The Aeneid Read Online Free Page B

resemblances are obvious, but the differences are profound. There are two eloquent silences in classical epic. In the
Odyssey
Ajax, the great rival of Odysseus, stood aloof and would not speak, but went to join the other souls of the dead in Erebus. In the
Aeneid
Dido refuses to speak to Aeneas, but rushes off into a dark wood to rejoin Sychaeus who had been her husband. Virgil plunders Homer, and refashions what he takes.
    The descent to the Underworld has also a philosophical dimension. Virgil puts on the lips of Anchises an explanation of the creation of the world and of the nature of life and death. Just as Plato ends
The Republic
with the Myth of Er, who tells how he died in battle and saw the souls of the dead waiting to rise again to rebirth, so Anchises shows to Aeneas the procession of his descendants moving up towards the light of life. The end of Book 6 is philosophy in epic.
    It is also politics. Almost nine-tenths of the heroes represented in this parade are members of the Julian family. In a Roman funeral the masks of the ancestors were carried through the streets to their tombs while fathers would retail to their sons the achievements of their forefathers. In Virgil’s pageant of the heroes, the dead go in procession by families, not to their tombs along the Appian Way, but up to glorious rebirth while Anchises predicts their great achievements to his son. This book therefore ends with a funeral in reverse, culminating in a eulogy of the Julian family of Augustus and an obituary of his nephew, son-inlaw and heir designate, young Marcellus; it is so powerful that Marcellus’ mother swooned when she heard Virgil speak it. The
Aeneid
is a poem set in the distant heroic past. To make it a political poem relevant to his own times, one of Virgil’s strategies is to include praise of Augustus in prophecies like the great speeches of Jupiter near the beginning and end of the poem, the history of the wars of Rome depicted on the prophetic shield of Aeneas at the end of Book 8 and here in the Parade of Future Romans, the prophecy which Anchises delivers to embolden his son with this vision of the destiny which lies before his family.
    This is all fiction. The pageant is invented by Virgil. We do not know what Virgil’s beliefs were about the creation of the world or the transmigration of souls. Just as Plato’s myths are not meant to be taken as the literal truth but as stories resembling truth, so, after what started as a narrative of a journey and ends as a dream, Aeneas leaves the Underworld not by the Gate of Horn, the gate of true shades, but by the Gate of Ivory which sends up false dreams towards the heavens. At the beginning of the first century BC Meleager, in introducing the epigrams included in his
Garland
, had given Plato a golden branch to carry as his emblem. Perhaps the Golden Bough and the Gate of Ivory in the
Aeneid
are there to give us notice that the philosophy at the end of this book and the Parade of Future Romans are, like the Platonic myths, falsehoods resembling the truth.
    For an explanation of the details in the Parade of Future Romans in the underworld, see Appendix I .
BOOK 7
WAR IN LATIUM
    Aeneas and his fleet sail into the mouth of the River Tiber and build a camp on its banks. Latinus, the king of Latium, welcomes them and offers Aeneas his daughter, Lavinia, in marriage. Seeing this, Juno sends down her agent Allecto to stir up resentment against Aeneas. She persuades Queen Amata to oppose Aeneas’ marriage and whips up Turnus, a neighbouring Latin prince, to go to war against the Trojans. She then engineers a skirmish between the local people of Latium and a Trojan hunting party led by Ascanius. War has begun
.
Turnus and Allecto
    Turnus, prince of Ardea, had hopes of marriage to Latinus’ daughter and succession to his throne, and Queen Amata supported him. But when Allecto, disguised as an aged priestess, visited him in his sleep and urged him to war, he rebuffed her: ‘Leave