Virgil's Poem of Rome's Destiny

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Notes

Notes

1. The Aeneid is at once bi- and tripartite in construction. Books 1–6 and 7–12 are units, but so are 1–4, 5–8, and 9–12). Books 4 and 12 end with the deaths of Dido and Turnus, respectively. The pair correspond, for reasons obvious to all who know a bit of Roman history, to Cleopatra and Mark Antony whom Aeneas’ descendant Augustus will defeat in the great sea battle at Actium, depicted centrally on the new shield for Aeneas that the god Vulcan has prophetically decorated, and that Aeneas inspects at the end of Book 8.

2. Juno—Hellenic Hera—is highlighted as the chief divine booster of those villainous Greeks who sacked her hated Troy but is also, far less accurately, identified with the goddess Tanit worshipped at Carthage.

3. Although Dido resorts in a very un-Epicurean way to “black magical” ritual at the end, she utters some very Epicurean sentiments, especially at 4.379f where she denies that gods disturb their quietude by involvement in human affairs.

4. When Aeneas avenges Pallas to appease the latter's aged father this corresponds not so much to Achilles’ revenge of Patroclus upon Hector as the great Achaean hero's revenge upon Memnon—like Turnus, unlike Hector, a demigod—over grieving old Nestor's son Antilochus, whom Memnon slew in battle. The latter story belonged to the pre-Homeric tradition, although the (lost) literary Aethiopis that recorded it is post-Homeric.

5. Whose reported suicide in Alexandria “before Caesar Octavian arrived” may, I think, be doubted; he is likelier, I think, to have gone down fighting Caesarian assassins against impossible odds, even like the Greek Alcibiades with whom Plutarch parallels Coriolanus, or perhaps could have drunk himself to death like surrendered Demetrius Poliorcetes, his Plutarchian counterpart from Greece. Caesarian propaganda can have whitewashed the assassination by fashioning a preposterous romantic melodrama, which Plutarch transmitted and which the author of Romeo and Juliet raised to high poetry. It was concocted, one might suspect, in order to save face for Augustus’ nephew Iulus Antonius, son of Mark by Caesar's sister Octavia, and, of course, to exculpate Octavian himself. His defensiveness about Antony's death comes through in Plutarch, but no reason for it unless in embarrassed retrospect; and the odd business about the sword stained with Antony's blood brought to surprised and grief-stricken Octavian does not ring true.