Aeneid III A
If the second book of the Aeneid is a nightmare, the third books is a melancholy depiction of people who are so obsessed with the past that they cannot deal with the present, much less face the future. Aeneas has been told of his glorious mission and the destiny of his people, but all it seems he can do is to wander from place to place, forever setting up miniature Troys.
(I have been remiss in posting new comments on the Aeneid, both because of our forthcoming Summer School and because of writing too much nonsense about politics on the Chronicles website. To catch up, I am going to keep my treatment of Book III fairly brief, though I am happy to expatiate in response to questions.)
If the Aeneadae–that is, a nation now defined by its leader–are going to escape, they need a fleet. This mundane fact and the even more mundane search for wood takes on a great significance, when they take their timber from the foot of Mt. Ida, sacred to the Great Mother. (Remember, Creusa is now her immortal servant, and even these trees will take on life later on in the poem.)
Their first attempt to found a settlement–in Thrace–is a disaster, though some scholars connected the town of Aenos with Aeneas. There, building his pathetic town, he pulls a plant and from the gush of blood discovers the body of Priam’s murdered little brother, Polydorus, who had been sent for safe-keeping. The tale is the basis of Euripides’ beautiful play the Hecuba, in which the mother, Hecuba, goes mad with grief over the murder of her remaining son and daughter. Vergil is well aware of the play and of Euripides’ portrayal of the brutality of war and the demoralizing effect of such horror and suffering. Vergil takes the opportunity to preach on the evils of greed as the basis of violence. Obviously he had not read Mises.
Sailing to Delos, Apollo’s sacred island, they receive fairly good prophetic instruction to go to the original land of Dardanus, but old Anchises–the voice of nostalgia and the mistakes of the past–takes them to Crete, from which the king, Idomeneus has been expelled, making Crete an opportunity. Famine and plague teach them better. A second application to Apollo, they are given explicit instructions to go to Italy–as Cassandra, Apollo’s doomed prophetess–had predicted.
Book III is the most Odyssean and thus we have a sequence of magical adventures or at least allusions to them (the Cyclops). Their attack on the Harpies misfires, when the queen of these ugly brutes curses them to a famine, much as Polyphemus the Cyclops puts a curse on Odysseus. This seems unfair, in view of the Harpies’ nastiness. On the other hand, it is their land, after all, and the Trojans were trying to eat their cattle. We shall see later how the curse was fulfilled in a harmless fashion.
[More to come...]
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Category: Booklog
“I have been remiss in posting new comments on the Aeneid, both because of our forthcoming Summer School and because of writing too much nonsense about politics on the Chronicles website.”>>
I believe most of us following your discourse on the Aeneid are also following your commentaries on politics, so we do not feel deprived. I wish I could attend your summer school, but my wife and I are caring for her mother who, it appears, may outlive all of us.
The lull in the discussion was alright with me since I was sick for a week and then decided to take a break from Vergil in order to read Camps’ introduction, the latest Chronicles, and more of Scullard.
I really had to resist seeing Anchises like some of old fool in a comedy movie, first whining and refusing to go, and then leading the journey woefully astray while wasting a lot of time. Of course that’s not fair to him, and Vergil didn’t intend such a ridiculous thing, but he didn’t write the story for moderns tainted by the movies of Mel Brooks, along with ‘Airplane’, and ‘Hot Shots’. Lloyd bridges could have done a hilarious send-up of Anchises, and just imagine the sea storms!
‘Vergil takes the opportunity to preach on the evils of greed as the basis of violence. Obviously he had not read Mises.’
Clearly, the wisdom of the ancients trumps the ideologies of the moderns.
Anchises guides the voyagers to Crete because they were told to go to a land from which their ancestors had come, and Trojans are partly descended from Cretans who settled in Troy, thus the Trojans have a dual lineage along with ancestors who came from Italy before it was called by that name. This is all intriguing, though perhaps not all that relevant to the story.
As far as book three being the most Odyssean, the encounter with the Cyclopes is most entertaining, and though at first it may seem to be a crass borrowing from Homer, somehow it fits in and it works. It’s an episode that one cannot start reading without finishing. Here Virgil brings the story into the Homeric world in a way that the fall of Troy does not, but I cant put my finger on just why that is. Perhaps it’s because the story, after finishing the account of the fall of Troy, diverges from the Homeric tales after Aeneas leaves Illium, and now Virgil ties it back in, in a very picturesque manner? This seems to have been intentional.
Dr Fleming,
I am struck by how abruptly Book III seems to end and, in particular, how briefly the death of Anchises is treated by Vergil here. Is this perhaps intended as an indication of how deeply Aeneas feels the loss of his father – a loss so painful that he is loath at this time to speak of it further?
If book III is Odyssean, it also seems to be a Trojan reconciliation with the Greeks. Although Aeneas is aTrojan, Vergil doesn’t want him to remain forever at odds with the Greeks. In book III, Aechaemenides is treated kindly, and Orestes is the savior of Andromache and Helenus. This reconciliation is later continued with Aeneas befriending Evander and Evander’s son, Pallas, losing his life fighting for Trojans. And an even more interesting twist is that Vergil distances the Trojans from Troy — noting that the “father of our [Trojan] race,” Dardanus, was from Italy. The old loyalties of the Iliad have been transformed.
Mr. Roberts has made a valuable point. Just as Juno will some day support the Trojan-Romans, so too the Greeks, who are destined to be ruled by Rome–or, as Vergil might think, find their true liberty under Roman protection–must be reconciled.