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Geomythology and the Death of King Priam in The

Aeneid, Book 2

Timothy John Burbery

To cite this article: Timothy John Burbery (2019) Geomythology and the Death of King Priam in
The�Aeneid, Book 2, Folklore, 130:1, 81-88, DOI: 10.1080/0015587X.2018.1510623

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2018.1510623

Published online: 20 Mar 2019.

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Folklore 130 (March 2019): 81–88
https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2018.1510623

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Geomythology and the Death of King Priam in

The Aeneid, Book 2
Timothy John Burbery
Abstract
This article examines an anomaly in Virgil’s Aeneid, book 2, and offers a possible
solution based on the method known as geomythology. In this section of the poem,
the narrator depicts the fatal stabbing of King Priam in front of his own altar, within
the citadel of Troy, as the city is being burned by the Greeks. Immediately following
this passage is a curious ‘epitaph’ for Priam, which notes that his body is huge,
decapitated, and lying on a beach. Scholars have provided various explanations for
this apparent discrepancy, with varying degrees of success. This article explores how
a geomythological approach, focusing on the misidentification of the remains of a
woolly mammoth, may resolve the issue.

Geomythology: A Brief Introduction

Geomythology is a scholarly discipline that, as its name suggests, constitutes a hybrid
of geology and mythology. It was anticipated by thinkers such as Euhemerus, a late
fourth-century BC mythographer who rationalized myths as exaggerated versions of
actual events and persons. The term ‘geomythology’ was coined by American
geologist Dorothy Vitaliano, who argued that geology and mythology may be
mutually illuminating, as scientists can glean scientific data from legends about
earthquakes, floods, and other disasters; geology, in turn, can benefit from the
insights of humanistic disciplines such as the rhetoric and history of science.
Geomythology also shares affinities with literary theories such as ecocriticism, in
that both approaches consider the intersection of myth, literature, and the natural
world, and with historical methods such as Big History, a movement that seeks to
expand the traditional scope of historiography beyond the advent of human culture
to much earlier events, as far back as the Big Bang (Christian 2011). Geomythological
discussions have also been featured in Folklore, including analyses of griffins, Beowulf,
and South Asian legends (Mayor and Heaney 1993; Van der Geer et al. 2008;
Burbery 2015).

ß 2019 The Folklore Society

82 Timothy John Burbery

The most influential contemporary practitioner of geomythological analysis is

historian-folklorist Adrienne Mayor, who has published studies on the geomyths of
both Native Americans and the Greeks and Romans, and most recently on the
historical roots of the legends of the Amazon warriors. In her book The First Fossil-
Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times (Mayor 2011), Mayor
examines the discoveries of ancient animal bones, such as those of the woolly
mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, whose remains seem to have been mistakenly
identified in antiquity as belonging to giants, humanoid and otherwise. Many of the
examples she marshals are from the Mediterranean, including multiple sites in
Greece and Anatolia. As she demonstrates, both in this book and in an earlier Folklore
article, geomythology may serve to resolve interpretative and artistic cruxes, such as
the long-standing mystery of the putative existence of the griffin (Mayor and Heaney
1993). The purpose of this article is to extend a geomythological approach to another
interpretative difficulty, relating to the account of Priam’s death in The Aeneid, book
2, lines 526–58.

King Priam’s Death and Eulogy

Priam’s killing is vividly rendered by Virgil, and comes immediately following the
taunting of the old king by Pyrrhus:
. . . hoc dicens altaria ad ipsa trementem 550
traxit et in multo lapsantem sanguine nati,
implicuitque comam laeva, dextraque coruscum
extulit ac lateri capulo tenus abdidit ensem.
haec finis Priami fatorum; hic exitus illum
sorte tulit, Troiam incensam et prolapsa videntem 555
Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum
regnatorem Asiae. iacet ingens litore truncus,
avolsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus.
(Fairclough 1925, 330; all Latin quotes are from this edition)

. . . So speaking,
He dragged the trembling king to the very altar,
Slipping through his son’s blood, then twisted a left hand
In his long hair; next, with the right he drew
A sword and thrust it to the utmost hilt
Into his side. Such was the fate of Priam,
This his allotted end, to see Troy burned,
Its citadel fallen, who once ruled in proud Asia
So many lands and peoples. Upon the shore
His mighty torso lies, the head hacked off
From shoulders: it is a corpse without a name.
Geomythology and the Death of King Priam in The Aeneid 83

(Lind 1962, 37, lines 584–94; unless otherwise noted, all English quotes from The Aeneid are from L.
R. Lind’s translation)

Here, Priam is slain in front of his own altar by Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, who stabs
the old man in the side. Following this event, the narrator then notes (lines 557–58)
that Priam now lies on a shore:
. . . iacet ingens litore truncus,
avolsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus.
. . . Upon the shore
His mighty torso lies, the head hacked off
From shoulders: it is a corpse without a name.

Robert Fitzgerald (possibly echoing Shelley’s Ozymandias) translates the lines as

follows (Fitzgerald 1990, 52):
On the distant shore
The vast trunk headless lies without a name.
And Rolfe Humphries (1987, 51) renders it thus:
He lies, a nameless body, on the shore
Dismembered, huge, the head torn from the shoulders.

Lines 557–58 present several difficulties. First, they do not seem to accord with the
ones immediately preceding them, where Pyrrhus stabs rather than decapitates
Priam. Fitzgerald translates lines 552–53 as follows: ‘The sword flashed in his right
[hand]; up to the hilt / He thrust it into his body’. Second, there is no suggestion in
Virgil that any of the Trojan dead are brought outside Troy’s walls; instead, in
Fitzgerald’s rendering, presumably all corpses burn within ‘Proud Ilium’ that lies
‘smoking on the earth’ (bk 3, line 4; Fitzgerald 1990, 65).
Of course, it is possible that the lines do not contradict each other; it may well
be the case that Priam’s body was taken out of Troy, decapitated, and deposited on
the shore. Virgil was under no obligation to depict every single action relating to
the narrative. Perhaps, too, the body was transported outside the city walls to
serve as a human sacrifice, on or near Achilles’s tomb, located there. Virgil refers
to the tomb in book 3, lines 438–40, when Andromach€e recounts the fate of the
Trojan women: ‘Happiest of us all was Priam’s daughter [Polyxena], / The virgin
picked to die at the great tomb, / Below Troy wall, of our dead enemy’ (Fitzgerald
1990, 77). Then again, the fact that Troy was razed by the Greeks, with perhaps
only a small portion of the city left standing, would appear to make this possibility
difficult. Indeed, Virgil claims that Neptune himself ‘has loosened the foundations
with his great trident and is shaking the walls, tearing up your whole city from the
place where it is set’ (bk 2, lines 611–12; West 2003, 42). It is also not clear
whether a corpse could serve as a fitting sacrificial victim. Moreover, the alleged
immensity of Priam’s body (ingens truncus) is surprising; while other figures such as
Sarpedon (bk 1, line 141) and Periphas (bk 2, line 620) are mentioned as being
colossal in The Aeneid, there is no prior suggestion of Priam being a giant man.
84 Timothy John Burbery

Scholarly Proposals
Scholars have offered various solutions to the discrepancy. For instance, Giampiero
Scafoglio calls lines 554–58 ‘a lament for Priam’s death or an epitaph’ (Scafoglio 2012,
665). He believes, along with Servius, a late fourth-century/early fifth-century
commentator on Virgil, that the poet alludes here to the beheading at sea of Pompey
the Great in 48 BC. Scafoglio quotes Servius’s remark on these lines: ‘Pompei tangit
historiam’ (‘Pompey touches history’) (Scafoglio 2012, 665). On the other hand,
Nicholas Horsfall points out that ‘some of the details in Virgil’s obituary of Priam do
not altogether suit Pompey’, noting, for instance, that ‘the body lying without honour
on the beach does not quite square with the facts of Pompey’s end’—that is, cremation
and immediate burial (Horsfall 2008, 418 and 423). Still, Horsfall goes on to contend
that ‘there are some details [in the account] solidly in favour of the [Pompey–Priam]
analogy’, which for him ‘serve to clinch the argument’ (Horsfall 2008, 418).
While Scafoglio agrees that the lines allude to Pompey, he maintains that this
reference ‘holds only a secondary, marginal meaning in the episode’, and claims that
‘it should be evaluated independently from any historic allegory’ (Scafoglio 2012,
665). He then cites fragments from the Greek epic cycles, noting that ‘Arctinus
reported that Priam was killed at the altar of Zeus Herceius; Lesches on the other
hand said that he was dragged from the altar and killed at his own door’ (Scafoglio
2012, 666). Significantly, ‘in both poets he died in the royal palace’ (Scafoglio 2012,
666). Priam’s decapitation on the shore, however, might seem to have originated with
Virgil: ‘No source earlier than the Aeneid testifies to the story of the beheading of
Priam on the Trojan shore’ (Scafoglio 2012, 665). Yet Virgil did not, according to
Scafoglio, invent this scenario; rather, as Servius claims, it came from ‘an unspecified
tragedy by [the Roman tragedian Marcus] Pacuvius’ (220–130 BC) (Scafoglio 2012, 666).
Plausibly, Scafoglio remarks that if Virgil had been the inventor of the second
version of Priam’s death, ‘he would not have introduced it with such a brief and
allusive reference, which presupposes a literary model where the story was
developed broadly’ (Scafoglio 2012, 666). He then sets out to identify which tragedy
Virgil was influenced by. The best candidate, he believes, is Hermiona (Scafoglio 2012,
666), which is extant only in fragments.
Scafoglio conjectures that Hermiona may have depicted the murder of Neoptolemus
(who is also known as Pyrrhus) by Orestes in the temple of Apollo, near the altar.
(This episode is featured in Euripides’s play Andromache, lines 1147–49 and 1161–65.)
He also surmises that the murder would have occurred off-stage, according to Greek
theatre conventions, and would have been reported by a messenger. That speech, he
suggests, ‘may have contained a reference to the [earlier] murder of Priam’, and
would have voiced thereby a kind of poetic justice, since as noted, Neoptolemus had
previously killed Priam in much the same way (i.e. by stabbing, near an altar)
(Scafoglio 2012, 668). In addition, ‘Pacuvius’s messenger [may have] told a different
story’ compared to Virgil’s account of the king’s death, to wit, ‘the murder of Priam
being committed on the Trojan shore, as a human sacrifice in honor of Achilles,
enacted next to his tomb but close to an altar, as required by the ritual of sacrifice’
(Scafoglio 2012, 668).
Geomythology and the Death of King Priam in The Aeneid 85

To support his hypothesis, Scafoglio cites as a parallel the execution of Polyxena,

near Achilles’s tomb, which event occurs in a work that pre-dates Hermiona:
Euripides’ Hecuba. In lines 518–92 of Hecuba, the unfortunate maiden bares her
breasts to the avenging Neoptolemus before he dispatches her. An eyewitness notes
that, ‘Torn between pity and duty, / Achilles’s son stood hesitating, and then /
slashed her throat with the edge of his sword’ (Euripides 1955, 519, lines 567–69).
Virgil’s motive, Scafoglio argues, is ‘to show that (at least sometimes) there is a
divine justice, a delayed but appropriate punishment for the impious offender’
(Scafoglio 2012, 669).
Scafoglio’s hypothesis that the image of Priam’s decapitation may originate in
Hermiona could be correct, yet it must remain conjectural, given that it is based on a
mostly non-extant play. In addition, the alleged parallel between Priam’s and
Polyxena’s deaths is not fully convincing. For as Scafoglio admits, citing Horsfall,
‘human sacrifice correctly understood does not resemble . . . what happens here [at
line 553]’ (quoted in Scafoglio 2012, 665). As Horsfall explains, ‘Priam’s death-wound
. . . corresponds not at all to the fatal blow administered in a Roman sacrifice’ (Horsfall
2008, 390). That is, the king dons armour when he realizes his city is threatened: ‘the
old man uselessly / Put on his shoulders, shaking with old age, / Armor unused for
years, belted a sword on’ (bk 2, lines 662–64; Fitzgerald 1990, 51). Hence, his breast and
throat presumably would have been protected, which could explain why he is stabbed
in his side. By contrast, as noted, sacrificial victims such as Polyxena were slain by
having their throats cut, which action allowed their blood to gush forth.
Another possible solution of the crux is that Virgil is perhaps using Priam as a kind
of metonym for Troy. As goes Priam, so goes Troy, Virgil may be implying, summing
up the demise of Troy in the person of its king, now beheaded, and deploying the
image of decapitation as a metaphor for the city’s near-total destruction. Still, the
evidence would seem to point more towards a non-figurative reading, as the poet’s
description of the dead king renders him as a physical entity, a corpse or trunk, thus
emphasizing his corporeality, rather than suggesting any metaphorical resonances of
his body. Also, the fact that Priam is called nameless (sine nomine) would seem to
complicate attempts to regard the body as symbolic.

A Geomythological Interpretation
A third possibility is that the lines concerning Priam’s corpse are a description of
a mammal that died on the Anatolian coast, and whose bones fossilized and were
covered with sand. It was subsequently exposed during a storm centuries or
millennia later, and mistaken for an enormous man. The suggestion may not be
as far-fetched as it appears. As Mayor shows, there are a number of instances in
antiquity in which animal bones or remains were similarly misidentified; in fact,
some of these supposedly human corpses were believed to belong to worthies of
the Trojan War, including Ajax, Achilles, and Hector, and were identified on the
Anatolian shore. For example, she notes that ‘according to Homeric myth, Ajax’s
grave was on the headland of Rhoeteum, where the Greek ships had landed to
attack Troy’ (Mayor 2011, 115). She goes on to speculate that ‘[b]ones big enough
86 Timothy John Burbery

to be worthy of the mighty Ajax would most likely belong to a Miocene

mastodon or rhinoceros’ and points out that ‘these and other large mammal
remains are abundant in the Neogene-Pleistocene deposits of Troy’s eroding coast’
(Mayor 2011, 115). In addition, Mayor observes that there was a widespread belief
in antiquity that the heroes of the distant past were enormous in size; indeed,
Philostratus’s romance On Heroes, although written approximately two centuries
after The Aeneid, may have been working with older oral traditions. It cites
prodigies such as Achilles’ huge corpse, which was alleged to be thirty-three feet
long, and exposed to view when the cave housing it eroded (Mayor 2011, 117).
Ajax’s body is also noted by Philostratus, and is said to be fifteen feet or more in
length, while the mythical Antaeus was said to be around eighty-five feet long by
the historian Strabo, one of Virgil’s contemporaries. Moreover, the city of Thebes
sent a group to Troy to recover the bones of Hector, and eventually buried him
(or at least a number of massive, human-looking bones), according to Pausanias
(Mayor 2011, 113 and 269).
Although claims of such colossi may strike some modern readers as preposterous,
as mentioned, such allegations are common not only in Greek and Roman tradition,
but also in many other legends and myths. A probable explanation for at least some
of the assertions of the Greek and Latin writers is that they were based on
misidentified faunal remains. Mayor cites a number of reasons why such
classifications probably occurred. For instance, as noted, the areas where these bones
were found are now known to contain rich deposits of fossilized remnants of
mammoths, mastodons, and other megafauna of the Miocene, Pliocene, and
Pleistocene eras. She also observes that ‘mammoth and mastodon skeletons were
sometimes mistaken for giants’ or mythic heroes’ remains . . . especially as the
extinct mammals’ scapulae and limb bones resemble those of humans but on a large
scale’ (pers. comm., 21 March 2018). Woolly mammoth femurs, in particular, as well
as their rib-cages and scapulae, look much like human bones, albeit supersize
versions of them, and these body parts would often survive for millennia (see, for
instance, figs 2 and 3 in Burbery 2015, 322–23). Mammoth and mastodon skulls, by
contrast, are quite porous and tend to crumble, particularly since the Mediterranean
is characterized by intense seismic activity. That activity frequently crushes and
disarticulates skeletons, such that ‘whole skeletons [of prehistoric elephants] are
rare’ (Mayor 2011, 66), and even when largely intact ones are unearthed, they tend to
be headless.
It is true that mammoth and mastodon tusks often survived, and would thus seem
to constitute a strong indicator that other bones found near them were not human.
However, the ancients did not always know that tusks belonged to elephants; while
they did recognize that tusks were made of ivory, they believed they were produced
from the ground like minerals (Mayor, pers. comm., 21 March 2018). Mayor also
notes the universal human tendency to anthropomorphize nature, an impulse that
could have been a factor in ancient misreadings of weathered-out animal bones. This
impulse is not limited to premodern society; as Mayor demonstrates, modern-day
forensic experts have made similar errors. In an anthropological study by the US
Geomythology and the Death of King Priam in The Aeneid 87

Federal Bureau of Investigation of the bones of supposedly human victims of

murders, about fifteen per cent of the remains turned out to be animalian (Mayor
2011, 80).

Conclusion: Mammoth Bones and Priam

Summing up, then, it is possible that someone found mammoth or mastodon
remains, lacking a head, on the Trojan shore, and then erroneously, but following a
certain logic, identified them as Priam’s, famously slain near this area centuries
earlier. Virgil need not have seen the bones himself, of course, and in fact never
visited Troy as far as we know; it would have been enough for him to have heard or
read an account of an immense, headless figure discovered on the beach near Troy,
and then include it in The Aeneid. One possible source could have been his Roman
predecessor Pacuvius, for as Horsfall states, anticipating Scafoglio’s argument, Virgil
may have had Pacuvius in mind when he composed the ‘epitaph’ for Priam by
alluding to the shore, at line 557 (litore) (Horsfall 2008, 418). Although Horsfall
remarks that we do not know ‘how the idea came to Pacuvius, except perhaps as a
(possibly original) wish to associate Priam’s end with the tomb of Achilles’ (Horsfall
2008, 418), it may be that Pacuvius heard about or saw the weathered bones on the
beach himself, and was the first to make the mistaken identification.
It seems germane that in two other passages Virgil appears to accept what we
would now regard as a geomyth, that is, a belief that the earth sometimes yields the
remains of human giants, who had supposedly been buried earlier. Thus, in his duel
with Aeneas, near the end of the epic, Turnus spies a massive boulder; in order to
emphasize the rock’s as well as Turnus’s hugeness, the narrator notes that it is a
boundary stone, and states: ‘Scarce could that stone twice six picked men upraise /
With bodies such as now the earth displays’ (Mayor 2011, 281). Similarly, in the
Georgics, he describes a farmer who, while ploughing, will sometimes unearth javelins
and old helmets, and will ‘marvel at giant bones in the upturned graves’ (bk 1, line
497; Fairclough 1925, 115). As the son of a farmer, it is possible that Virgil had first-
hand experience of such discoveries.
Moreover, while he does not fully endorse the truth of it, in The Aeneid Virgil notes
in passing the legend of Enceladus, the giant who was said to have been buried alive
by Mt Aetna in Sicily; Enceladus’s tossings and turnings supposedly cause volcanic
eruptions (bk 3, line 667 and following). The poet’s awareness of such claims and his
tendency to believe them make it more plausible that Virgil also could have accepted
the allegations about the massive Priam, supposedly lying on a beach near Troy.

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Biographical Note
Timothy Burbery teaches English at Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia, USA. His
research explores connections between literature and science, with an emphasis on
geomythology. Publications include Milton the Dramatist (Duquesne University Press, 2007),
a previous article in Folklore, and essays in EARTH, Milton Studies, Milton Quarterly,
and The Ben Jonson Quarterly.