An introduction to the book’s thesis of the role played in Virgil’s Aeneid by engagement with the Stoic, specifically Chrysippean, concept of human responsibility or freedom as a means to allow the poem’s gods and heroes to assent meaningfully to providential World Fate. This, it is suggested, becomes a model for Virgil’s guardedly optimistic conception of the Augustan Empire. A bibliography follows of the key pertinent modern literature on the field including works by R. Heinze, M. Bowra, M. Edwards, R. Rabel, M. Schauer, D. Quint, H.-P. Stahl, C. Nash, and J. Farrell. It is concluded that the literature so far has not adequately appreciated the full significance of Virgil’s adoption of Chrysippus’ belief in human responsibility and in World Fate and providence.

Troy is fated to destruction so that Aeneas will fulfil World Fate in settling in Hesperia, as Hector and Creusa tell him, Venus and Creusa convincing him that his Homeric defence of Troy is contrary to fate. Latinus assents to Aeneas as the fated husband of his daughter Lavinia, but is forced to open the Gates of Janus against Aeneas by Amata, whose rejection of known fate sways the day. Turnus knows fate but resists it out of his Homeric sense of honour, which makes him commit mistakes on a general scale, as in the ambush on Aeneas’ troops. Ultimately, however, he comes to accept the importance of fate, and un-Homerically to face Aeneas alone as a sacrifice one-for-all. Aeneas gradually wishes to assent to fate, as when he follows the advice of Nautes to ‘follow’ where fate leads, and in particular when Anchises in the Underworld fires Aeneas with a desire for what is to be. He counters Turnus’ Homeric individualism by his focus on the wider vision of World Fate. However, when he kills Turnus he fails Stoicism, which commended clementia. He therefore remains a Stoic ‘progressor’, not a Sage, even though he does set the stage for World Fate and the formation of Rome.

Jupiter is subject to World Fate just as much as any other god or human in the Aeneid. He has to unravel the secret scroll of fate to find out what it is. He is presented as a Quindecimvir Sacris Faciundis inspecting the Sibylline Oracles. As a Stoic would, he tries to find out fate and see it through, as when he says, ‘the fates shall find a way’, but like a Homeric deity he can be inconsistent and often goes against it. Juno has complete knowledge of what fate has in store, but she rejects it, so that her interventions can only retard fate by causing individual fates like Dido’s or Turnus’. Her reasons are Homeric: her Homeric self-assertion cannot stand the affronts to her dignity. The individual fortunes of her protégés are tragic in the strict sense. Ultimately, however, she assents to fate, and even shapes it in her bargain with Jupiter. Venus has an ‘impulse’, her love of her son, she knows fate from Jupiter, and she assents to it, but she is capricious even towards Aeneas in her various disguises to him, even while healing him. She is devious in her agreement with Juno to manipulate Dido, but she does make sure fate comes about even through her indirection.

The Aeneid is qualifiedly Augustan. It does not suppress the problems of Augustus’ rise. It foregrounds human tragedy within the range of events in suspension, fortunae, though these cannot impede providential World Fate. Dido and Turnus make choices against fate that are up to them; the fact of fate’s providence makes these and other tragedies even more cruel. Virgil combines the Stoic concept of cosmic fate with the contemporary view that the Roman empire was coterminous with the inhabited world, and he innovatively adds that Rome’s universal fate is Stoically providential. He complicates that model with his emphasis on the human tragedy involved in Rome’s establishment. Rather than being Augustan or anti-Augustan, the Aeneid is realistic in its acceptance of the problems of Augustus’ rise and guardedly optimistic chiefly because of Virgil’s independent didacticism for Augustus. He presents as exempla for Augustus Hercules and Aeneas, though the latter’s defective inclemency to Turnus is meant to encourage Augustus’ well-advertised exercise of clemency. Anchises’ words at Aeneid 6.851–3 have a special didactic application to Augustus: ‘tu regere imperio .... memento’.

Stoicism before Chrysippus believed in radical determism, but Chrysippus reintroduced the notion of human responsibility. He argued that it is in our power to assent to an impression or otherwise and work with it, and it is likewise in our power to assent to or to reject World Fate, working with or against it. He illustrated this with his analogy with the top that needs a spin: its spinnability is its inherent cause, but needs an external cause to activate it. In this way, he further posited, we can assign good or bad morality to humans, judging by their will to live Stoically, that is, ‘in accordance with nature’, the Stoics’ highest virtue. Virgil adopts this model in the Aeneid, so that Aeneas can be seen as learning to assent to World Fate, while Juno, Dido and Turnus can ignore or reject it. Virgil in fact incorporates Chrysippus’ analogy in a simile depicting Amata driven by her inherent desire and by the daemonic goddess Allecto to deny her assent to World Fate. However, he locates deviations from World Fate within the Stoic category of ‘events in suspension’, ‘indifferents’ or individual fortunes, which might temporarily challenge World Fate but never negate it.

The figures of Dido and Aeneas in Aeneid 4 illustrate how Virgil adopts Stoic belief in human responsibility. Dido’s naturally determined disposition to fall in love with Aeneas is indeed Homerically co-motivated with Venus and Juno (who can be viewed as Stoic ‘impressions’), but she allows it to resist ‘incognitively’ what she knows from Aeneas and the prophets is fate, Aeneas’ duty to ‘follow Italy’. She is ‘dragged’ by fate through her own noble disposition when she realises her wrongdoing and wishes for her death. Otherwise, her career and her curses on Rome illustrate perfectly the Stoic chain of fate’s causality. Aeneas, despite his growing knowledge of his fate and his natural disposition to fulfil it, at first rejects it because of his Stoically ‘incognitive’ loneliness. In his speech to Dido, he reveals that his assent to fate is still shaky when he states that he is not following Italy ‘of my own will’. The oak simile captures his situation: ‘his mind remains unmoved, tears roll to no purpose.’ But after Mercury urges him to perform his duty to fate, he obeys, ‘rejoicing’ , finally giving his assent to fate, but remaining very much a Stoic ‘moral progressor’.

This chapter presents a detailed examination of the theory of language put forward in the Babylonian cosmogony, Enuma elish. This poem locates the origin of language at the very beginnings of the cosmos’ formation, even before the gods came to be. Accordingly, language is one of the first principles on which the world is founded. Thus, just as there is a temporal and spatial dimension of existence, there is also a linguistic one that is beyond the human and the divine. The poem futher explores this idea in using wordplay and etymology of sacred places, divine objects, and gods. In this context, the patron god of Babylon, Marduk, is conceptualized as a polyonymous cosmic divinity who incorporates into his persona the names of other gods.