Juno's Aeneid

A Battle for Heroic Identity

Joseph Farrell

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691221250, 9780691211169
• eBook ISBN: 9780691211176
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Literature

A major new interpretation of Vergil's epic poem as a struggle between two incompatible versions of the Homeric hero

This compelling book offers an entirely new way of understanding the Aeneid. Many scholars regard Vergil's poem as an attempt to combine Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into a single epic. Joseph Farrell challenges this view, revealing how the Aeneid stages an epic contest to determine which kind of story it will tell—and what kind of hero Aeneas will be.

Farrell shows how this contest is provoked by the transgressive goddess Juno, who challenges Vergil for the soul of his hero and poem. Her goal is to transform the poem into an Iliad of continuous Trojan persecution instead of an Odyssey of successful homecoming. Farrell discusses how ancient critics considered the flexible Odysseus the model of a good leader but censured the hero of the Iliad, the intransigent Achilles, as a bad one. He describes how the battle over which kind of leader Aeneas will prove to be continues throughout the poem, and explores how this struggle reflects in very different ways on the ethical legitimacy of Rome’s emperor, Caesar Augustus.

By reframing the Aeneid in this way, Farrell demonstrates how the purpose of the poem is to confront the reader with an urgent decision between incompatible possibilities and provoke uncertainty about whether the poem is a celebration of Augustus or a melancholy reflection on the discontents of a troubled age.

1

Arms and a Man

Where to Begin?

The Aeneid opens with a brief formal proem announcing its theme and summarizing its plot. Readers have long regarded the poem’s first, thematic words, “arms and a man” (arma virumque), as emblematic of its Iliadic and Odyssean “halves.” Juan Luis de la Cerda, the last and greatest of Vergil’s Renaissance commentators, put the case very clearly when he wrote, “the entire Aeneid is contained in these two words, ‘arms’ and ‘man,’ 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.”¹ This view of the poem goes back at least to Servius, who notes more explicitly that the poem’s narrator announces his subjects in a different order from that of his narration, “for he tells first of Aeneas’ wanderings and afterwards about war.”² Here Servius anticipates a question that readers might ask and tries to gloss over the problem by referring to a standard rhetorical device—in this case a figure of speech called hysteroproteron—basically, “reverse order.”³ 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.⁴

So it is in this case. Servius’ 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 Vergil’s masterpiece.

As for the Aeneid itself, didn’t 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 Aeneas’ voyage preceded the wars that were subsequently fought in Italy.⁵

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 Servius’ comment on “arms” in line 1 we find this: “Many explain in various ways why Vergil begins with ‘arms,’ 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.”⁶ This biography, which served as a preface to Servius’ 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 Vergil’s career, the so-called “pre-proemium,” 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 “arms” as the poem’s first word. Servius’ note also indicates that the choice of this word was a topic of learned discussion within about a century of the poet’s death.⁷

It is also possible—I would say, likely—that this part of Servius’ comment derives from some predecessor who had his eye on a Homeric commentary, specifically one on the Iliad.⁸ 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: “They discuss why he began with ‘anger,’ 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.”⁹ These parallel comments are interesting, not in spite of, but because of the fact that Servius does not share the Homeric scholiast’s concern with words of ill omen, catharsis, or the sublime. Remember, Servius himself does not even think that “arms” 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 “anger.” Nevertheless, the similar form of these two comments raises the possibility that they share a common origin. The Homeric scholiast’s ultimate source was a commentary on the Iliad in monographic form.¹⁰ 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 “arms” is the poem’s 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 poem’s 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 Iliad—and not the Odyssey.¹¹

There are quite a few borrowings of this kind in Servius and other ancient Vergil commentaries. Many of them are extremely tralatician—notes on geography and mythology, for instance, travel freely among all kinds of ancient exegetical works.¹² It is also clear that Vergil himself made use of such scholarship in his imitation of Homer and other Greek authors.¹³ But some comments, including this one, seem to indicate a desire on the commentator’s part to emulate Homer’s critics in the same way that Vergil emulated Homer. An Aeneid commentary that began by asking why “arms” was the poem’s 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 “something greater than the Iliad.”¹⁴

The idea that this correspondence between arma and mênin 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 Orsini—also known, and perhaps better known, as Ursinus—who first pointed out that the Aeneid proem as a whole resembles that of the Odyssey.¹⁵

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 gods’ violence, on account of savage Juno’s unforgetting anger,

after many sufferings in war, as well, until he founded a city. (Aeneid 1.1–7)

Sing me, Muse, the versatile man, who was much driven astray,

after he sacked the holy citadel of Troy,

and learned many people’s 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 1.1–5)

The similarities are obvious. Note in particular that the Latin word for “man” (virum) translates the Greek andra as literally as possible. In contrast “arms” (arma) connotes warfare, but does not actually mean “anger” (mênin). In both cases “man” is modified by a limiting relative clause of description alluding to the heroes’ difficult journeys from Troy; the words “much” or “many” appear in anaphora; the demonstrative pronoun “he” 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 heroes’ 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 lines—the first complete sentence—of the Odyssey.¹⁶

Ursinus’ 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: “ ‘Arma virumque;’ this is an imitation of the opening of the Odyssey, ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε κ.τ.λ. [andra moi ennepe etc.] … The words are not a hendiadys, but give the character of the subject and then the subject itself.”¹⁷ That is to say, remarkably, in Conington’s mind (and in sharp contrast to most ideas about epic poetry) the first word of the poem hardly counts: the reader should construe “arms” 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 “man.” Conington thus anticipates a more recent trend towards interpreting the Aeneid primarily in Odyssean terms.¹⁸ However, most readers who consult his commentary today do not find the matter treated so decisively. After Conington’s 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...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note to the Reader
• Introduction
• 1. Arms and a Man
• 2. Third Ways
• 3. Reading Aeneas
• Appendix: mene in-and Menin
• Works Cited
• Index of Passages Cited
• General Index