Where to Begin?
The Aeneid opens with a brief formal proem announcing its theme and summarizing its plot. Readers have long regarded the poemâs first, thematic words, âarms and a manâ (arma virumque), as emblematic of its Iliadic and Odyssean âhalves.â Juan Luis de la Cerda, the last and greatest of Vergilâs Renaissance commentators, put the case very clearly when he wrote, âthe entire Aeneid is contained in these two words, âarmsâ and âman,â with an even division between the books. It deals with the man, that is, with Aeneas, in the first six and with arms in the latter six.â This view of the poem goes back at least to Servius, who notes more explicitly that the poemâs narrator announces his subjects in a different order from that of his narration, âfor he tells first of Aeneasâ wanderings and afterwards about war.â Here Servius anticipates a question that readers might ask and tries to gloss over the problem by referring to a standard rhetorical deviceâin this case a figure of speech called hysteroproteronâbasically, âreverse order.â Explanations of this sort are not very satisfying, but many of them call attention to issues that were the subject of learned debate in earlier antiquity.
So it is in this case. Serviusâ near contemporary, Macrobius, sheds further light on this issue by relating it to the program of Homeric imitation that students are still taught to recognize in Vergilâs masterpiece.
As for the Aeneid itself, didnât it borrow from Homer, taking first the wanderings from the Odyssey and then the battles from the Iliad? Yes, because the order of events necessarily changed the order of the narrative: whereas in Homer the war was fought at Troy first, with Ulysses become a wanderer on his return from Troy, in Vergil Aeneasâ voyage preceded the wars that were subsequently fought in Italy.
The question is discussed in such simple terms that it may strike the modern reader as inconsequential. But one should not be too hasty to draw this conclusion. If we return to Serviusâ comment on âarmsâ in line 1 we find this: âMany explain in various ways why Vergil begins with âarms,â but their opinions are obviously meaningless, since it is clear that he made his beginning elsewhere, as was demonstrated in the foregoing biography of the poet.â This biography, which served as a preface to Serviusâ Aeneid commentary, is almost entirely the work of Suetonius, the prolific scholar and imperial official who compiled it several centuries earlier, around 100 CE. In it, Suetonius quotes a four-line summary of Vergilâs career, the so-called âpre-proemium,â which he says Vergil himself composed to stand immediately before line 1 of the poem. It was supposedly one of just two passages that the editors or literary executors appointed by Augustus actually excised before releasing the Aeneid to the public. Few if any now believe this story, and even though Servius did, his own testimony admits that many before him did not and regarded âarmsâ as the poemâs first word. Serviusâ note also indicates that the choice of this word was a topic of learned discussion within about a century of the poetâs death.
It is also possibleâI would say, likelyâthat this part of Serviusâ comment derives from some predecessor who had his eye on a Homeric commentary, specifically one on the Iliad. No such work has come down to us intact, but in the marginal notes, or scholia, that survive in some medieval manuscripts of Homer, we find the following comment: âThey discuss why he began with âanger,â such an ill-omened word. For these two reasons: first, so that by means of this emotion he might cleanse the relevant part of the soul, and so that he might make his listeners more receptive in respect of grandeur.â These parallel comments are interesting, not in spite of, but because of the fact that Servius does not share the Homeric scholiastâs concern with words of ill omen, catharsis, or the sublime. Remember, Servius himself does not even think that âarmsâ is the first word of the poem; the ostensible point of his comment is to refute those who do, while no one ever doubted that the Iliad begins with âanger.â Nevertheless, the similar form of these two comments raises the possibility that they share a common origin. The Homeric scholiastâs ultimate source was a commentary on the Iliad in monographic form. Servius probably did not use Homeric commentaries directly, but he definitely used earlier Aeneid commentaries, and some of these drew on Homeric commentaries by Greek scholars. I therefore infer that in the first issue he raises Servius quotes what one of his predecessors wrote, and that this predecessor was quoting the same Iliad commentary that would later be excerpted in the marginal notes of our medieval Homer manuscripts. In its original form, the note that Servius adapts, instead of explaining away the question of why âarmsâ is the poemâs first word, may have dealt with the problem in a more interesting way, like the Homeric commentary on which it is based. Another inference to be drawn from this similarity between the two exegetical traditions is that some ancient Vergilian critic, interpreting the first word of the Aeneid as a reference to the poemâs Iliadic program, decided to open his commentary on the poem in the same way that one of his Homeric predecessors had opened a commentary on the Iliadâand not the Odyssey.
There are quite a few borrowings of this kind in Servius and other ancient Vergil commentaries. Many of them are extremely tralaticianânotes on geography and mythology, for instance, travel freely among all kinds of ancient exegetical works. It is also clear that Vergil himself made use of such scholarship in his imitation of Homer and other Greek authors. But some comments, including this one, seem to indicate a desire on the commentatorâs part to emulate Homerâs critics in the same way that Vergil emulated Homer. An Aeneid commentary that began by asking why âarmsâ was the poemâs first word looks like the work of someone who regarded the Aeneid as rivaling the Iliad in particular. There would be nothing surprising in this. Propertius, the first Roman writer who specifically mentioned the Aeneid, famously called it âsomething greater than the Iliad.â
The idea that this correspondence between arma and mĂȘnin signals a more general one between the Aeneid and the Iliad informs the modern reception of the poem, as we shall presently see. This perspective, however, can be properly understood only with reference to the alternative. It was the Renaissance scholar Fulvio Orsiniâalso known, and perhaps better known, as Ursinusâwho first pointed out that the Aeneid proem as a whole resembles that of the Odyssey.
I sing arms and a man, who first from the coasts of Troy
came to Italy, exiled by fate, and to Lavinian
shores, much driven astray, he, on land and on the sea,
by the godsâ violence, on account of savage Junoâs unforgetting anger,
after many sufferings in war, as well, until he founded a city. (Aeneid 1.1â7)
Sing me, Muse, the versatile man, who was much driven astray,
after he sacked the holy citadel of Troy,
and learned many peopleâs cities and mind,
and endured many sufferings, he, on the sea, within his heart,
striving to save his life and the homecoming of his companions. (Odyssey 1.1â5)
The similarities are obvious. Note in particular that the Latin word for âmanâ (virum) translates the Greek andra as literally as possible. In contrast âarmsâ (arma) connotes warfare, but does not actually mean âangerâ (mĂȘnin). In both cases âmanâ is modified by a limiting relative clause of description alluding to the heroesâ difficult journeys from Troy; the words âmuchâ or âmanyâ appear in anaphora; the demonstrative pronoun âheâ is used resumptively (according to Greek usage in the fourth line of the Odyssey and at the expense of normal latinity in line 3 of the Aeneid). Stress is laid upon the heroesâ sufferings on the sea. One hero sacks a city, the other founds one; and so on. At the level of diction and sentence structure as well as theme, the opening seven lines of the Aeneid do in fact very closely resemble the first five linesâthe first complete sentenceâof the Odyssey.
Ursinusâ view of the matter held sway for a long time. In fact, the English commentator John Conington, writing about three centuries after Ursinus, echoes him while adding a surprising point: â âArma virumque;â this is an imitation of the opening of the Odyssey, áŒÎœÎŽÏα ÎŒÎżÎč áŒÎœÎœÎ”ÏΔ Îș.Ï.λ. [andra moi ennepe etc.] ⊠The words are not a hendiadys, but give the character of the subject and then the subject itself.â That is to say, remarkably, in Coningtonâs mind (and in sharp contrast to most ideas about epic poetry) the first word of the poem hardly counts: the reader should construe âarmsâ as a kind of modifier rather than as a specifically Iliadic element, and should understand that the Aeneid begins unambiguously as another Odyssey, announcing its theme with full emphasis on âman.â Conington thus anticipates a more recent trend towards interpreting the Aeneid primarily in Odyssean terms. However, most readers who consult his commentary today do not find the matter treated so decisively. After Coningtonâs death in 1869, his work was revised and expanded under the supervision of Henry Nettleship, who scrupulously indicated, whenever he added an opinion of his own, that he was spea...