2 - Imtheachta Aeniasa and its place in medieval Irish textual history

Summary

Few statements about the status of literary texts in their respective textual cultures would appear to be uncontroversial, but one of the uncontroversial ones concerns the status of Virgil’s Aeneid as an epic. Much more controversial are the status of Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley) as national epic in medieval Irish textual history and its relationship to Classical models in general and to Virgil’s Aeneid in particular. This chapter has two points of departure, first the assumption that Táin Bó Cúailnge represents an Irish equivalent of Virgil’s Aeneid, discussed in detail in Abigail Burnyeat’s chapter to this book under the perspective of compilatio, and second the fact, which is often ignored in this context, that there existed in medieval Irish textual culture an Irish Aeneid proper in the form of Imtheachta Aeniasa (The Adventures of Aeneas), the medieval Irish ‘translation’ of Virgil’s Aeneid. Burnyeat usefully reminds us that it was ‘the historical and genealogical material [of Classical narrative] which was of great interest and significance to medieval readers and adaptors’, more so than its heroic and personal aspects, and that ‘among the grammatical and rhetorical expositions which make up the greater proportion of the discussion [of Virgil’s work] we also find evaluations of genre, and historical and chronological discussion that makes it clear that the basic critical categorization of the Aeneid in particular was as historia’. This is true also of Imtheachta Aeniasa, at least in its extant manuscript form and transmission: its positioning within a larger historical cycle is effected by compilatio, the addition of a historical prologue derived from Dares, and of a historical epilogue.

In his recent ground-breaking study Heroic Saga and Classical Epic in Medieval Ireland, Brent Miles has successfully argued that the rhetorical strategies of what he calls ‘medieval Irish classicism’ inform both Togail Troí (The Destruction of Troy), the Irish adaptation of Dares’s De Excidio Troiae Historia (History of the Destruction of Troy), and Táin Bó Cúailnge. Questions concerning a reflection of this classicizing style in the Irish version of the Aeneid and the implications of its author’s stylistic choices for the position of this text within medieval Irish textual history form the immediate starting points for my chapter.