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Octavian and Orestes Again

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Michael Dewar
Michael Dewar
Affiliation:
The University of Calgary
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Extract

In an earlier paper it was argued that in the famous chariot simile at the end of the first Georgic, Virgil imitates a passage from the Choephoroi of Aeschylus describing the onset of Orestes' madness. It was also suggested that Virgil may have been intentionally drawing a parallel between Octavian and the son of Agamemnon. Orestes avenged his father by murdering his mother Clytemnestra, but in so doing he deepened the guilt that afflicted Argos and thus gave new life to the curse that lay on the house of Tantalus. So too, perhaps, Virgil is warning Octavian that in seeking to avenge his ‘father’ Caesar by killing his murderers at Philippi he is precipitating civil war, and so continuing the cycle of blood-guilt which similarly afflicts the Roman people. If such a suggestion seems fantastic it can now be supported by analogy from an explicit parallelism of Octavian and Orestes in a passage of Claudian. The first part of the passage in question reads as follows:

Maurusius Atlas

Gildonis Furias, Alaricum barbara Peuce

nutrierat, qui saepe tuum sprevere profana

mente patrem. Thracum venienti e flnibus alter

Hebri clausit aquas; alter praecepta vocantis

respuit auxiliisque ad proxima bella negatis

abiurata palam Libyae possederat arva

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , December 1990 , pp. 580 - 582
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1990

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References

1 ‘ctavian and Orestes in the Finale of the First Georgic’, CQ 38 [1988], 563–5Google Scholar. For the identification of the charioteer with Octavian cf. Servius ad he.: ‘hoc vult dicere: res publica quidem habet optimum imperatorem, sed tanta sunt vitia temporum praeteritorum, quae in dies singulos aucta sunt, quemadmodum in processu equorum cursus augetur, ut ea, licet optimus rector refrenare non possit, sicut et auriga ferventi cursu equos non potest plerumque revocare.’

2 For the war against Gildo see Claudian, , De Bello Gildonico, esp. 1.241–52Google Scholar, J. B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire (repr. New York, 1958), i. 121–6, and Cameron, A., Claudian. Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius (Oxford, 1970), pp. 93–123Google Scholar.

3 Honorius thus exacts the penalty Theodosius would have inflicted on Gildo had death not raised him to Heaven (Bell. Gild. 1.253–5), and fulfils the sacred task entrusted to him by his father's ghost (Bell. Gild. 1.314).

4 Cf. Tac. Ann. 1.10 ‘dicebatur contra: pietatem erga parentem et tempora rei publicae obtentui sumpta.’

5 If so, it may have a left a trace in Lucan too. At De Bello Civili 7.777f., during the night after Pharsalus, Caesar is tormented by the ghosts of his slain fellow-citizens, and is compared to Orestes hounded by the Furies: ‘haud alios nondum Scythica purgatus in ara / Eumenidum vidit voltus Pelopeus Orestes.’ Claudian's contemporary Prudentius similarly manifests considerable hostility to Augustus on the grounds of sexual immorality (something of an obsession for Prudentius) at c. Symm. 1.245–61.