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VIRGIL and the MONUMENTS (Lecture Given to a Joint Meeting Of 19 VIRGIL AND THE MONUMENTS (Lecture given to a joint meeting of the Virgil Society and the London Branch of the Classical Association, on January 12th, 1985). The title of this talk may sound enigmatic and even provocative; can it be appropriate to echo Miss Lorimer's magisterial work on Homer, when we turn to an epic poet whose awareness of the past was so much more complex than Homer's, and whose purposes were so different? A survey of archaeological sites mentioned in the Aeneid might have its own fascination, but would it necessarily establish a relation between Virgil and the monuments he chose, or needed, to include in his narrative? The subject is immense. To clarify the scope of this paper I must tell you how it first took shape. In 1982 I was reading the Aeneid repeatedly, and attending especially to the idea of memory - both personal and collective - as a shaping theme throughout the poem. I was fortunate in being able to do this work in Italy, where I found myself increasingly aware of the natural surroundings and the remains surviving from Virgil's time. The relation between the poem and the material world seemed integral and significant in ways which I could not then attempt to define. Two years later, when Dennis Blandford invited me to read this paper to the Virgil Society, the title Virgil and the Monuments was his happy thought and it seemed to me exactly right. I was again in Italy, visiting monuments in Rome and Etruria. These visits were not planned as Virgilian expeditions. The twenty or so people who took part in them wanted to see the most important remains of Roman civilisation, to observe and understand as fully as was possible in ten days whatever material remains 20 might still express its essential nature. Again and again members of this group would raise questions that related these monuments to Virgil. It seemed important to them to ask whether Virgil would have seen this building, this tomb, this statue. If these artefacts were pre-Augustan, what did they mean to Virgil's generation? If post- Augustan, what elements of Augustan and Virgilian consciousness did their makers incorporate into them? These questions occurred to the members of our group because they knew the Aeneid well and could not help recalling it in the places we visited. They believed Virgil's poem to be the quintessential expression of Romanitas. So as we looked at the ruins of Veio and Tarquinia, at the House of Augustus or the Shrine of Juturna, we were all seeking answers to two questions: can we reach a fuller understanding of the Aeneid by looking at the monuments of Italy? and can the Aeneid throw light for us on these historical monuments themselves? The word monument will be used today in the widest sense, as Virgil himself uses it, to include movable objects and personal possessions, also even natural features such as a tree or a rock. In Aeneid VIII, when Evander guides Aeneas over the site of the future Rome, he asks him to survey the veterum monimenta virorum, the "memorials of ancient men" (356), on the walk from the Forum Boarium to the Capitol and Palatine. These monimenta include an altar, a gate, a cave, two oppida, and a sacred grove. Whether constructed by human hands or not, all these are seen as embodying the qualities of the earlier generations, or the individuals, associated with them in the past. Aeneas' visit to the site of Rome is the most detailed topographical passage in the Aeneid, and this more than any other Book presents the monuments of ancient Italy as charged with significance, one might almost say with creative energy, for the future. An example of such significance occurs in Book VIII, when Virgil describes the hilltop fortress of Tarchon (603-7). In Virgil's time, Etruscan greatness already belonged to 21 the past; it was almost four hundred years since Caere had provided a refuge for Rome's sacred objects and their priests during the invasion of the Gauls. But this historic moment of Caere's saving initiative is unmistakably foreshadowed when Aeneas and his cavalry enter the woodland where Tarchon's stronghold looms above, offering the promise of alliance and future security. This Trojan accord with Tarchon will bring to birth the alliance between Rome and Caere many generations later. This moment, pointing to Rome's coming domination of Italy, prefigures the unified Italy of the Augustan settlement. The gathering of historic momentum in this ancient structure, the fortress of Tarchon, is noted - as so many aspects of historic weighting in Book VIII are noted - in the edition of K.W. Gransden, a work whose wide-ranging perceptiveness will be well known to members of this audience. The topographical material of Book VIII is full of such prefigurings. We can begin to perceive these more clearly now than was possible in earlier centuries, when so much of pre-Roman Italy was unrevealed by archaeology. Of course, we must still miss a great deal. But in the seventy years since Warde Fowler wrote his Observations on Books VII and VIII, we have realised more fully how precise and selective Virgil was in his descriptions of the monuments surviving from more distant times. Our increased knowledge of ancient Cumae for instance, and of many sites in Latium, enables us to answer very positively the first of our two questions about Virgil and the monuments. Archaeological study does help us to understand the Aeneid better: what Virgil selected, from all he knew of the richly varied Italian past, indicates something of what the cultural history of Italy meant to him, and what the task of Aeneas was to mean. Our second question - does the Aeneid help us to understand the monuments better? - will be best answered by examples, and I hope to point to a few of these which will justify a positive answer to this question too. 22 It is obvious that a single lecture could not attempt any adequate survey of the vast field of Italian topography and archaeology; and others are able to do this much better than I could. What perhaps makes my title's echo of Miss Lorimer into more than a strict impertinence is the reminder it offers of the strongly Greek elements that existed in the pre-Roman past of Italy, continually evoked by Virgil's monuments. Not only Greek, but specifically Homeric. The presence of Homeric figures on Etruscan pottery, and in some Etruscan painting, is well known. But these Homeric elements are not limited to the Etruscan part of Virgil's Italian world. We may look at one example from the first Book whose action takes place on Italian soil. The palace of King Latinus in Book VII, with its hundred columns, and the venerable laurel tree that stands in the inner courtyard, brings a clear evocation of King Priam's palace at Troy in Book II. The detail of the laurel tree also carries a reminder of the laurels planted, or else hung, at the doorway of Augustus' house in 27 B.C. The parallel with Troy is not, on the face of it, what we might expect. Latinus was not a Homeric figure. In Hesiod he is supposed to be the son of Odysseus and Circe; anything but Trojan. As a native-born Italian king he might be imagined as living in a different kind of palace from those of Asia Minor, even if his kinsman Dardanus had travelled to Phrygia and become the ancestor of Priam's line. It is Virgil who makes Latinus Homeric - and Trojan. The link with Dardanus is the first claim that Latinus recognises when he receives Aeneas' embassy with words of welcome; and Dardanus, he informs them, now dwells in "the golden palace of the starry heaven" (210). This line again recalls the palace in Troy, where the screams of the women rose to strike "the golden stars" on the night of Troy's destruction. 23 The identification of Latin with Trojan has often been recognised as a major theme in Book VII. The two peoples share qualities of heroic courage and spontaneity; before doom came upon them they lived sponte sua, in a Golden Age of unsuspecting openness. Just as the Trojans were trapped by their own gullibility at Troy, and Nisus and Euryalus are trapped by their own recklessness, so the Latin Camilla falls through her eagerness and folly, and both peoples can become victims of Juno's ruthless enmity. Virgil establishes this identification of Latin with Trojan in several ways. One is the imagery of the flaming torch, brandished by the Fury Allecto and by the Latin queen whom she has driven mad. Lavinia the Latin princess is turned to a living torch by the supernatural fire that kindles in her hair. Juno also recalls the ominous dream in which Hecuba saw herself made pregnant by a flaming torch, before the birth of Paris. This speech of Juno's explicitly makes the association of the torch with the coming of a royal child, Latin or Trojan. In Juno's hands the flames are used to destroy the cities of those she hates. The saving aspect of this fire-omen, seen in lulus' flaming hair in Book II, and in the flaming helmet given to Aeneas by Venus in Book VIII, does not concern us here. All the peoples of the epic, and most of the individuals, will move into new roles in the rather intricate narrative development of Books IX - XII.
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