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DOES AENEAS VIOLATE THE TRUCE IN AENEID 11?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2015

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy*
Affiliation:
University of Canterbury, New Zealand, 4 Fendalton Road, Christchurch 8014, New Zealand
*
[email protected]
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Extract

At the beginning of Aeneid 12, a truce is agreed so that Aeneas and Turnus can fight each other in single combat (12.161-215). But this truce is violated through the instigation of Turnus’ sister Juturna (222–56), who in turn has been instigated by Juno (134–60). The Italian Tolumnius casts a spear that kills an Etruscan warrior (257–82). Aeneas pleads for calm and the maintenance of the truce, but he in turn is wounded by an arrow (311–23). Turnus, seeing the Trojans in disarray, rushes into battle, and a general engagement ensues (324–82). So Turnus, even if he did not instigate the breach, does nothing to heal it, and for that reason alone (in the eyes of some commentators) is a criminal, who deserves his ultimate death at the hands of Aeneas.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 65 , Issue 2 , December 2015 , pp. 704 - 713
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Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2015 

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References

1 I am grateful to Lee Fratantuono, Bruce Gibson, Philip Hardie, Stephen Harrison, Richard Jenkyns, Patrick O'Sullivan and Graham Zanker for discussion of aspects of the Aeneid, and especially to Richard Jenkyns for encouragement to write this article and to an anonymous referee for valuable suggestions. None of these should be assumed to agree with anything I say, however.

2 For example: Wlosok, A., ‘Vergil in der neueren Vorschung’, Gnomon 80 (1973), 129–51Google Scholar; Galinsky, K., ‘The anger of Aeneas’, AJPh 109 (1988), 321–48Google Scholar. For a different view, see R.F. Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge, 2001), 288–93.

3 K.W. Gransden (ed.), Aeneid Book XI (Cambridge, 1991); N. Horsfall, Virgil, Aeneid 11: A Commentary (Leiden, 2003). The possibility that the Trojans violate the truce is, however, raised by Fratantuono, L.: see ‘Trickery and deceit in Aeneid XI’, Maia 17 (2005), 33–6;Google Scholar and A Commentary on Virgil, Aeneid XI (Brussels, 2009).

4 It may appear that the minimum must be at least thirteen days, not twelve. However, I will argue later (as suggested to me by R. Jenkyns) that the twelfth day may be the day when hostilities are permitted to resume, rather than the last day of peace. M. Sala discusses chronology in ‘Eneide’, Enciclopedia Virgiliana (Rome, 1985), 2.236-310, at 238. She places the beginning of the truce on the ninth day after the Trojans’ landing, but says nothing about the length of the truce itself and events during it.

5 See Gransden (n. 3), 9. L. Fratantuono, Madness Unchained: A Reading of Virgil's Aeneid (Lanham, MD, 2007), assumes that the action of the book takes place over three days, and remarks at 358: ‘Both my interpretation of the chronology and Gransden's demand an understanding that the truce was broken’. But neither he nor Gransden discusses the implications of this for our view of Aeneas’ behaviour.

6 This was pointed out to me by Richard Jenkyns.

7 O. Taplin, Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad (Oxford, 1992), 283 suggests that the Trojans’ precautions are a matter of poetic rather than military strategy, to lead the eye of the reader out towards the fighting that will inevitably resume. But, even if so, this presupposes that, to Homer's audience, the Trojans’ fear would not have seemed ludicrous or exaggerated.

8 On the Roman system for numbering days of the month, see D. Feeney, Caesar's Calendar (Berkeley, 2007), 152–3.

9 For a useful discussion of the origins of this controversy, see Schmidt, E.A. ‘The meaning of Vergil's Aeneid: American and German approaches’, CW 94 (2001), 145–71Google Scholar.

10 See OLD s.v. pius 3c and s.v. pietas 3d.

11 As O. Lyne, Words and the Poet (Oxford, 1989), 188 says, commenting on this passage: ‘For Aeneas the importance of Dido is not over.’

12 S. Anzinger, Schweigen in römischen Epos (Berlin, 2007), 52 comments aptly on 6.806-7: ‘Das ist ein dringlicher Appell, noch verstärkt durch dieses ‘Kranken-Schwester-Wir’, und eben dadurch fällt der Blick des Lesers nun auf Aeneas: Anchises hat ihm mit leidenschaftlichen Worten die Bedeutung seiner historischen Mission klarzumachen versucht, er hat durch die Pronomina betont bzw. suggeriert, daß dies seine, des Aeneas, Zukunft sei … ; aber all die aufregenden Enthüllungen haben Aeneas nicht aufgerüttelt, „Zögern” und „Furcht” dauern an: stumme Indifferenz, kein Kontakt.’

13 P.R. Hardie, Virgil Aeneid Book IX (Cambridge, 1994), 93, on lines 95–7 suggests that Jupiter may not be ‘honest’ in his reply to Cybele, but does not suggest any reason for this.

14 Cf. S. Mack, Patterns of Time in Vergil (Hamden, 1978), 81: ‘Though he opens the council with a demand for concord, Venus and Juno have only to complain that harmony is impossible for Jupiter to give in. It is a moment of supreme anticlimax … After proclaiming his intention to make [a] decision, he states that he will provide no leadership at all …’. A more traditional view is expressed by R. Heinze, Virgil's Epic Technique, trans. H. and D. Harvey and F. Robertson (London, 1993), 236: ‘… the poet cannot naturally be the one to destroy belief in the poetic pantheon which he has himself set up, nor can he give the state religion a slap in the face.’ But the poetic pantheon is Homer's, not Virgil's, and both of Virgil's messages (the Augustan and the non-political one) require him to use that pantheon in ways that have no Homeric parallel.

15 Cf. Harrison, E.L., ‘The structure of the Aeneid: observations on the links between the books’, ANRW 31.1 (1980), 359–93Google Scholar, at 391 n. 130: ‘[T]o appreciate the rhetorical shifts of Virgil's Jupiter, compare and contrast the two speeches he makes to the two goddesses when he has them alone (1.257ff. to Venus, 12.834ff. to Juno), remembering that in each case he is talking about one and the same future.’

16 As R. Tarrant delicately puts it (perhaps too delicately), in Virgil Aeneid Book XII (Cambridge, 2012), 139 and 303, on line 190, ‘A[eneas] anticipates a stage in which the two peoples remain distinct; the agreement reached between Jupiter and Juno supersedes that vision …’, and on lines 835–6, ‘Here Jupiter goes well beyond what Juno has asked of him …’.

17 Commenting on line 689, Burke, P.F., ‘The role of Mezentius in the Aeneid ’, CJ 69 (1974), 202–9Google Scholar, at 205 and S.J. Harrison, Vergil Aeneid 10 (Oxford, 1991), 236 suggest that there is Homeric precedent for Jupiter's intervention in that Zeus encourages the Trojans into action against the Achaeans in Il. 15.592–604, even though the Achaeans are fated to be victorious in the end. But Zeus does this in accordance with his promise to Thetis that the Achaeans will not succeed in defeating Troy until her son Achilles returns to battle. Jupiter has no such excuse in Aeneid 10.

18 As R. Jenkyns, Virgil's Experience (Oxford, 1998), 318 points out, the close of the fourth Georgic hints at Virgil's attitude towards poetic and political achievement: ‘Great Caesar and modest Virgil each receive the same amount of space—four lines; and as the paragraph sweeps forward, we may reflect that it is the poet in his privacy, not the public man, who occupies the climax’.