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The Camillus Factory: Per Astra AD Ardeam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

John Henderson
John Henderson*
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge
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Extract

      None but dry-eyed, calculating, angular little gentlemen can take much delight in the studies of the University.
      (Tennyson on Cambridge)

Hard to believe. We are told something obvious, something reassuring, something foundational by Servius at the outset of the Aeneid:

totius autem Italiae curiosissimum fuisse Vergilium multifariam apparet.

(ad Aen. 1.44)

Virgil cared the most to know all Italy—it's obvious in many a way.

Any Roman rhetoric graduate knew that the surefire way to subvert all arguments is to argue that they prevaricate: clearly, since texts are systemically interpretable, there is always a gap between the ‘multifarious’ moves they make and their ‘totality’, there is always a point passed by which could, so arguably should, have been featured; copiousness is always interested distraction. Thus, as a display of love supreme for all Italy, the Aeneid revels in wholesale incuria, acknowledging the guilt of pretention in massive, genocidal, proportions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , 2000 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 2000

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References

This paper was presented to a seminar on ‘Virgil’s Social Memory’ held by the Department of Classics at Stanford University (23 Feb. 2001). My thanks to Alessandro Barchiesi for the invitation. It is dedicated to Philip Hardie; and to Jamie Masters, epic poet of (the unfinishable) Ardea ad astra.

1. Aen. 7.12,24; cf. Basto, R., ‘The Grazing of Circe’s Shore: A Note on Aeneid 7.10’, CW 76 (1982),42fGoogle Scholar.

2. Augustus coins his own phrase for spontaneous fealty: iurauit in mea uerba tota Italia sponte sua. Re-distribution of phrasing is required before a great Latinist’s special pleading can represent the sense t/his way: ‘The clearest proof is in Augustus’ own words at Res Gestae 25.2, “The whole of Italy swore allegiance to me of its own free will…”’ (West, D., ‘The End and the Meaning: Aeneid 12.791–842’, in H.P. Stahl (ed.) Vergil’s Aeneid: Augustan Epic and Political Context (London 1998), 303–08Google Scholar, at 306. My emphases).

3. Cf. Mantua, diues auis (10.201) – Ardea…dictus auis (7.411f.): ‘grandfathers’ (Dyson, J.T., ‘Birds, Grandfathers, and Neoteric Sorcery in Aeneid 4.254 and 7.412’, CQ 47 [1997], 314–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Paschalis, M., Virgil’s Aeneid: Semantic Relations and Proper Names [Oxford 1997], 351Google Scholar, on ‘semantic interaction’ between auuslauis; Greek derivation—ὀρvιθóμαvτις—can be a plus in Latin poetry, not least in Homeric epic). Ovid good as tells us so at Am. 3.15.7f., Mantua Vergilio gaudet…/Paelignae dicar gloria gentis ego (cf. ib. 11–14), as Silius saw, Pun. 8.592–94 (with Verona, 595 ∼ Am. 3.15.7).

4. Cato Origines 2 fr. 19 Chassignet (= D. Serv. ad Aen 7.697) had told the world how King Propertius of Veii fostered the founding of the sacred wood at Capena.

5. Ovid is the essential route from Virgil to Vegius: omitted e.g. by Mack, S., ‘The Birth of War: A Reading of Aeneid 7’, in C. Perkell (ed.), Reading Vergil’s Aeneid: An Interpretive Guide (Norman OK 1999), 128–47Google Scholar, at 324 n.18; explained by Thomas, R.F., Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge 2001), 279–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ‘Maphaeus Vegius and Aeneid 13’, esp. at 284, ‘a function of forced closure’—but without a single mention of Ardea.

6. Golding, A., The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis translated oute of Latin into English meeter (London 1567)Google Scholar.

7. Among other rings, bird-poem metamorphoses cluster in Met. 2 and 14: cf. Keith, A.M., The Play of Fictions: Studies in Ovid, Metamorphoses Book II (Ann Arbor 1992), 137–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Barchiesi, A., ‘Endgames: Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15 and Fasti 6’, in D.H. Roberts, F.M. Dunn, and D. Fowler (eds.), Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature (Princeton 1997), 181–208Google Scholar, esp. 194, on ending Ovid’s Metamorphoses. For the Ardea/heron story, cf. Bömer’s note (IV.147f.) on Ov. Met. 14.445ff.

9. James, S.L., ‘Establishing Rome with the Sword: condere in the Aeneid’, AJP 116 (1995), 623–37Google Scholar, explores condere in the Aeneid everywhere but not at 12.893. On Turnus as arduus, cf. Hardie’s note on Aen. 9.53. Turnus the ardeant suitor: Ahl, F., Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets (Ithaca and London 1985), 265Google Scholar n.29.

10. Cf. Henderson, J., ‘Polishing off the Politics: Horace’s Ode to Pollio, 2.1’, MD 37 (1996), 59–136Google Scholar, at 118–20, on retractatio.

11. P.R. Hardie, ‘Closure in Latin Epic’, in Roberts, Dunn and Fowler (n.8 above), 139–62, at 145f.

12. The twinning of Aeneas’ extinction of Latinus’ unnamed city with Amata’s suicide encapsulates the worldwide, epic-long trope: Aen. 12.554–92, 593–611.

13. Hardie, P.R., ‘Augustan Poets and the Mutability of Rome’, in A. Powell (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus (Bristol 1992), 59–82Google Scholar, at 81 n.43—with a ‘perhaps’.

14. Cf. Mack (n.5 above), 134f., on the foundation-story of Ardea directed by Dido-esque Danae; read alongside Caieta (135f.). This alloys Turnus with Pallas, Argive genealogy/swordbelt with Argive myth: Breen, C.C., ‘The Shield of Turnus, the Swordbelt of Pallas, and the Wolf: Aeneid 7.789–92,9.59–66, 10.497–9’, Vergilius 32 (1986), 63–71Google Scholar.

15. notasque paludes/deserit atque altam supra uolat ardea nubem: Wilkinson, L.P., The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey (Cambridge 1969), 235fGoogle Scholar.

16. In subuolat etcineres plausis euerberat alis./et sonus…, Met. 14.576f., Ovid simultaneously outbids his version of Virgil’s metamorphosis of Aeneas’ fateful ships, subuolat et remos plausis circumuolat alis, Met. 14.507, and steals the screech-owl violence of Jupiter’s bird-morphed bitch from hell, in Turnus’ face as premonitory trailblazer for Aeneas’ fulminating turbine of a spear (uolat…turbine, Aen. 12.855 ∼ uolat…turbinisinstar, 923), by insistently echoing, and echoically signalling the echo in, hanc uersa in faciem Tumi se pestis ob oralfertque refertque sonans clipeumque euerberat alis (12.865f.: the only previous extant use of this rare verb, otherwise in poetry at Halieutica 38, and in prose from Curtius and Sen. Nat. Hist, onwards; cf. Bömer’s note [IV. 188] on Ov. Met. 14.575–77). Aeneas does not know, Turnus may intuit, we cannot not know what ghastliness speaks through Aeneas’ taunts, then, at Turnus, uerte omnis tete in fades…, Aen. 12.891: the Dira contrives already to shut down Aeneas’ first route of no-escape for Turnus, in a spooky preemptive strike for narrative closure: ‘compacted into the instant form of a wee bird…, wings and all’ (alitis in paruae subitam collecta figurant,…alas 862, 869), she cancels in advance his recourse to metamorphosis, a bid for self-concentration, any chase to the stars on plumes (uerte omnis tete in facies, contrahe quicquid…, and opta ardua pennis/astra sequi, 891f): now Jupiter-Aeneas-Virgil have shut down any ‘re-wind’ to a Homeric-style ‘foot-race’, Turnus, ‘his’ poem, and we, are left with only one last place to turn: ‘self-burial in the hollows of the earth’. Just as Ovid earlier picked on his own central topic of metamorphosis to trounce Virgil’s shipnymphs (E.L. Harrison, ‘The Metamorphosis of the Ships [Aeneid 9.77–122]’, Proceedings of the Leeds International Latin Seminar 8 [1995], 143–64, esp. 151), so he again retaliates by cashing out the harder and hardier option he has taken out on ‘metamorph’-itis.

17. Pollard, J., Birds in Greek Life and Myth (London 1977), 68fGoogle Scholar.

18. Hershkowitz, D., The Madness of Epic: Reading Insanity from Homer to Statius (Oxford 1998), 107fGoogle Scholar: I shall rely heavily on her seething chapter on the Aeneid in what follows.

19. Hardie, P.R., Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford 1986), 179Google Scholar, on this touch of ring-structure.

20. For Aeneid’s chain of cunctant- upon cunctant-: A.J. Boyle, ‘Aeneid 8: Images of Rome’, in Perkell (n.5 above), 148–61, at 156; Holoka, J.P., ‘Heroes cunctantes/Hesitant Heroes: Aeneas and Some Others’, in J.N. Kazazis and A. Rengakos (eds.), Studies in Ancient Epic and its Legacy in Honor of Dimitris N. Maronitis (Stuttgart 1999), 143–53Google Scholar.

21. Cf. R.F. Thomas, ‘The Isolation of Turnus: Aeneid Book 12’, in Stahl (n.2 above), 271–302, at 290f: ‘This simile is unique in Vergil, and the uniqueness resides in the introduction of first persons. The effect is to involve Vergil, and us as readers, precisely in the failure of Turnus: he has become one of us…’. So, too, M.C.J. Putnam, ‘Aeneid 12: Unity in Closure’, in Perkell (n.5 above), 210–30, at 222, notes this ‘usage of first-person plural verbs unique in the epic… [I]n no other instance does he persuade us as we read not only to feel compassion for a character but actually to become his equivalent. We are Turnus, as any strength he might muster for the final confrontation ebbs away’ (my emphases). And we must rest, too, from this most foolhardy of reading-assignments: ‘Understandably, few willingly put themselves through this process for long. Some, however, persist until one day they arrive at the end of the Aeneid’ (Farrell, J., Latin Language and Latin Culture [Cambridge 2001], 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

22. Undying Juturna is robbed of closure—or she and her brother would quit the last line together: possem tantos finire dolores /nunc certe et misero fratri comes ire per umbras (Aen. 12. 880f. ∼ sub umbras, 952); cf. Mitchell-Boyask, R.N., ‘Sine fine: Vergil’s Masterplot’, AJP 117 (1996), 289–307Google Scholar, esp. 298f.

23. Barnes, W.R., ‘Seeing Things: Ancient Commentary on the Iliad at the End of the Aeneid’, in S. Morton Braund and R. Mayer (eds.), Amor: Roma: Love & Latin Literature (Cambridge 1999 = PCPS Supplement 22), 60–70Google Scholar, at 69, entertaining a connection between πάλλε–v and Pallas.

24. ‘Most people encounter the Aeneid under some degree of compulsion somewhere along the line…’ (Slavitt, D.R., Virgil [New Haven 1991], 157Google Scholar).

25. Cf. Bömer’s note (IV.153–58) on Ov. Met. 14.445ff.; Galinsky, G.K., Aeneas, Sicily, and Rome (Princeton 1969), 149f.Google Scholar, on [luppiter] Indiges. Cairns, F., ‘Geography and Nationalism in the Aeneid’, LCM 2 (1977), 109–16Google Scholar, at 113, memorably spells out, and defends, the Machiavellian powerplay. Farrell (n.21 above, 1 –8) traces the core myths in Juno’s insistence on ‘the power of latinity’, ‘linguistic imperialism’ plus ‘nativism’, through ‘to generations of novices who by reading the poem prove themselves as Latins’.

26. Henderson, J., Fighting for Rome (Cambridge 1998), 199fGoogle Scholar. and n.121.

27. Cf. Ovid, Fasti 4.905,937, 942, Nomento…, turn… nil nisi nomen habet.

28. O’Hara, J.J., True Names: Vergil and the Alexandrian Tradition of Etymological Wordplay (Ann Arbor 1996), 190Google Scholar, on ‘A. 7.411–12’; Paschalis (n.3 above), 106, ‘“arduus” combines here Height with Fire (“ardeo”) and elsewhere Height with Light or Sight’ (with n.l15), and 255f., ‘The toponym “Ardea” suggests Height (“arduus”), Fire (“ardeo”), and Flight; the city was so named after the bird “ardea” (“heron”),which was etymologized from “arduus” because of its “flying high”… War-fire, Wound, and “dolor” lurk in “Ardea”’; Maltby, R., A Lexikon of Ancient Latin Etymologies (Leeds 1991), 48fGoogle Scholar., s. vv. ardea and Ardea. Cf. Cruttwell, R.W., Virgil’s Mind at Work: An Analysis of the Symbolism of the Aeneid (Oxford 1947), 143–64Google Scholar, ‘Ashes and Spirit’.

29. Cf. Dyson (n.3 above), 315 n.3.

30. Survival only in name blends into its primal opposite, the unnamed: Euryalus’ mother; Latinus’ torched city; Jupiter’s Dira… Virgilian epic is up to here in the business of extermination.

31. G.B. Miles, ‘The Aeneid as Foundation Story’, in Perkell (n.5 above), 231–50, gives a stark tally for ‘the Aeneid as foundation story’; cf. Bickermann, E.J., ‘Origines gentium’, CP 47 (1952), 65–81Google Scholar.

32. Alföldi, A., Early Rome and the Latins (Ann Arbor 1965), 153Google Scholar.

33. See Chaplin, J., Livy’s Exemplary History (Oxford 2000), 139fGoogle Scholar., on this classic Roman weaselling.

34. So too in the copious narrative of Plutarch Camillus 23.2.

35. On the ‘developed legend of Camillus’, fetching Camillus from Ardea to face down the Gauls in Rome, see Cornell, T.J., The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 B.C) (London and New York 1995), 316fGoogle Scholar., who suggestively puns this paradigm of the ideological feint as ‘an attempt to compensate for the most humiliating fact of all’. Camillus’ propriety between Ardea and Veii counts as moderatio in Val. Max. 4.1.2.

36. Le. Kraus, C.S., ‘“No Second Troy”: Topoi and Refoundation in Livy, Book V’, TAPA 124 (1994), 267–89Google Scholar; Miles, G.B., Livy: Reconstructing Early Rome (Ithaca and London 1995), esp. 79–98Google Scholar; Jaeger, M., Livy’s Written Rome (Ann Arbor 1997)Google Scholarmentions the triangle Ardea-Veii, Veii-Rome, at 63 on 5.46.4–11. Feldherr, A., Spectacle and Society in Livy’s History (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1998)Google Scholar, esp. 78–81 (‘Camillus the Historian’), at 80 n.82, just notes the warning at 5.44.7 to the Ardeates, to act ere Ardea becomes Gaul.

37. Masters, J., Poetry and Civil War in Lucan’s ‘Bellum Civile’ (Cambridge 1992), 104fGoogle Scholar.

38. Ceausescu, P., ‘Altera Roma: histoire d’une folie politique’, Historia 25 (1976), 79–108Google Scholar.

39. Tilly, B., Vergil’s Latium (Oxford 1947), 36fGoogle Scholar., on Ardea fading from Middle Republic annals, into Augustan and imperial disrepute for swamp-fever. Citizens in municipium Augustum Veiens would have their own take on Rome.

40. Cf. W.J. Dominik, ‘Hannibal at the Gates: Programmatising Rome and Romanitas in Silius Italicus’ Punka 1 and 2’, in A.J. Boyle and W.J. Dominik (eds.) Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text (Leiden [forthcoming]).

41. For archaeological Ardea: Melis, F. and Quilici-Gigli, S., ‘Luoghi di culto nel territorio di Ardea’, Archeologia Classka 34 (1982), 1–37Google Scholar.

42. Tilly (n.39 above), 31–53 (‘Ardea’), at 31f.

43. C. Plini Secundi Naturalis Historiae Libri XXXVII: Ex Editione Gabrielis Brotier cum Notis et Interpretatione in Usum Delphini (London 1826)Google Scholar.

44. E.g. Pollitt, J.J., The Art of Rome c.753 BC-AD 337: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs NJ 1968Google Scholar; repr. Cambridge 1983), 52 on Marcus Plautius and 115f. on Spurius Tadius; Ling, R., Roman Painting (Cambridge 1991), 212Google Scholar on M. Plautius and 213 on Studius; cf. Isager, J., Pliny on Art and Society (London and New York 1991), 131fGoogle Scholar.

45. Tilly (n.39 above), 76, on ‘the Ardeatine cult of Juturna’.

46. Schork, R.J., ‘The Final Simile in the Aeneid: Roman and Rutulian Ramparts’, AJP 107 (1986), 260–70Google Scholar.

47. Henry, J., Aeneidea, or Critical, Exegetical, and Aesthetical Remarks on the Aeneis (London and Edinburgh 1873), Vols. 1–4Google Scholar.

48. Hardie, P.R., ‘Virgil and Tragedy’, in C. Martindale (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge 1997), 312–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 324 and n.29.

49. Juno euocationes: Feeney, D.C., ‘The Reconciliations of Juno’, in S.J. Harrison (ed.) Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford 1990), 339–62Google Scholar, esp. 360.

50. What would the thriving municipium of imperial Gabii make of Anchises’ list of ‘Nomentum, Gabii, Fidenae, …, Cora, etc’ as ‘names’ for the future (Aen. 6.773) and Lucan’s list of ‘names’ become ‘fairy-stories’ clinging to ‘ruins’, ‘Gabii, Veii, Cora’ (BC 6.392)? (Alessandro Barchiesi shares with me the thought that Coramque in both lists smuggles below the bar of metre hints of ‘presence’ (coram) and of ‘[potential] locus’ [χώρα].) In Roman myth, Gabii was stormed by Rome’s last king, Tarquinius Superbus, to help Ardea (and…Collatia) buy space for Lucretia and her men to re-shape Rome into the Republic: lapsing into unRoman dirty tricks, Sex. Tarquinius pretended to play their godsend ‘exiled Camillus’ leader against Rome before delivering Gabii to his father; on the Tarquins’ expulsion, Sex tried a come-back to ‘his throne’ there, but was slain in revenge-killing (Liv. 1.53–60); Latin origin of Roman ritual garb, cinctus Gabinus (Aen. 7.612); failed Sullan colony; famously desolate, Ogilvie on Livy 1.53.3–4, Horsfall on Aen. 7.682f., Ahl, F., Lucan: An Introduction (Ithaca and London 1976), 216fGoogle Scholar.

51. And Ardean Venus? Strabo Geography 5.232 barely mentions the Aphrodision near Ardea where the Latins meet up, preoccupied with telling us how it was ‘Samnites that wasted the area’—and, yes, true to myth, the area was wasted. This Aphrodision is listed after Ardea by Pliny Natural History 3.56 and Mela Itinerary 2.4.

52. Cf. Quint, D., Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton 1993)Google Scholar, esp. 63–65, at 65: ‘It is only when the past has been successfully repressed—when it ceases to repeat iself in its former version—that it can be repeated with a difference in order to be reversed and undone.’ This calls for violence.

53. ‘Reading helps us to forget what we read… We do not need to remember the Aeneid because we can read it. But the need is clearly even less, Broch suggests, after we have read it… We have what is important about the Aeneid not in the moment of reading but in the moment after. Furthermore the possibility that we may and probably must read it again gives to the reading of the poem a life and a history of organic development that the memorised words of the poem could never have.’ (Koelb, C., Legendary Figures: Ancient History in Modern Novels [Lincoln NE and London 1998], 67–88Google Scholar (The Legendary Self: Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil’), at 87.