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Action and Emotion in Aeneas1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

John R. Wilson
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Extract

In the Aeneid there is a tendency to dissociate action from emotion. Action is often dictated by a strong sense of duty, while emotion, instead of being a motivating power, becomes an idle accompaniment that contradicts the meaning of the act. This is most clearly observed in the person of Aeneas, particularly in those Odyssean books when he schools himself in a ‘new heroism’ whose very basis seems to depend on such a dissociation. Thus, in the midst of Troy's destruction, his natural desire is to die fighting for his city. If he had acted out this desire (as he begins to do) he would have been conforming to the standards of the old, Homeric, heroism. But he is caught in the complicated fabric of Rome's future, and the old, simple heroism, founded on a natural and impulsive nobility, is not for him. He must go against his natural desire and, as a runaway, escape the doomed city to refound it elsewhere. And yet his heart is set on the city he has lost, not on the city he must build, as becomes clear in the succeeding books. In Book iii he envies the miniature Troy which Helenus and Andromache have built in Epirus, while in Book iv he longs to stay with Dido and share in her city. The division he so frequently evinces in these early books between what he has to do and what he wants to do can be considered as part of a training in pietas, in devotion to his highest duty, which is consummated in the underworld encounter with his father Anchises in Book vi.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , April 1969 , pp. 67 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1969

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References

page 67 note 2 For an analysis of the Aeneid in somewhat similar terms see Parry, Adam's outstanding article, ‘The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid’, Arion ii, no. 4 (1963), 66–8Google Scholar0, reprinted in Virgil, a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Commager, Steele (Twentieth Century Views series) (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), 107–23.Google Scholar

page 68 note 1 The discomfiture of Aeneas is perhaps mirrored in a quandary of the author, who lets Aeneas' speech trail off with the metrically incomplete line Italiam non sponte sequor. (Aen. iv. 361)Google Scholar

page 69 note 1 For the application of the lacrimae to Aeneas rather than to Anna or Dido see Pöschl, Viktor, The Art of Vergil (tr. Seligson, ) (Ann Arbor, 1962), 46–7.Google Scholar

page 69 note 2 Another figure who elicits similar feelings is the young Marcellus, who appears as a sacrificial figure at the end of the catalogue of Roman heroes in Book vi. Like Pallas, he promises so much, and achieves so little. The waste of death overclouds the brightest triumphs that Anchises predicts for the imperial city.

tu Marcellus eris. manibus date lilia plenis,

purpureos spargam flores animamque nepotis

his saltern accumulem donis, et fungar inani

munere. (Aen. vi. 883–6)Google Scholar

From a practical point of view, Anchises' suggestion to Aeneas is wild. Anchises will scatter flowers on the as yet unborn soul of Marcellus in a gesture that is consciously futile, inanis. The desperate absurdity of this points at once to the strength of his emotion and the futility it engenders. The only compensation for the loss of Marcellus is the poetry itself.

page 70 note 1 See Clausen, Wendell, An Interpretation of the Aeneid, in Virgil…, ed. Commager, 82Google Scholar. This is a thorough reworking and, for the most part, expansion of an article in HSCP 68 (1964), 139–47Google Scholar. The observation on Aeneas' feelings for Ascanius is not in the original version of the essay.

page 72 note 1 See Clausen, Wendell, op. cit., 84.Google Scholar

page 72 note 2 See Johnson, W. R., ‘Aeneas and the Ironies of Pietas’, CJ lx (1965), 360–4.Google Scholar

page 73 note 1 For Turnus as a foil for Aeneas see Henry, James, Aeneidea…, v. 4 (Dublin, 1889), 128–30.Google Scholar

page 74 note 1 Putnam, Michael C. J., The Poetry of the Aeneid (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)Google Scholar, ch. 4. See also Poe, Joe Park, ‘Success and Failure in the Mission of Aeneas’, TAPA 96 (1965), 321–6Google Scholar. Kenneth Quinn takes a similar position in his Virgil's Aeneid: A Critical Description (London, 1968)Google Scholar. See especially 341–6, where Quinn discusses what he calls ‘implicit comment’ on Aeneas (conveniently ignoring some very explicit comments).

page 75 note 1 Lawrence, D. H., Studies in Classic American Literature, section i (The Spirit of the Place) (London, 1922).Google Scholar