Proceedings of the Society 21 (1993) 17-34 ©1993

Aeneas and the Idea of *

Troy, and its importance to , makes an immediate appearance in the , in those pregnant first lines: Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris I Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit I litora. I empha­ sise profugus. We may feel that Aeneas lacks colour, that he has little with which to engage our deeper sympathies. But his exile is a continuing theme that would have touched a chord in Roman hearts. For Romans to be exiled was a disconcerting, even depersonalising experience. In a letter to Atticus, written in 58 BC, during his exile, Cicero says that he feels a sense of loss not only for his possessions and friends but for himself: "For what am I now?" (3.15.2). Away from Rome, he had no role to play, nothing to define him as a Roman citizen. 's poems from Tomi express year after year the same sense of deprivation: "My body is sick, but my mind sicker, ever surveying its ills; I miss the sight of the city, my dear friends, and, dearer than all, my wife" (Tr. 4.6.43-6). Seneca, consoling his mother for his own absence in Corsica, summarises the disadvantages of exile under three heads: poverty, disgrace and being the object of scorn {Dial. 12.6.1).1 Yet all these famous Romans had their hopes. Even Ovid, who was never allowed home, never quite despaired that flattery and the power of poetry would win his restoration. But Aeneas had no such hope. His city had been destroyed: he had been shown by his mother a vision of the gods destroying it. He had left, and could not think of returning. His father's first impulse on learning of the capture of the city by the was to commit suicide rather than exsiliumpati.2 In the height of his own despair during the storm off Africa, Aeneas passionately expresses regret that he had not been allowed to die at Troy, where had died, and so many other Trojans (1.94-101). But that had not been the gods' plan. Feror exsul in altuml cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis (3.11-12). * I am grateful to the audiences at the meeting of the Virgil Society and at a subse­ quent one of the Oxford University Classical Society for their searching questions.

17 MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM

There, if anywhere, lay the consolation. Aeneas is being carried off to exile, but he is taking with him his comrades, his son, the Penates, the great gods of Troy. In this sense his fleet can be seen as Troy itself. That is how Juno sees it in her speech to Aeolus: he is "carrying to Italy and the defeated Penates";3 and Aeneas himself, praying to in book 3, asks the god to preserve altera Troiae I Pergama, the remnants left by the Greeks and the savage (3.86-7). His fleet, then, is the substitute citadel of Troy, waiting for a new site. And a new site for Troy is precisely what the Trojans are looking for in the first part of the Aeneid. Early in book 3 they make an attempt to colonise Crete. Aeneas tells how "greedily" he laboured on the walls of the city he longed for and called it Pergamea;4 his people, "gladdened by the name", he urged to love hearth and home (3.132-4). It is, signifi­ cantly enough, the Penates, the household gods of Troy, who warn Aeneas in a dream to move on. Eventually, they promise, they will raise his descendants to the stars and give their city an empire; but Crete is not the due place.5 Once the fleet has sailed round the Peloponnese and come to the coast of Epirus, they find that other Trojans have pre-empted the idea of founding a new and replica Troy. Hector's wife , now mar­ ried to , is living in "a small Troy, a citadel imitating the great one", complete with a Scaean gate and a dry river bed named after the Trojan .6 As British colonists found comfort in calling remote settlements after familiar places back home—Perth, Canterbury, New York—so these Trojans were cognomine laeti: it was at once a good omen and a reminder of their lost home. Hence, when rebel against Aeneas in Sicily in book 5, the agent of Juno who eggs them on appeals to Trojan names: "Shall no walls ever again be called the walls of Troy? Shall I nowhere see Hector's rivers, Xanthus and Simois?"7 And she claims to have dreamed words of : hie quaerite Troiam (5.637). When Aeneas gives in to their rebellion and agrees that a part of his force should settle in Sicily, he founds a mimic Troy, just as had Andromache: "This is to be Ilium, those places are to be Troy" (5.756-7). That is the last we hear of the founding of a New Troy. It is as though the colonisation of a Sicilian city purges away Aeneas' impulse to try to start all over again. But that is not to say that the idea of Troy is now forgotten.8 My pupils, twenty five years and more since Brooks Otis wrote his book on

18 THE IDEA OF TROY

Virgil,9 still tell me in their essays what Otis so persuasively suggested, that the underworld scene in book 6 is a turning point, where Aeneas bids farewell to the Trojan past in the shape of , and turns resolutely to the Roman future, glimpsed in the speech of . But we should not take this too far. Whatever we are supposed to make of the passage about the Gate of Dreams at the end of the book, we are perhaps being told amongst other things that there is something dream­ like about the events that have preceded. Virgil does not allude to them again, and Aeneas seems not to remember them in the second half of the poem, any more than he paid explicit attention to the dream of Hector in book 2. The Trojans go on being Trojans, who can be mocked by Italians as effeminate and oddly dressed easterners. Their camp can be called Troia.10 There is no important discontinuity after book 6. Nor should there be. It is an essential part of Virgil's purpose to work out the implications of Juno's remark to Aeolus that Aeneas carried Troy to Italy. The idea of Troy goes on. It goes on, indeed, until the very end of the poem. There Juno and Jupiter settle the future of Italy in marital conversation. Juno requests that after the marriage of Aeneas and the Italians should not have to change their name (notice again this important theme) or have to be called Trojan, with a new language and new clothes (12.823-5). They are to be Italians: occidit, occideritque sinas cum nomine Troia (828). That, it seems, is the end of Troy, both name and concept. Jupiter smilingly grants the request, again with emphasis on the name: "the Trojans will merge with the Latins in body only, and sink into the mass" (835-6). The joint race will, in the far future, excel in piety and give imperial honours to Juno. It is important to see what is, and what is not, implied by this compact. Jupiter and Juno come to an arrangement that saves the face of the defeated Italians. But the Trojan element does not disappear as finally as is here suggested. When Jupiter says rather mysteriously that he will "add customs and sacral rites, and make the Trojans into Lat­ ins",11 he is veiling the fact that there is an important element of religious continuity between Troy and Rome. That has been placed before us ever since the first lines of the first book: Aeneas is to suffer much dum conderet urbem I inferretque deos Latio.12 The gods he im­ ports into Latium are, most literally, the Penates, the household gods. When. Hector appears in a dream to Aeneas on the night Troy fell, he

19 MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM says explicitly: "Troy commends to you its sacred objects and its Penates; take them as the companions of your adventures, and look to build great walls to house them when you have finished your wanderings across the seas."13 It was these companion deities who, as we saw, advised Aeneas not to persist in the attempt to colonise Crete; and, praying to the Sibyl in book 6, Aeneas very properly asks that settlement in Latium may be granted to the Trojans, "their wandering gods and the harassed numina of Troy" (6.67-8). In the next book, accordingly, when the expedition arrives in Italy and Aeneas recognises the omen of the tables, he hails the land that fate owes to him, "and you, 0 loyal Penates of Troy. This is home, this our native land" (7.121-2). Virgil does not need to spell out the continuity further. The household gods of Troy become the house­ hold gods of Rome. Of course, the formation of the religious system familiar in Virgil's own day was, in the terms of the Aeneid, a complex matter. If the Penates have to be transferred from Troy to Latium, a grand god like Apollo, patron deity of Troy, needs no transference. Just as he is already there in Delos, so he is already there in Campania, inspiring the words of the frenzied Sibyl. Other gods had been enemies of Troy. Venus had shown them to Aeneas on Troy's last night, massing to destroy the city, wrecking the walls he had built, Juno, , and, worst of all, Jupiter himself urging on the others (2.608-18). It was to be a long time, it seems, before Juno was finally reconciled to Rome: not, indeed, till the second Punic War.14 Then there were the local gods of Italy, whom we glimpse the Trojans taking over even within the poem. We have seen what a vivid feeling they had for their rivers back home, Xanthus and Simois. All the more shocking when the Sibyl promises a replay of the , this time on Italian soil: "not Simois nor Xanthus nor a Greek camp will be lacking" (6.88-9). The river thus prefigured is the Tiber itself, beside whose waters much of the drama of the second half of the Aeneid is played out.15 The Trojans land at its mouth, Aeneas sails up and down it when visiting the site of the future Rome, Turnus plunges into it to save his life at a tight moment. It was of course in the end to be the Roman river, "Tiber, father Tiber, to whom the Romans pray". Hence the significance of the Tiber's acceptance of the Trojans in book 8. The river god appears to Aeneas in a dream, calling him "the man awaited by the land of the Laurentines and the fields of Latium" (8.38). Aeneas, on waking, prays like a naturalised

20 THE IDEA OF TROY

Italian to the of Laurentum, tuque, o Thybri, tuo genitor cum flumine sancto (8.72), words redolent with Ennian associations.16 The god responds by reversing the force of his current so that Aeneas' ship can sail without exertion to its meeting with Evander. It is in the same confidence of acceptance as a new Italian that Aeneas can, in book 12, call not only on the sun, Jupiter, Juno, Mars, but also on the fountains and rivers and "this land" (12.176-81).17 But in another oath Aeneas remains the Trojan he has always been. In book 10 he addresses Cybele, who has just metamorphosed his ships: alma parens deum, cui Dindyma cordi I turrigeraeque urbes biiugique ad frena leones.m That reminds us of a last strand in the complicated web that made up Roman religion. They had not always worshipped the Magna Mater from Asia Minor; but her cult was introduced, with whatever forebodings, in the late third century BC. That, in some sense, is part of the continuity between Rome and the Trojan East. It was to become a devotee of the Great Mother that Creusa, Aeneas' lost wife, had been kept behind in Troy.19 Aeneas did not bring Cybele to Rome; but, in the end, she came. The continuity between Troy and Rome is suggested in other than religious ways. Most obvious is the literal genealogical connection.20 The descent of Julius Caesar and Augustus from Venus and Aeneas is the supreme instance. Nasceturpulchra Troianus origine Caesar, I... lulius, a magno demissum nomen Iulo (1.286, 288). Or in another famous passage: 'hie Caesar et omnis luli I progenies' (6.789-90). Minor Trojans, however, are seen as ancestors of Roman gentes less grand than the Julii. There is , soon to be Italus Mnestheus, genus a quo nomine Memmi,21 who takes part, without success, in the boat race of book 5. Later in the same book there is Atys, genus unde Atii duxere Latini (5.568). A Memmius had been patron of the poet Lucretius, and an Atia had the honour of being the mother of Augustus. Odder that Virgil should draw attention, in just the same way, to another boat-racer, .. .domus tenet a quo Sergia nomen (5.121). For the most obvi­ ous Sergius of the century was the conspirator Catiline, seen properly consigned to underworld punishment on the Shield (8.668-9). But, if it is any consolation, the Sergestus of the boat race found himself stuck on a reef, and his ship well and truly wrecked (5.204) In the same book as the boat race Virgil takes the opportunity to forge a link of a different kind. The young men take part in an intricate

21 MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM equestrian manoeuvre, and Virgil tells us how it descended to his own day. practised it when he founded Alba Longa, the Albans taught their descendants, and Rome took over the Ludus Troiae, "pre­ serving an ancestral rite. The boys even now are called Troy, and the column of riders Trojan" (5.596-602). Williams' note on 5.545 f. tells us the evidence for the custom under Sulla and Caesar and its regularisa- tion by Augustus. More symbolically, Virgil makes use of non-religious objects surviving from the Sack of Troy and carried away in Aeneas' ships. Not all the Trojans' treasure, it seems, went to the bottom in the shipwreck off Africa. When Aeneas has met , he sends for his son from the ships, but also for gifts "snatched from the ruin of Troy", "a cloak stiff with gold-embroidered figures, and a dress with a border woven of yellow acanthus flowers, Argive Helen's treasures that she had brought from Mycenae when she left for Troy and her illegal marriage, a wonderful gift from her mother Leda; a sceptre too that Ilione, eldest of 's daughters, had once carried, and a pearl necklace and a double gold coronet set with jewels" (1.645-55: translation indebted to D.A. West's). Those are gifts for Dido, and not all of them might seem to have been very tactfully chosen. They were chosen, of course, by Virgil himself, to suggest an atmosphere of foreboding and ill-luck. When Dido looks wonderingly at them, she is as struck by the gifts as by the boy Ascanius, and Virgil underlines the peril she is in: infelix, pesti devota futurae (1.709-14). Ascanius is Cupid in disguise, and the gifts are of ill omen. Spoil taken from the Greeks at Troy is part of the array of prizes for winners in the games for Anchises.22 But more significant is a scene in book 7. It is well known that Virgil uses an elaborate series of repetitions to underline the parallel between the arrival of Aeneas in Africa in book 1 and in Italy in book 7. One effect is to suggest the dangers that attend the alliance with Latinus no less than that with Dido in Carthage; foreboding is again prevalent. But all the same we know that all will be well in the end this time. The alliance that Dido had offered in book 1 is offered again by Latinus in book 7. Through no fault of his own, Latinus' offer does not at first seem to bear more fruit than had Dido's. But eventually it is taken up as the divine solution. Jupiter and Juno, after a pointless war, ratify a treaty that Latinus and Aeneas could, in happier circumstances, have arranged for themselves.23 Accordingly the gifts offered to Latinus in book 7 are of better omen than those offered to Dido

22 THE IDEA OF TROY in book 1. They too are from the past, "relics taken from burning Troy". Besides clothes woven by Trojan ladies are given a gold vessel once used by Anchises to pour libations at his altars, and a staff held by Priam when he laid down the law by custom to his summoned people, and his sacred head-dress: symbols, if we wish to see it that way, of religious and political continuity.24 Troy, then, passes much on to Italy and to the future Rome. What is the point of such a stress? It is clear that it is firmly in accord with policies of Augustus, and it was no doubt encouraged by him. Even when Virgil was sketching a future epic of a rather different kind in the proem to Georgia 3—an epic, indeed, that he may never have intended to write—a culminating feature of it is Troy: Assaraci proles demissaeque ab lovegentis I nomina, Trosque parens et Troiae Cynthius auctor (35-6): emphasis again on names and genealogy, Augustus descended from Assaracus and , and beyond them from Jupiter. And Apollo, patron of Troy and of Augustus, is not lacking. The idea of course is not new. The story of Aeneas coming from Troy to Italy was ages old. But it takes on now a new and urgent significance. It was part, in this new Hellenis­ tic Rome, of the legitimisation of a ruler that he should be a future god, descended from gods; and that he should take for his patron a Trojan god, Apollo, was equally appropriate. But there was more than that. Italy needed a mythology to rival that of the Greeks. Virgil supplies it, using the far more than the pitiful fragments of Roman saga. But, though formulated by the Greeks, it is a mythology that can be slanted against the Greeks. As we shall see, Virgil's enthusiasm for the Trojan connexion has its counterpart in the depreciation of the Greeks. The Aeneid is a sturdily Roman poem—more Roman, one would like to think, than Virgil's deeper convictions would have wished. It repre­ sents Aeneas and his men, in many respects, as the Romans liked to see themselves, pious, brave, uncomplicated. There is nothing at all defen­ sive about the famous climax of Anchises' speech in the underworld. By now, in the flood of his inspiration, addressing not his son but Romanus, a future Roman, Anchises concedes that others will shape bronzes with more plastic skill (mollius hints at a contrast with those hard men, the Romans), and carve likenesses from marble: plead cases better and master the secrets of astronomy. So much for the Greeks, praised and patronised for their skills in the arts of peace. Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento I (hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem, I

23 MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM

parcere subiectis et debellare superbos (6.847-53). I quote yet again these celebrated words to remind you how the Romans saw themselves: as warriors and empire-builders. Nor is this anything isolated in the Aeneid. The Parade of Heroes that culminates25 in these words has been largely devoted to war and warriors; so is the Shield of Aeneas in book 8. Augustus' role, Jupiter prophesies at the start of the poem, is to bound his empire with the ocean and his fame with the stars (1.287, cf. 236). The peace that is there mentioned would not mean any cessation of foreign conquest: merely an end to the tragedy of civil conflict. In a precisely similar way in Anchises' speech the celebration of Augustus' founding of a new age of gold in Italy is juxtaposed with proud prophesy of Roman advances in Africa and India that will not, one presumes, take place without bloodshed (6.791-5). It is important steadily to bear in mind that Virgil represents Augustus not as a Prince of Peace but as the latest and greatest of Roman imperialists.26 How does the continuity with Troy fit in to such a scheme? Very closely. Troy is for Virgil not a peaceful city, wantonly sacked by blood­ thirsty Greeks. It is a city that—though Aeneas does not put it this way—in the end suffers what it has meted out in the past to others. 0 patria, o divum domus Ilium et incluta bello / moenia Dardanidum! is Aeneas' exclamation when the Horse is about to enter the city (2.241-2); and as the crisis deepens, urbs antiqua ruit multos dominataper annos— the word is to be used of Rome's empire, when domus Aeneae cunctis dominabitur oris (3.97). The Trojans, that is, had been lords and mas­ ters, domini, as later the Romans were to be: rerum dominos gentemque togatam (1.282). The Trojans, of course, did not wear the toga, and the Italians mock them in the Aeneid for their sleeves and turbans.27 For they remained easterners, and their lost empire had been an eastern one: tot quondam populis terrisque superbum I regnatorem Asiae is the epitaph on the dead Priam.28 And Ilium itself was proud: ceciditque superbum I Ilium.29 The rule of the Trojans was regnum: in the consoling speech to his men in book 1, Aeneas offers them the prospect of the kingdom of Troy rising again from the ashes.30 And, as is the way with empires, Troy had become rich. Their military and imperial prowess rested on a generous basis of accumulated wealth. We have seen how even the remnants of it sufficed for presents to Dido and Latinus. And the gaza, "treasure" that Aeneas saw bobbing in the waves after the shipwreck is only a fraction

24 THE IDEA OF TROY of the whole (1.119). Returning into defeated Troy in search of his wife, Aeneas had seen and Ulysses guarding the treasure-trove: Troia gaza brought from every side, "pilfered from burned shrines, tables of the gods and solid gold vessels and clothing taken captive" (2.763-4). Earlier the Trojans are seen tearing down gilded beams from their ancestral houses in a vain attempt to ward off the Greeks (2.448). Empire had brought the same sort of wealth to Rome:31 the Capitol, says Virgil in book 8, is "golden now, but once shaggy with sylvan thickets" (348). And there is no attempt to disguise the link between Trojan rule and Trojan wealth: Aeneas begins his tale to Dido by summarising his story as one in which the Greeks destroyed the wealth and lamentabile regnum of Troy (2.4-5); even the island of Tenedos was dives opum Priami dum regna manebant (2.22).32 This was no nouveau riche city. Aeneas constantly stresses its great age in book 2. When it falls, it crashes like an antique ash in the mountains (2.626); and the literal trees associated with it are aged too, the laurel by Priam's altar (veterrima: 2.513), the cypress at Ceres' deserted temple (antiqua)33 If Rome's ancestry can be traced back to Troy, then her genealogy has a grandly ancient branch. Correspondingly, the Italian branch is old too. Antiquam exquirite matrem is Apollo's advice in book 3 (96), and the vision of the Penates confirms: est locus, Hesperiam Grai cognomine dicunt, I terra antiqua, potens armis atque ubereglaebae (3.163-4). Italy is old, warlike, rich (at least in agriculture) no less than Troy. And the same characteristics are stressed in Virgil's account of Latinus' palace (7.170-91). What need, then, of Troy, one might ask. It was perhaps the renown conferred on it by Homeric legend that the Romans craved. Aeneas, speaking to his disguised mother in book 1, is duly modest about the chances of her having heard of the name of Troy (1.375-6); but when he arrives in Carthage he finds that the Homeric story is already enshrined in murals in the temple of Juno (1.456-93). His reaction is to rejoice not only in the tears that men have shed for the Trojans, but in the laus and fama that these decorations signified (461,463). Dido herself is emphatic: quis genus Aeneadum, quis Troiae nesciat urbem, I virtutesque virosque... ? (1.565-6).34 The gloria of the Trojans is seen as over in Panthus' despairing words during the sack (2.325-6); but Helenus in book 3 is emphatic that the grand story is not yet concluded: vade age et ingentem factis fer ad aethera Troiam (462). And indeed the story does not stop there. The whole sweep is succinctly

25 MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM put in Jupiter's great prophecy in book 1 (279 ff.) The gens togata, the imperial Romans, are at the same time the domus Assaraci, the house of Anchises' grandfather, which will conquer Pthia, land of Achilles, and Mycenae and Argos, realm of and . This conquest of Greece is put in brutal terms to which I shall return. But Jupiter now goes on to the great modern conqueror: nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar (1.286), the Augustus who will limit the empire only by the ocean, and who will eventually be received in heaven "weighed down by the spoils of the East" (1.289-90). The continuity of Roman with Trojan imperialism, of the two rulers over the East, could hardly be made more clear. But there is a final twist to all this. When the river Tiber, as we have seen, answers Aeneas' prayer in book 8, he addresses him as "you who are bringing back to us the city of Troy from her enemies" (8.36-7). This is a covert allusion to something that we have never been allowed quite to forget, that Virgil regards the Trojan royal family as itself Italian in origin.35 Latinus tells when the Trojans arrive in Latium in book 7 that there was an Italian legend that it was from 'these fields' that set forth to the east (206-7), and Ilioneus confirms that in his reply: hinc Dardanus ortus (240). Using those same three words, the vision of the Penates in book 3 had given the same story (3.167). The very town is twice named, Corythus, identified with modern Cortona (3.170, 7.209). It is these facts that give retrospective sense to Aeneas' words to his mother in book 1: Italiam quaero patriam et genus ab love summo (Mynors' comma is misleading here).36 Aeneas is looking for a Trojan ancestral home and a race descended from Jupiter: Dardanus', that is, in Etruria. In this light, Aeneas' mission, so like ' in other respects, becomes, like Odysseus', a nostos, a return to his roots. Perhaps his exile was not so painful after all. This connection of Troy and Italy is significant in another aspect. Virgil is short of Italian mythology, and is happy to give Greek mythical characters an Italian connection or even home.37 The fabulous personages of the , located by in a never-never land innocent of geogra­ phy, are found specific Italian homes in the Aeneid: the dread Scylla and Charybdis guard the narrow strait between Sicily and the toe of Italy, and hard by the active volcano of Etna the Cyclops still have their abode. And as the Trojans sail up the coast from Campania to Latium, they can hear the magic sounds of the household of Circe (7.10-20). Hercules is given

26 THE IDEA OF TROY an Italian connection as the slayer of the Palatine monster Cacus, himself a robber employing a method familiar from one of the Homeric Hymns. Hippolytus, magically restored to life, had been transported to Italy to live the sort of secluded rural life he had always enjoyed, and (more oddly) sent a son to fight in the Latin war (7.761-82). And just as various Italian heroes are given Greek relatives (Halaesus, for instance, is related to Agamemnon: 7.723-4), so Evander, the exiled Greek, has a family tree that links him with Aeneas, and tells a story that makes him and Anchises guest friends (8.157-68). By such means, Virgil enriches the Italian scene, and makes it seem an integral part of the world of Greek myth. But in general, as we have seen, it is Virgil's intention to stress the links between Troy and past and future Italy.38 Troy is portrayed as a great city, such as Rome was eventually to become in her footsteps, time-honoured, glorious throughout the civilised world, rich in gold, a warrior state ruling an empire. Virgil occasionally puts into the mouth of opponents of Aeneas the sort of anti-Eastern sentiment all too famil­ iar from Latin literature, portraying the Trojans as oddly dressed and even effeminate. But such propaganda is shown to be ill-conceived:39 it is the sort of that Roman writers were occasionally prepared to concede to the other side—one thinks, for instance, of the stirring speech of a Scottish chieftain in Tacitus' Agricola (30-32) accusing the Romans, amongst other things, of making a desert and calling it peace. No practical conclusions were meant to be drawn from such effusions. Rhetoric had always been available to both sides of every question. So too in the Aeneid:*0 we are not meant to approve of larbas' dismissal of Aeneas as another with a company of half-men,41 or of the stirring words of Remulus Numanus in book 9 (598-620). Remulus taunts the Trojans as the polar opposites of the tough Italians who take their children to the rivers to harden them off with the icy water, and who make a living out of plunder. The Trojans are quite different: over-fond of the dance, clothed in bright yellows and purples, lazy, addicted to strange religions. Such words bring their revenge. Ascanius is stung, and at once shoots Remulus through the head (9.632-4). The Trojans are warriors if anything superior to the Italians. It is emphatically not their task to bring a leavening of peace and culture to warlike Italy; they are warlike too. Furthermore, the Trojans are free of another stain that Virgil in his

27 MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM earlier years made great play of. At the end of the first Georgia, Virgil famously cries: satis iampridem sanguine nostro I Laomedonteae luimus periuria Troiae (501-2). Laomedon, in the legend, had cheated of his wages when he gave his services at the building of the walls of Troy.42 The resulting curse Virgil sees, in the context of the Georgics, as extending beyond the fall of Troy itself to affect the city of Rome de­ scending from it; it is still at work in the bloodshed of the civil war between Antony and Octavian. Dido, who lays Rome under a different curse, is aware of the earlier one laid on Troy when she says (to herself): nescis heu, perdita, necdum /Laomedonteae sentisperiuriagentis? (4.541- 2). That is to turn Roman aspersions on Punica fides against themselves with a vengeance. But we are not meant to sympathise with Dido at this point, or to believe that Aeneas cheats Dido as well as leaving her. Nor, more importantly, are we meant to regard the Trojans as still under any curse laid on Laomedon.43 His offence (still recalled by Neptune at 5.810-11) is only part of the reason for the gods' anger at Troy. Aeneas, talking to the Sibyl, addresses all the gods and goddesses quibus obstitit Ilium et ingens /gloria Dardanidum (6.64-5); and he had been told by his mother at Troy that it was not so much the guilt of Paris and Helen as divum inclementia, divum that had doomed Troy (2.601-3). He had indeed been given by Venus a privileged vision of the gods in action, dirae facies inimicaque Troiae I numina magna deum (2.621-2). Nep­ tune is duly there (610), pointedly destroying the walls he had built, but he is not alone. Juno is named next (612). Her motive has been known since the start of the poem: the judgment of Paris, Jupiter's adulterous begetting of Dardanus, and the honour given by Jupiter to the Trojan boy Ganymede (1.25-8). Athena was there too (615) and, as the climax, Jupiter himself, egging on the other gods (617-8).44 But once Troy has fallen, though Juno's anger notoriously continues, there is no talk of Neptune's rancour going on.45 The fault of Laomedon has been purged. Nor are Virgil's allusions to the name of Laomedon in the least redolent of the curse:46 least of all the friendly words of Evander in book 8 on how he had met Priam, son of Laomedon (the patronymic is used twice in five lines) in days of old (8.157-62). I conclude that Troy is a positive symbol, an unblemished ancestor for Rome,47 granting Rome access to the world of myth by a route that did not involve too much identification with the Greeks. It is with the Greeks that I shall end. The Roman attitude to them

28 THE IDEA OF TROY

was in many ways ambivalent, even paradoxical. They owed to them almost all of such culture as they had, yet regarded them with suspicion or even contempt as pacific cultivators of the inferior arts of peace. The Romans were great ones for negotium, for the active side of life; they regarded the Greeks as all too sunk in otium—rather unfairly, consider­ ing that Greek lack of worldly initiative was not unconnected with the Roman destruction of Greek political and military power. Greek leisure burgeoned, even now, with art and philosophy and poetry. That, for Roman philistines, made Greeks even more contemptible. It does, I am afraid, seem that Virgil in writing the Aeneid kept himself, at least on the surface, within this tradition. And I have already suggested that when he makes Anchises, at the end of book 6, juxtapose Greek art with Roman military might he is not intending to criticise the Romans. The Aeneid, that could never have been conceived without its Greek literary forebears, here ignores the Greek prop which held it up: excudent alii spirantia mollius aera [no mention of poetry]... Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (6.847, 851). Rome is asked to forget that Homer wrote the Iliad and concentrate on the fiction that Rome can trace a desired mythological descent from the city of Troy, itself seen as a proto-Rome. The emphasis on Troy, at any rate, has its counterpart in a downgrad­ ing of the Greeks in the Aeneid.4* The piety and kindness of the Trojans is in book 2 sharply contrasted with the perfidy49 and cruelty of the Greeks. Think, for instance, of the episode. Sinon employs all the arts of emotional oratory, when the Trojan youth throng round to mock him. He plays on their pity (misero mihi, 70), and the Trojans' hearts are turned around by his laments, all their impulse stayed (73-4). When he finishes his tale, his lacrimis vitam damus et miserescimus ultro (145). He swears an oath by 'the eternal fires and their sanctity that cannot be violated' (154-5), and reveals the fictional plans of the Greeks: captique dolis lacrimisque coactis I quos neque Tydides nee Larisaeus Achilles, I non anni domuere decern, non mille carinae (196-8). If that is an exam­ ple of the Greek superiority in pleading a case (orabunt causas melius) then straightforward Trojans and Romans would not be impressed by it. As for Greek cruelty, one need think only of the sinister figure of Pyrrhus/Neoptolemos, likened to a snake coming up into the light from its hole after a winter feeding on evil herbs: gleaming in its new skin, bright with youth, it exults in the sun and flickers with triple tongue

29 MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM

(471-5). Priam tells him that Achilles his father would have had more pity; but Pyrrhus drags him to the altar, trembling and slipping in the blood shed by his son a moment before, takes his hair with his left hand, and with his right raises his glittering sword to plunge it, hilt-deep, in the old man's side. Haec finis Priami fatorum (550-4). It is understandable that this should be the tone of Virgil's account of the sack of Troy, for he makes it Aeneas' account; and Aeneas makes no attempt to tell the story in a way that reflects any credit on the Greeks. But Virgil does nothing to redress the balance.50 In book 11, in another episode that links with Italy, Virgil shows us the Greek Diomedes, now living in central Italy. But his spirit is all gone (11.252-95). He sees the Greek destruction of Troy as a sin that has been punished in the persons of the returning Greek heroes. Diomedes' own men have been turned into birds, in requital for his wounding Venus' hand on the plains of Troy. When the Italians send to him for help against Aeneas, he is unwilling to take him on a second time: "Do not, do not drive me to take up such wars again." He says that if the Trojan war lasted for ten years, it was thanks to the martial skills of two men, Hector and Aeneas. "Beware going to war with him." The scene could perfectly well have been used to put the Greeks in a better light, Instead, Diomedes is represented as cowed, afraid to renew a fight against so dangerous a foe. The whole scene is designed solely to empha­ sise the prowess of the Trojans. To return to historical times. In Anchises' jingoistic speech in the underworld one hero is not named, but from his exploits it is clear that he can only be Lucius Mummius, conqueror of Corinth in 146 BC: "that man, triumphing over Corinth, will drive his chariot up to the Capitol, glorious with his slaughter of the Greeks."51 Another hero (L. Aemilius Paullus) "will destroy Argos, Agamemnon's Mycenae52 and the descend­ ant of himself, mighty Achilles' race,53 in revenge for his Trojan forebears and for the violation of Minerva's temple" (6.838-40). That is the Aeneid's way of describing the final conquest of Greece, its reduction to the status of a Roman province, the destruction and pillaging of Corinth, for its art treasures and its commerce. Jupiter, though, has said it all before, in his first speech of the poem: "the time will come, as the years slip by, when the race of Assaracus will reduce Pthia and glorious Mycenae to slavery (seruitio premet) and lord it over conquered Argos (dominabitur)" (1.283-5). For domination, reduction to slavery, was the

30 THE IDEA OF TROY forte of the master race, Rome, as it had been of Troy in the past. It was left to Greece merely to provide the hexameters to compose the poem in which Virgil seems to exult over their servitude.54

Corpus Christi College, Oxford MICHAEL WMTERBOTTOM

NOTES 1. For the disgrace, cf. Georg. 3.225-6 (of a bull) victus abit longeque ignotis exsulat oris, I multa gemens ignominiam... For the scorn, cf. Amata at Aen. 7.359 exsulibusne datur ducenda Lavinia Teucris...? More generally, cf. Eel. 1.64-78, Georg. 2.511-12. 2. 2.637-8. There are several references to the possibility of suicide in Cicero's letters from exile (e.g. Ait. 3.7.2). 3. 1.68. Cf. 8.11-12 victosque penates I inferre (hostile report), and 8.678-9 hinc Augustus agens Italos in proelia Caesar I cum, patribus populoque, penatibus et magnis dis (pointedly recalling 3.11-12). 4. So earlier in Thrace (3.18): Aeneadasque meo nomen de nomine fingo. 5. 3.147-171 (esp. 158-9). 6. 3.349-51; also 302 (Simois), 336. 7. 5.633-4 (addressed to patria and penates). Cf. 10.60-1 (Venus to Juno) Xanthum et Simoenta I redde, oro. 8. W.S. Anderson's talk of'the incubus of Troy' CVergil's Second Iliad', reprinted in Oxford Readings in Vergil's Aeneid, ed. S.J. Harrison (Oxford 1990) 240 is far too strong. More sensitively, G.N. Knauer, Die Aeneis und Homer (Gottingen 1964) 351. 9. Virgil (Oxford 1964), esp. p. 297. 10. See 10.27 (nascentis Troiae) and 58 (recidivaque Pergama), with Harrison's notes on both passages; also 74-5 (Troiam...nascentem), 214. 378. Long ago (1.206) Aeneas had been confident illic [i.e. in Italy] fas regna resurgere Troiae, and Virgil continues the theme of rebirth in new surroundings; all that has gone is the idea of a replica Troy. Note also 8.36-7 (discussed on p. 26), looking back to 3.86-7 (where see R.D. Williams' note); 9.247 (Aletes appeals to dipatrii, quorum semper sub numine Troia est); and see further D.C. Feeney in Oxford Readings ..., 356 n. 74. Hence the emphasis later that the name of Troy should disappear (see below). 11. 12.836-7. The words take up those of Aeneas himself at 12.192 (sacra deosque dabo), just as Jupiter and Juno are only ratifying plans adumbrated by Aeneas and Latinus (see p. 22). See W. Suerbaum, Poetica 1 (1967) 186-90; ROAM. Lyne, Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid (Oxford 1987) 81-3. 12. 1.5-6. Cf. 8.10-12 (their arrival). 13. 2.293-5. In the next lines Hector gives Aeneas the Vestal fire, but that is not mentioned later ("das ewige Feuer.. .nicht leicht als transportiert gedacht werden kann": R. Heinze, Virgils Epische Technik4 (Leipzig 1928) 35 n. 2). 14. Feeney in Oxford Readings..., 341. 15. See V. Buchheit, Vergil ilber die Sendung Roms (Heidelberg 1963) 178-87.

31 MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM

16. Two more invocations of Tiber: 8.540 (Aeneas), 10.421 (Pallas). 17. At his first arrival Aeneas (7.136-40) geniumque loci primarnque deorum I Tellurem Nymphasque et adhuc ignotaprecatur I flumina, as well as Trojan deities (see n. 18). 18. 10.252-3. In 7.139-40 (see n. 17) Aeneas Idaeumque Iovem Phrygiamque ex ordine matrem I invocat. Cf. also 9.258-9 (Ascanius invokes the Penates, the Lar of Assaracus and the Vestal penetralia). 19. 2.788. Cf. also 6.784-7, where R.G. Austin's note gives further references in the Aeneid and general background. For the connection between Troy and the Magna Mater see G.K. Galinsky, Aeneas, Sicily, and Rome (Princeton 1969) 176-7 (also 224- 7). 20. For the 'Trojan families' see Galinsky, 165 n. 66 (much from Servius on Aen. 5.117). 21. 5.117, where see Williams' note. 22. 5.259-61 (360 is mysterious). 23. Compare 1.572-4 (esp. Tros Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur), 7.263-73, 12.189-94 and 821-40). 24. 7.244-8. See Buchheit, 161-2, invoking the legend that the sceptre was one of the seven things that Tield' the Roman imperium. 25. There follows an addendum (854 addit) on the Marcelli, elder and younger, both seen as warriors. 26. So too with Aeneas, seen by the Romans as martial as well as pius: Galinsky, ch. 1. He is pietate insignis et armis (6.403). 27. 9.616 (cf. 4.216). Hence the mention in the final solution of the abolition of Trojan clothing (12.825). 28. 2.556-7, where Austin cites Iliad 24.543-6 for his empire; add Aen.7.217-8, with J. Conington's note. Priam gave iura vocatis I ...populis (7.246-7), presumably not just Trojans: contrast the non-imperial rule of Dido (1.507 iura dabat legesque viris, de­ spite, that is, being a woman) and Acestes (5.758 patribus dat iura vocatis). As for regnatorem, Virgil elsewhere employs the word of gods, usually Jupiter. 29. 3.2-3. Neither here nor in 2.556 is the adjective pejorative. Virgil is aware of its etymology (Isidore, Etym. 10.248 superbus dictus quia super vult videri quam est; qui enim vult supergredi quod est superbus est) and enjoys placing it in contexts where the high are brought low (2.557 meet, 3.2 cecidit; cf. also 2.504-5postes...superbi Iprocubuere and perhaps also 1.523 iustitiaque dedit gentis frenare superbas and 6.853 debellare superbos, "fight them down". 30. 1.206 illic fas regna resurgere Troiae. Still alive at 8.470-1 quo sospite numquam I res equidem Troiae victas aut regna fatebor (Evander on Aeneas). 31. Sallust, Epist. Mithrid. = Hist. 4 frg. 69 §5 Reynolds namque Romanis cum nationibus populis regibus cunctis una et ea vetus causa bellandi est, cupido profunda imperi et divitiarum. 32. Cf. also 2.603 has...opes, 3.53 opes...Teucrum (though opes maybe used there as in 10.609). Homer, II. 24.543-5 connected the wealth of Priam with his empire. 33. 2.714 (the temple itself is vetustum, 713, cf. 742). Note also Troia antiqua 1.375, 4.312; 2.635 antiquas domos; 6.648 genus antiquum Teucri. Naturally the ethos of epic is important here.

32 THE IDEA OF TROY

34. The words find a characteristic counterpoint in Latinus' at 7.195-6. 35. Well discussed by Buchheit, 151 ff.; he regards it as Virgilian invention (163-6). 36. 1.380, where see Austin's commentary. 37. So too "the Greeks craved Greek ancestry for the barbarians" (Galinsky, 95), and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 1.89) argued the point for the Romans. 38. We should not forget , founder of Padua (1.242-9), placed by Livy, for his own reasons, at the very start of his History. 39. See e.g. Suerbaum, 196-201, with the relevant Iliadic parallels. 40. Cf. also the speeches of Juno at 7.293-322 and 10.63-95. 41. 4.215-7; cf. 12.99-100 (Turnus). 42. See R.A.B. Mynors on Georg. 1.502. Some told that Apollo had helped build the walls, but Virgil was not going to have Apollo angry with Troy. He does not (or cannot) protect his priest at 2.430; but he is not among the gods at 2.608 ff., and he is steadily helpful to the Trojans later. 43. Thus Virgil resembles Horace, who later discards the idea of Troy's guilt that he used in Odes 3.3 (whatever that poem is supposed to mean): see Buchheit, 171 n. 92. 44. That may not be a "further voice" (Lyne 75-8). If called to account for his actions, Jupiter might have said that his fiovkf]require d the fall of Troy in order to bring about the rise of Rome. But Virgil is stuck with the myth: how could Troy have fallen against Jupiter's will? ( was a rather different matter.) 45. On the contrary. Neptune calms the storm in book 1 which Juno had raised by intriguing with Aeolus (1.124 ff.), and he fills the sails of the Trojans to help them pass the land of Circe (7.23). At 5.800-15 he reassures Venus that he favours Aeneas now, and had, indeed, done so at Troy. His role is markedly different from that of Poseidon in . 46. Contra K J. Reckford, AJP 82 (1961) 261 (on 7.105). 47. Contra e.g. Feeney, 358-60. See rather Buchheit, 154 n. 20 speaking of "die vergilische Tendenz, die Trojaner selbst nur von der besten Seite zu zeigen". 48. The pervasive argument of Galinsky that Rome used descent from Troy to promote good relations with the Greeks seems to me highly paradoxical. 49. Though observe the Trojan trick at 2.387 seq. Note Turnus' disapproval of Greek tactics at Troy (9.150-3). 50. Evander, though, a Greek, inspires no fear in Aeneas (8.129-30), who has (somehow) equipped himself with a genealogical table that links him to the Arcadian king (8.131-42). There was a story (Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 32) that he had been driven out by Argive hostility, and it is odd that Virgil does not make more explicit use of this than he does in 8.333 me pulsum patria. 51. 6.836-7. Cicero reacts more justly to the event: ...maiores nostri...Karthaginem et Numantiam funditus sustulerunt; nollem Corinthum, sed credo aliquid secutos [!]... (Off. 1.35). 52. The echo of Iliad 4.51-3, where says that Zeus may destroy her beloved Argos, Sparta and Mycenae in exchange for Troy, hardly softens the ethos of our passage. 53. . It may be noted that his ancestor Pyrrhus used his descent from Achilles as an anti-Roman rallying cry ( 1.12.1). Conversely, Rome seems to have tried to justify its conquest of Epirus by exploiting a Trojan connection there (see

33 MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM

3.500-5, and for the details Buchheit 157-9). 54. Augustus' own policy towards the Greeks, at least after Actium, was far less divisive: see G.W. Bowersock, Augustas and the Greek World (Oxford 1965) passim.