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Aeneas and the Idea of Troy * Proceedings of the Virgil Society 21 (1993) 17-34 ©1993 Aeneas and the Idea of Troy * Troy, and its importance to Aeneas, makes an immediate appearance in the Aeneid, 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. Ovid'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 Greeks 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 Hector 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 Ilium and the defeated Penates";3 and Aeneas himself, praying to Apollo in book 3, asks the god to preserve altera Troiae I Pergama, the remnants left by the Greeks and the savage Achilles (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 Andromache, now mar­ ried to Helenus, 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 Xanthus.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 the Trojan women 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 Cassandra: 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 Deiphobus, and turns resolutely to the Roman future, glimpsed in the speech of Anchises. 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 Lavinia 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.
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