Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T08:26:34.761Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Immovable Delos: Aeneid 3.73–98 and the Hymns of Callimachus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Alessandro Barchiesi
Alessandro Barchiesi
Affiliation:
University of Verona
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the following two passages we read Apollo's epiphany to (respectively) the Trojan leader Aeneas and Callimachus

Type
Articles
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , December 1994 , pp. 438 - 443
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 ‘Deceitful Crete; Aeneid 3.84ff. and the Hymns of Callimachus’, CQ 43 (1993), 255–7, at p. 255.Google Scholar

2 E.g. Paschalis, M., ‘Virgil and the Delphic oracle’, Philologus 130 (1986), 44–68, at p. 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar and n. 60 (with bibliography). The theme of miraculous door-opening is spared for another Apolline consultation, Aen. 6.81.

3 Labate, M., MD 18 (1987), 76–80.Google Scholar

4 Delos is latent in tellus by assonance. Colitur is explained by Conington and by R. D. Williams ad loc. as simply meaning ‘is inhabited = exists’, but that seems reductive. The verb, repeated at 77 coli dedit, implies that a promise made in the most ancient text dedicated to the Delian cult, the Homeric hymn to Apollo, has now come true: Leto had promised that the small island would be honoured (as a holy place, as a site of oracles) in return for the hospitality given to her, cf. Hymn Hom. Apoll. 53, 72, 88. Now coli suggests that the island is not only inhabited, but cultivated, visited, hallowed and maybe even that it is – unusually for an island – the addressee of a religious hymn: the Callimachean Hymn to Delos, model for this Vergilian episode. Those meanings are all within the semantic range of coli.

5 On the epithet see below, n. 15, and cf. Mineur, W. H., Callimachus, Hymn to Delos (Leiden, 1984), 61.Google Scholar

6 Note further Quint, D., ‘Repetition and ideology in the Aeneid’, MD 23 (1989), 9–54, at pp. 14–16Google Scholar: in a following episode, the Strophades adventure, the idea of the floating island surfaces again.

7 Heinze, R., Virgils epische Technik (Leipzig and Berlin, 1915 etc.), 101.Google Scholar

8 E.g. Paschalis, art. cit., 54–6; Masters, J., Poetry and Civil War in Lucan's ‘Bellum Civile’ (Cambridge, 1992), 184Google Scholar. A comparison with the much more conventional procedure of Cumaean consultation at Aen. 6.42–102 is instructive: as the narrative unfolds, religious practice becomes closer to ‘historical’ standards. Here Vergil seems to be fulfilling the island's prayer uttered at Hymn Hom. Apoll. 79–81 – a request left unanswered by Greek culture: not just a sanctuary for the god, but also an oracle for men (see above, n. 4, for this technique of saturating an archaic model).

9 Williams, F., Callimachus. Hymn to Apollo (Oxford, 1978), 15–17Google Scholar; Paschalis, art. cit., 55; Heyworth, art. cit., 255; Beschi, L., EV s.v. Delo (1985) II 21.Google Scholar

10 This vibration is so magical that it produces an effect of prosody that is unique in the whole poem, -que being treated as a long before a simple liquid consonant, liminaQUĒ laurusque. Ovid imitates the scene in a Delphic consultation, and the effect is ‘routinized’–as is predictable when Delphi supplants Delos: Met. 15.634–5 et locus et laurus (!)…intremuere simul. On the systematic contrast in the ‘politics’ of seismology between Delphic vibrations and Delian stability, cf. Panessa, G., Fonti greche e latine per la storia dell'ambiente e del clima nel mondo greco (Pisa, 1991), I 325.Google Scholar

Vergil adapts to his Delian wonder a Lucretian register of sublimity: omnia saepe gravi tremere et concussa repente (6.122, quoted by Hardie [below, n. 11], 225) is active in the clausula tremere omnia visa repente, and helps to sustain the effect of cosmic profundity. The pious reaction of the Trojans, summissi petimus terram (3.93) inverts a Lucretian model, where the subject is the perverse results of a superstition fostered by mantic practice: terram genibus summissa petebat (1.92).

11 Virgil's Aeneid. Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford, 1986), 225Google Scholar ‘such things in Virgil sometimes appear to have become merely a stylistical mannerism… but often there is a more specific point’.

12 ‘Contamination’ includes not just the hymnic models in Callimachus, but also Apollonius, whose presence in Book III is ubiquitous. Apollo's mysterious epiphany in the desert island of Thynias and the reaction of the Argonauts (Arg. 2.674–719) are surely relevant here, especially when the whole island is shaken (2.680) as the god moves on. Note particularly Hunter, R., ‘Apollo and the Argonauts: two notes on Ap. Rhod. 2. 669–719’, MH 43 (1986), 50–60Google Scholar; Feeney, D. C., The Gods in Epic (Oxford, 1991), 75–6Google Scholar (‘Apollo is not simply seen… the reaction of nature shows that he is “physically” and weightily “there”’. There is a studied contrast between the violent physicality of the epiphany and its lack of narrative consequences; conversely, Vergil's epiphany combines indirect manifestation and a strong dividend at the level of plot).

13 We should be wary of underestimating the link between the epiphany at the start of Hymn II, where the god's presence is introduced, and the programmatic revelation at the end of the hymn, where the god's voice patronizes Callimachus' modern poetics (lines 105–12). Thus the moment when Aeneas undertakes his epic journey is sanctioned by the god of slender and pure poetry. There is an interesting effect of literary genealogy and recapitulation: Apollo's Delian cult recalls simultaneously the modern poetry of Callimachus' Hymns II and IV, and the ‘Homer’ of the archaic Hymn to Apollo (an important model and foil for Callimachus), the blind singer who is traditionally (Cert. Horn, et Hes. 315–21) tied to the remote songs of Delian festivals. Apollo's voice exploits a Callimachean licence but also quotes (and manipulates, see below) two lines from the Iliad. Setting his epic hero in motion, Vergil collapses the distance between a neo-Homeric and a post-Callimachean poetics.

14 On Pindar and Callimachus, Bing, P., The Well-read Muse (Göttingen, 1988), 96–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The idea of Delos as a steadfast island is implied in other points of Hymn IV: 306 σϕαλς οὖδας (cf. Mineur ad loc.) and 325 ἰστη (cf. Bing, 102; 142–3, quoting Plat. Phaedr. 247a).

15 Schol. Call, hymn 4.11 p. 66 Pf. ἄτροπος· ἤγουν κνητος κα ἂσειστος· γρ Δλος οὐδποτν σειμνη τινσσεται; Hdt. 6.98 οὔτως οὐδν ἦν εικς κινηθναι Δλον τ πρν οσαν κνητον; Thuc. 2.8.3 ἔτι δ Δλος κινθη λγον πρ τοτων, πρτερον οὔπω σεισεισα ϕ᾽ οὖ Ἒλληες μμνηνται. Perhaps the coupling of immota and contemnere ventos shows that Vergil alludes to hymn 4.11 ἠνεμεσσα κα ἂτροπος, reading ἂτροπος through the interpretive tradition preserved in the part of the scholion to 4.11 that I have just quoted (the scholiastic alternative, ‘unfilled’, is favoured by most modern commentators).

Delos' immunity from earthquakes is attested as a piece of Varronian information by Plin. N.H. 4.66 ‘Delos, quae diu fluctuata, ut proditur, sola motum terrae non sensit ad M. Varronis aetatem’.

16 Waverings, misunderstandings and renewed consultations are traditional ingredients in the narratives of colonisation oracles (Horsfall, N., Vergilius 35 (1989), 9–13Google Scholar; Virgilio: l'epopea in alambicco [Napoli, 1991], 81)Google Scholar: but what is at stake here is more than a ktisis, it is the birth of a world power.

17 γνος πντεσσιν replaces βη Τρώεσσιν. Cf. Heyworth (art. cit.), 256 and n. 3. The god of Callimachean poetics (above, n. 13) quotes, and updates, two lines from the Iliad, the lines which serve as a stepping stone to start the new epic (cf. Iliad 20.302 ‘destiny wants Aeneas to come out alive…’) and are the main authority to legitimize Vergil as a successor to Homer.

18 Among the many interpretations proposed for the obscure μϕοτρη μεσγεια, L. Koenen's suggestion (‘Die Adaptation ägyptischer Königsideologie am Ptolemäerhof’, in AA. VV., Egypt and the Hellenistic World [Leuven, 1983], 186–7)Google Scholar that Callimachus is echoing the traditional formulae that describe the Egyptian kingdom (‘Lord of the two lands, of lands and islands, wherever the sun shines…’ et sim.) is especially rewarding. In general, I take the three lines 168–70 as a deliberate blurring of boundaries and temporal perspectives. Apollo's foresight can be tied to a contemporary assessment of Ptolemaic rule, though I am not convinced by attempts to use it as a precise mapping of Ptolemaic expansionism in Coelesiria and the Aegean; but this is surely not the end of the story. It would be awkward to imagine the embryonic Apollo setting a geographical limit and a deadline to the growth of the empire: the poetics of encomium requires an open-ended dimension, and the meaning is intended to ‘grow’ together with the expected success of the laudandus.

19 Another two-edged omen in Vergil is Venus' sign (Aen. 8.520–40): it allows a double reading, a promise of victory for Aeneas, a dark intimation of civil war, with an impending personal loss, for Evander's house (see my comments in La traccia del modello [Pisa, 1984], 80–90). The reference to Aeneas and the location of the omen on the Arcadian Palatine are intersecting, rather than complementary, forces. See also O'Hara, J. J., Death and the Optimistic Prophecy in Vergil's Aeneid (Princeton, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 The threatening god is Ares, sitting on a Thracian mountain (4.63–5). Aeneas has just quitted Thrace, Mavortia tellus (cf. 3.13), where his devotion to Mars (35 Gradivumque patrem) and the mistaken attempt to refashion a tradition (18 Aeneadasque…fingo) have come to nothing. Apollo ousts Ares in the Vergilian narrative; again, the tension may be indebted to the poetics of Hymn IV (cf. 58, with Bing, op. cit. [n. 14], 122 ‘The realization of Callimachean song is part of the new order that comes with Apollo's birth, and it helps overturn the old. To Callimachus, the most significant representative of the old order is Ares. He constructs the poem in such a way that Ares is the force that must, by various means, be overthrown.’).

21 4.361 Italiam non sponte sequor and 4.381 i, sequere Italiam ventis… should be set apart, since sequor can mean ‘seek to reach a stationary object’, but I cannot exclude the possibility that ‘fleeing Italy’ is present by implication.

22 A few lines before, Aeneas has seen a representation of the Cretan labyrinth on the doors of Apollo's Cumaean temple. The description at 6.27 hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error, parallel to Aen. 5.591 (the lusus Troiae) frangeret indeprensus et inremeabilis error, alludes to Cat. 64.114 tecti frustraretur inobservabilis error, but this whole tradition of ‘unnatural’ lines would not exist without Call, hymn 4.311 Πασιϕης κα γναμπτν ἔδος σκολιο λαβυρνθου, an anomalous word-distribution for a perverted architecture (‘ein krummer Vers für das “krumme” Labyrinth‘, Fränkel, H., Wege und Formen frühgriechischen Denkens (München, 1968), 130 n. 4)Google Scholar. In the same context, the Athenians are called Cecropidae (6.21) which looks again like an echo of Hymn IV (315: ‘an gleicher Versstelle in gleichem Zusammenhang’, Norden ad 6.21).

Daedalus' self-reflexive work – an artistic representation of a work of art, by the same author – recapitulates the importance of the labyrinth theme (see now Doob, P., The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages [Ithaca and London, 1990])Google Scholar in the first part of the Aeneid: the main articulations are Aeneas' errores and the lusus Troiae, but again we might underline a contribution from Callimachus' Delian poem. The lusus Troiae has a labyrinthine design (Aen. 5.588–92) exactly like the Delian Crane-dance described by Callimachus (4.310–15): the dance had been instituted by Theseus as an imitation of the twists and turns of the maze (Plut. Thes. 21) and the dance-floor was around the Delian altar (Poll. 4.101); exactly the place where Apollo has started Aeneas' labyrinthine errores.