Anchises Reading Aeneas Reading Marcellus

Jay Reed

Syllecta Classica, Volume 12 (2001), pp. 146-168 (Article)

Published by Department of Classics, University of Iowa

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/syl.2001.0002

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/538183/summary

Access provided at 19 Oct 2019 01:20 GMT from Brown University

 Anchises Reading Aeneas Reading Marcellus

Jay Reed
Cornell University

Two currents, of hope and of disappointment, seem to run side by side

through Anchises’ prophecy in Book 6 of the Aeneid and Aeneas’ whole journey
in the Underworld, without diluting each other’s power. We are here concerned
with the way this dual current is manifested in Aeneas’ own thoughts and ac-
tions, and particularly with his change of course from melancholic doubt to
enthusiasm. How does his father “kindle” Aeneas’ spirit with love of his Roman
mission (incenditque animum famae venientis amore, 6.889)? This question is
involved with the episodes that precede and follow that verse—the lament for
Marcellus and the departure through the Gate of False Dreams—and with all of
Aeneas’ spiritual negotiations with the realities he meets in the Underworld. It is
also involved with his father’s insight into and response to Aeneas’ state of mind,
and indeed with each character’s own constantly evolving consciousness.
Let us start with how Aeneas reads Marcellus.1 It is he who singles
him out (6.860–66):
I wish to thank the Editor and referee of Syllecta Classica for their comments and
suggestions and Kirk Freudenburg for his.
1I press the metaphor at 6.754–55 et tumulum capit [Anchises] unde omnis longo
ordine posset / adversos legere et venientum discere vultus.
 REED: ANCHISES READING AENEAS … 147

atque hic Aeneas (una namque ire videbat

egregium forma iuvenem et fulgentibus armis,
sed frons laeta parum et deiecto lumina vultu):
“quis, pater, ille, virum qui sic comitatur euntem?
filius, anne aliquis magna de stirpe nepotum?
qui strepitus circa comitum! quantum instar in ipso!
sed nox atra caput tristi circumvolat umbra.”

Here Aeneas said (for he was observing a youth going along together
[with the elder Marcellus], extraordinary for his beauty and flashing
armor—but far from happy were his brow and the eyes in his down-
cast face), ‘Father, who is that who accompanies the hero as he goes?
Is it his son, or one of the grand stock of his descendants? What a
clamor his companions make! What quality there is in him! But black
night swirls around his head with a mournful shadow.’

These are Aeneas’ last words in Book 6, his last until he finds himself on
Italian soil at 7.120, and they sum up his mood in this book, his hypersen-
sitivity to the sufferings of others. What has attracted his attention? Surely
Marcellus’ intriguing combination of evident promise and mysterious gloom.
Aeneas’ final metaphor expatiates on his trepidation beyond his feelings
about the boy in front of him. The phrase nox atra he seems to borrow from
270–72 (the phrase is closural in both passages), as if that simile had regis-
tered his own feelings about the fading light as he entered the Underworld
(though there is no overt sign of his focalization there):
quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna
est iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbra
Iuppiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem

… as under an uncertain moon, beneath its grudging light, a path

goes through the forest, when Jupiter has buried the sky in shadow
and black night has stolen the color from all things.

The parallel is pregnant: so too Marcellus’ coming doom, “black night,”

steals from him something like his “color”—the splendor predicted by
his beauty, his flashing arms, the obvious acclamation of his compan-
ions—and represents Aeneas’ vague dread about the youth in terms of
the dread he has felt since coming down here. Add to these associations
his memories of his doomed defense of Troy at 2.358–60, which echoes
even more fully in 6.866:
148 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001)

… per tela, per hostis

vadimus haud dubiam in mortem mediaeque tenemus
urbis iter; nox atra cava circumvolat umbra.2

… through the weapons, through the enemy host we go towards

indubitable death and make our way through the middle of the
city; black night swirls around with an enclosing shadow.

Reusing his own words, Aeneas seems sorrowfully to identify with the
mysterious boy, and to reverse in hindsight the import of “dark night,”
whose shadow in Book 2 was protective. The phrase now carries for
him connotations of the loss of loved ones and the wreck of a nation
(not an inept connection, as Anchises’ answer will show). The infernal
setting nicely picks up the touches of “death” and a “journey” in the
earlier passage. We have in Aeneas’ last spoken line in the Underworld
an allusive summary of the particular anxiety that has dogged him since
he entered, and a reawakening of old anxieties, which he now reads into
Marcellus.
Yet more of Aeneas’ attitude can be read here. He seems to focalize
the parenthetical introduction of Marcellus (860–62), which structur-
ally parallels his ensuing words (note, in each passage, the initial sed in
the last line and the focus on Marcellus’ head); Aeneas is after all the
explicit viewer, the subject of videbat. Line 861, however, complicates
this attribution of viewpoint: what he first notices is Marcellus’ beauty
and flashing arms, details that pick up Anchises’ foregoing account of
the older Marcellus’ warlike splendor and particularly his capture of the
Gallic commander’s arms at Clastidium. For a moment we seem to be
continuing the pageant in the bellicose vein in which Anchises has been
presenting it, encountering a new member of the same martial line,
when the ominous, transforming sadness enters: sed frons laeta parum et
deiecto lumina vultu (862). The question that follows repeats the se-
quence of national interest and personal sadness. Conditioned to the
importance of lineage in this parade, and perhaps alerted by a family
resemblance between the older and younger Marcelli (which instar may

2
The verbal model of both 2.360 and 6.866 may be Hor. S. 2.1.58 (seu Mors atris
circumvolat alis; C. 20.351–2 provides the idea of a doomed head enveloped in night.
Antip. Sid. AP 7.713.3–4 uses a similar image for the oblivion of death.
 REED: ANCHISES READING AENEAS … 149

imply), Aeneas translates his observation of the youth’s martial poten-

tial into a guess about his genealogical place and relation to the other
spirits. Yet—and now he translates his observation of the youth’s “sad
brow” and “downcast face” into the symbolism of his own apprehen-
sion—black night swirls her mournful shadow around his head. We
catch Aeneas in the process of being reconstructed by his father’s words,
assimilating a certain viewpoint with certain aims, yet asserting his own
preoccupations too. Lines 860–62 imbricate contrasting viewpoints,
the narrative reveals Aeneas’ attitude in its present, antithetical form;
we see his feelings as fluid, and as he speaks they change.
The dualism here concentrates an antinomy between Aeneas’ mel-
ancholy and a more accepting view of things (here that of Anchises).
Long before he meets his father, Aeneas proceeds through the Under-
world bemused, bewildered, unhappy with the explanations given him
for what he sees. When the Sibyl expounds the rule that the unburied
flutter and wander for a full century before gaining admission to the
lands of the dead, he stops in his tracks, “pondering much,” and pities
this condition as an “unjust lot” (6.332 multa putans sortemque animo
miseratus iniquam). When later, noticing the comforts of Elysium, he
asks Anchises what “terrible desire” drives the spirits back to “the light”
(721), his devaluation of life runs counter to the terms set by the Sibyl,
when she chides Palinurus for his “terrible desire” to get into the Un-
derworld (373, with the same phrase—tam dira cupido—in the same
sedes). The encounters with Dido and Deiphobus and the survey of
Tartarus do nothing to relieve his doubts about the ultimate goodness
of the arrangements he observes. We can trace the development of this
melancholy from the disappearance of Palinurus, which leaves him, so
recently buoyed by the hopeful reenactments of Trojan festivities and
the promising departure (5.827–8), “groaning much” (5.869) and “weep-
ing” (6.1). The supposition with which he ends Book 5 sets the stage
for an anxiety that will abide for a thousand more lines (5.870–71):
o nimium caelo et pelago confise sereno,
nudus in ignota, Palinure, iacebis harena.

Oh Palinurus, having put too much trust in the serenity of heaven

and sea, you will lie naked on an unknown beach.
150 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001)

His gloomy underestimation of Palinurus, who had in fact refused to trust

the good weather (5.848–51), disguises a misplaced optimism, insinuating
his own wishful confidence that care will see one through; he deliberately
suppresses the possibility of an unpreventable tragedy, let alone the action
of a malevolent god. No wonder the revelations of the Underworld depress
him, contradicting this apotropaic bromide by urging him to accept hu-
man unhappiness as final, and actually part of a divine plan.
Elysium at first gives comfort, but the meeting with Anchises itself, so
structured as firmly to deflate Aeneas’ hopes, briskly ends it. The scene
corresponds verbally to his recognition of his mother at 1.407–09:
quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis
ludis imaginibus? cur dextrae iungere dextram
non datur ac veras audire et reddere voces?

Why do you so often tease your son—you cruel, too!—

with false disguises? Why may we not join hand to hand,
and hear and exchange sincere speech?

For a moment in the Elysian Fields it seems that his other parent will
fulfill this wish (6.687–89):
venisti tandem, tuaque exspectata parenti
vicit iter durum pietas? datur ora tueri,
nate, tua et notas audire et reddere uoces?

Have you come at long last—has that piety of yours, expected by

your father, overcome the hard journey? May I look into your
face, my son, and hear and exchange familiar speech?3

As if cued by these words, yet made apprehensive by the experience

with Venus, Aeneas fatally completes the wish thus (697–702; he is
repeating the plea from 5.742):
“ … da iungere dextram,
da, genitor, teque amplexu ne subtrahe nostro.”
sic memorans largo fletu simul ora rigabat.
ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum;

3
The substitution of notas for veras warns us to suspect the veracity of Anchises’
subsequent voces; on this see below.
 REED: ANCHISES READING AENEAS … 151

ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,

par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno

“Let me join hands, let me, father, and do not withdraw fom my
embrace.” Speaking thus, he simultaneously drenched his face with
copious tears. Thrice there he tried to put his arms around his
neck; thrice the simulacrum, grasped in vain, evaded his hands
like sporting winds or a fleeting dream.

Twice now he has been deluded of the parental touch he craves (add too
the meeting with the ghost of Creüsa at 2.792–94 from which 700–02
are repeated). His father characteristically offers no explanation (con-
trast his Homeric model, Anticlea’s shade, at Odyssey 11.215–24). Just
as after 1.409, the narrative picks up without giving Aeneas’ reaction;
but it is here that, appalled by the sight of the ghosts along Lethe, he
asks what terrible desire drives them to go back to the light and “to
revert again to slow bodies” (720–21). His own body must now be
feeling unbearably slow.
Aeneas is evidently struggling with a kind of mistrust in the real
good of all he sees, which his father’s exposition will have to anticipate,
absorb, or dodge. Anchises, who accounts for the Elysian spirits’ desire
in exuberantly materialist terms, in the quasi-parodistic Lucretian lan-
guage for which Virgil had already showed his facility at Eclogues 6.31–
40, at first fails to address the anxiety that underlies his son’s question at
719–21. If Aeneas’ ingenuousness is thus blunted in part, it neverthe-
less cuts through Anchises’ optimism and elegant philosophizing to pose
deeper questions.4 His words on Marcellus, which reveal Aeneas to have
assimilated waveringly his father’s vision, provide Anchises with a new
opportunity to resolve his son’s lingering conflict between acceptance of
that vision and the persistence of his own skeptical melancholy. He first
addresses the gloom that evidently surrounds the boy (867–74):
tum pater Anchises lacrimis ingressus obortis:
“o gnate, ingentem luctum ne quaere tuorum;
ostendent terris hunc tantum fata nec ultra
esse sinent. nimium vobis Romana propago
visa potens, superi, propria haec si dona fuissent.

4 cf. Otis 300: “The ‘answer’ is in one sense disappointing.”

152 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001)

quantos ille virum magnam Mavortis ad urbem

campus aget gemitus! vel quae, Tiberine, videbis
funera, cum tumulum praeterlabere recentem!”

Then his father Anchises began, with tears welling: “Oh my son,
do not inquire after the immense grief of your kindred. The fates
will only show this young man to the world, and let him stay no
longer. Too powerful, O gods, would the stock of Rome have
seemed to you had this gift been hers to keep. What great lamen-
tations of men the Campus will send up to the great city of Mavors!
And what funeral rites you will see, god of Tiber, when you glide
past the new tomb!”

Suggesting that this is a descendant he would have preferred to pass

over, Anchises nevertheless extends this near-praeteritio into a run of
loci on the brevity of Marcellus’ life and the grief it brings to Rome.5
His impressionistic but crystalline vision of the state funeral, complete
with details of Roman geography, contextualizes his son’s vague impres-
sions of grief as a very specific event with public, national implications
(still fresh for the poet’s first audience).
He dilates upon the future loss (875–86):
nec puer Iliaca quisquam de gente Latinos
in tantum spe tollet avos, nec Romula quondam
ullo se tantum tellus iactabit alumno.
heu pietas, heu prisca fides invictaque bello
dextera! non illi se quisquam impune tulisset
obvius armato, seu cum pedes iret in hostem
seu spumantis equi foderet calcaribus armos.
heu, miserande puer, si qua fata aspera rumpas!
tu Marcellus eris.

No boy of the Trojan race will exalt his Latin ancestors so high by
his promise, nor will the land of Romulus ever glory so in any of
her nurslings. Alas for the piety! Alas for the old-time trustiness
and the right hand unvanquished in war! When he was in armor
no one would ever have come against him without paying a price,
either when he went against the enemy on foot or when he spurred
his foaming horse’s forequarters. Alas, pitiable boy, if only you
could somehow break through harsh fate!6 You will be Marcellus.

5 Details and parallels in Norden 341–45; cf. Brenk.

 REED: ANCHISES READING AENEAS … 153

Anchises is still teaching, teaching. As he stressed in his very first

words to Aeneas at 688, in a slightly tendentious question, that it
was pietas that had brought him safely through the shades, so here
he reminds him of the necessity of that quality, together with fides
and above all prowess in war, by mourning their loss in a paragon of
the nation that Aeneas will soon found (Iliaca, Latinos, and Romula
combine the dual past and unified future of Aeneas’ people in a single
glorious line). Of the traits noticed by Aeneas, Anchises’ epicedium
does not pick up his beauty, but only the military prowess it em-
blematizes; this not only resumes the projected warlike nature of
Rome from 851–53, but also anticipates Anchises’ instructions con-
cerning the war in Italy (890). Anchises curiously emphasizes the
element of vengeance (879 non … impune) in Marcellus’ repulsion
of attacking foes—a lesson from which Aeneas will profit when deal-
ing with oath-breaking Rutulians. In this line of exempla, from whom
and for whom Aeneas paradoxically must become the exemplum, the
merely potentially great Marcellus becomes even more parodoxically
the supreme exemplum, ending the list and receiving Anchises’ long-
est accolade, even longer than the fifteen lines on Augustus (791–
805).
Augustus’ nephew and son-in-law, groomed to follow an illus-
trious cursus toward the principate, Marcellus died at nineteen in
the autumn of 23, just a few months after Augustus’ own recovery
from an illness that had threatened to leave Rome leaderless, and in
dying recalled all the perils to the Roman state that Augustus was
supposed to have laid to rest. Anchises’ epicedium blurs the distinc-
tion between the Julian line and the other Roman families, making
Marcellus, who appears beside other Claudii Marcelli, a sort of uni-
versal Roman heir (and Augustus a sort of universal paterfamilias).
The “recent tomb,” Augustus’ newly completed mausoleum in the
Campus Martius, becomes generally Roman, accessible to the mourn-
ing of a mighty nation.7 The archaic name “Mavors,” which appears
for the first time in the poem here, makes the evocation of national-
6
On the si-clause here, representing an unfulfilled wish, see Goold 121.
7 Dio 53.30.5 implies that the tomb was still under construction at Marcellus’ death.
154 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001)

ity more emotional (and also reinforces Anchises’ martial concerns).

Marcellus is a gift to the whole Roman people, conceived as a great
family (870 Romana propago); lines 875–76 most poignantly sum
up the concerns for family, nation, and succession: “No boy of the
Trojan race will exalt his ancestors so high in hope.” These themes
permeate the whole poem, of course—Palinurus, for example, knew
to beseech Aeneas “by your father, by the hope of rising Iulus”
(364)—and particularly furnish the vehicle for Anchises’ instruc-
tion, in which family is metaphorical for nation and succession is
paramount. Marcellus, the terminus (whether intended or not) of
that instruction, becomes the ultimate synecdoche for the pageant
of Rome. Anchises’ lament has transfigured his son’s melancholy into
an encomium of the Romanness he has been expounding all along.
The tactics of Anchises’ answer are comparable to the way his
exposition of the heroes manipulates hope and disappointment to
anticipate and absorb any objections his account of Roman history
and Roman virtues may inspire in his son. The early part of the
pageant, to be sure, glosses over various disasters and dynastic snags
and culminates in a uniformly glorious account of Augustus (al-
though the omission of Remus at least is more honest than Jupiter’s
astonishing lie that Romulus and he will “give laws” together: 1.292–
93). Yet the presentation encompasses both good and bad in Roman
history and reaffirms Anchises’ earlier lesson that emotional distur-
bances of all kinds are necessarily a part of earthly existence (hinc
metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque, 6.733).8 After Numa, things
take a distinct turn for the worse, as Anchises describes the reigns of
the early kings in increasingly distressed terms (Tullus Hostilius at
813 is otia qui rumpet patriae; Ancus Marcius at 815–16 is iactantior
… nimium gaudens popularibus auris). Hastening us past the unno-
ticed fifth king to the expulsion of the Tarquins and the establish-
ment of the Republic, Anchises can now find almost nothing pleas-
ant to say (817–23):
8cf. O’Hara 166 (in his study of deceptively optimistic prophecies in the poem):
“Anchises’ speech to Aeneas speaks more honestly than most prophecies of the
difficulties that the future will bring.” O’Hara goes on to emphasize the “gap be-
tween what Aeneas can understand and what the reader is reminded of.”
 REED: ANCHISES READING AENEAS … 155

vis et Tarquinios reges animamque superbam9

ultoris Bruti, fascisque videre receptos?
consulis imperium hic primus saevasque securis
accipiet, natosque pater nova bella moventis
ad poenam pulchra pro libertate vocabit,
infelix, utcumque ferent ea facta minores:
vincet amor patriae laudumque immensa cupido.

Do you wish to see the Tarquin kings and the proud soul of Brutus
the avenger, and the rods of magistracy that he took back? This
man will be the first to receive the power of a consul and the sav-
age axes, and as a father will call his sons, for urging rebellion, to
punishment for the sake of fair liberty—unhappy, no matter how
posterity will judge this deed. Love of his country will prevail, and
immense desire for praise.

Instead of extolling Brutus’ patriotism or wisdom, Anchises lets Aeneas

hear of the “savage axes” in whose authority he had his sons put to
death. His judgement is excruciatingly balanced here: pulchra implies at
least a hard choice, probably the right one; utcumque (“no matter how”)
shifts the verdict to Brutus’ infelicitas and even casts doubt on the
protreptic value of this vision, opposing to happiness the very values to
be instilled. The next remarks swerve from this dilemma only to run
back into it (824–25):
quin Decios Drusosque procul saevumque securi
aspice Torquatum et referentem signa Camillum.

But why not look at the Decii and the Drusi over yonder, and
Torquatus, savage with his axe, and Camillus bringing back the
standards.

Quin is abrupt, adversative, indicative of a turn; but before we reach the

end of the line we find another axe (and the epithet saevus again) wielded
by another father in the name of some virtue: as consul, Titus Manlius
Torquatus had his own son executed for insubordination in battle (does
he appear in Elysium actually carrying the axe?).
9
The avenger has received Tarquin’s fatal epithet along with the fasces. The reading
advocated by Servius, which makes the anima superba Tarquinius’ by hendiadys in
817, rests not on the Latin (-que in third place in 818 would be very strained), but on
a prejudged notion of whose soul Anchises should call proud.
156 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001)

After these miseries the movement to civil war feels natural. “No,
my children, do not habituate your spirits to such great wars!” is the
odd way Anchises admonishes Pompey and Caesar (832 ne, pueri,
ne tanta animis adsuescite bella), as if they were simply to commit a
crime of excess against the civilizing bellicosity Anchises means to
enjoin as the supreme Roman art (851–53). The strained admoni-
tion embarrasses his precepts by pointing up the ease with which
they defeat the Roman ideals they should support. There is no way
cleanly to separate the values of Anchises’ protreptic from the
infelicitas he deplores in Brutus, the impiousness of Caesar and
Pompey, and, by implication, the deplorable side effects of some of
the other heroes’ loyalty to Roman principles. Some of Anchises’
warnings are visible both to Aeneas and to us; some just to us. But
plainly Aeneas, who came down to the Underworld eager above all
to see his beloved father again (see 108 and that whole speech), finds
himself charged with the task of founding a nation whose moral
principles lead to human misery and whose father-son relationships
end in execution or civil war. Aeneas does not speak again, after the
Lethe question, until he has reviewed those Roman descendants and
heard their histories, and then it is to pick out of the crowd for
explanation the one sad face. His flashing arms (fulgentibus armis,
861) are ominous after those of Pompey and Caesar (quas fulgere
cernis in armis, 826)—does Aeneas notice them for this very reason?
Is it the very gloom on Marcellus’ brow that suggests to him a son of
the older Marcellus (filius … ?, 864), in view of Brutus’ sons?
Here, then, is the background to Aeneas’ question and Anchises’
answer: the father has taken care to warn about the troubling aspects of
the future, while the son has remained sensitive to those aspects above
all others. Even as Aeneas stepped into the Elysian fields, a discordant
note had sounded underneath all the felicity, raising suspicions that the
injunctions he would receive there would have a negative side—our
suspicions, since it is an intertextual signal I mean, unreadable by Aeneas.
Ennius’ Annales of course provide a model for much in Elysium: in the
encomium of Augustus, where heaven receives the Ennian formula “stud-
ded with burning stars” (stellis ardentibus aptum, 797); perhaps in
Anchises’ account of the metempsychosis, where Wigodsky (73–74)
 REED: ANCHISES READING AENEAS … 157

discerns the influence of the epic-founding proem to the Annales.10 In

the section on the heroes of the Punic Wars both the Hellenism Scipiadas
and the learned pun in fulmina are probably Ennian, and unus qui nobis
cunctando restituis rem (846), the capsule summary of Fabius Maximus,
closely adapts (and makes even more Ennianically spondaic) unus homo
nobis cunctando restituit rem (Annales 363 Skutsch).11 Ennius’ tale of
Roman origins becomes a template for Virgil’s—and Anchises’—own
interpretation. Yet this pattern is signalled long before, if we take 179
itur in antiquam silvam (“there is a procession into an ancient forest”),
which introduces the Annales-derived wood-gathering scene for Misenus’
funeral pyre, as metaphorical for Virgil’s and his reader’s progress.12 One
would have thought this scene, derived by Ennius himself from Homer
and applied to the aftermath of Pyrrhus’ defeat of the Romans at
Heraclea, already instinct enough with Roman anxiety reverberating in
the parallel tales of history and poetry; Virgil’s metaphor beckons us
into a richly cullable forest of old material simultaneously historical and
poetic.
Within this programmatic network of allusions is one to the rape of
Ennius’ Ilia, transformed at 6.637–39 into the descent to “the pleasant
assemblies of the pious and Elysium” (amoena piorum concilia Elysiumque,
5.734–35) where Anchises had promised their meeting:
his demum exactis, perfecto munere divae,
devenere locos laetos et amoena virecta
fortunatorum nemorum sedesque beatas

These rites performed and their duty to the goddess fulfilled, they
went down to happy places and the pleasant greeneries of groves
of the fortunate and the blessed abodes.

10Wigodsky’s summary is suggestive (74): “Vergil in his parade of heroes has thus
in a sense put the contents of Ennius’ later books into the form of his proem.”
For stellis ardentibus aptum see Ann. 348 Skutsch (cf. stellis fulgentibus aptum in
27 and 145).
11 Wigodsky 72–3. On the pun see O’Hara (1996)179–80.
12cf. Enn. Ann. 175–9 Skutsch. The metaphor is most recently dealt with by
Hinds (10–14) in a discussion of literary echoes that signpost their own allusive-
ness.
158 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001)

The new scenery, a pleasing change for Aeneas and the Sibyl (who have
just been perusing the horrors of Tartarus), echoes Annales 38–40
(Skutsch), Ilia’s dream:
nam me visus homo pulcer per amoena salicta
et ripas raptare locosque novos. ita sola
postilla, germana soror, errare videbar …

For it seemed that a handsome man carried me away across pleas-

ant willow-groves and riverbanks and places strange to me. After-
wards it seemed, sister, that I wandered alone….

Recollection not just of the rape, but of the troubles between the result-
ing twins (retailed in the Annales, but omitted from Anchises’ version of
history), should lend irony to the notes of relief and promise. The simi-
larity between Ennius’ and Virgil’s passages hinges on the compound
description of the scene: the “strange, or new, places” become “happy
places” (in contrast with the Mourning Fields where Dido abides, as
well as with Tartarus), and amoena virecta echoes amoena salicta. One
would like to know whence Virgil replaced Ennius’ “willow-groves” with
virecta, presumably meaning “green places” or the like, a word unat-
tested before this passage.13 Austin (ad loc.) calls it “a Virgilian coinage”;
if so, Virgil will have modeled it directly on salicta, introducing the
notion of “greenery” (from vireo, connoting refreshment and new vigor)
in the first syllables. Ilia’s “riverbanks” are lost from Virgil’s wording,
but if our literary memory provisionally supplies them, it will not have
too long to wait for them to resonate: his father’s instruction will begin
with Aeneas’ troubled questions about the souls gathered around the
banks of Lethe some 60 lines later.14 All this makes for just a passing
echo, yet it rings true: both Ilia and Aeneas are unwitting conduits of
the Roman race. Aeneas’ passage through the scene of his indoctrina-
tion is momentarily likened to a ktistic rape.

13Unless, as is most unlikely, Dirae 27 (optima silvarum, formosis densa virectis) is

earlier. Later Apuleius uses it at Met. 4.2, 8.18, and 10.30.
One also remembers the passage at 305–14 on the unburied souls on the banks of
14

Acheron, which is also followed by a troubled question from Aeneas.

 REED: ANCHISES READING AENEAS … 159

Yet it is impossible to suppress here all memory of him as the

pursuer, the role of Ennius’ Mars and the one that Aeneas had in
Dido’s nightmare at 4.465–68, which also is modeled on Ilia’s dream.
The replacement of raptare by devenere clouds the decision, and of
course this whole episode (not to say the whole poem) casts him as
ancestor of Rome, like Mars in the Annales. Amata, for one, might
not hesitate to characterize Aeneas as a ktistic rapist, a violent seizer
of the ancestorship due another; but the characterization need not
be definitively negative, in so far as the outcome can be thought
happy (how are we to think of Ennius’ Mars?). Aeneas, passively
impregnated with prophecies of Rome, from this perspective is also
the aggressive enabler of those prophecies that Anchises would make
of him, and that he in fact becomes in the remaining books of the
Aeneid. This reworking of Ennius heralds both the foundational pith
and all the ambivalence of Anchises’ teaching in Elysium.
Critics rightly home in on the “waste and futility” of Marcellus15
at the end of the history lesson, and seek to explain their effects on
the vision of Rome that precedes, the way in which the possible
frustration of generations yet to come modifies our reading (and his
own) of Aeneas’ mission. Marcellus’ early death, as Anchises pre-
sents it, may be held either to depress—even undercut—the glori-
ous achievements foretold, or to complement, perhaps even aug-
ment them. Johnson (106–07), noting especially the pathetic un-
real conditions at 870–71 and 879–81, hears in the speech “a trag-
edy, indeed a bitterness, that threatens to overwhelm the magnificence
of the Roman achievement.” Putnam’s formulation (95) recalls the
implications of the deaths of Dido and Turnus: “It is as if the poet
were saying that the Roman mission cannot go forward without loss
of life, that the reality of death ever looms as a counterbalance to
progress.” To Otis (303) lines 870–71 (nimium vobis Romana propago
/ visa potens, superi, propria haec si dona fuissent) communicate an
avoidance of destructive pride, affirming the necessity of sacrifice,
“especially sacrifice of the young,” on which “the ordeal of empire”
is based; but he accepts this as a complicating tragedy of Aeneas’

15 Feeney (1986) 15.

160 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001)

mission, through which Marcellus “prefigures the similar heroes of

the last six books: Pallas, Lausus, Euryalus, Camilla.” For the more
optimistic Glei (122–25), not only does that sentiment warn Aeneas
against hybris, but the death of Marcellus itself providentially fore-
stalls a case of destructive superbia in theodical terms, and in practi-
cal politics spares Augustus conflict with Livia on the one hand and
with Agrippa on the other.
Grief over Marcellus can subvert or support the Roman program,
depending on the consciousness that frames the grief, and we see the
rhetoric of these characters doing both. What is true of Marcellus is
true also of the other heroes in the episode, the negative connotations
of whose deeds and natures are framed variously enough to suggest both
the failure of the ideals Anchises makes them represent, or a necessary
price for the glory toward which he leads Aeneas through them. A
definitive message would be hard to pin down, because these less pleas-
ant details of Roman history are by no means immanently negative or
unnegotiable; they are always caught up in a dialectic of viewpoints. A
pessimistic perspective on them is always available to a skeptical melan-
choly such as that of Aeneas, but that itself is an ever-changing mood,
influenced by his father’s exhortations and explanations. Aeneas’ mel-
ancholy eventually finds its own resolution: into his reaction to Marcellus
runs his whole experience of the Underworld, and Anchises channels
that experience to his own uses. Constantly correcting his own approach
in response to his son’s reactions, Anchises embeds in the pathos of his
lament the same lessons as in the rest of his commentary, and the pa-
thos itself subtly welds to them his son’s melancholy, redirecting toward
national concerns his sensitivity to personal tragedy. One should not
misunderstand the teary quietism of the Marcellus episode as undercut-
ting the pro-Augustan tenor of Anchises’ commentary. Empson (1) saw
in the “dreamy, impersonal, universal melancholy” of the Aeneid as a
whole “a calculated support for Augustus”—never more calculated than
in this lament for Augustus’ heir. On the other hand, Anchises has not
disguised the down side of Roman history. He must only neutralize the
doubts it raises in his son.
His gorgeous offering of a futile, proleptic floral tribute completes
the transformation (883–86):
 REED: ANCHISES READING AENEAS … 161

manibus date lilia plenis,

purpureos spargam flores animamque nepotis
his saltem accumulem donis, et fungar inani
munere.

Give lilies in armloads; I will strew crimson flowers16 and heap

over the soul of my descendant these gifts at least, and fulfill the
empty duty.

The flowers that will cover Marcellus, a sensuous image of beauty cut
down in its prime, perform by metonymy the same function as will the
flower-similes of Euryalus and Pallas. Onto each of these dead princes
one might project one’s own false hopes, unmet expectations, and bro-
ken promises of the past, and in indulging grief take comfort in the
beauty that surrounds him. The imagery is crucial to the rhetoric of
Anchises, whose armfuls of lilies adorn and hide the coming tragedy: it
helps divert true indignation at the cost of Rome’s success into tolerable
sadness for one who is said to be simultaneously a sacrifice for that
success (870–71) and Rome’s would-be champion. His offering cathar-
tically involves Aeneas and the Sibyl in the ritual (date),17 taking the
edge off Aeneas’ melancholy and cleansing him of his misgivings. All
that beauty and voluptuous grief compensate him for the human com-
fort missing from the destiny he has witnessed, and help reconcile him
to the sly demands of his father’s mourning.
As after the futile embrace, the narrative picks up at line 886 with-
out giving Aeneas’ reaction to Anchises’ account of Marcellus:
sic tota passim regione vagantur
aeris in campis latis atque omnia lustrant.
quae postquam Anchises natum per singula duxit
incenditque animum famae venientis amore,
exim bella viro memorat quae deinde gerenda,

The reading that takes spargam as a subjunctive dependent on date (“Grant that I
16

may strew lilies, crimson flowers, with full arms …”), with no stop after 883, pro-
duces a jejune apposition; and Anchises should not be asking anyone’s permission,
but rather inviting his guests to join in.
17I cannot agree with Tiberius Donatus ad loc. that the plural date represents only a
trope, “since there was no one around who could give” (cum non essent praesto qui
darent). Anchises is addressing two people (cf. 854).
162 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001)

Laurentisque docet populos urbemque Latini,

et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem.

So they wander everywhere around the whole place, on the broad,

airy plains, and look over everything. And after Anchises led his son
through all these things, one by one, and kindled his spirit with love
of the coming fame, he speaks to the hero of the wars that must
thereupon be waged, teaches him about the Laurentian peoples and
the city of Latinus, and how he is to avoid or endure each task.

The crucial line is 889. The tense of incendit, parallel to duxit, is perfect
(lacking the merely conative force of an imperfective aspect that the
present tense might hold): Anchises did kindle Aeneas’ spirit with love
of Roman glory, presumably by means of the Roman descendants and
his glosses on them. The phrase recalls 4.232, where Jupiter wonders if
future glory has failed to kindle the dilatory hero (si nulla accendit
tantarum gloria rerum …), and answers Anchises’ rhetorical question at
6.806–07 as to whether fear or doubt still keep Aeneas from translating
his fine qualities into action.18 Line 889 implies that Aeneas has lost his
doubtful mood, and indeed we do not see it again. When did this hap-
pen? Apparently during Anchises’ epicedium, the rhetoric of which has
successfully united Aeneas’ melancholy to Anchises’ precepts, dissolv-
ing the former into the latter.
The insight that the Underworld prophecies change Aeneas ethi-
cally, which goes back to Heinze, was formulated for recent generations
of critics by Otis: “Aeneas has been finally brought out of the past, to
moral duty and his future.”19 Yet commentators have noticed that Aeneas
does not seem to remember any of the prophecy of Elysium; at least, he
does not repeat it to anyone, clearly act on any part of it, or permit it to
clear his mind of all remaining hesitation.20 Only at 12.111—where he
speaks consolingly to Ascanius and his comrades of what is to be, “teach-
ing them destiny” (fata docens)—is there a hint that he might be passing
down the specific precepts of his father (although there he may just be
18 Servius on 889 makes the connection with 806.

Otis 303 on lines 806–07; cf. 307: “But of course we do not realize this new
19

Aeneas in action until the books to come.” cf. Heinze 271–80.

20 See especially Michels 140–43.
 REED: ANCHISES READING AENEAS … 163

addressing his chances against Turnus).21 It is hard to decide whether

his slaying of Turnus shows that he has learned to debellare superbos
or whether, regardless of Anchises’ words at 6.853, he kills in mere
anger. So what of the prophetic scene does remain to effect a change
in Aeneas’ attitude? Can we assume that a general love of fame (famae
venientis amor) persists in him, though memory of the particulars
evanesces as he departs?
There is evidence, in fact, that Aeneas has not only absorbed the
lesson, but remembered its words. Anchises’ epicedium is the fullest
statement in the Aeneid on the tragedy of young death, the precedent
that prepares us for the celebrated fallen youths of the Italian war. What
does Aeneas say at the sight of the slain Lausus (10.825)? “Quid tibi
nunc, miserande puer ….” What does he say at the sight of the slain
Pallas (11.42)? “Tene” inquit “miserande puer ….” He echoes his father
contemplating the future corpse of Augustus’ would-be heir: heu,
miserande puer … (6.882). In the case of Pallas, lacrimis ita fatur obortis
at the end of 11.41 echoes the opening of Anchises’ speech, lacrimis
ingressus obortis, at 6.867: Aeneas over Pallas telescopes his father’s la-
ment over Marcellus.22 It is as if, along with information on the coming
generations of Albans and Romans, along with the love of coming fame,
Anchises had taught his son the proper reaction to the death of a young
Roman (the hope of his people) and the proper use for sadness. Implic-
itly Aeneas recognizes in both Lausus and Pallas scions of races that will
have a part in Rome, though themselves fated not to share in that achieve-
ment and that lineage. At 11.43–44 he suggests as much over Pallas,
who, more obviously than Lausus, might have taken part in the Trojan
settlement: has Fortuna begrudged him Pallas, that he might not see
Aeneas’ reign? (ne regna videres nostra). His vision of the future, to be
sure, still does not stretch further than vague glimmerings of his own
regime, but these two youths who might have shared it he has learned
to pity in his father’s terms. Their aura of lost promise is calqued on that
of Marcellus, and his conflicting connotations of national greatness and
21 cf. 6.759 (Anchises) et te tua fata docebo.
22Note also that at 11.53 (infelix, nati funus crudele videbis) he gives Evander the
epithet his father gave Brutus (6.822).
164 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001)

dynastic anxiety resonate in them. Anchises’ message about nationhood

and generational succession, his interpretation of the perils that bestrew
the road to glory, seems to have reached Aeneas specifically through the
lament for Marcellus.
For us the dual stream of hope and disappointment persists even in
the kindling, whose closest verbal parallel is 4.196–97. There Iarbas
hears of Dido’s affair with Aeneas:
protinus ad regem cursus detorquet Iarban
incenditque animum dictis atque aggerat iras

Forthwith [Fama] bends her course to King Iarbas, kindles his

spirit with her words and piles up his anger.

The echo recalls us to the treachery of fama (the subject of 4.197, the
object of Aeneas’ love at 6.889), whose hideous personification at 4.173–
88 climaxes with “as tenacious a messenger of the invented and the
depraved as of the truth” (188 tam ficti pravique tenax quam nuntia
veri).23 To be sure, we can balance the description preceding Iarbas’ prayer
with a detail of Jupiter’s response to it. He looks toward Carthage and
sees “the lovers, who had forgotten their better fame” (oblitos famae
melioris amantis, 221): there must be a fama appropriate for Aeneas, at
least in the eyes of Jupiter; and that at 6.889 will echo in the fama et fata
nepotum that Aeneas hoists with the shield at 8.731. Yet the parallel
with 4.197 likens Roman fama to the multi-tongued demon in Book 4,
and recalls the duplicity of the “fame” for which Anchises kindles Aeneas’
love (compare Fama’s dicta with those of Anchises at 6.898). The meta-
phor in amore is also pregnant with ambivalence. When at 721 Aeneas
asks what dira cupido drives the souls back to the light, it is curious,
especially in view of the Lucretian model, that Anchises’ immediate
response (his account of the progress of souls at 724–51) makes no use
of a like metaphor. Instead, his answers first replace the cupido of the
question with the forgetfulness of Lethe and then (in the pageant of
heroes) with the drive for Roman glory that Aeneas is meant to share.
The erotic trope of the question at 721 is only directly answered at 889,
when that “dire love” at which Aeneas shuddered is transfigured as the
23 On the ambivalence of fama in the Aeneid see Michels 140 n. 2.
 REED: ANCHISES READING AENEAS … 165

force that fires him to return to the light full of high enthusiasm. By
then, of course, the ambivalence of Anchises’ whole presentation has
accrued to the metaphor, particularly through his verdict on Brutus
(823): “Love of his country will prevail, and immense desire for praise.”
Amor, immensa cupido: the infelicity that necessarily follows from Brutus’
“loves” will accompany Aeneas out of the Underworld and through the
journeys and battles of the rest of the poem.
Anchises now sends his son and the Sibyl back up through the Gates
of Sleep (6.893–99):
Sunt geminae Somni portae, quarum altera fertur
cornea, qua veris facilis datur exitus umbris,
altera candenti perfecta nitens elephanto,
sed falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia Manes.
his ibi tum natum Anchises unaque Sibyllam
prosequitur dictis portaque emittit eburna,
ille viam secat ad navis sociosque revisit.

There are two Gates of Sleep, of which one is said to be made of horn,
through which true shades are given an easy egress; the other shines in
its perfection with gleaming ivory, but the ghosts send false visions to
the sky [through it]. Then and there Anchises follows his son and the
Sibyl with these words and sends them out the ivory gate. He makes
his way to the ships and rejoins his companions.

No challenge will be offered here to the opinion that Virgil’s Gates of

Sleep defy simple understanding, nor will the present interpretation
seek to stave off future controversions of their meaning, to which one
looks forward. Dense with mystery and contradictions, the passage begs
the questions of what metonymy permits Aeneas himself to exit by these
Gates (sent out, as if a dream, by his father’s Manes), or by what meta-
phor false dreams (or any) can be said to pass out by the Gates with
him. Solutions to the whole complex founder against one or more of its
parts. The explanation (which begins with Servius24) that the meaning
of the Ivory Gate speaks over the poem to its readers, signalling the
poet’s intention to calibrate his vision’s degree of veracity, occludes the
implications of the passage for the characters and their actions. Critical
24Serv. on 893 et poetice apertus est sensus: vult autem intellegi falsa esse omnia quae
dixit.
166 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001)

observations, on the other hand, that the predictions or the whole Un-
derworld episode is dreamlike fail to account for the relevance of “false”
(versus the other gate), while efforts to cast the proceedings as somehow
false (ethically, if not literally) must leave aside the designation “dream”:
a case of Feeney’s Binoculars, and so perhaps indicative of a permanent
Virgilian enigma.25 Zetzel’s suggested treatment of the image as “an ex-
tended form of enallage” (275) perhaps offers the best hope for tenta-
tiveness and subtlety.26
Without aiming, then, for a complete interpretation, we are con-
cerned here with how the exit through the Gate of False Dreams com-
ments on the change that we have been tracing. The prophetic function
of the Gates of Sleep (here as in Odyssey 19.562–67) tempts one to
interpret the choice of the Ivory Gate as acknowledging some fallible
component in the prophecies Aeneas has just heard, some major part of
them that will not come true.27 This makes psychological sense in view
of the personal cost of the virtues exemplified in the Pageant of Heroes:
they can bring you laudes, but they can make you infelix. When Anchises,
after teaching Aeneas what he must be, sends him out of the Under-
world through the Ivory Gate, he is affirming the disappointment that
this fama brings to one who seeks a more than national and posthu-
mous felicity.28 The first of that long line of Roman heroes, Aeneas car-
ries up to the light virtues and values incapable of bringing about the
happiness that he has now learned not to yearn for. At 719–21 it was
unthinkable to him that the souls should wish ever to leave “the blessed
abodes” (639); now he himself willingly leaves them, imbued and al-
tered by a persuasion as potent as Lethe. The death of Palinurus had
exposed Aeneas’ delusion, on the eve of his descent, that true endeavor
25Feeney (1991, 168) compares trying to understand definitively the Allecto-Amata
episode in Book 7 to “looking at an object through a pair of binoculars with incom-
patible lenses.” cf. Hexter 122–24.
26Zetzel gives bibliography on the passage up to his publication. On the complexities
see also Bray at 57.
27 cf. O’Hara 170–72. -
28cf. Goold 245 n. 36: “In verse 896 falsa does not mean exactly ‘false,’ but rather
‘delusive’ ….”
 REED: ANCHISES READING AENEAS … 167

brings fortune; by the end of the poem he will disavow something

like the felicitas that escaped Brutus when he tells his own son at
12.435–36:
disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
fortunam ex aliis

My child, learn valor and true toil from me, fortune from others.

His very commendation of fortuna to Ascanius, of course, reveals that

his dialogue with Anchises has not quite ended; yet for his own life the
lesson has stuck. This abnegation of felicitas or fortuna, the flip side of
his pietas (in that “happiness” comprehends, at an extreme, those per-
sonal aims for which men had destroyed the Republic), makes him a
worthy Roman ancestor. It is not that Aeneas is taught by Anchises to
trust destiny. He goes from incorrectly trusting destiny at the end of
Book 5 to properly mistrusting it after Book 6, in accepting the amor
venientis famae and dropping hope of happiness as a necessary conse-
quence or even a likelihood. When he passes under the gleaming ivory,
the mood is somber, but his action is unsentimental. He has made peace
with deception.
Was not Elysium like a dream from the very beginning? In these
amoena virecta Aeneas has met prophecies as true as those dreamt by
Ilia, none more so than Anchises’ account of the death of Marcellus—
which in fact, by Virgil’s economy of allusion, refers us back to that
prophetic dream. The riverbank from Annales 39 reappears as the site of
Marcellus’ tomb at 872–74, where the designation of Rome as the “city
of Mavors” also recalls Ilia’s homo pulcer. At 875–77 Anchises calls
Marcellus a puer Iliaca de gente, from the Romula tellus: a “boy from the
race of Ilium”—or “ … of Ilia,” from a country named for Ilia’s son.
When Aeneas finally exits the Ennian forest that he entered at line 179,
he bears within him duplicitous visions of a splendid but uneasy future.
168 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001)

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