Reading Aeneas and Dido: Suggestion and Inference in Aeneid 1-4 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Mary Christine Marquis IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Christopher Nappa, Advisor February 2013 © M. Christine Marquis 2013 Acknowledgements There are many people without whose generosity this dissertation could not have come into being. My advisor, Christopher Nappa, has given me infinitely patient support and guidance every step of the way, and has offered thoughts on matters great and small that have greatly improved the quality of this work. (Remaining errors, needless to say, are my own.) He and Steven Smith have also shown me a great deal of kindness personally. I am also grateful to Nita Krevans, who has been a delightful and enlightening instructor, role model, and a great supporter of my development as a scholar. Tom Clayton encouraged me as an undergraduate and supported my pursuit of graduate school, and, as things come full circle, has kindly agreed to be a reader of this dissertation. I also appreciate Spencer Cole’s willingness to give my study his time and energy as a reader. I am grateful to the all the CNES faculty, from whom I have learned so much over the years, and to the department as a whole for the Hutchinson Dissertation Fellowship that supported my research in 2008-9. I would also like to express my appreciation of the department staff, especially Barb Lehnhoff and Kate Gallagher, who have been unflagging in their friendly assistance. Finally, I would like to note my gratitude to my fellow graduate students, who have contributed so much toward making this long journey as fun and interesting as it could be. I am particularly indebted to Christine Lechelt, Heather Woods, and Kathleen Ess, whose friendship has seen me through the vicissitudes of graduate school. I certainly could never have completed these years of graduate study without the emotional and material support of my parents, Diane and Jerry Hendrickson. They have logged many hours helping us take care of our house and baby (and all cheerfully!), and our two cross-country moves would have been completely impossible without them. I am also grateful to my parents-in-law, Laurie Porter and Ron Marquis, who have each in their own important ways given us the emotional and practical support that has enabled me to complete my studies. My siblings, Anne, Joe, Tom, and John, have kept my spirits up and been my friends throughout life. My sister’s humor and love, in particular, has kept me going, and my fascination with the topic I study has been nourished by many conversations with my dear younger brother and fellow classicist. The love, patience, understanding, and unrelenting spirit of self-sacrifice of my husband Bryce humbles me. The affection and gratitude that I feel toward him is so far beyond words that I hesitate to try to express it; anything I can say will fall so terribly short. We have weathered so much together on this long journey, and shared so many joys—none more delightful that the addition to our life of our beloved daughter Rosie. She has made my heart grow beyond what I could have ever imagined, and my love for her has helped me keep everything in perspective and stay on the sunny side of the life I am so lucky to have. i Dedication To Bryce, omnis curae casusque levamen and Rosie, animae dimidium meae ii Table of Contents Abbreviations . iv Introduction . 1 Chapter 1: Quae Me Cumque Vocant Terrae . 47 Chapter 2: Vultum Demissa . 103 Chapter 3: “Saved to No Purpose” . 171 Chapter 4: Nunc, Nunc . 248 Conclusion . 317 Bibliography . 320 iii Abbreviations ad at (the citation) AJP American Journal of Philology ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt BCE Before Common Era (=BC) CA Classical Antiquity CB Classical Bulletin CE Common Era (=AD) CHCL Cambridge History of Classical Literature CJ Classical Journal CP Classical Philology CQ Classical Quarterly CR Classical Review CW Classical World ECM Échos du Monde Classique FGrH Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Berlin 1923—55. G& R Greece and Rome GRBS Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology JRS Journal of Roman Studies L&S Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary OCD Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. OCT Oxford Classical Text OLD Oxford Latin Dictionary PVS Proceedings of the Vergil Society RE Realencyclopädie der classischen Alterumswissenschaft. Stuttgart 1893—. REL Revue des Études Latines s.v. sub voce TAPA Transactions of the American Philological Association TLL Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Leipzig 1900—. YJC Yale Journal of Classical Studies Ancient Works adv. Indoct. Lucian’s Adversus Indoctum Aen. Vergil’s Aeneid Ant. Rom. Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Antiquitates Romanae AP Horace’s Ars Poetica Arg. Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica BP Nevius’ Bellum Punicum Dial. Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus iv DM Anonymous Tractatus De Muliebris DServius Servius Danielis Ep. Horace’s Epistulae Ep. Justin’s Epitome of Pompeius Trogus Fab. Hyginus’ Fabulae G. Vergil’s Georgics Gramm. Suetonius’ De Grammaticis Her. Ovid’s Heroides Il. Homer’s Iliad Inst. Quintilian’s Institutiones Oratoriae Met. Ovid’s Metamorphoses N.A. Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae Od. Homer’s Odyssey Pun. Appian’s Punica Sat. Macrobius’ Saturnalia Serv. Servius TCD Tiberius Claudius Donatus Trist. Ovid’s Tristia VSD Vita Suetonii/Donati v Introduction: An Audience-Oriented Approach This study takes an audience-oriented approach to the first four books of Vergil’s Aeneid, attempting to consider interpretive issues in the text in terms of the hermeneutic process of linear reading.1 My interest is in structures of suggestion and prompts to inference (the way that Vergil “says much in little, and often in silence,” as Dryden put it), and in particular how Vergil’s indirect methods of exposition invite readers to construct character motivations that help them both to notice and to fill in “gaps” in the plot. Adapting concepts from Wolfgang Iser’s study The Act of Reading, I explore the views that the text offers the reader as he or she moves sequentially through it (the “wandering viewpoint”), and how structures of oblique suggestion—particularly intertextual recollections and epic similes, as well as breaks in “good continuation” like surprise and contradiction—invite reader participation in the construction of the narrative. Such structures employ provocative indeterminacies that challenge the reader’s synthesis of information into coherent configurations of meaning (“gestalten”), and so encourage him or her to establish consistency by supplying further inferences (what Umberto Eco calls taking “inferential walks” and writing “ghost chapters”) based on the “horizon” or background formed by the series of previous views offered by the text. 1 The term “audience-oriented” is an umbrella under which a diverse array of theoretical approaches fit. Suleiman (1980: 3-45) identifies and discusses exemplars of six: rhetorical (Booth), semiotic and structuralist (Barthes, Riffaterre, Genette, Fish, Culler, Prince, Todorov); phenomenological (Iser); subjective and psychoanalytic (Holland); sociological and historical (Goldmann, Jauss); and hermeneutic (Derrida and opponents). She observes (p. 7) that “[t]hese approaches are not monolithic (there is more than one kind of rhetorical or hermeneutic criticism), nor do they necessarily exclude each other.” On Iser and reception theory specifically, see Holub 1984. 1 These concepts, which I will discuss in more detail below, are by no means new, but in applying them, in conjunction with the traditional tools of classical philology, to a much disputed episode in Vergil’s Aeneid, I hope to shed light on important aspects of character and plot development that must be supplied by reader inference within a linear progression of indirect suggestions. In each chapter of this study I focus on one key gap in the first four books of the poem and then show how a linear, “first” reading of the previous views that make up its horizon allows a meaningful inference to be drawn that closes the gap and advances the plot in ways that have not, to my knowledge, received recognition. This hermeneutic method, with attention to the process of the development of meaning, tries to correct for the effect that purely formalist approaches can have of leading interpreters to “rewrite the history of [their] experience of a text teleologically.”2 I argue that the outcome of the Dido and Aeneas episode, in which Aeneas ultimately displays commitment to his mission and leaves Carthage, has caused a critical tendency to efface, retrospectively, the provisional suggestions in Books 1—4 that he did not originally intend to do so, and so to flatten out the path leading to the story’s conclusion. Part One: The Reader What audience- (or reader-, or reception-) oriented approaches have in common is an interest in the reader end of the author-text-reader axis. This interest in the reader is the consequence of acceptance of the postulate that “meaning is always realized at the 2 Slater 1990: 21. 2 point of reception,” as Martindale has articulated it.3 In the plainest speech, readers make meanings—though the degree of freedom they have in doing so is a matter of debate. Acceptance of this notion is now widespread, even among those who would not identify themselves as reader-response (vel sim.) critics, and it does not preclude interest in the author’s intended meaning.4 It simply requires recognition that the author’s intention must be perceived by a reader who identifies it as such. To claim otherwise, as Martindale observes, would be to posit “a ‘metaphysics’ of the text and a meaning immanent within the signs regardless of any readerly activity.”5 The reader, therefore, is the place to start.