), and Fletcher (2006). The many papers and commentaries of Horsfall trace Vergil’s antiquarian sources in detail; on his organization of received ethnography see especially chapter 4 of Thomas (1982). Chapter 5 of Dufallo (2007) contains a discussion of Vergil’s construction of a new Roman subject as against late Republican models; see also Feldherr (1995). The bib-liography given by these mostly recent treatments will lead back to earlier discussions.

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