Virgil's Cinematic Art: Vision as Narrative in the Aeneid 0197643248, 9780197643242

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Virgil’s Cinematic Art

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Virgil’s Cinematic Art Vision as Narrative in the Aeneid

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KIRK FREUDENBURG

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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Freudenburg, Kirk, 1961– author. Title: Virgil’s cinematic art : vision as narrative in the Aeneid / Kirk Freudenburg. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022029506 (print) | LCCN 2022029507 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197643242 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197643266 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Virgil. Aeneis. Classification: LCC PA6825 .F779 2023 (print) | LCC PA6825 (ebook) | DDC 873/.01—dc23/eng/20220922 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029506 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029507 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197643242.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

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For Judi—​ First, Last, Best

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Contents

Preface List of Illustrations

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Introduction: The “Seeming” of the “Seen”—​Narrative as Vision in Ancient Epic 1 I.1. Seeing with Eyes Tightly Shut  1 I.2. Two Worlds in Dialogue: Film Analysis and Classic Narratology  5 1. Introducing Suture 1.1. Tracking Turnus: Visual Pursuit  15 1.2. Watching Paris: Hatred at First Sight  21 1.3. Sightings, First and Last: the Insect Similes of the Aeneid  29

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2. Precedents in Earlier Roman Poetry 2.1. Getting High with Lucretius  39 2.2. Vertical Relations  48 2.3. The Grammar of Angles Taken  60 2.4. The Other Side of High: Positioning Pathos  64

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3. Seeing as Telling 3.1. The Temple Ecphrasis of Aeneid 1  80 3.2. Aeneas the Neoteric  86 3.3. Duces Feminae: Fade to Dido  93 3.4. Image Pairs: The Catullan Background  101 3.5. Caving In to Desire: Dido’s Wedding Parade  103

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4. Imagery as Understory 4.1. Dido’s Visual Feast  111 4.2. Picturing Virgil’s Words: Dido in the Middle  114 4.3. Golden Dido  120 4.4. On Keeping Dido Unfathomable  127 4.5. Girl on Fire  131

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5. Imagery as Counternarrative in the Death of Camilla 5.1. Imagining Camilla  143 5.2. Tracking Prey with Camilla  144 5.3. Dressed to Kill: Clothing as Fire-​starter, Again  148 5.4. The Death of Camilla as a Life Fully Lived  152 5.5. One Last Look: Visual Counternarrative, and the Humanness of Virgil’s “Heroes”  153

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Appendix

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Works Cited

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Index

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Preface

Like packages arriving in the mail, sabbaticals get snatched when they arrive, and my most recent sabbatical showed up when Yale’s libraries were closed, books were hard to come by, and interlocutors were nowhere in sight. The American politics of that dark moment were so unholy and distressing (still are) that I needed “somewhere else” to go with my thoughts; somewhere far away, in antiquity, in stories, in film. During my cloistered leave, much of which was spent in a spare bedroom repurposed as a makeshift office, I made myself finish editing a commentary that had taken me more than twenty-​five years to complete, and I drafted this book from start to finish. I could do that, pursuing a new project with uncharacteristic haste, not only because circumstances dictated that the book had to be idea-​driven, since it was just me, alone with my thoughts, rather than in conversation with people and books, but also because for the better part of ten years I had been floating the basic ideas of the book in lecture form. The essence of what I wanted to say was mostly worked out and ready to go. I just needed a snatch of time to get my ideas down in readable book form. The style of the book may seem “off ” to some: too colloquial, irregular, impertinent. But the choice was deliberate. I wrote it this way because I want the book to be accessible to non-​specialists, even as I harbor high hopes of its saying things necessary and new to scholars of Virgil’s Aeneid (and of ancient epic more generally); things that they might actually choose to take seriously. Whether I have managed to pull off this “double act” is not for me to say. I first lectured on the basic substance of this book at a meeting of the Classical Association of the Northwest at the University of Washington in March 2010. There, thanks to the kind invitation of Cathy Connors, I gave the conference’s keynote address under the title “The Cinematography of Virgil’s Aeneid,” choosing to make that my theme (rather than something, yet again, on Roman satire) because I thought the basic ideas I was toying with might grab audiences, especially since (as in this book) the argument lends itself so well to being packaged with ample, color-​rich visual illustrations. At first, the illustrations were eye candy;

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icing on the cake. But as I continued to develop my ideas, the visual realizations of Virgil’s epic in various artistic media over time became meaningful problems in themselves, and a key component of my arguments concerning the realization of Virgil’s text in image form. I gave fresh versions of the lecture, tweaking and correcting ideas at each point along the way, at Johns Hopkins University (thanks to Silvia Montiglio), at Bryn Mawr College (the annual “Agnes Michels Lecture,” with thanks to Radcliffe Edmonds), at Dartmouth (the annual “Zarbin Lecture,” thanks to Pramit Chaudhuri and Margaret Graver), at the University of Missouri (thanks to Dan Hooley), at La Sapienza in Rome (thanks to Andrea Cucchiarelli), and, under a different title, as the annual “Michael C. J. Putnam Lecture” at Brown University (thanks to Jerry DeBrohun, and to Michael Putnam himself ). The book’s main premises were also tested at Yale, twice in lecture form, and in the course of two separate graduate seminars on vision in ancient poetry. As always, thanks are due to the students who took these courses and helped develop and refine my ideas. Alessandro Barchiesi has been a great interlocutor and friend for many years, and he was especially generous in giving me feedback on an earlier draft. His support for this unconventional book means a lot to me. At Yale, I have enjoyed the unique privilege of being able to run my ideas by some truly great minds: Egbert Bakker on ancient epic narrative; Francesco Casetti on film theory; and, on Virgil’s Aeneid, David Quint, whose influence is obvious throughout; also Chris Kraus (when she was not busy being department chair), and Irene Peirano (when she was still here). All of these Elihu-​interlocutors are owed my gratitude at levels that I cannot begin to repay. Rob Harmon of the Best Video Film and Cultural Center in Hamden, CT, has been a great conversation partner over the years. As I worked out my ideas, pondering them aloud, he put me on to films that I needed to see, and his knowledge of the editing techniques of individual directors was crucial in putting together the Appendix of Film Edits at the end of the book. I want to thank the anonymous readers of Oxford University Press for their incisive criticisms and suggestions, all of which served to make this a much better book. Stefan Vranka, my OUP editor, was a pleasure to work with, and he is to be thanked for letting me have my say within a series that I think, under his direction, is every bit as risk-​taking and transformational as it is venerable. Ekaterina Koposova undertook the daunting task of searching out and securing permissions for all the figures and plates of the book. This took the steady and knowing effort of many months. I’m not sure what I would have done without her. The support of my family has proven invaluable over the last two, Covid-​ challenged years. By now Paul and Annah have busy lives of their own, but they don’t keep those lives to themselves. They invite their parents in and make time for family, and I am enormously grateful for that. For her part, Judi, my wife,

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takes me away from departmental life (and all that entails) to better places; places where I want to be largely because she is there with her own inviting presence, her warmth, her interests, and ample gifts. I’m not saying that this is the last book that I will ever write (I have at least two more in me), but it’s the one I wanted to dedicate to her because it was written at home, with her close by, in what would otherwise have been very depressing times. My deepest debt is to her for the support she generously gives, and the perspective she provides.

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List of Illustrations

I.1 Orpheus among the Thracians, c. 440 bce. Staatliche Museen, Antiksammlung, Berlin V.I. 3172. INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo 2.1 RRC 426/1, a denarius of 56 bce showing Jugurtha’s surrender to Sulla. British Museum 2.2 RRC 431/1, a denarius of 51 bce showing a defeated Jew offering an olive branch. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 2.3 RIC I(2) Aug. 287, a denarius of 19 bce showing a Parthian surrendering a captured Roman standard. British Museum 2.4 Marble relief sculpture, late fifth century bce, from the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae. Achilles slays Penthesilea, who looks into her killer’s eyes and reaches out to him with her right hand in a gesture of supplication. British Museum 2.5 South Italian grave amphora, c. 330 bce, depicting Achilles delivering the decisive blow to an already defeated Memnon. National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden 2.6 A graffito from Pompeii (CIL iv 10236), depicting a gladiatorial missio. L. Raecius Felix kneels before M. Attilius. He has removed his helmet (situated on the ground in front of him) in a gesture of surrender. The inscription confirms that Attilius has won the contest and that Raecius Felix has been granted a reprieve. Photo: Kirk Freudenburg 2.7 A mosaic of the third century ce (National Archaeological Museum of Spain, Madrid), showing a retiarius (net-fighter) named Kalendio fighting a secutor named Astyanax. Kalendio is on the ground, wounded, and raises his dagger in a gesture of surrender. Azoor Photo / Alamy Stock Photo

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3.1 Sculptures of the western pediment, Temple of Athena Aphaia in Aegina, c. 500 bce, as displayed in the Glyptothek Museum, Munich. The eastern pediment is less well preserved, but also features Athena as the largest figure at the center of a Trojan battle scene. Glyptothek 83 4.1 Woodcut illustration of Dido’s Feast, Sebastian Brant, 1502. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University 132 4.2 Woodcut illustration of Dido’s Suicide, Sebastian Brant, 1502. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University 139 5.1 (Left) RRC 511/1, Aureus of 42–40 bce, picturing a bearded Sextus Pompey. British Museum. (Right) RRC 525/2, Denarius of 40 bce, picturing a bearded Octavian. American Numismatic Society 156

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Introduction

The “Seeming” of the “Seen”—​ Narrative as Vision in Ancient Epic

I.1.  Seeing with Eyes Tightly Shut I begin this book by inviting you to take some time with an image (Figure I.1): a Greek red-​figure vase from Athens, from roughly the middle of the fifth century bce. The vase, a large krater used for mixing wine in festive communal settings where songs were sung, features at its center the legendary singer Orpheus, seated on a rock. He is out in the wilds of nature, playing his lyre. We know this story. He plays for himself, to soothe the pain that he cannot get past, over the loss of his young bride, Eurydice. Men dressed in native Thracian costumes are drawn in to listen. They are mesmerized. Take a moment to look at the image, and see what all you can see. I want you to notice especially the eyes: look at how the figures peer this way and that, each caught up in the world of his own imagining; watch them watch. The singer, it seems, is oblivious to the fact that others have been drawn in to listen. He is inside the bubble of his own song. With his head thrown back, he stares upward toward the sky. That’s where his vision is focused, seeing well past anything that might actually be up there. And yet what he sees is up there, running before his mind’s eye, as so many images playing on a screen of his own imagining. In order to see his story, he has to stare at nothing. For his part, the man directly in front of him, like a snake ensnared by a charmer, stares straight into those upwardly directed eyes of Orpheus, as if to see behind them, and catch sight of all that they are seeing. Meanwhile the man behind the singer is turned to one side, facing us, as it were, leaning back on his spear, eyes tightly closed. He is seeing things as well, all the while pleasurably ensconced by the bubble of the song, as is the man leaning on his shoulder. He

Virgil’s Cinematic Art. Kirk Freudenburg, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197643242.003.0001

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Figure I.1 Orpheus among the Thracians, c. 440 bce. Staatliche Museen, Antiksammlung, Berlin V.I. 3172. INTERFOTO /​Alamy Stock Photo.

casts his eyes down toward the ground, as if to stare at nothing in particular. All the eyes in this image, you see, are directed toward different places, and yet all are focused squarely on the same thing: the story that Orpheus summons before their mind’s eyes as he sings; as he re-​envisions in the present, haling into the here and now, the sights and sounds of his tragic journey to the dark of Hades.1 Orpheus, so the legend goes, is the son of Kalliope, the muse of epic song, and thus he is a man born to musical greatness. Later representations of his solitary lamentation show rocks and trees leaning in to listen to him, and wild animals sitting mesmerized at his feet, lions with deer, lambs with wolves. Here the “wild” creatures tamed by him are Thracians, whom Athenians of the period tended to

1. The earliest secure reference to Orpheus’ underworld sojourn to recover Eurydice is Eur. Alcestis 357–​62, on which see Bowra 1952: 119. The play dates to 438 bce, so there is no reason to think that whatever Orpheus might be singing to the Thracians cannot concern his journey to the underworld. But the main songs for which Orpheus was known before the Hellenistic period were the enigmatic cosmogonic tales known as the Orphic hymns, ritual songs connected to the Orphic mysteries, concerning the afterlife, and the coming into being of the universe as a harmonized whole. If we take that to be what Orpheus is singing to the Thracians on the vase, we can interpret the fact that some eyes look down toward the ground, others up to the heavens, and so on, as indications of the spaces that they are being taken to by the song (a song about the heavens, human life on earth, death and the underworld).

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regard as “primitive and savage beings.”2 Such is the power of his song to tame, enchant, move, pacify. The muse from whom Orpheus was born was herself a daughter of Mnemosyne, “Memory,” so when epic poets call upon this muse to launch their stories, they commonly do so by asking her to “remember” or “call to mind” the past to which the story refers (mnesaiath’ “sing into my memory” in book two of the Iliad, memora “call back to my mind” in the first lines of Virgil’s Aeneid). To our ears, such invocations sound as though the muse is being asked to retrieve information (as if muses were some sort of terabyte-​rich external hard drive that crafty poets could hack into). But as my colleague, Egbert Bakker, has so beautifully shown in a recent work on Performance of Homeric Poetics: “the poetics of the Homeric tradition is an optic poetics.” “Telling the epic story is for the poet very much a matter of seeing it, and of sharing this reality with the audience in the context of the performance. . . . Remembering an event from the past is bringing it to the mind’s eye, seeing it, and describing it as if it were happening before one’s eyes.”3 It is that kind of memory work that we see rendered in action on the krater painted by the Orpheus Painter. Legend had it that Homer, the singer of the Iliad and Odyssey, was blind, so he was rendered by ancient artists with his eyes clouded over, or shut. And yet he was the poet whose words, according to an ancient commentator, “set forth the whole imaginative representation so vividly (enargos) as to render his listeners nothing less than spectators” (theatai: you can see and hear our word “theater” in that last word).4 Homer’s imaginative representation (his φαντασία/​phantasia, that is, the picturing capacity of his mind, an idea that comes into Latin as imaginatio, imagination, literally the “image-​” or “picture-​making” of the mind) is described here by Homer’s incisive ancient commentator as something he “sets forth” (προβέβληται/​probebletai) for others to see. To capture the same idea (προ “forth” +​βέβληται “hurls”) in Latin, one would say “proicit” (pro “forth” +​iacit “hurls”) “he projects” his imagination.5

2. On Athenian attitudes toward their neighbors to the north, see Pache 2001. For Thracians coded in ancient literature as “the non-​Greek, the uncivilized, the nonhuman mired in ‘nature’ and the passions of the body,” see LeVen 2021: 192–​93. 3. Bakker 2005: 63, 146; further on which see Clay 2011: 14–​17. See also Myers 2019: 1–​64, focusing on the divine gaze as both a prominent, ongoing theme in the Iliad, and a device of visual rhetoric that serves “to seduce audiences with the sense that what they are seeing is something like what the gods must see: a spectacle at once ephemeral and eternal” (181). 4. bT Scholia ad Hom. Il. 23.362: πᾶσαν φαντασίαν ἐναργῶς προβέβληται ὡς μηδὲν ἧττον τῶν θεατῶν ἐσχηκέναι τοὺς ἀκροατάς. 5. Gk. προβάλλω “hurl forth” =​Latin proicere.

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Homer isn’t just a story-​teller. He is a “projectionist” of images. In fact, that is the way the eyes were thought to work in Classical times: by one common reckoning, they took light in by sending it out.6 Functioning like arms, the eyes reached out and grabbed things that they brought back into the mind. They were beams that shot out and fetched things. Like Orpheus’ listener, the one with his eyes wide shut in the image discussed above, in order to see, Homer must look inside himself, where the Muses, daughters of Memory, are making the past present in his here and now. That is where he, the blind singer, sees a full world of light, movement, and color that he projects into our consciousness through his words. It is no wonder, then, that the ancients thought of such poets as “divine,” filled with powers gifted to them by the gods. But how? That is the big question of this book. How does one imagine in words? How to take what plays inside, in the theater of one’s own imagination, and turn it outward for others to experience? I pose the question this way, as a matter of experience rather than sight, because the ancient epic poets, who are the subject of this book, do not just prompt their listeners to see things. They get them to “imagine along,” folding them into their performances as co-​ fantasists: persons right there on the scene, taking it all in. Their images, dream works conjured by words, flow along with those words. Not only do they exhibit colors and shapes and occupy space, but also they are spotted first from this angle, then from that; zoomed in upon and scanned for details, then panned back from to be reobserved as a larger complex whole, or a curious big blur. No mere pictures, these. They are living images that shake, dart about, darken, roar. They demand attention, get looked at, listened to, run away from. Studies of visualization in Latin poetry have tended to treat static images: a seductively dressed lover; an intricately carved cup. This book takes up with such things, but it is not about them. Rather, it concerns the full-​on cinematics of ancient narrative: how words provoke an active, forward-​moving process of experiential participation (viewing, hearing, feeling) in the hearer’s mind’s eye; poets not as verbal painters, but as projectors, purveyors of imagined happenings. Whereas most studies of narrative visualization concern seeing (this is especially true on the Latin side of the ledger), this one concerns watching. And listening. And trying to keep up. The book’s central focus will be on the imaginative doings of Virgil’s Aeneid explored through a series of extended close readings of passages that are especially rich in visual and other sensorial cues. The emphasis will be on how things are made to “seem”/​“ be seen” by Virgil, exploring both sides of Latin uidetur, where 6. On sight that grabs/​fetches and pierces in ancient thought, see Lovatt 2013: 18–​19, 310–​11. For theories of sight in Greco-​Roman antiquity, see Squire 2016a: 1–​35.

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seeing and seeming are mutually entailed. Delving into the rhetoric of immediacy deployed by Virgil, much of which, but not all, he inherits from earlier writers, I will look not only at what is conjured, and the devices whereby it is conjured, but why it is conjured in the way(s) that it is conjured, and why the watching (both ours as readers, as well as that of watchers inside the story) matters to the story itself. My main point in working through the experiential cues of the passages I have chosen to explore will be to demonstrate that these rhetorically produced moving visions of peoples, places, and things do far more than enliven the story-​telling by lighting things up and adding splashes of color and sound. Rather than merely “decorating” the narrative, the experiential effects that Virgil puts into play do serious narrative work of their own by structuring lines of sight, both visual and emotional, and shifting them about. They tell us not just who is watching, but who is most engaged with what is there to be seen at any given time. They draw us into specific, highly individualized and motivated lines of sight, into places where we are given to see things not necessarily as they “are,” but as they “seem” to persons inside the story; persons who are not only emotionally engrossed in what is happening around them, but who are prone to see and react to these happenings in highly personalized ways. What these characters, “sutured in” as inset viewers, give us to see, in other words, is never synonymous with just “what’s there” to be seen. It has to be reckoned with differently, as an interpretation of what’s there; equal parts optical reception and emotive engagement/​reaction. What we see, in other words, by standing in with characters as they look on and react, is not just what happens to be there, capturing their attention. It is a version of what’s there, telling us how they see what they see; the “seeming” of the “seen.”

I.2.  Two Worlds in Dialogue: Film Analysis and Classic Narratology I have scare-​quoted the phrase “sutured in” a few lines above in order to mark it as something odd that needs to be explained. Most of my explanation for this metaphor will come in the form of demonstration in the chapters to follow. But first a few words about the general theoretical background of the idea. In the world of film studies, “suture” is, by now, a highly developed concept having to do with how films are stitched together from disparate shots to be seen as a continuous whole.7 It concerns, at one level, the practical level of filming and editing, what

7. For an excellent, brief introduction to filmic suture, emphasizing the evocation of visual pleasure and “interest focus” via film editing (i.e., the establishment of character-​focalized views

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film directors do to create the illusion of continuity—​if, in fact, that is what they are after. But at a much deeper level, it has to do with how viewers experience transitions from one shot to the next and participate in making sense of them by filling gaps in the visual field that the camera itself cannot fill.8 Until very recently, cameras could only give us to see what was directly in front of them at any given time: a flattened, vertically challenged snippet, maxing out at 180 degrees from left to right, of a boundless three-​dimensional visual field. It is in the suturing, that is, the stitching together of back-​and-​forth shots of viewer(s) and viewed, that something like a full visual field comes together, not “in the round” in any material sense (the cinematic screen remains flat, and its limits cannot be breached) but in the imagination. Fully conversant with the codes, that is, those unnoticed conventions of film-​making that allow for a sense of the whole to be constructed, viewers actively participate in suturing the field and imagining the whole from the carefully arranged (visually manipulative) parts that they are given to see. Much of the work that has been done on suture in film since the 1960s concerns the psychological needs that are tapped into and met by these efforts, and on which they rely.9 That is, they explore why viewers are so eager to be taken in by, and play along with, these tricks of editing, and to make up for the inadequacies of the medium itself—​such is my extremely schematic oversimplification of a concept that has always been highly contested and, by now, has its own long and complex history. Suffice it to say that the discourse around suture in modern studies of film narrative is highly theoretical and lies well beyond the scope of this book. Rather, in the pages that follow I will stay on the practical (rhetorical, narratological, semiological) side of things by looking at only a few of the most basic devices that film directors use to get viewers to fill in gaps and inhabit specific lines of sight: perspectives ranging from the omniscient and detached to the partial, personal, and emotionally blinkered.

into which viewers are drawn), see Verstraten 2009: 87–​95. Looking at the discursive practices of Italian Neorealist films, Casetti 2011 goes one step further by describing cinematic suture in terms of not only discursive coherence, but the establishment of a sense of reality: “realistic cues are immersed in a discourse. They must act as links in the discursive chain, providing an illusory mastery over the discourse while at the same time offering an illusory restitution of reality” (96). 8. For a brief, historical account of suture theory (which has its origins in Lacanian psychoanalysis) within a larger new study of the psychological underpinnings of film-​editing techniques and their narratological purposes and effects, see Butte 2017: 20–​38. 9. The founding study introducing Lacanian “suture” to film theory is Oudart 1969. For the early history of the concept in film theory, see ­chapter 3 of Heath 1981: 76–​112.

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As a mere “first go” at aligning some of these standard film-​making/​editing practices with the visual workings of ancient epic, my emphasis will be on demonstration rather than on theoretical elaboration. I want to demonstrate that these suturing devices, all fully familiar to us from film, though none of us really ever pays attention to them (because we are not supposed to10), are, in a very real sense, already “there” in ancient epic, cueing us to imagine fuller visual fields in which watchers inhabit specific lines of sight, and that by doing the productive “filling in” work that these visual cues prompt us to do, they give us to see things that we might not otherwise see. For my part, I do not regard the filmic practices studied here as mere helpful analogies. I think that they are a version of, and a specific and highly practical realization of, what story-​tellers have always done to get their hearers/​readers to imagine along with them. Modern technology, in this case, is a tool of the imagination, produced by it and serving its needs, rather than the other way around. It was not the zoom lens that invented the possibility of zooming in and zooming out. It realized those possibilities in a specific form: as images lit up on a screen. Epic performers/​writers, such as Homer and Virgil, had been doing such things for their readers and listeners all along. They just projected in a different space: in the imaginarium of the mind’s eye. As to any larger importance that I hope to claim for these demonstrations, my emphasis will be not on their psycho-​social and/​or ideological underpinnings and effects, but on their narrative value; that is, the way they affect the story itself.11 I hope to show that any given thread of epic narrative has to be reckoned with differently (if only, at times, somewhat differently) once we allow ourselves to collaborate with its visual cues; that is, once we read with our eyes tightly shut and actively imagine what we are being given to see (remember the eyes of Orpheus’

10. For two excellent and highly readable studies on the topic of how hard-​wired neural (bottom-​up) and conceptual (top-​down) processes combine to bring story segments together in the mind, so that they are perceived as a continuous whole, see Zacks-​Swallow 2007 on “segmentation” (a study that concerns the automatic processes whereby long continuities in film are segmented into understandable and memorable units; thus it concerns the mind’s imposition of boundaries), and Shimamura et al. 2013 on film edits (a study specifically concerned with the way match-​action editing techniques induce “edit blindness” in viewers, i.e., the illusion of continuity despite segmentation). 11. The main studies of film narration that inform the “filmic” analysis of epic narration in the pages below are Bordwell 1985 (a classic study, still a staple in much modern film analysis) and Verstraten 2009 (especially good at exploring the practical considerations of shot analysis, and the narrative impact of cinematography more broadly construed). On the “physical narratology” of popular films (twelve studies correlating the patterned use of devices of a film’s physical articulation, such as shot length, duration, motion, luminosity, etc., to the larger structures of the story itself ), with full bibliography on recent studies of film narration, see Cutting 2016.

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listeners in the image above). Once there, “sutured in” with viewers inside the story, we necessarily see things from peculiar perspectives. By seeing what the characters themselves see, and feeling with them as they watch and react, we gain new angles on the story itself. That is my main emphasis throughout: visual details not as mere information or enhancements to the story, but as cues for performing specific imaginative processes. In fact, as I hope to show in the pages that follow, there are cases where what is made to seem/​be seen in the mind’s eye runs directly counter to the specific thrust of the narrative that produces it: a young girl’s drawn-​out death, oddly conveyed through images of a life fully and happily lived (Camilla); the happy peace-​making of a queen, and her celebration of new and abiding friendships, told through images of hostility and lasting hatreds (Dido). This chiastic cross-​purposing of things “seen” and “said” is a feature of Virgil’s art that has gone largely unnoticed in studies of the Aeneid. In the pages that follow I plan on noticing such things rather aggressively. Throughout this book, I make a case for readers/​listeners as watchers of visual images that poets project with their words. In saying this, I do not wish to imply that those who read or listen to epic poetry passively “receive” images that are beamed into them in verbal packets, as if the poet’s words had magical powers to carry discrete images from place to place. Rather, the readers/​listeners I have in mind are to be understood as individual makers of the visions that the poet’s words prompt them to see for themselves, not via “delivery” of those images, but via the elicitation of inferences in readers about how things must be imagined; inferences based on ways of seeing derived from everyday experience, and from the codes and patterns of epic story-​telling. That is, the poet’s verbal “projections” are not visions in themselves, but cues to the image work (imaginatio) that we listeners and readers perform—​and no two readers will perform that work in the same way.12 No two listeners will see the same thing. Exactly how this (the envisioning of what the poet says) happens in the mind is beyond the scope of this book to explore, and even further beyond the competence of its author to understand. In fact, the fundamental, big questions concerning what happens inside us as we watch stories unfold are among the most hotly debated issues of modern film studies. They are well worth getting into,

12. For an outstanding deployment of recent cognitive research in the study of ancient narrative, arguing not for pictures painted by words, but for texts that are, in themselves, highly “imageable” insofar as they prompt listeners/​readers “through verbal cues imaginatively to connect with the narrated world as they would perceptually connect with the real world,” see Greithlein and Huitink 2017 (quoting 68). For further arguments along these lines, see Huitink 2019 and 2020.

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but in this book, the emphasis will be on the rhetoric of visual manipulation that provokes us to see as we read. When it comes to what we see as we read, analogies with film narratives, though good to think with, are of limited use because film directors have the capacity to put exactly the same images before all eyes in ways that epic poets do not. In such cases (and there are many in this book) where I attempt to “envisage aloud” what we are being given to see by the poet’s words, the vision that I describe is to be understood as my response to the poet’s visual cues; a description of how his rhetoric has worked its influence on me. Others, processing the same cues, will see things “as cued” (thus, constrained in certain ways) but for themselves. On the whole, the approach I take in this book is that of a Classicist who reads and reckons with words rather than one who sees and reckons with images. But in the matter of how readers take up and process visual cues, it has been significantly inflected by recent studies of visual perception as a “predictive” and highly referential process,13 as well as “cognitivist” accounts of how we watch narrative films and make sense of what we are being given to see. Especially influential in this regard are the film studies of David Bordwell, whose close readings of films treat the piecemeal disclosures of visual information as perceptive challenges that elicit ongoing efforts of intellection in viewers who are always striving toward coherence, always filling in for what the pictures on the screen leave us to work out for ourselves. According to Bordwell, much of what we see when we watch films is not what is “up there” on the screen; it is the fill-​in work of our brains as we try to conceptualize a sensible, unstitched whole from the craftily edited montage of parts.14 Drawing on structuralist semiology (Saussure, Benveniste, Barthes) and formalist studies of narratology (esp. Bakhtin, Genette), Bordwell addresses narrative films as if they were texts (this is especially true of his earlier works), even while appreciating the many ways in which they are not texts.15 Because he treats camerawork and techniques of film editing both as narrative devices and forms of rhetorical manipulation, of central concern to his analyses are the rhetorical structures of narrative films. In fact, because Bordwell has for so many years

13. Two user-​friendly summaries of recent studies of visual perception (i.e., what we experience as a passive process of “taking in” reality; a simple matter of looking at “what’s there” in front of us) as itself a highly imaginative and experience-​based process, wherein much is intuited and filled in by the mind itself, see Seth 2019 and Dijkstra 2021. 14. Bordwell 1989: 18: “perception is not a passive recording of sensory stimulation; the sensory input is filtered, transformed, filled in, and compared with other inputs to build, inferentially, a consistent, stable world.” 15. On Bordwell’s departure from the textual analogy, see Verstraten 2009: 26–​28.

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focused on the conscious and nonconscious (learned, but to the point of having become second-​nature) processes of intellection and emotional engagement in ways that Freudian and Lacanian theoreticians, on the one hand, and experimental neuroscientists, on the other, do not, his recent efforts within the field of Film Studies have been criticized for being committed to the “logocentric solipsism heralded by classic cognitivism.”16 Although his work is heavily informed by narratological theory, Bordwell’s emphasis is on the inferential processes that are triggered by the visual data at the point of its reception, and on the cognitive “constructivist” effort that this information elicits from us in making sense of it. For as different as this approach is in its “cognitivist/​constructivist” emphasis, it meshes nicely with certain practices of close reading that Classicists are quite familiar with. In fact, many of the “schemata” that Bordwell imagines viewers using to make sense of what film-​makers give them to see have clear counterparts in the tools that Classicists routinely use to interpret the workings of ancient narrative texts: intertextual engagements, historical contexts, remembered habits of genre, rhetorical topoi, cultural structures of thought, and so on.17 By dangling things before the eyes, epic writers call on readers to see, summoning them to their stories as spectators. In so doing, they address the person(s) behind those eyes as a specific point of reception. It is the very act of visual address that brings the spectator into existence. As has been expertly argued by Francesco Casetti, in a creative redeployment of Benveniste’s I-​you-​he/​she linguistic paradigm of cinematographic enunciation, the filmic story-​teller’s creation of an outwardly addressed visual reality (an address uttered by the “I” of the film-​maker/​ poet concerning the “he/​she” of the story, addressing the unnamed “you” who consumes the tale being shown/​told), creates an internal witness to that reality; an implied observer; a spectator.18 The story-​teller’s visual disclosures, like volleys in a tennis match, are part of a game of back-​and-​forth: they are projected/​ volleyed toward a demarcated and rigidly rule-​bound space on the other side of

16. Quoting Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra, in a reply to David Bordwell and Malcolm Turvey (http://​www.davidb​ordw​ell.net/​blog/​categ​ory/​film-​the​ory-​cogn​itiv​ism/​). 17. On “schemata,” see Bordwell 1985: 31–​51, and Bordwell 1991: 129–​95. 18. Bordwell departs from Benveniste’s linguistic approach, pursued in different ways, toward different ends, by Christian Metz and Francesco Casetti, by arguing that “if in analyzing a film we cannot distinguish first-​person discours (i.e., shots bearing personal marks of the author) from second-​person discours (i.e., shots bearing personal marks of the viewer) then the category of person has no equivalent in cinema” (Bordwell 1985: 23–​24). For a critique of Bordwell on this point, arguing that his denial of the second person function in film is based on a misreading of Benveniste, see Verstraten 2009: 26–​30.

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Introduction

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the screen where someone waits in readiness, not to be unexpectedly hit by these images, but to go after them and respond in turn. The artist’s visual provocations thus both create an interlocutor, the “you” thus interpellated by being addressed (“served to” and expected to get into the game and respond), and they initiate and significantly condition the nature of the response itself. The implied viewer is thus, in the end, not synonymous with any given onlooker. Rather, he/​she is a self intuited from the procedures of the game itself (“a silhouette which the text creates within the interior of its own limits”19). Moved into certain positionalities by the summons itself, the spectator responds to this summons by trying to keep up as a skilled and knowing partner in the game. As watchers of visual narrative, we do this by striving to create a coherent imaginary world out of what we are being given to see, one that accords with the enunciation of the images that are offered (their particular sequence, their fullness, clarity, brightness, mood, color, the angles from which they are observed, etc.). By engaging in this game and mastering its challenges, the viewer emerges as a coherent subject: the master of a complex discourse. In the end, it is this drive to “give coherence to the intrigue” of what we see that explains our readiness to engage in this game in the first place, and to assume its responsibilities.20 Throughout this book, it is my contention that the drive for visual coherence is just as urgent in the readers/​listeners (interpellated as viewers) of ancient epic as it is in the spectators of modern narrative films. In their stories, epic poets have the ability to specify who sees what by telling us that their characters are doing so (“and catching sight of Helen, the old men murmured to one another,” Hom. Il. 3.154–​55). With few exceptions, makers of narrative films do not enjoy this luxury, because the medium through which they tell their stories does not allow them to speak to their viewers in any direct way (a rule not often broken, though it can be, e.g., via captions, voice-​over, direct address toward the camera). Rather, to move us into and out of the visual and emotional worlds of embedded focalizers, they show us images from certain angles, first this, then that, in ways that require us to infer what they themselves must leave unsaid. Seeing how film directors do this in their own medium in multiple, highly crafted ways, lets us see how else it might be happening in ancient narrative tales, where cues prompting us to “see along with” inset focalizers can be just as subtle. Because these cues are often intimated rather than openly declared,

19. Casetti 1998: 10. 20. On the “scopic drive,” see Casetti 1998: 9, 70, and cf. Verstraten 2009: 88–​90 on filmic suture as an ongoing process of establishing curiosity-​and desire-​inducing absences that are filled, with each filling shot creating a new absence.

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they can easily be passed over. As a result, specific lines of sight, along with the emotional worlds they might otherwise draw us into, are left unimagined, and their richer meanings unappreciated. In her groundbreaking studies of epic narratology, Irene de Jong shows just how subtle and varied the cues for focalization by characters can be. She distinguishes between inset (she prefers “embedded”) focalization that is explicitly signaled by verbs of seeing, feeling, or thinking, and focalization that is implied by subtler means, “such as evaluative words, interactional particles, moods, or deictics.”21 Film directors have their own subtle means for implying focalization by characters, many of which are filmic realizations of the devices on de Jong’s list. By treating these devices, as small and seemingly insignificant as they sometimes are, as indicators of embedded attitudes and particular points of focus, de Jong has greatly expanded not only our sense of how much embedded focalization is folded into ancient epic tales, but our sense of how much contemplative inward content these tales both contain and are capable of conveying. It is this last point especially that I hope to drive home in this book. Numerous studies of the history of the representation of the self in Western literature are premised on the idea that the ancient world did not develop literary forms that allowed for the exteriorization of inner-​selves; that the characters of ancient epic are monologic, completely externalized, with nothing more to reveal about their insides than what they say aloud and/​or show on their outsides;22 that their emotional lives are more generic than they are relatable and real; that what goes on inside them is not where the story is; that later, more developed forms bring us fully into the thought worlds of characters, but ancient forms do not.23 De Jong’s studies suggest that such descriptions of a severely stilted “ancient interiority” need to be rethought. At the very least, they are overstated, and ignore much. With great precision and methodological rigor, de Jong demonstrates that much of what has for so long been deemed missing from ancient epic narratives has actually been there all along, hiding in plain sight. We just have to know how to look for it. To take just one famous example from the rich store of her classic study, Narrators and Focalizers, de Jong points out that at Iliad 3.126–​28, when Homer describes Helen weaving the struggles of the Trojans and Greeks into her 21. de Jong 2004: 51. 22. See, e.g., Powell and Morris 2006: 102: “Homer refers to people by such epithets as ‘shining,’ ‘swift-​footed,’ or ‘of thick arms,’ but never describes their characters. Rather, he shows them in action, revealing who they are by how they speak and what they do.” 23. Erich Auerbach and Mikhail Bakhtin played a decisive role in normalizing the idea that ancient forms, especially Homeric epic, lack the interiority of later Western forms. On the influence of Auerbach, see de Jong 2004: 21–​23; on Bakhtin, see Branham 2019: 42–​50.

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tapestry, the relative clause that caps off these lines (“[struggles] which they were suffering because of her at the hands of Ares”) takes us into her thoughts as she “projects her own feelings of guilt into the motives of her weaving.”24 In these lines, in other words, we have a case of an external observation by the story’s principal narrator (Homer telling us what Helen was weaving) that at the same time needs to be heard as conveying the unspoken thoughts of Helen herself as she broods over the trouble she has caused.25 The evidence that de Jong marshals to demonstrate this is compelling, but she is quick to point out that such instances of implicit embedded focalization are always to be considered ambiguous and beyond proving, and that they often must be read as a mix of the thoughts of an inset character folded in with the primary narrator’s intrusions upon those thoughts. She points out that, given the inherent ambiguities of embedded focalization, and the ever-​present possibility of narratorial intrusion, scholars have tended to restrict discussion of focalization by characters to cases where the language itself leaves no doubt that character focalization is in play. She herself, however, takes the opposite approach, arguing that “It seems . . . more enriching to operate the other way around and assume that the presence of a verb of seeing and so on always indicates that an embedding of focalization takes place.”26 I deem this the better option as well. In the close readings that follow in this book, I hope to provide a “more enriching” experience of Virgil’s Aeneid by paying close attention to “who sees” in the poem, just as de Jong has done in her studies of the Iliad and Odyssey. But I also want to expand our sense of how that embedded seeing/​seeming is signaled. This is where, as I hope to show, the devices used by film directors have much to reveal. As mentioned above, de Jong finds signals for embedded focalization not only in verbs of seeing, thinking, and feeling, but in an impressive number of oblique devices that Homer uses to draw us into

24. de Jong 2004: 120. 25. One might take a “Theory of Mind” approach to the same passage by arguing that Helen is dwelling not on her guilt per se, but on the way she thinks others perceive her, blaming her for the disaster that rages around the city. She is caught thinking these thoughts right as she is about to go to the Scaean gate where the question of her guilt will be discussed separately by the city’s elders and by Priam (Il. 3.150–​65). On “Theory of Mind” approaches to ancient epic, see Scodel 2016. 26. de Jong 2014: 54; cf. de Jong 2004: intro., p. xx: “Since the narrator is the one who in the end verbally presents the embedded focalization of the character, there is always the methodological problem of proving that a certain word represents the focalization of the character rather than the narrator. For some, this is reason enough to reject the concept of embedded focalization altogether. In my view most cases are defensible and in all cases it is heuristically more interesting to allow for a broad range of perspectives than to ascribe everything to the one narrator.”

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the inner lives of his characters: “perception-​passages, find-​passages, thoughts/​ emotions-​passages, indirect speech, final clauses, indirect questions, (certain) causal and relative clauses.”27 It is this bigger set of devices (and there are considerably more than just these) that I take to be implied by de Jong’s phrase “and so on” in the sentence quoted in the paragraph above. By looking to the world of narrative films to see how directors use shots craftily edited to tell us not only “who sees” but how they are engaging emotionally with what they see, I hope to expand our sense of what de Jong’s “and so on” might reasonably be thought to entail, and thereby make a case for the fuller emotional lives of Virgil’s characters.

27. de Jong 2004: 122.

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Introducing Suture

1.1.  Tracking Turnus: Visual Pursuit I begin with a demonstration of how processes of visual intellection can be put into play with a few deft strokes of an expert’s pen, using a standard poetic device that tends not to be thought of in visual terms. There is not much to it, really: a simile describing Juturna car-​jacking Turnus’ chariot. After knocking the charioteer, Metiscus, from his spot, she takes her brother for a wild ride (Aen. 12.471–​480): ipsa subit manibusque undantis flectit habenas cuncta gerens, uocemque et corpus et arma Metisci. nigra uelut magnas domini cum diuitis aedes peruolat et pennis alta atria lustrat hirundo pabula parua legens nidisque loquacibus escas, et nunc porticibus uacuis, nunc umida circum stagna sonat: similis medios Iuturna per hostis fertur equis rapidoque uolans obit omnia curru, iamque hic germanum iamque hic ostentat ouantem nec conferre manum patitur, uolat auia longe. She herself climbs into his spot, and with her hands she sends an arching wave along the reins, sporting the entire kit, the voice, the body and the arms of Metiscus. Just as . . . black, when through the mighty halls of a wealthy lord she flies and goes fluttering in high arcs round the atrium . . . a swallow as she gathers bits of grass and food for her chattering nests, and at one moment her call echoes in the empty portico and at the next it goes round (the master’s) watery ponds. In just that way Juturna is swept by her horses through the midst of the enemy, and flying

Virgil’s Cinematic Art. Kirk Freudenburg, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197643242.003.0002

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in her speeding chariot she confronts every rank, and now she exhibits her brother, celebrating his victory, first over here, then over there, and she doesn’t allow him to grapple with Aeneas, but flies well away from his path. I have highlighted the device in question, the impressively stretched hyperbaton that puts the adjective “black” at the beginning of line 473 (nigra) and the noun it describes, the “swallow,” at the far end of 474 (hirundo). Latin poets were quite fond of this device, which puts emphasis on the first word of the pair by setting it in front of other words that have to be “stepped over” (the literal meaning of hyperbaton) on the way to meeting up with the second member of the pair. For neoteric poets, such as Catullus, it was something of an overused stylistic tic.1 But rarely do Roman poets of any stripe leave the reader hanging for as long as this: two entire lines. Something must be made of the especially ungainly hyperbaton that Virgil puts into play here. But what? Earlier epic poems provide no obvious model for Virgil’s darting swallow simile. But it has a clear counterpart in one of Theocritus’ domestic vignettes, Idylls 14.39–​42, where the speed of a young woman named Cynisca as she leaves her abusive boyfriend (presumably for another man) is compared to that of a swallow gathering tidbits for her nestlings then dashing off: “Giving tidbits to her young under the eaves, the swallow dashes off to collect more food. Quicker still did Cynisca fly from her soft seat, straight through the hall and out the main gate.” This is what her departure seemed like to Aeschinas, the boyfriend whom Cynisca walked out on. According to the story he tells his friend (the simile occurs as a snatch of their conversation), after he hit her in a drunken fit of rage, Cynisca was out the door faster than a darting swallow. In the matter of poetic technique, the Theocritean original resembles Virgil’s remake in that it lets the modifier “giving” float unassigned for a while before assigning the word “swallow” to it at the end of the line (μάστακα δοῖσα τέκνοισιν ὑπωροφίοισι χελιδών, 39). But the delay between modifier and noun is comparatively slight and not terribly significant: a two-​word separation in Theocritus versus a twelve-​word separation in Virgil. Oddly, twice before in writing on swallows, Virgil had pushed hirundo off to the line-​end following adjectives led off with earlier in the line, but the separations in both of these earlier cases are much smaller, and in both cases they are used to describe not

1. In their fancier moments, neoterics were especially fond of either interlocking or entirely enclosing a second separated word-​pair within the first (as happens here with magnas . . . aedes). For the device, see Hoffer 2007.

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the bird’s speedy dashing in and out of sight, but the shrill and rapid-​fire chatter of its song.2 These comparanda, while helpful, don’t get us very far. In his recent commentary on the twelfth book of the Aeneid, Richard Tarrant suggests that “the image of a bird tirelessly searching for food to feed its young clearly parallels Juturna’s frantic efforts to keep T. [Turnus] from harm” and that via the simile Virgil “emphasizes the effort and motion involved in her search.”3 Both of these comments strike me as correct and insightful. But in both cases the emphasis is on only one side of the “seen as seeming” coin; namely, on what Juturna is doing to keep Turnus safe rather than on what she seems like to the man who is trying to track Turnus down. In his note on lines 473–​74, Tarrant adds that the hyperbaton “may suggest the large spaces traversed by the bird” and that “the tiny bird moving within a vast space implies a similar comparison of scale for Juturna on the battlefield.” It is on this point that I would like to expand, by doing yet more with the visual cues of the old figurative device that Virgil takes to extremes here. Consider how it makes you experience the bird’s chattering flight in real time, as a process, as if you were right there in the open-​air atrium of a large Roman mansion as this noisy and amazingly fast dark thing goes darting about. Notice: thanks to the hyperbaton, the first thing that we are given to see by the simile isn’t a bird at all, but a splash of black (niger, the free-​floating adjective at the front end of the hyperbaton). We don’t know what this thing is—​it’s just that fast, first caught sight of as a blur, a mere splash of black. But black what? That is the question posed by the hyperbaton, by that lonely adjective reaching forward toward its noun nearly two lines off. Trying to catch up to it, we read on, trying to find the noun that will give shape and meaning to the color. In the process of “walking over” the dozen words that intervene, we take in other images and sensations. We see that we are within the space of a deluxe “rich man’s” mansion, the hugeness of which is emphasized by the inset hyperbaton magnas . . . aedes. We hear echoing inside (nigra uelut magnas domini cum diuitis aedes) that carries over into the next line (peruolat et pennis alta atria lustrat hirundo). There, having made a turn at the line end, we encounter further visual stimuli: a fluttering of wings flying high across the top, circling the atrium walls. Then finally at the end of the line we see what it is: a swallow. It has landed to pick

2. Virg. G. 1.373 aut arguta lacus circumuolitauit hirundo =​a complete one-​line quote of Varro of Atax fr.14 Courtney (itself a rendering of Aratus 942–​44). Also G. 4.305: ante /​garrula quam tignis nidum suspendat hirundo. 3. Tarrant 2012: 213–​14 (commenting on lines 473–​80).

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up a bit of grass for its nest. And notice: it is only when it has landed that we can actually make it out. That is where the mystery of what this dark fluttering thing is that we have just been tracking here and there and trying to make out is finally solved. The bird becomes well-​formed and complete (no mere dark blur; neither bat nor butterfly, nor some vague mystery bird, but a swallow) only when the sentence, as a grammatical construction, becomes well-​formed and complete. But then, just as quickly as we catch sight of the bird we lose it again: off it goes, out to circle around the rich man’s ponds, and we hear it chattering as it goes. That is how fast Juturna was, this simile says. That is how hard she was to track with the eye and to keep clearly in sight as she went “flying far away from Aeneas’ path” (uolat auia longe, a punning phrase that equates auia “off the path” with “avian” flight). This is what Juturna seems like as she goes flying this way and that through the battle lines in Turnus’ chariot: like a swallow darting in and out of sight. But to whom does she seem this way? This is where I take issue with the simile’s point being put so emphatically in terms of what Juturna is doing, that is, the frantic, motherly (actually sisterly) effort that she puts into keeping her brother safe, rather than in terms of how that frantic activity is being seen by the most interested viewer of all: Aeneas. Virgil makes clear that the line of sight that we are brought into by the simile belongs to Aeneas; that what we are being given to see is how he sees, a particular version of what is there to be seen. He does this first by establishing Aeneas as the man at the front of a pack of Trojan soldiers, leading the hunt for Turnus. In the two lines that immediately precede the lines quoted above, Virgil writes, “in that thick cloud of dust he goes looking for Turnus. Him alone he tracks. Him alone he calls out to fight” (466–​ 67). He then reminds us that what we are being given to see is from a specific, hostile point of view when, in the payoff to the simile, he writes “In just that way Juturna is swept by her horses through the midst of the enemy” (medios . . . per hostis, 476). This is odd. Juturna is not weaving in and out among the Trojans at this point. She is not riding “through the midst of the enemy” but among her friends, the Rutulians, attempting to get as far away from the Trojans as she can. It is only from the other side, from where Aeneas stands, that she is riding away through the midst of “the enemy.” Then Virgil caps off the simile by observing: “just so does Aeneas trace (Turnus’) winding tracks in order to block his path. He hunts the man down, calling out for him in a loud voice through the scattered troops” (481–​83). The effort that the swallow simile puts us to, in the experience we have of catching a quick glimpse of a flying blur, then tracking it best we can, then finally catching a quick glimpse of the bird before it flies off again—​all of that belongs to Aeneas. With the simile, Virgil puts us in Aeneas’ line of sight where we strive just as hard

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as he does to catch sight of Turnus and track him down. Finally we spot him, but then off he goes. How frustrating that is: “why won’t the man just stay still and fight?! Where is he off to now?!”4 As far as what is typically needed to establish specific lines of sight within any given bit of narrative, this is overkill. As will become clear from examples dealt with later, the visual cues prompting us to inhabit lines of sight that are specific to viewers inside the story do not need to be this obvious to get us to recalibrate and play along. But I have chosen to begin with this example because it is so deliberate and so fully experiential. In its own way, it is a miniature version of what we do when we watch a narrative film, in that it puts us in touch with the step-​by-​step, constructivist processes that find us making meaning(s) on the fly out of visual information that is being fed to us in dribs and drabs over time.5 Among the most basic devices that film directors use to connect what is seen on the screen to specific lines of sight belonging to viewers inside the story is the so-​called shot/​reverse shot edit (see Appendix, item 1).6 In the most basic version of the device, the camera first faces one way to take in whatever happens to be directly in front of it: a person, a happening, or whatever, all neatly framed as a point of interest. But of interest to whom? Then in the next shot the camera makes a 180-​degree turn to show some view (usually frontal, in order to show the face) of the person(s) watching, person(s) for whom what is being viewed is of particular interest. It is in this swivel from shot to reverse shot that we are told a 4. In animal similes especially, V. shows a marked tendency toward separating an eye-​engaging adj. (commonly a demonstrative adjective used as a deictic, i.e., denoting “there it is!”) at the beginning of the simile from the noun that names the animal one or more lines further on; cf. 10.707–​8 ille . . . aper, 11.809–​11 ille . . . lupus, 12.5–​6 ille . . . leo. The pronounced separation (hyperbaton) serves to create a momentary arc of tension and release, as it invites readers to gather in clues and gradually work toward envisioning the animal (as if attempting to track it) before the animal comes fully into view by finally being named. 5. On vision itself as a bodily engaged (“enacted”) cognitive process that, however non-​ processual and merely receptive it may seem, takes place over time, see Noë 2004: “the detailed world is not given to consciousness all at once in the way detail is contained in a picture. In vision, as in touch, we gain perceptual content by active inquiry and exploration” (33). Then again, more succinctly: “the visual field . . . is made available by looking around” (Noë’s emphasis, 57). In other words, the filling in of gaps in perceptual input, gaps that are both many and large, to produce a sense of a continuous whole (what we see and think of as merely what’s there to be seen), is not a matter of the mind’s referring to stored picture templates in order to define and make up for what the visual input leaves out. Rather, it concerns the reconciling of what emerges from the ongoing process of visual inquiry (visual stimuli not as passively received input, but information gained over time from purposeful bodily and ocular movements in relation to objects, i.e., things sought out, grabbed and made relevant) with common patterns of movement and thought. Put much more simply, it is a case of ongoing bodily visual engagement that is both helped and constrained by bodily gained experience. 6. See Bordwell 1985: 110–​13.

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magnificent lie, one that we must play along with if we are to have any sense of what is going on in the story. The reverse shot tells us that there is no camera there at all. Rather, that the things just seen by us in shot one are things not as captured by a camera, but by someone watching from the other side; someone revealed in shot two. It is they/​he/​she whose line of sight we have been made to inhabit. Cameras are like humans in that they have no eyes behind their heads. They see only what they look toward. There are hundreds of ways to create the sense of a 360-​degree whole from separate frontal/​fractional shots. What I have described above is merely one of many ways, filmic suture at its most basic. Sometimes, as in the Virgilian passage studied above, the suturing can be made even more deliberate by first establishing a viewer, then showing what is being viewed, then returning to the viewer to register his/​her reaction (viewer/​viewed/​viewer). Often the first step is omitted, and one is given to see happenings that are not assigned to any particular viewer who has been set in place. This may be because there is no inset viewer taking things in, such as when a panoramic shot is used to establish a larger setting within which things will happen. Or it may be because we are meant to intuit the existence of a viewer who is there, but who has yet to be revealed. To do this we must note the particulars of what we are being given to see and treat them as cues that prompt us to make sense of what we are being given to see. We do this all the time in watching narrative films. Why am I looking out through a barred window and seeing a courtyard surrounded by barbed wire? (because I am a prisoner looking out from his cell). Why am I looking so intently at this elegant woman’s diamond necklace? (because I am the cat burglar who has infiltrated the cocktail party, planning his next heist). Why is that man running away from me, dodging into an alleyway and hurling himself over a fence? And how is it that I am managing to remain tight on his heels, and that my view of what’s in front of me is so unsteady and jostled? (I am the police detective who is attempting to chase him down). And so on. The possibilities are fairly endless. But in every case, whether working from a few dodgy cues or many obvious ones, viewers are expected to infer things based on what they have been given to see, and thus to comprehend them as meaningful parts of a larger emerging story. Making sense of what is there, in other words, is not what writers and film-​makers do for those who read and watch. It is what readers and watchers, and readers as watchers, do for themselves in order to establish a knowing (and familiar and safely controlled) relationship with what writers and film-​makers give them to see.7 7. For a brilliant, constructivist account of viewers acting on cues and surmising meanings and an overall sense of the fabula from the structures of the film itself (using prior knowledge of the way films work), see Bordwell 1985: 29–​47.

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I belabor these points because, when we read ancient epics, we tend, out of an abundance of caution, not to let ourselves perform these operations. The works of Homer and Virgil have been around for thousands of years, and for all that time they have not needed us to make inferences and fill in gaps in order for them to say what they have had to say. Or have they? Because we are wont to treat these works as “classics” that speak for themselves, we tend to hold back from inferring unless we are explicitly told to do so. Even in cases where the text repeatedly signals that the things being shown are to be taken “as seen” by an inset spectator, as in the swallow simile examined above, we tend to take the writer’s visual cues as indications of just “what’s there” to be seen (i.e., what Juturna is doing, and how she is behaving) rather than as the particular view of an interested spectator (what Juturna seems like to Aeneas as he watches her do these things). In the end, or such is my claim, the simile is at least as much about him as it is about her.8 To fail to note this is to lose important insights into what is going on in the story, all in favor of our not wanting to supply things that the writer has not explicitly said. And yet that is exactly what we are being prompted to do: gather up visual information as we go, recalibrate, and infer. Were we to approach watching narrative films in the same passive way, supplying no rationales for how the shots relate, we would see people doing things, first in this shot, then the next, but we would have no story. We would be at a loss.

1.2.  Watching Paris: Hatred at First Sight I turn now to a scene of “hatred at first sight” from Homer’s Iliad, where details of outward appearance and comportment serve to expose the inner lives of characters who look on and react. I offer it as a case study in how the detailed description of someone’s outsides is, at the same time (I would say primarily), a description of someone else’s insides. The third book of the Iliad begins with the Trojan and

8. In my estimation, Chapter 4 of Lyne 1989 (“Narrative through Imagery,” 63–​99) remains the single best study of Virgil’s similes. In a significant (and quite deliberate) departure from West 1969, Lyne defies the hesitation toward inference mentioned above by insisting that “the main function of a simile is not to illustrate something already mentioned in the narrative, but to add things which are not mentioned, in a different medium: imagery” (68), and that with his similes Virgil gives us some correspondences, “and he leaves us to construct other ‘correspondences,’ i.e. he leaves us to insert into the narrative details to which details may correspond . . . and to infer thereby the important added ‘narrative’ ” (88). For example, he demonstrates that what is added (via readerly inference) by the famous simile describing Lavinia’s blush at Aen. 12.65–​69 is something that the narrative itself leaves untouched: Lavinia’s desire for Turnus; the fire that burns inside of her (80–​82). Going well beyond similes per se, my emphasis throughout this book is largely the one insisted upon by Lyne in his pioneering study: “narrative through imagery” (82) rather than imagery as merely decorative and/​or illustrative.

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Achaean armies advancing against each other in ordered ranks from opposite sides, with leaders taking up positions along the front of each line, each at the head of his own troops. The book’s first two lines give us this image as a view that we take in from some high and distant spot. Watching from there we immediately have our attention grabbed by the more shrill and agitated of the two sides, as the Trojans are described as a massive, clamoring “flock.” The collective rush of sound that reaches the heavens as the Trojans move toward the Greeks, shouting as they go, is compared to the tumult of a massive flock of cranes as they take flight from the river Ocean to wage battle against the Pygmies. The rush of unintelligible noise that is turned up in line 2 is then muted in line 8 as we turn our attention from one side to the other. There we see the Greeks advancing in complete silence, breathing fury and concentrating on battle tactics in their heads. Ethnic characterizations are rendered via visible signs here, as the Trojans are spotted as a seething mass, loudly agitated, while the Greeks are observed as quietly determined and calculating: marked as persons with insides. Once we have taken in this introductory, distant, high-​angle view of first this side, then that, the scene before us suddenly turns dark and hard to make out, as our view is clouded over by the dust that is being kicked up by the soldiers’ feet. The simile that compares the dust clouds rising from the plains to mists that come down over the mountaintops, turning day into night, making it hard for shepherds to see any farther than a stone’s throw, reminds us that our view of the scene is from some high and distant spot, as if we ourselves were up among the shepherds, struggling to make things out. This shepherd’s perch, as we will see in ­chapter 2, is a highly encoded spot, a place where epic writers often take us to show us sweeping vistas, and to dwell on difficulties of perception. By the beginning of line 15 the two advancing clouds have nearly converged. Then in line 16 we catch sight of a single soldier who has popped out to capture our attention at the front of the dust cloud on the Trojan side (16–​28): Τρωσὶν μὲν προμάχιζεν Ἀλέξανδρος θεοειδὴς παρδαλέην ὤμοισιν ἔχων καὶ καμπύλα τόξα καὶ ξίφος: αὐτὰρ δοῦρε δύω κεκορυθμένα χαλκῷ πάλλων Ἀργείων προκαλίζετο πάντας ἀρίστους ἀντίβιον μαχέσασθαι ἐν αἰνῇ δηϊοτῆτι. τὸν δ’ ὡς οὖν ἐνόησεν ἀρηί̈φιλος Μενέλαος ἐρχόμενον προπάροιθεν ὁμίλου μακρὰ βιβάντα, ὥς τε λέων ἐχάρη μεγάλῳ ἐπὶ σώματι κύρσας εὑρὼν ἢ ἔλαφον κεραὸν ἢ ἄγριον αἶγα πεινάων: μάλα γάρ τε κατεσθίει, εἴ περ ἂν αὐτὸν σεύωνται ταχέες τε κύνες θαλεροί τ’ αἰζηοί:

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ὣς ἐχάρη Μενέλαος Ἀλέξανδρον θεοειδέα ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ἰδών At the front of the pack, leading the Trojans, was Alexander, looking like a god. Slung over his shoulders he had a leopard’s skin, a curved bow and a sword. Shaking two spears, their tips made of bronze, he challenged all the Argives’ best to fight him in dreadful battle, might against might. And as war-​loving Menelaus caught sight of him there, strutting with big steps at the front of the pack, he was thrilled, just like a lion that has happened upon a huge meaty hunk. Starved, he has discovered a horned deer or a wild goat. He greedily wolfs it down, even as dogs, swift to arrive, powerful and robust, attempt to drive him off. Just so did Menelaus thrill with delight as he beheld Alexander before his eyes, looking like a god. This is Paris’ first appearance in the epic (also known as Alexander). Given his central role as the attractive foreign prince whose seduction of Helen brought the war about, it makes sense that Homer should expend some time up front describing him as a particularly dazzling sight to behold. But here we must note that the view that we have of him as he struts about in his spotted cape is not from some high and far-​off spot, that shepherd’s perch where we watched the armies coming together from opposite sides. By this point we are down in the heart of the action, observing Paris from some spot opposite him as he parades in front of us. We are close enough to take in the details of his outfit, to note how handsome he is, and that the tips of his spears are made of bronze. Once we observe all of this, our attention flips to the other side, where we see Menelaus reacting to the spectacle that Paris puts on. The change in positionality from high and distant to low, close and frontal, is a cue. It tells us that what we are now being given to see may have to be reckoned with differently, not as a direct statement from Homer to us, but as a visual experience “quoted” from inside someone else’s line of sight. Functioning as a cue, the shift in positionality elicits a general misgiving about what we are now being given to see: “am I the one seeing this in isolation, as so much visual information passed along from Homer to me (visual description as general directorial staging), or am I seeing this through someone else’s eyes, not as staging info., but a drawn-​out visual quote? If that is the case, to whom might this particular line of sight belong?” These issues rove along as questions looking for answers as we watch Paris parade about. Then in lines 21–​28 we catch sight of Menelaus looking on from the other side. It is there, upon seeing not just any random watcher watch, but the man who has had his wife stolen away by the foppish prince who parades in front

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of him, that the penny drops, and that the two separate acts of viewing, first ours then his, are sutured together as one. It turns out that he has been there watching all along. In fact, all the viewing that happens in the passage quoted above is a single act that occupies one moment in time. It is sequentialized in the telling, but that is not what we are to make of it.9 As in film, the description happens in separate stages, with one shot giving the view, followed by a second shot showing the viewer. It happens this way because that is the way we construct full vision from the individual snatches of visual information that our eyes take in. When it comes to eyesight, we humans are occipitally challenged, and even in our mind’s eyes the limits of our physical eyesight are observed. At any given time, we see what is in front of us, and what happens behind us is in the dark. For that to be seen, we must turn to it, and the back must become the new front. That, I suggest, is what is happening in this passage. To put this in filmic terms, first we have a frontal shot that shows Paris putting on a colorful display (the viewed). Then we have a reverse shot that shows Menelaus taking in that display from the other side (the viewer). The narrative that invites us to envision the whole splits a single moment into two shots set in sequence. As said above, this is a matter of necessity, given limits to our vision, but here it is also a case of Homer using that necessity to great effect by restricting our knowledge up front, hinting that we may be seeing through someone else’s eyes, while withholding the identity of the viewer, thereby building suspense before the big reveal: it is Menelaus, the jilted husband. He is the one watching all of this! It is a delicious revelation, artfully postponed. Whatever else this is, it is not a case of Menelaus coming along to catch sight of what we have first been given to see by Homer, even though that is the way the events are sequenced on the page, and that is the way we tend to read these things. Menelaus is not stepping in to watch with us. Rather, in having our attention turned toward him, we are being alerted to the fact that we have been watching with him all along. In fact, we were never viewing any of this apart from him. Ever since we came down from that shepherd’s distant perch (a high-​angle establishing shot) to spot Paris popping out of the cloud and linger over the details of his dress and comportment, we have been parasitically situated inside Menelaus’ line of sight, taking in the “live feed” of what he sees. That is what the shift from the shepherd’s perch to the low frontal view from the other side signals: that what we are now seeing is quoted sight. As in film (for a famous example, see Appendix, item 2), we are required to roll with this: to suspect that this may be the case, and to move

9. On Homer’s ability “to represent events as simultaneous even if he has to narrate them consecutively,” see Grethlein and Huitink 2017: 78.

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forward in suspense, actively wondering whose line of sight we may have moved into. A few lines later, our suspicions are confirmed (there is someone watching) and the mystery is solved (it’s Menelaus). That is what I had in mind above, when I described Virgil’s swallow-​tracking hyperbaton as a miniature version of what we do when we process the visual workings of a narrative film. We pick up on pieces of information and make our way forward, scanning for further bits of information that we can use to fill gaps in our knowledge and make sense of the whole. Because the author (let’s say Homer, in this case, since he is the one we are talking about) wants to create experiential arcs of curiosity, tension, and release in those who listen, he deliberately constrains the very sense-​making activities that he sets in motion by withholding critical information until the time is right, thereby enticing us forward toward the big reveal.10 I have belabored these points here because I wanted, in the early stages of this book, to show how some of its main premises have been constructed. I will get on with demonstrating things in a much less deliberate way when I return to Virgil, but first I need to look back at the passage from the Iliad’s third book, yet again, in order to complete an unfinished bit of premise construction. In introducing this passage above, I made a big claim about how the outward visual impression that we have of one man is really about the insides of another. I need to qualify this, and give a fuller account of what I mean, because one of my main premises in this book is that what the inset viewer sees is a window into how he sees, and often a miniature story in itself. Consider the vision that we are treated to in the lines above: a cape-​wearing Paris prancing in front of the Greeks and calling them out. Usually this is read as visual information from Homer to us that tells us about Paris’ insides from his outsides. Surely that is right. But, as I have argued above, Homer is not doing this via “direct” visual representation. He is doing it via visual quotation. It is Menelaus who creates this image of Paris by picking out the details that catch his interest, the ones that matter most to him both as a jilted husband, and as the man who intends, in a moment, to step forward and kill him. What Menelaus sees is as an expression of how he sees. It is about his insides, not Paris’. Starting up high, Menelaus first takes note of the man’s god-​like good looks (there he is, that handsome package that Helen could not resist). Then, moving down to the shoulders, he spots the leopard skin cape (stylish, eye-​ catching, exotic), then the bow (a weapon with cowardly associations, wielded by someone who shoots from the back, not the weapon of a πρόμαχος “lead-​fighter,”

10. On film narration as a continual process of creating suspicions (a sense of where the story is headed) while withholding crucial information, see Bordwell 1985: 48–​62.

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“fighter in front”). Lower down at the man’s side he sees a sword, and in his hands are two spears tipped in bronze, a smallish detail easily spotted because they are Paris’ forward-​most feature. They are being waved in Menelaus’ face as he looks on, as yet unrecognized, from the other side.11 In issuing his threats, Paris struts about in big loping steps (showy bravado). What we have here is no mere collection of facts concerning Paris’ appearance. Nor is it anything like the sum total of what is there to be seen. Rather, the visual details are a partial and tendentious take on what is there to be seen. Can it be that the man parading in front of Menelaus has no defensive weapons? No helmet, no shield, no greaves, no cuirass, and so on—​in fact, other than the cape, not a stitch of clothing on his frame? It is not that these items, which we might normally expect to see on a Homeric warrior, are not actually there. It is that Menelaus chooses to note certain details, and not others. The picture we have of Paris (a stylish pretty-​boy prancing about, waving showy spears but divested of protective gear) is an expression of the viewer’s disdain, capturing a real warrior’s disapproval of a false and foppish one. It is a vision of hatred at first sight, fashioning Paris as a gorgeous piece of meat that Menelaus will soon tuck into. I make this last point, drawing on the passage’s inset simile, because it too (and considerably more obviously) is a visual illustration of what is going on inside Menelaus’ head. The simile takes us into the thrill he feels upon seeing Paris suddenly appear, right there in front of him: like a starving lion, he has just stumbled upon a magnificent piece of meat. But it also takes us into the thinking that has gone into the seeing that has just been described, accounting for that way of seeing as a projection of the onlooker’s calculations and inner thoughts. The animals we are asked to picture by the simile, the horned deer and wild goat, are notoriously skittish.12 At the snap of a twig, they turn tail and run. That is the kind of man Menelaus sees in front of him: a coward, someone whom he proleptically regards as dead already (a “handsome carcass” in Fagles’ translation). The deer, in

11. According to the “enactivist” approach of Grethlein and Huitink, the specific cue that prompts audiences to imaginatively connect with the scene being described, in this case, is the waving of the spears. For as simple and under-​described as that detail is, it stands out as the most “enactive” feature of the description because it concerns a purposeful and quite basic bodily interaction with an object that is named by a “basic-​level” term. As pointed out by Grethlein and Huitink 2017: 79: “cognitively realistic narratives are those which, instead of providing fully fledged and isolated descriptions, introduce objects as and when they are entangled in the action.” Among the main theoretical linchpins linking the “enactivist” approach of Grethlein and Huitink to recent cognitivist studies of film are the groundbreaking studies of Alva Noë on “embodied” mental perception; see esp. Noë 2004 and 2009. 12. Already at Iliad 1.225 Achilles has berated Agamemnon as a coward “with the eyes of a dog and the heart of a deer.”

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this case, is a buck with horns, and it is understood that the wild goat is horned as well. In fact, the horns of the wild goat are the material from which curved bows are made, like the one Paris has slung across his back. A specific visual connection is being made here between the animal’s horns, and the bow on Paris’ back. Those horns look impressive. But they pose no threat to a hungry lion. Such are the thoughts that occupy Menelaus as he looks at Paris. Not that he is thinking in terms of lions and wild goats.13 He is thinking of himself as a killer, and Paris as his long-​sought-​after next big kill: easy prey, and as good as dead already. The main point that I am making here is that the simile elaborates upon the tendentious watching that precedes it, picking up on certain visual details that were caught sight of there. It assigns specific thoughts to the particulars that Menelaus chooses to focus on as he looks at Paris. As such, the simile functions as a kind of second tier, deep-​level suture that bores down into Menelaus’ peculiar way of seeing things, by attaching specific thoughts to the things that Menelaus has given us to see. The foppish version of Paris quoted from Menelaus’ sight is itself already a window into Menelaus’ insides. The simile takes us even farther into Menelaus’ thoughts as he scans Paris’ frame and prepares to attack. This is all perhaps too obvious to require all the elaboration that I have given it. But before leaving the simile I want to suggest that there is an important further function served by what may seem to be an obvious, but merely incidental, feature: its length. It takes time to work through the simile because it is big, and for the whole of that time our focus is not on Paris per se, but on Menelaus: we are watching him watch Paris, getting behind his eyes, into his thoughts. For six entire lines, we observe him emotionally absorbed by what is in front of him, relishing in the sight. Then, as he steps down from his chariot to make his way toward Paris, our attention snaps back to happenings on the field of battle. For the entire time that Menelaus has stood across from Paris, watching him, narrative time has stood still. The simile detailing his inner thoughts functions as a kind of silent reverie or dream sequence that defies narrative time. By being so long in the telling, it captures the emotional intensity with which Menelaus lingers over what he sees: the longer the simile, the more intense the looking, and the greater its emotional impact. We, the story’s listeners/​fellow-​imaginers, share

13. This is a case where the focalization of the principle Narrator-​Focalizer (Homer) is assimilated to that of a character. The simile describes the inset focalizer’s experience of what he sees, but not necessarily the specific terms of his/​her processes of thought. See de Jong 1985a: 264, arguing that although the simile as such belongs to Homer, its contents are determined by the inset viewer’s thoughts (“Indem das Gleichnis innerhalb eines sekundärfokalisierten Kontextes steht, wird sein Inhalt, obwohl das Gleichnis als solches primärfokalisiert bleibt, doch von der Auffassung dieses sekundären Fokalisators mit bestimmt”). Further on “assimilated” comparisons and similes in Homer, see de Jong 2004: 124–​27.

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this experience by being drawn into the viewer’s time bubble, all the while he stands there hating the hell out of Paris, and jumping for joy on his insides, now that he finally has his chance to kill him. Having drunk his fill of Paris parading before his eyes, Menelaus steps down from his chariot and makes his move, and in making that move, Menelaus goes from being the viewer to the thing viewed. Narrative time starts again. The lines below directly follow those quoted above (29–​32): αὐτίκα δ’ ἐξ ὀχέων σὺν τεύχεσιν ἆλτο χαμᾶζε. τὸν δ’ ὡς οὖν ἐνόησεν Ἀλέξανδρος θεοειδὴς ἐν προμάχοισι φανέντα, κατεπλήγη φίλον ἦτορ, ἂψ δ’ ἑτάρων εἰς ἔθνος ἐχάζετο κῆρ’ ἀλεείνων. Straightaway he [Menelaus] leapt down from his chariot to the ground, in full armor. And thus as Alexander, looking like a god, caught sight of him there among the lead-​fighters, he was struck with terror inside, and he stepped back into the throng of his fellow-​fighters to avoid meeting his doom. Another six-​line simile follows, comparing Paris’ instant withdrawal from Menelaus to that of someone who has just spotted a snake at his feet while walking a mountain path: with a start, he recoils, turns white with fear, and starts to tremble, then backs away. All of which, Paris’ hasty withdrawal and the simile that describes it, is then assigned to a particular viewer when Homer says: “Upon seeing him, Hector tore into him with insults” (τὸν δ’ Ἕκτωρ νείκεσσεν ἰδὼν αἰσχροῖς ἐπέεσσιν, 38). It is to Hector in particular that Paris seems just like a man who has spotted a snake and put on such a vivid (bordering on ridiculous) display of instantaneous panic: recoil, pallor, trembling, escape, ticking off all the boxes of cowardice and lack of inner resolve. In an instant, Paris has gone from an impressive spectacle of fashionable soldiery at the front of the pack to an ashen-​faced shiverer hiding among the common fighters. Twice mentioned in the passage that describes Paris’ retreat (once before the simile, and once inside it) is his movement away from his position in front of his troops, as a leader, into the larger, common crowd of Trojan fighters (ἑτάρων εἰς ἔθνος “into the throng of his fellow-​fighters,” 32; καθ᾽ ὅμιλον ἔδυ Τρώων “he sank down in among the Trojans”). Clearly this is a big issue for Hector. It suggests that he regards Paris’ sudden withdrawal through royal eyes, as an abdication of princely responsibilities, and a grotesque display of social impropriety: a leader plunging in among the led, his subjects, to exploit them as shields. For Hector,

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Paris is not just running away from a fight, he is degrading himself, and his office as prince. In the nineteen lines of direct speech that follow, Hector berates his brother largely in terms of bad optics: for putting on such a cowardly display right there in front of the Greeks, and for failing to live up to the promise of his noble looks by matching them with noble deeds. For Hector, the emphasis is on the way that Paris looks to others who look to him for leadership, rather than for sexual thrills. What he sees in his brother’s movement from front to back is not just cowardly behavior, but ruinous political messaging.

1.3.  Sightings, First and Last: The Insect Similes of the Aeneid I want now to turn to two rich visual experiences from books 1 and 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid, the first describing Carthaginians as bees (Aeneas’ first view of Carthage), the second describing Trojans as ants (Dido’s last view of the Trojans). These bookend similes, we shall see, find Aeneas and Dido sighting future realities in mind-​bending ways. As if peering through time, they see the same future prefigured in what they see, but they respond to that future in criss-​crossed ways. Leading into the first simile, the hero has just washed up on the shores of a strange land, and with some unexpected help from his mother, Venus, disguised as a local hunting girl, Aeneas makes his way to the city of Carthage.14 His first view of the city is also ours, and it does not come gradually, as a place sighted from a distance and slowly approached, but all at once, as a full panoramic spectacle that opens up beneath his feet as he surmounts the last hill that hangs out over Carthage on its far side (Aen. 1.419–​36): Iamque ascendebant collem, qui plurimus urbi imminet, adversasque adspectat desuper arces. Miratur molem Aeneas, magalia quondam, miratur portas strepitumque et strata viarum. Instant ardentes Tyrii pars ducere muros, molirique arcem et manibus subvolvere saxa, pars optare locum tecto et concludere sulco. [Iura magistratusque legunt sanctumque senatum;] hic portus alii effodiunt; hic alta theatris

14. For a brilliant recent study of Aeneas’ encounter with his mother in book 1, marking the problems raised by the scene and the passage’s long history of interpretation since antiquity, see part one (1–​154) of Starnone 2020.

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fundamenta locant alii, immanisque columnas rupibus excidunt, scaenis decora alta futuris. Qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura exercet sub sole labor, cum gentis adultos educunt fetus, aut cum liquentia mella stipant et dulci distendunt nectare cellas, aut onera accipiunt venientum, aut agmine facto ignavum fucos pecus a praesepibus arcent: fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella. And soon they were making their way up the hill that juts over the city. There, from high above, he looks out over the citadel. Aeneas is stunned to see massive works where once low huts were huddled. He is stunned at the gateways, the bustling noise and the paved streets. The Tyrians are ablaze with effort. Some trace walls and build the citadel and roll up stones by hand. Some seek a spot for a home and close it in with a furrow. They are selecting laws and magistrates and a holy senate. Over here are others dredging a port, others over there make a spot for theaters with deep foundations, and they carve out massive columns from the cliffs to stand lovely and tall on the stages that will come. Their toil was like that of bees moving about over the flowery fields at the beginning of summer, when they are raising the young of their kind to adulthood, when they either pack the flowing honey and fill their cells to bursting with sweet nectar, or they receive loads from those returning, or they form a battle line to keep the drones, a lazy brood, away from their hives. The work effervesces, and the honey is fragrant, and smells of thyme. The lines generate no suspense concerning who is seeing what. Virgil very deliberately places Aeneas as a viewer in a specific spot, high on a hill, directly overlooking the city. Then, as he begins to describe what Aeneas sees down below, he twice turns toward him to register his amazement at what he sees (miratur . . . miratur “he is amazed . . . he is amazed”15). This flipping back and forth between the viewer and the viewed leaves no doubt that what we are being given to see of Carthage is “as seen” by Aeneas. It is from his optical line of sight that the construction activities happening down below resemble those of bees building a hive.

15. On the anaphora of forms of the verb miror in the Aeneid, see Wills 1996: 292 n. 3. The device has a famous precedent at Hom. Iliad 24.478–​80: θάμβος . . . θάμβησεν . . . θάμβησαν (“amazement . . . he was amazed . . . they were amazed”). On θαῦμα (“wonder”) as “preeminently a condition of seeing in Homeric poetry,” see Slatkin 2007: 27.

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That said, this “hive” impression of the rising city is not just a necessary outcome of his being so far away, positioned in a place where the whole site can be taken in at a glance, and where all the workers look incredibly small. It represents his way of accounting for and valuing what he sees, as a vision informed by his desires to found a city of his own. What Aeneas marvels at in such an impressively extended reverie (the simile is massive) is an image of his own dreams realized right there before his eyes: a magnificent city rising from the ground. It is a version of what he has been promised, and what he has, for so long desired to see for himself. A sight for his sore, refugee eyes. It is as the leader of his own refugee swarm that Aeneas marvels at what he sees: a worksite bustling with worker bees building a honey-​sweet hive, with law courts, theaters, magistrates, a senate, and so on.16 But there, in Virgil’s itemizing of what Aeneas sees, is the problem. A big one. How can Aeneas, the Homeric character inside the story, be seeing any of those things? In the mythic world where Aeneas lives, bounded by the timescapes of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the poems of the Epic Cycle, the things caught sight of by Aeneas do not exist.17 Not yet, and not by a long shot. Later cultures, located solidly in historical time, built theaters, artificial harbors, and so on, but it is not clear that certain of the institutions and structures picked out by Aeneas ever existed at the site of Carthage at any time in its Phoenician history, let alone at its inception; that is, they are not known to have existed at Carthage until the Romans rebuilt the site for themselves in the late first century bce, after having left it to molder in ruins for more than a century. That rebuilding of Carthage as a Roman city was taking place right as Virgil was writing these lines, as was the rebuilding of another famous Carthage (Carthago Nova) in Spain.18 The idea that the institutions spotted by Aeneas were built into the Phoenician city of Carthage as part of its original design is absurd in the extreme. To put theaters there, for example, with lofty columned scaenae, in the ninth century bce,

16. The point is well made by Giusti 2014: 42: “it is with the same admiration [sc. as that of G. 4.3] that Aeneas now watches a people building the walls of their city . . . in both cases, admiration emerges from the unsatisfied desires of the spectators: either Virgil’s bitter awareness of the impossibility of reproducing such a society in the human world, or Aeneas’ desire to found a bee society himself, had he the land to do it.” 17. Giusti 2014: 43 points out that Aeneas’ awestruck view of the city has a parallel in book 7 of Homer’s Odyssey, when the shipwrecked hero first catches sight of Scheria and realizes that he has “landed among an enlightened civilization.” Like Odysseus, Aeneas sees that he has landed among a super-​culture, the likes of which he has never seen before. But the jump out of mythic time, if it is there at all, is far less obvious in the case of the Homeric model. 18. On the rebuilding of Carthage as a Roman colony, see Goldschmidt 2017: 368–​69. On the rebuilding of Carthago Nova in Spain, see Morgan and Shi 2015.

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would imply that the Phoenicians invented stage drama and introduced it to the West, and that the Greeks required three hundred years or so to catch up to them and take all the credit for what the Phoenicians had done. Some structures spotted by Aeneas are unproblematic (walls, homes). The paved roads (strata uiarum) are questionable, and yet other structures and cultural institutions should not be there at all.19 They do not belong either to the time, or to the culture. They belong to later empires. As a package, they belong most obviously to the Romans themselves who, in expanding the reach of their empire, stamped them out wherever they went as “civilizing” instruments of colonial rule.20 What Aeneas sees from his hilltop perch, then, is not just Carthaginians building a city, but “colonizing” and “civilizing” a place that, only a short while before, had belonged to certain hut-​dwelling others (magalia quondam), indigenous peoples conveniently displaced.21 He sees them behaving like Romans. Bees, for the Romans, are the quintessential colonizing insect: they swarm out of their old places into new ones and build new homes for themselves. Virgil knows a good deal about bees, having devoted most of his Georgics’ fourth book not just to keeping them, but to explaining their human-​like qualities (their passions, society, political structures, riots, wars, etc.). Having put so much time into seeing bees as humans in the Georgics, he now flips the analogy in the Aeneid to consider humans as bees. Aeneas sees the Carthaginians doing what Romans do: having descended upon a place that once belonged to others, they have displaced the indigenous peoples and have set out to construct a Roman city. Many an editor has bracketed the line describing the elections of magistrates and a senate, because those institutions stand out as the most awkwardly Roman of all. 19. The main Homeric template behind the description is Od. 6.6–​10, describing the city built by the colonizing Phaiakians (walls, houses, temples, and the allotment of fields) when they migrated to Scheria. Attempting to explain the paved roads, Servius (D) notes at line 422: “The Phoenicians are said to have been the first to pave roads with stones.” His note concerning the mention of a theater in line 427 smacks of desperation: “He (Virgil) has done well to make mention of a theater, either because the city is being built by Greeks, who often enjoy spectacles, or, as some critics would have it, to honor the science of music.” 20. Morwood 1991: 212: “The overall picture is un-​Carthaginian. The promise of high civilization in the city which Aeneas sees and the establishment there of the rule of law in fact sound decidedly Roman.” 21. Servius was clearly puzzled by the phrase magalia quondam, and rightly so, because it raises the question of how Aeneas can be marveling at something that is no longer there. He solves the problem by dividing verse 421 into two perspectives: “The one ‘Aeneas marvels at the massive works’ is ascribed to Aeneas, while the other ‘where once there were huts’ is ascribed to the poet.” Alternatively, one can imagine Aeneas looking at a site where most of the huts have been cleared. My own preference is to let Aeneas see things that are not “there” any more, but once were, that is, just as he can see future things that are not there yet, he can see past things that once were.

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But the line that precedes it, where Carthaginians are spotted plowing a furrow around the site where they plan to build a home, is perhaps even more jarringly implausible, in that it finds Carthaginians performing a Roman “founding” ritual (plowing the sulcus primigenius) that no other culture is known to have practiced; a case of pious Aeneas catching sight of Carthaginians acting piously.22 Aeneas cannot possibly be seeing all that he sees. And yet he sees it, all the same. Despite the lure, there is no way to bracket off the culturally implausible and/​or historically impossible details of this picture without deracinating it of its most challenging and provocative feature: the uncanniness of Aeneas’ sight; his catching sight of things that should not be there; things highly attributable to other cultures and other times, as if to anticipate and prefigure them. All of which is odd and unsettling, certainly. But here we would do well to remember that everything about the Carthage episode in the Aeneid is wildly off in its chronology: fleeing Troy after its fall in 1184 bce, Aeneas visits Dido founding her city c. 814 bce. Impossible, but there it is.23 In addition, there are several noteworthy occasions in the Aeneid where Aeneas spends time “marveling” at things that are far in the future; things that he cannot possibly understand or put words to. And yet on those occasions Virgil tells us both how and why Aeneas sees what he sees, letting us know what to make of it. Not so in the beehive simile. Here the tasks of noting chronological mismatches and making sense of them he leaves entirely to us. Because these “time collapse” issues could easily consume the rest of this book, I cannot go into them any further than I have.24 Suffice it to say that when Aeneas sees the city of Carthage being built before his eyes, his vision is inexplicably proleptic. Somehow (perhaps it is best to leave it at that) he sees Carthaginians building his city, his future, rather than their own. Rather more darkly, he sees Carthage as if already defeated, rising up as a Roman city, its long and illustrious history as an autonomous empire already in the past.25

22. On the ritual, see De Sanctis 2007. As a uniquely Roman practice, see Bettini 2011: 85: “the act of ploughing completed on occasion of the foundation of a city is truly exceptional, and is suffused with religious meaning.” 23. On the historical impossibility of the encounter, widely recognized in antiquity, see Hardie 2014b: 52–​53. 24. On the collapsing of timescales in the Aeneid, see Feeney 2007: 161–​63, and Freudenburg 2018: 217–​18. 25. On bees as Roman colonizers, cf. Aen. 7.64–​70. Alternatively, at G. 4.212–​14 Virgil analogizes bees to Egyptians, Lydians, Parthians, and Medes, a canonical set of “servile” eastern peoples who, the poet says, are amazingly organized and cooperative when their king is solidly on his throne. But when he is lost they turn violent and self-​destructive. Could this be built

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The bookend simile comes in the middle of book 4, as the Trojans hurriedly load their ships to get the hell out of Carthage. There the Trojans are likened to ants laying waste to a pile of grain. As Williams points out in his classic commentary, this is “the only simile in Greek or Latin epic concerned with ants” (ad 402f.). As follows (Aeneid 4.397–​411): tum uero Teucri incumbunt et litore celsas deducunt toto nauis. natat uncta carina, frondentisque ferunt remos et robora siluis infabricata fugae studio. migrantis cernas totaque ex urbe ruentis: ac uelut ingentem formicae farris aceruum cum populant hiemis memores tectoque reponunt, it nigrum campis agmen praedamque per herbas conuectant calle angusto; pars grandia trudunt obnixae frumenta umeris, pars agmina cogunt castigantque moras, opere omnis semita feruet. quis tibi tum, Dido, cernenti talia sensus, quosue dabas gemitus, cum litora feruere late prospiceres arce ex summa, totumque uideres misceri ante oculos tantis clamoribus aequor! Then the Teucrians set to shoving and hauling their tall ships down across the full length of the shore. The greased hull swims. And in their eagerness to flee they fetch out of the woods oars covered in leaves and logs of oak still unhewn . . . from the city’s every corner you could see them flocking out in a rush, just as when ants plunder a huge pile of barley, thinking of the winter ahead, and restack it at home. Their black battalion goes out over the fields, and in a narrow line they cart their spoils across the grass. Some shove giant grains, straining with their shoulders, while others keep the troops moving and scold the dawdlers. The entire path effervesces with work. What did you feel then, Dido, when you saw such things? What groans did you utter when you looked out from your high tower to see the shores seething far and wide, when before your eyes you saw the entire sea disturbed by such great commotion? Here, in contrast to the bee simile, you have no character set in place to take in the view. Not at first, anyway. The passage begins with a series of images of Trojans

into Aeneas’ way of seeing Carthage as well? Is he, as he always seems to be in the Aeneid, always already a Roman—​even in that way?

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launching their ships along the beach and carrying leafy logs out of the woods. As viewers, we have little to go on to make out where we are, but it seems that we are rather far back from these activities: far enough to take in the beach’s entire length and some part of a nearby forest, but close enough for us to note that the logs coming out of the forest are left unworked, and that they are shaggy with un-​trimmed leaves. The half line that tells us that the logs were left unworked because the Trojans were in a hurry to get going mirrors the sense that the words convey: like the quickly improvised oars it describes, the line is itself unfinished, presumably because the poet himself was in a hurry to press on. It serves as a metapoetic “note to self ” for Virgil to come back to this line and fix it later. Which, sadly, he never did. Then in the next line the verb cernas (“you could see them”) suggests that what we are seeing is not “as seen” by some specific character in the tale, but by whatever “you” happens to be reading the story or hearing it told. Then the simile proper: we see the Trojans as ants, exiting the city en masse. The vista is wide, observed from some high, far-​off spot facing the beach, from the direction of the city itself. From that spot we zoom in to see their individual efforts (again, as in the bee simile, we are observing men at work): some push loads with their shoulders, others keep the people moving along, and so on. Then we pull back, much farther and higher this time, to take in a long line of black leading out from the city to the sea. In the process of panning back, the individuals heaving and shoving below blur before our eyes into a seething dark collective. That is where the surprise happens. As the camera withdraws to its far high spot, it pulls back to reveal Dido looking out upon everything that we have just been given to see. It is only then, when the apostrophic question “what did you feel, Dido, as you looked out upon these things?” is asked, that we realize that what we thought was omniscient and informational viewing, Virgil telling us what was there to be seen, is not that at all. She is the one who has been absorbed in observing the Trojan’s busy departure, struck by how hurried they are, and how ant-​like they are in their organized despoiling of her stuff (more on this below). The ant simile, as weird and unprecedented as it is, belongs to Dido, through whose eyes, emotions, and evaluative reckonings we are given to see it—​perhaps as a first sign of her seeing things strangely, and her being well on her way to losing control. There are no surprises in the bee simile having to do with who sees what. Aeneas is put in an optimal spot for viewing, and then, as he looks at things happening down below, we take in the live feed of his visual experience. The surprise comes in what he sees, not in whether he is the one seeing it. Here, in the ant simile, the surprise is quite different. It is sprung at the end, when Dido comes

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into the frame. Only then, as we catch sight of her looking out from the citadel of Carthage, do we realize that she has been up there watching with us all along; that, in fact, our entire experience of watching the Trojans hurriedly prep their ships and pour out of the city to sail away has been via live feed through her eyes. The revelation is not only unexpected, it is unsettling: there she is, suddenly spotted, brooding in silence. Creepy. Such sudden reveals are the stuff of thrillers and slasher films (see Appendix, item 3). Here the device adds a note of menace to what we have just been given to see, and helps confirm and darken some of the more sinister and hateful undercurrents of the simile itself (see below). Up above I used the metaphor of the camera pulling back behind Dido’s head to reveal her as the surprise viewer. No two readers will imagine Dido’s sudden reveal in the same way, but I have this as an over-​the-​shoulder suture rather than a frontal close-​up because Dido comes into the frame at the tail-​end of a process of panning away from what is happening down below. We are still looking outward toward the beach, pulling back from it, when Dido comes into view. In film, the over-​the-​shoulder shot has one decided advantage over the facial close-​up in that it captures in a single frame the distance that separates the watcher from what is being watched. Because of this, the device can, by putting viewer and viewed close together, be used to emphasize not just physical proximity, but emotional and/​or sexual intimacy, or things more sinister such as the threat of violent contact, intrusion into one’s personal space, overbearingness, and so on. Conversely, by showing the viewer at a great distance from the viewed, the same device can be used to express emotional detachment, desperate longing, safety (being at a safe distance), helplessness (being too far away to help), and so on.26 Something similar seems to be happening here, as Dido comes into the frame at the tail-​end of the process of panning back. As if to underscore her emotional isolation, the pull-​back reveal allows us, in a single moment, to observe the large distance that separates Dido (suddenly in focus, close to us) from the Trojans (blurred en masse in the distance) moving away from her down below. In revealing Dido as the viewer, Virgil does not turn toward her frontally in order to register her emotional reaction. This is something he might easily have done by noting that she had tears running down her face, for example, or that her eyes sparked with rage, or whatever. Instead, he lets the sound of her groans carry the emotional load as he poses a series of apostrophic questions (that is to say,

26. For general observations on over-​the-​shoulder shots in film (limited primarily to dialogue scenes), see Keast 2014: 125–​27, and Bowen 2018: 70–​72. The basic expressive possibilities of over-​the-​shoulder and close-​up shots are neatly explored and illustrated by S. C. Lannom on the StudioBinder website (https://​www.studi​obin​der.com/​blog/​over-​the-​shoul​der-​shot/​).

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questions that find him turning away from us, his listeners/​readers outside the story proper, to address a character inside the story): “what did you feel, Dido, as you looked out upon these things? What groans did you utter?” The questions are not honest inquiries into the mystery of Dido’s feelings. Rather, they serve to mark the depth of her emotional engagement with what she sees. Virgil rarely “turns away” from us, as he does here, to address someone inside his story. When he does so, it is most often to mark a significant emotional juncture in the story, as happens here. The apostrophe suggests that Virgil himself is swept up by the emotional power of what he is describing.27 It puts the depth and hugeness of Dido’s feelings beyond his powers to describe, eliciting, in turn, powerful emotions from those who observe the poet swept up by his story, and momentarily losing control. Although the ant simile belongs to Dido, she is not seeing ants. She is seeing Trojans. Nor is she necessarily thinking “in terms of ” ants. Rather than literalizing her thoughts, the simile symbolizes them, turning them outward as a moving visual analogy. Virgil’s apostrophe and the groans uttered by Dido make clear that she is emotionally distraught and wracked by sorrow. These are the groans of a woman who has lost hope, watching her lover leave her behind, ruined and alone. Resemblances between Dido and Catullus’ Ariadne, both looking out toward lovers who have dumped them as they head back out to sea, are not hard to detect here, and many have seen them. What Dido, at first glance, seems to be lacking to hold up her end of the analogy is Ariadne’s fury. But a closer look at the simile exposes a seething cauldron of Catullan odi (“I hate”) eating away at her insides to go with the amo (“I love”) of her forlorn groans. Throughout the simile, the Trojan “ants” spied by Dido are described in explicitly menacing terms: not just conveying supplies to load onto their ships but “laying waste” to the grain pile and conveying “spoils/​booty” through the grass. It is as if she were watching an army sacking a city, her city.28 As Elena Giusti has recently pointed out, such evocations, aided by memories of Virgil’s Georgics, where ants are stripped of all of their many positive connotations to be described as plunderers, help “in expressing Dido’s feelings that the Trojans have already

27. Commenting on the use of apostrophe in Homer and Virgil, Block 1982: 8 writes: “This diversion occurs most effectively at emotional junctures, to emphasize the response of the speaker and thereby shape the response of the listener.” 28. The militarization of the ants caught the attention of Virgil’s ancient commentators. Serv. (D) comments on cum populant in verse 403: et bene rei paruae per metaphoram sublimitatem dedit, ut non uideatur de formicis, sed de exercitu loqui (“he has done well in giving grandeur to a tiny animal by means of the comparison, such that he seems to be speaking not of ants, but of an army”).

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been looting Carthage, as readers know well that their Roman descendants will do.”29 Virgil leaves just enough of his old farmer’s know-​how inside the simile for us to sense just how hateful the Trojans have become to Dido.30 Like so many marauding and predatory, yet highly organized ants: they came, they plundered, they left. Bees and ants are often spoken of in the same breath by ancient writers. Both are hard-​working social creatures, highly organized. But bees, they point out, make things (hives, honey), ants take things.31 Farmers love bees for their honey, but hate ants for their depradations. The bookend insect similes of books 1 and 4 form a visual chiasm wrought from these truths: upon his arrival in Carthage, Aeneas sees Carthaginian “bees” busily making. Upon Aeneas’ departure from Carthage, Dido sees Trojan “ants” busily taking. But despite the criss-​crossed patterning of their sight, both viewers manage to see one particular thing that lies well beyond their own time: the destruction of Carthage by the Romans. That said, each presages the city’s destruction in a different way: what Aeneas sees as a Roman Carthage being built, Dido sees as a Phoenician Carthage being destroyed.

29. Giusti 2014: 40. 30. For Virgil’s use of recycled materials in the passage, see Coolidge 1965. 31. Cf. Plin. Nat. 11.108.2 “These [ants] also share out their labors, as do bees, but those animals [bees] make their food, while these [ants] gather it together” (et hae communicantes laborem ut apes, sed illae faciunt cibos, hae condunt). Further on the division of labor among ants, cf. Lucian Icar. 19 and Servius ad Aen. 4.403.

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Precedents in Earlier Roman Poetry

2.1.  Getting High with Lucretius To begin this chapter, I step away from the Aeneid to look at some visual maneuvers of two earlier Roman poets that can help us account for Virgil’s expert manipulation of vision in the telling of his tale. These are two poets whom we know Virgil read and took very seriously. The first, and perhaps the most important, is Lucretius, whose Epicurean agenda essentially requires him to produce proofs of a visual kind. In his didactic epic addressed to Memmius, he tells us that nature is entirely material; that we need pay attention only to what we can touch and see, and not to stories of ghosts or punishments in hell, or whatever else the crazed poets of the past have grabbed up from the world of their dreams.1 The real world is made of hard stuff, he says, and of nothing; atoms and the void. And that is all there is. But you see the problem here. Lucretius says “trust your eyes” because only what you can see for yourself is actually there and real. But no one can see the “atoms” (elementa, primordia rerum) that he is going on and on about in this epic. They are no more visible than Tityus having his liver picked at by crows in Hades, the very sort of nonsense that, Lucretius complains, myth-​tellers scare up to keep people groveling at the feet of superstition (superstitio), but with no basis in reality.2 To deal with this problem, Lucretius had to develop a whole set of devices to help us, his willing students (Memmius, in the end, is a stand-​in for

1. Lucr. 1.978–​1023, on which see Jocelyn 1986. 2. Schiesaro 1990 is the fullest, and by far the best, study of analogies as didactic tools in Lucretius. He nicely captures the problem of seeing the invisible on 36: “il problema consiste in fondo nell’opposizione tra un predicato essenziale della realtà atomica e la vision della realtà che appare ai nostri occhi e che sembra smentire quell postulato. Gli atomi devono esistere, ma non si possono vedere.”

Virgil’s Cinematic Art. Kirk Freudenburg, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197643242.003.0003

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us), transfer our visual knowledge from things we can see to things we cannot.3 He does this wonderfully in book 1 by reviving some famous water and wind similes from Homer—​water being a visible substance, wind being visible only in its effects. As Denis Feeney has pointed out in his study of first similes in epic, the Homeric background of Lucretius’ first series of similes in the book is easy to spot (for example, the raging floods of Lucr. 280–​94 that smash down bridges and flatten forests derive from Homer’s description of Diomedes and Ajax as destructive flash floods at Iliad 5.87–​94 and 11.492–​96), but that what Lucretius has done here is produce a completely new kind of simile from the old Homeric template: instead of comparing a hero to some violent force of nature, as Homer had done, he has compared one violent force of nature (the winds, which are not visible) to another (raging waters, which are visible). “The traditional epic simile is here being harnessed to serve the purpose of a completely different kind of explanatory model.”4 For as scientifically abstruse and nouveau, antiwar and anti-​myth, as Lucretius is at the level of his message, at the level of the vehicle he uses to deliver that message he is entirely retro, deeply committed to reproducing the martial sounds of Rome’s most famously patriotic poet, Quintus Ennius. In the first quarter of the second century bce, Ennius wrote an eighteen-​book epic poem in the style of Homer (Ennius himself is responsible for jettisoning Italy’s native Saturnian meter in favor of Homer’s hexameters), which he named the Annals. In it he describes Rome’s unlikely rise from a band of battered Trojan refugees, led by Aeneas, to the Mediterranean’s dominant superpower. He starts from the fall of Troy and brings his story of Rome’s rise to unparalleled greatness right down to his own day. Myth (complete with heavenly councils, partisan gods battling over turf, etc.) barrels straight into history in this poem. Rome is a project conceived in heaven, “exerted” into existence by enlightened gods. Though the Annals of Ennius survive only in fragments, it is clear that much of the work was devoted to Rome’s wars of imperial conquest in the third and second centuries bce, focusing on the magnificence of Rome’s political institutions, her selfless and talented generals, and her god-​fearing political leaders. All of which, at the level of message, makes Ennius’ Annals an extremely odd (in fact quite ludicrous) choice for Lucretius to choose to emulate. As an Epicurean, Lucretius has no kind thoughts to spare for Rome’s wars of imperial conquest. The very idea of gods of state is anathema to him, and in the successes of great generals and politicians Lucretius sees no glory, only greed, delusion, ignorance.

3. See Schiesaro 1990: 35–​38 for the two Lucretian similes analyzed in this chapter. 4. Feeney 2014: 204.

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For Lucretius, the message conveyed by Ennius is not just off-​target, it is exactly what’s wrong with the world.5 And yet, for the purposes, not of constituting, but of conveying Lucretius’ new message, Ennius’ Annals of Rome’s rise to imperial preeminence are, ironically, rather perfect. The sweeping rhythms and rhymes of Ennius’ poem were built into every Roman schoolboy’s DNA, put there by grammarian teachers who did not spare the strap.6 At lines 80–​84 of book 1, Lucretius worries aloud to Memmius that his message may be regarded as impious, even criminal. But if Roman republican “piety” (pietas) could ever be captured as sounds rumbling bravely along like the Romans themselves, it was captured by Ennius. For Romans of Lucretius’ day, Ennius’ Annals was the sound that piety makes.7 In addition, one of the fundamental messages conveyed by Lucretius throughout his poem concerns the continual warlike strife of the atoms that make up all matter. One day, he insists, these forces of chaos and destruction will win out, and the universe will dissolve into its constituent parts, thus to be recompiled by natural processes yet again, many eons in the future. Thus, for Lucretius, a poet with his own story of never-​ending wars that he wants to tell, the Annals of Ennius serve as a storehouse of ready-​made language, illustrations, figurative conceits, and so on, that are easily adapted not just to the description, but to the full imaginative experience of wars fought at an atomic level. One violently discordant world helps conceptualize the other, and although it is not in his Epicurean DNA to praise the imperial conquests of great Romans of the past, Lucretius manages to repurpose the sounds and figurative conceits of Ennius’ praise of vainglorious Roman warlords in his own praise of the world’s pioneering great thinkers, such as Epicurus, and of poets, such as Ennius himself.8 It is in the unlikely nesting of his Epicurean message inside all of these sounds and figurative conceits that Lucretius innovates radically. While other poets in the 50s bce were busy being swept up by the “new poetry” of Calvus and Catullus, Lucretius was singing radical peacenik tunes about ending wars,

5. On the need to consider the mismatch of Lucretius’ Ennian vehicle to his Epicurean message not just odd, but meaningful, see Nethercut 2021 (“Lucretius appears to have selected Ennius as a model not because it was the expected or inevitable thing for any hexameter poet to do. . . . He chose Ennius as a model precisely in order to dismantle thoroughly what he considered (or constructed as) Ennian values,” 2). 6. On Ennius’ Annales as a school text, see Jocelyn 1969: 55–​66; Goldschmidt 2013: 18–​35. 7. Goldschmidt 2013: 22: “The way in which the Annales were read, taught, and remembered in educational contexts would have played a decisive role in emphasizing Ennius’ ‘Roman heart.’ ” 8. Famously at Lucr. 1.62–​79, where Epicurus is described as military conqueror who crashes through locked gates, defeats the enemy (superstitio), and returns home laden with spoils.

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living a simple life, and dropping out, all to the sounds of a Roman military marching band. Because Feeney’s study offers such a thorough and insightful analysis of Lucretius’ materialist visualizing similes in book 1, I will move ahead to book 2 of the De rerum natura where Lucretius takes on a slightly different problem of human vision: that of matter, as seen, felt, heard, seeming continuous rather than particulate. This, Lucretius argues, is not a matter of atoms being invisible to the human eye tout court, but of their seeming, given their incredibly minuscule size (as if from a great distance), to blur into a continuous whole without any separate parts (as, for example, water, which does not, to the touch or sight, seem to be made of particles). It is here, I think, where Lucretius’ influence on Virgil as a verbal maker and mover of images is most pronounced (connections with the visual dynamics of Virgil’s insect similes will be obvious). And here, once again, we will see how, in adapting things found in Homer (and likely Ennius, though we cannot be sure) to the particular needs of his philosophical project, Lucretius manages to innovate quite radically. In lines 318–​32 of book 2, Lucretius provides a pair of analogies to help us understand how particles underlie matter that, given limits to our sight, we take to be continuous. He writes: nam saepe in colli tondentes pabula laeta lanigerae reptant pecudes, quo quamque vocantes invitant herbae gemmantes rore recenti, et satiati agni ludunt blandeque coruscant; omnia quae nobis longe confusa videntur et velut in viridi candor consistere colli. praeterea magnae legiones cum loca cursu camporum complent belli simulacra cientes, fulgor ubi ad caelum se tollit totaque circum aere renidescit tellus supterque virum vi excitur pedibus sonitus clamoreque montes icti reiectant voces ad sidera mundi et circum volitant equites mediosque repente tramittunt valido quatientes impete campos; et tamen est quidam locus altis montibus, unde stare videntur et in campis consistere fulgor. For often on a hillside wooly sheep shear the rich pasture, as they inch forward wherever the grasses call, inviting them (to dine), grasses that glisten with gems of fresh dew. And their lambs drink themselves silly and play and cutely coruscate. From far off all of this seems to blur together and

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to stand motionless as a blot of white on a green hill. And again when mighty legions fill stretches of the plains with rapid motion as they stir up the pretenses of war, when the glare of it rises to the sky and the whole surrounding region casts back a bright reflection of bronze; and from the clash of men noise kicks up from beneath their feet, and the mountains, struck by their shouting, bounce their voices to the stars above; and horsemen come flying around the sides and make a quick attack into the middle, as the ground shakes from their powerful pounding. And yet there is a spot up high in the mountains where they seem to stand still, a motionless glare on the plains. Lucretius insists that our perception of material as homogeneous rather than particulate is an optical illusion. To prove his point, he takes us up to a high pasture, a shepherd’s blissful perch, lush with dewy grass. There we see sheep lazily grazing, “shearing” (a clever pun) the green grasses that will become their white fleece. In describing these grasses as “glistening with gems of fresh dew” he puts us, as viewers, down at ground level, as if in the visual line of sight of the shepherd, if not the sheep themselves, where we see dewdrops suspended from the tips of individual leaves of grass. They glisten like highly polished gems. Then another enticing sight: lambs at play. As if drunk on their mother’s milk, they play at provoking fights with one another (as drunkards do for real; coruscare “to flash” is a weapon brandishing metaphor9). From far off, all these details are lost. As we pull back, the grazing sheep and cutely gamboling lambs blur together and stand motionless as a blot of white on a green hill. Connections between the visual dynamics of this passage and those of Virgil’s insect similes are not hard to spot: animals are observed first from close up, as individual creatures engaged in various activities, then we pull back to observe them lost in a collective blur (a coalescent hive, a line of black, a blot of white). And here, once again, we can see how, in adapting an illustration found in Homer (one suspects that Ennius may have been influential here as well) to the particular needs of his philosophical project, Lucretius manages to innovate quite radically. This last point is best demonstrated from the second of Lucretius’ back-​to-​back illustrations where, in describing a battle, not of lambs this time, but of legions, he gives a new turn to his point about false perceptions by adding a strong sonic component to the illustration. The soldiers engaging in battle (with Guillaumin, I suspect that this is real war not ceremonial mock battle or war games10) are

9. Cf. Virg. G. 4.74 pennisque coruscant of bees making showy threats. 10. See Guillaumin 2002.

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both seen and heard, first from a spot fairly high and far off, but close enough to hear specific sounds and take note not of small details, but of sweeping ones. Unlike the simile of the frolicking lambs, the battle spectacle illustration matches sound to sight. As if high on a hillside rather than right down in the action, we first observe men in motion over vast stretches of a battle plain surrounded by mountains. We see the “flash” of their weapons (fulgor, as a common lightning word, carries a sense of motion) and we hear them shouting. Horses race about and boomingly pound the ground. The noise of this echoes off the surrounding mountains. Then we pull back to observe all of these same things as a motionless “glare” rising from below (once again the word is fulgor, but this time it is qualified as consistere “standing still”). From this far off spot, all motion is lost (skyward flashes blur into a continuous glare), and no sound reaches our ears. This second illustration is built from various precedents in Homer, such as Iliad 2.455–​58 comparing the glare of the gathered Greek troops’ bronze armor rising into the sky (αἴγλη παμφανόωσα δι’ αἰθέρος οὐρανὸν ἷκε) to the glow of a distant forest fire, high in the mountains, and Iliad 4.446–​56, describing the much anticipated first clash of the Greek and Trojan armies: οἳ δ’ ὅτε δή ῥ’ ἐς χῶρον ἕνα ξυνιόντες ἵκοντο, σύν ῥ’ ἔβαλον ῥινούς, σὺν δ’ ἔγχεα καὶ μένε’ ἀνδρῶν χαλκεοθωρήκων: ἀτὰρ ἀσπίδες ὀμφαλόεσσαι ἔπληντ’ ἀλλήλῃσι, πολὺς δ’ ὀρυμαγδὸς ὀρώρει. ἔνθα δ’ ἅμ’ οἰμωγή τε καὶ εὐχωλὴ πέλεν ἀνδρῶν ὀλλύντων τε καὶ ὀλλυμένων, ῥέε δ’ αἵματι γαῖα. ὡς δ’ ὅτε χείμαρροι ποταμοὶ κατ’ ὄρεσφι ῥέοντες ἐς μισγάγκειαν συμβάλλετον ὄβριμον ὕδωρ κρουνῶν ἐκ μεγάλων κοίλης ἔντοσθε χαράδρης, τῶν δέ τε τηλόσε δοῦπον ἐν οὔρεσιν ἔκλυε ποιμήν: ὣς τῶν μισγομένων γένετο ἰαχή τε πόνος τε. And when the two approaching armies converged on the same spot, they launched shield against shield, spear against spear, the fighting rage of one bronze-​chested warrior met that of another. And when the bosses of their shields came into contact, there was a massively loud crash, then agonizing screams were mixed with shouts of triumph, the sounds of men killing and being killed, and the ground was awash in blood. Just as when two rivers, swollen by winter storms, rush down from the mountains and, in a bend where valleys meet, they crash down on the mighty waters that surge within the depths of a steep gorge. And of these things, far away in the mountains, a shepherd hears the rumble of thunder. Just so were heard the battle cries and struggles of the armies mixing in battle.

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Once again, as in the simile of Iliad 3 that we analyzed in the previous chapter, in order to help us imagine two massive armies converging (and, this time, actually clashing), Homer locates us far away, in a shepherd’s high mountain perch where our perception is challenged. But this time it is our hearing that is clouded over rather than our sight. The shepherd in this simile is so far away that he sees nothing. From a cataclysmic onrush of noise produced by two separate rivers hurtling down from the mountains and crashing into the gorge below, he can make out only a distant rumble. According to the sound term that Homer uses to describe what the shepherd hears, he thinks it is thunder, or perhaps the pounding of the surf. In either case, the reference is to a sound that, when heard up close, is perceived as a crash (the wave) or crack (lightning), but when heard from afar is perceived as a low, echoing rumble.11 The shepherd is confused. It is this parting observation, incidental to the Homeric original, that becomes the main point of Lucretius’ remake: the confusion of sound confuses the senses. In the case of distant armies clanking, pounding and shouting, what we take to be a single sound, and therefore think of as singular, is actually a blend of countless individual clangs, thuds, and shouts. There are multiple chiastic structures to be observed in the similes that Lucretius uses side-​by-​side to make his point. Some of these are obvious (nature versus culture, peace versus violence/​war). Others less so. In the first simile, we begin high up in a grassy shepherd’s perch, where we see things close by with utter clarity. We then pull back to a place where all that clarity is lost. Then, in the second simile, we begin from a spot fairly high up, as if on a hillside, looking down on the plains below. There we see a sweeping vista of soldiers filling the battle plains, and we can make out individual battle activities taking place, and we hear sounds bouncing off the surrounding hills. We then pull back to a spot extremely far away, where our sight is blurred and the sound not just muddled, but (it seems) completely turned off. Though no shepherd is mentioned, he need not be: we end up back in his spot, on a high mountain perch, trying to make out what is going on below. Lucretius’ charming image of sheep grazing and lambs frolicking has no precedent in Homer or Ennius. Rather, it is a locus amoenus (that is, an elaborate description of an idealized “lovely spot” in nature) drawn from the world of bucolic poetry.12 This peaceful mountain nook, in other

11. For the term δοῦπος referring to the roaring of the sea, see Od. 5.401 and 12.202. For the verb δουπεῖν used of thunder, see Il. 11.45. 12. For similar lovely snapshots of lush grasses, sheep grazing, and lambs frolicking, cf. Theocritus Idylls 8, and the praise of the shepherd’s blissful life in the pseudo-​Virgilian Culex (lines 60–​72, with a clear reference to Lucretius’ bejeweled grasses at line 70):

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words, is drawn from a generically “low” form. The scene of a battle taking place down low in the plains, however, is drawn from the very “highest” generic form, Homeric epic. High is low, low is high. I will have more to say about the cultural encoding of these criss-​crossed highs and lows below. Homer’s simile of war’s distant rumble is reworked by Virgil in book 2 of the Aeneid. Thereby the first battle simile of the Iliad takes on new life as the first battle simile of the Aeneid. When Aeneas first hears the distant sounds of Troy being sacked, Virgil describes his confusion and disbelief as follows (Aen. 2.298–​308): Diverso interea miscentur moenia luctu, et magis atque magis, quamquam secreta parentis Anchisae domus arboribusque obtecta recessit, clarescunt sonitus armorumque ingruit horror. excutior somno et summi fastigia tecti ascensu supero atque arrectis auribus asto: in segetem veluti cum flamma furentibus Austris incidit, aut rapidus montano flumine torrens sternit agros, sternit sata laeta boumque labores praecipitisque trahit silvas; stupet inscius alto accipiens sonitum saxi de vertice pastor. Meanwhile the city walls are astir with the sounds of agony coming from far off, and although the house of my father, Anchises, was set far back, all by itself, and covered over by trees, little by little the din of arms grows clearer. War’s horror is closing in. I bolt from sleep and up to the roof ’s very peak I climb. I stand there pricking my ears toward the sound. It was like that of a fire letting loose against a field of grain, whipped up by winds raging from the south, or a torrent hurtling down a mountainside: it levels the fields, it levels the fertile crops and the oxen’s toils, and it drags along with it the

O bona pastoris . . .    . . . at pectore puro saepe super tenero prosternit gramine corpus, florida cum tellus, gemmantis picta per herbas, vere notat dulci distincta coloribus arva. Oh, the blessings that belong to the shepherd! . . . yet, with a pure heart he often stretches out atop the soft turf, when the earth is in bloom, painted in jeweled grasses, and in sweet spring she marks off the furrowed fields with bright lines of color.

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woodlands it has toppled. From a rocky peak high above, a shepherd takes in the sound. He stands there bewildered, not knowing what it is. Virgil returns the simile to its Homeric roots by putting the emphasis entirely on sound. But the waters he describes are more destructive than those of the Homeric original in that they tear through lands cultivated by farmers, as actual wars do, and they level their forests and fields. Such details recall the famous simile of Iliad 5.96–​104 describing Diomedes as a flash flood that crashes through the farmers’ fields and levels their hard work, imagery later reworked as the farm-​ erasing floods of Georgics 1.481–​83 that are the portents of oncoming war in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination. Virgil adds a second component to the simile, comparing the noise of Troy’s destruction to the sound of fire whipped up by winds, burning fields of grain. Again, the farmer’s work is being destroyed. Lands, crops, cattle, trees, water, wind, flame. This simile is tinged with oracular “end of days” symbolism of cosmic upheaval and disintegration. But here, for the first time, the confused shepherd is integral to the simile as a point of comparison in himself, rather than merely a perspective-​establishing listener or onlooker tacked on at the end (though he is that too). Here he is a stand-​in for Aeneas, who has climbed to the roof of his father’s house to see if he can make out where the noise is coming from, and what it means. Aeneas’ bewilderment is like that of the shepherd in the simile. Neither can make sense of the sounds that strike their ears and that, in Aeneas’ particular case, are slowly becoming louder and clearer because the war is heading his way. In his note on diuerso (“far off,” or “from the opposite side”) in line 298, Virgil’s late antique commentator, Servius, explains that the large distance that separates Aeneas from the approaching conflict establishes an alibi for Aeneas in the mythically contested matter of his whereabouts when the walls of Troy were breached. He writes: “for he is saying that Aeneas did not betray the city, but that because the house was far off, he was both slow to become aware of the war and that he rather easily kept clear of its decisive moment.” The explanation is fascinating, and perhaps right. Aeneas was, in some versions of the myth of Troy’s fall, the villain who betrayed the city to the Greeks.13 But the emphasis in the description of Anchises’ house is on seclusion and overgrown rusticity as much as it is on noise-​muffling distance. The full set of details, taken differently, can be seen to anticipate the simile’s conclusion: it is as if Anchises’ house resembles a shepherd’s high retreat inside the city of Troy itself. Here one might recall that Anchises’

13. For the myth of Aeneas as the man who betrayed the city of Troy to the Greeks, see Scafoglio 2013.

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career as a mythical figure began when Aphrodite caught sight of him herding his sheep on Mount Ida. But the point here is not “once a shepherd, always a shepherd.” Rather, I take it to be a matter of bucolic symbolism: the shepherd, always so distant from war so as to be blissfully ignorant of it, no longer is. As had happened to Meliboeus, the less fortunate of the two conversing shepherds in Eclogues 1, war explodes into Aeneas’ secluded nook. The shepherd’s perch, always otherwise so safe and detached, is breached. Many Italians in Virgil’s original audience could relate to this symbolism in all too real and painful ways. In fact, what happens to Aeneas here, in a symbolically suggestive way, as he stands there, shepherd-​like, stunned and confused, listening to war’s approach, is something that nearly happened to Virgil himself. Aeneas is about to see his whole life turned upside down and his ancestral home lost. This is not mythically distant symbolism. It is Roman symbolism, informed by pain. As the chiastic similes analyzed above demonstrate, much of the Roman encoding was done already by Lucretius. The highs and lows occupied by oblivious shepherds and vainglorious, homicidal Roman warlords come into Virgil as pre-​encoded spaces, ready to be repurposed in the telling of new stories. For Lucretius, the shepherd’s high rock is a special, ideologically encoded place: an Epicurean locus amoenus. It is the place you want to be, distant from war, and so far away from the vainglorious killing of Roman legions that an ugly battle down in the plains looks rather beautiful as the “earth smiles back at you” with a glare of bronze (aere renidescit tellus). That uncomprehending shepherd’s perspective is a metaphor for an idealized Epicurean detachment, and the right way of seeing things: some things tight and close, putting a high value on things of little “Roman imperial” value, offered up by Natura herself, such as “gems” glistening in the grass, and lambs playing cutely at war, and a low value on massive battles coruscating in the plains below: the “low” of human cruelty and ignorance that can only look beautiful and smile up at you from very far away. “How sweet it is,” says Lucretius, in the famous proem of book 2, “when the winds are churning the surface of the mighty sea, to look out from shore upon the mighty struggles of someone else . . . and sweet is it, as well, to behold arrayed over the plains huge battles in which you have no part. But nothing is sweeter than to occupy a serene temple high up, fortified by the teachings of the wise, from where you can look down on others and see them wandering in error” (Lucr. 2.1–​9). This is what getting high with Lucretius is all about.

2.2. Vertical Relations The verb that Lucretius uses to describe his Epicurean sage observing errant humans far below is despicere, which gives us our English word “despise.” Not

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only is the sage “looking down on” fools who are physically beneath him, he is “despising” them as persons he views as beneath him in a much deeper sense. Secure in his own power, his attitude is one of knowing superiority and contempt. For Lucretius this is not a pun, nor is it a clever double entendre on his part. It is an expressive quality of the word itself, a built-​in double-​sidedness having to do with the vertical spacing of cultural power in the Roman imagination and in the ritualization of power in daily life.14 In the pages ahead, I will look at how this vertical spacing inflects the activities of watchers in Roman epic as they “look up to,” “down upon,” or “directly at” the persons and/​or things that have captured their attention. It is in connection with the highs and lows of seeing and being seen as a form of political communication in the Roman world that Virgil uses certain framing positions to create specific strong impressions of strength and vulnerability. By drawing connections with filmic high-​ angle, low-​angle, and straight-​on framing positions and analyzing the purposes to which they are put by modern directors, I will once again allow myself to “say the quiet part out loud” by indulging in the idea that these are not “mere” helpful analogies. First, some basic observations about the encoding of power relations in vertical terms, high, low, and straight-​on, in ancient Roman thought. In the Roman world of Virgil’s day, nobility (nobilitas) has to do with being seen; with occupying lots of space within a visual field and dominating that space by filling it with bright, legible symbols (tightly controlled insignia marking status), gestures, and colors. To be noble in Rome is to be know-​able (this is the literal root meaning of nobilitas); that is, easily recognized because one is prominent, and much in the public eye. In a way, Roman nobilitas is rather like our modern notion of celebrity, which has to do with catching attention: being in the public eye, talked about, interpreted, admired.15 Like Roman nobility, celebrity is not a concept that takes to being spiritualized. You cannot say, “look, I’m a celebrity, even though no one has ever heard of me,” or “no matter that no one recognizes me, I’m a celebrity in my heart.” It just does not make sense. And so it is with nobility in Rome: you cannot have it without performing it. The idea that “man is noble, descended from a noble family” cannot be detached from his occupying some large bright (and necessarily high) space in the

14. Further on the cultural spacing of Roman concepts of contempt, see Freudenburg 2020. On the double-​sidedness of the powers associated with looking out from on high in Roman thought (i.e., not only a matter of the vastness of what one is able to see, but of the ability to be seen from afar), see Vout 2012: 188–​226. 15. On the highly visual nature of Roman nobilitas, see esp. Flower 2011 and 2014.

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public eye that was reserved for men of high standing and from his performing in that space the rituals that belonged to it. In the end, nobility for the Romans is something you do. It is about making a certain kind of spectacle of yourself. And always as part of the spectacle there is some form, whether literal or figurative, of “looking down” upon others.16 Persons of lesser social rank are involved in these honor-​generating spectacles in roles of performed subservience that find them “looking up to” (suspicere) their superiors. In doing so, the power discrepancy that separates them from the ritual’s featured star is not just visibly underscored, it is instantiated via performance. Spatial metaphors equating the upward glance with respect and the downward with dismissiveness and contempt are familiar from English, where phrases such as “look up to” and “down upon” are commonly used to describe perceptions of moral and cultural worth (much versus little). English lacks the specific middle metaphor of Latin that makes the straight-​on glance a sign of hostile envy and hatred.17 The literal sense of Latin inuidia, which gives us English words such as “envy” and “invidious,” has to do with “looking straight at” (in +​ videre) rather than up to or down upon. The prefix in-​in this case carries a strong note of hostility, as it does in verbs such as invado (“invade”) and infesto (“infest,” “harry with attacks”), and when used as a preposition in phrases such as in Verrem (“against Verres”) and in Pisonem (“against Piso”). In origin, the word belongs to a world where sustained, straight-​on looks were considered not just impolite, but capable of inflicting harm. When looked at by their “betters,” persons of inferior status were expected to avert the eyes.18 The power dynamics of “looking up to” and “down upon” are on vivid display in the Aeneid’s last scene, where vertical spacing functions as a form of

16. That is the beauty of the verb despicere when compared to other verbs expressing roughly the same idea, such as contemnere (to “think nothing of ” or “regard with contempt”): it has a literal sense, based in visual dynamics, that can be heard even when the word is being used to mean “despise” or “scorn.” That said, there are places where contemnere demands to be interpreted in terms of the visual dynamics of “looking down upon.” For example, Seneca Epistulae Morales 80.8: “you could say the same thing about all those delicate sorts who hang high above the heads of men and above the crowd (supra capita hominum supraque turbam) riding on a litter. Their happiness is a pretense. Strip them of their costume and you will look down on them (contemnes illos).” Cic. Somnium Scipionis 20: “Then Africanus said, ‘I notice that even now you are contemplating the place and abode of humans. If those things seem to you as small as they are, then always keep your eyes on these heavenly realms. Despise earthly/​human things (haec caelestia semper spectato, illa humana contemnito!)’ ” 17. In Latin, the verb aspicio is neutral, meaning “to look at,” but carries no implications of hostility. 18. See Lovatt 2013: 310–​46 on the “assaultive gaze,” a term made famous by Caroline Clover in her 1992 study of gender and point of view in slasher films.

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communication taking place between Aeneas and Turnus and those (of us) who look on (Aen. 12.926–​31):   incidit ictus ingens ad terram duplicato poplite Turnus. consurgunt gemitu Rutuli totusque remugit mons circum et vocem late nemora alta remittunt. ille humilis supplex oculos dextramque precantem protendens. Struck by the blow, huge Turnus collapses to the ground and crouches back on his calf. The Rutulians surge up with a groan. The entire ring of mountains bellows back, and the lofty woodlands send back their voice far and wide. There, down low, on bended knee, he reaches out toward Aeneas with his eyes, and with a pleading hand outstretched. The highs and lows are easy to read here as positions of strength and vulnerability. Aeneas stands tall, looking down at Turnus. Turnus crouches down on one knee, looking up at Aeneas, and stretching his right hand toward him in a gesture of supplication. The chiastic visual layout is iconic, recognizable from the iconography of Roman coins picturing defeated enemies down on one knee, looking up toward the Roman champion who has defeated them.19 Some coins feature the defeated insurgent reaching a right hand or both hands toward his Roman subjugator in a gesture of supplication. On other coins he is pictured offering an olive branch (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2), and on yet other coins he hands over a contested object, such as the captured Roman standards handed over by the defeated Parthian on coins of 19 bce (Figure 2.3).20 Beyond numismatic iconography, the same visual chiasm can be seen in numerous artistic renderings of two particular scenes from the Cyclical Aethiopis: that of Achilles killing Penthesilea, who looks up at him, pleading with her eyes (Figure 2.4), and that of Achilles killing Memnon (Figure 2.5). Strangely, these two scenes seem to have been particularly widespread in antiquity, while depictions of Achilles bearing down on a fallen Hector are nearly nonexistent. In fact, the most common genre scenes in ancient art depicting Achilles and Hector

19. Also figuring the scene is a plethora cosmogonic imagery (Turnus as a fallen giant, blasted by Jupiter’s thunderbolt, as on the Great Altar at Pergamum): see Hardie 1986: 147–​54, and 2014b: 98. 20. On the political messaging of the coin in Figure 2.3, see Rose 2005: 22–​23.

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Figure 2.1  RRC 426/​1, a denarius of 56 bce showing Jugurtha’s surrender to Sulla. British Museum.

Figure 2.2  RRC 431/​1, a denarius of 51 bce showing a defeated Jew offering an olive branch. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

in the same frame represent neither their battle, nor Achilles delivering the decisive blow. Rather, they depict Achilles abusing Hector’s corpse, and his interactions with Priam in negotiating for the corpse’s return. While familiar as one of any number of standard genre scenes depicting momentous and pathos-​laden deaths in the battle for Troy, the visual chiasm evoked by the Aeneid’s last lines was perhaps most familiar to Romans of Virgil’s day as the final decisive moment of many a gladiatorial contest as observed from the seats of an amphitheater: one man is down in defeat, the

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Figure 2.3  RIC I(2) Aug. 287, a denarius of 19 bce showing a Parthian surrendering a captured Roman standard. British Museum.

Figure 2.4  Marble relief sculpture, late fifth century bce, from the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae. Achilles slays Penthesilea, who looks into her killer’s eyes and reaches out to him with her right hand in a gesture of supplication. British Museum.

other stands above him waiting to be told whether to finish the job (see Figures 2.6 and 2.7).21 Here the high woodlands and encircling mountains play the part of spectators high up in the stands, loudly reacting to what they see by echoing the shouts of the Rutulians who, along with the Trojans, stand in a ring around the fight, 21. On the gladiatorial coloring of the final showdown between Aeneas and Turnus, see Hardie 1986: 151–​54, and Leigh 1997: 249. For the larger epic phenomenon of heroes depicted as gladiators, see Lovatt 2013: 283–​93.

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Figure 2.5  South Italian grave amphora, c. 330 bce, depicting Achilles delivering the decisive blow to an already defeated Memnon. National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden.

Figure 2.6  A graffito from Pompeii (CIL iv 10236), depicting a gladiatorial missio. L. Raecius Felix kneels before M. Attilius. He has removed his helmet (situated on the ground in front of him) in a gesture of surrender. The inscription confirms that Attilius has won the contest and that Raecius Felix has been granted a reprieve. Photo: Kirk Freudenburg.

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Figure 2.7 A mosaic of the third century ce (National Archaeological Museum of Spain, Madrid), showing a retiarius (net-​fighter) named Kalendio fighting a secutor named Astyanax. Kalendio is on the ground, wounded, and raises his dagger in a gesture of surrender. Azoor Photo /​Alamy Stock Photo.

watching. These sounds penetrating from places far off put us in mind of audiences outside the frame. But the focus stays fixed on Aeneas and Turnus chiastically juxtaposed. Wounded and collapsed at Aeneas’ feet, Turnus reaches out toward Aeneas with his right hand, a weaponless weapon hand. That gesture speaks for itself as a sign of surrender, but it can also be seen as the opening bid (the un-​reciprocated first half ) of a so-​called iunctio dextrarum (“joining of right hands”) gesture; an offer made by Turnus, inviting Aeneas to grasp his hand, in order to solemnize peace between the armies, and to signal, via that joint communiqué, the formation a new political alliance.22 Aeneas ponders the offer, but keeps his right hand on the hilt of his sword. Ultimately, his final decision concerns how he will deploy that hand. Which icon will he step into? According to the bold phraseology of the final sentence quoted above, Turnus reaches out toward Aeneas not only with an outstretched and “pleading” (precantem) right hand, but with his eyes. The phrase likens Turnus’ eyes to an object

22. Cf. Livy 1.1.8–​9, where it is Latinus who stretches out his right hand (dextra data), which Aeneas grasps with his own, in order to visibly solemnize their friendship and initiate a pact between the leaders and their armies (inde foedus ictum inter duces, inter exercitus salutationem factam). Further on the gesture, see Khan 1998: 240–​43. For the hand gestures of the Aeneid’s last lines recalling Homer’s emphasis on hands in Priam’s supplication of Achilles at Iliad 24.478–​515, see Barchiesi 2015: 87–​88.

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physically surrendered to Aeneas, as if they were an olive branch or (I think certainly better, in this case) a weapon handed up to him to signal his defeat. Such gestures were fully familiar to Virgil’s Roman audience from gladiatorial contests where gladiators, when wounded and/​or physically spent and on the verge of being dispatched, could request a “reprieve” (missio) from the fight, and thus a chance to fight another day. They did so, as Cathleen Coleman points out, by making “an unambiguous gesture that would be visible at a distance.” She adds that, to make such a gesture, a crucial piece of equipment functioned as “a ready symbol of defeat, or the impossibility of victory. Most frequently this appears to have been the gladiator’s sword.”23 As if to signal defeat, Turnus lifts his eyes toward his conqueror. The detail, frontal and up close, marks a shift in perspective. With it, we are taken into Aeneas’ line of sight as he peers down at Turnus and looks him in the eye. There Aeneas sees an expression of chastened humility, devoid of threat. Here one recalls that the start of Turnus’ rage in book 7 was as a fire lit inside him by Allecto, turning him into a flaring cauldron of rage.24 Ever since that moment, Turnus’ internal fire could be seen sparking (12.102), burning (12.670), flashing (9.731) from his eyes.25 What Aeneas sees as he peers down at Turnus is that the fire inside him has gone out. Turnus has no more fight left in him. The adjective humilis suggests not only “humble,” describing Turnus’ defeated psychological state, but “low to the ground.” The word itself is fashioned from earth (humus), the low, dying stuff of “humans,” rather than the eternal blazing fire of the gods on high.26 What happens next is all about what Aeneas sees as he looks down on his defeated foe. Turnus does not ask to be spared, but that Aeneas return his body to his grieving father. He continues (Aen. 12.936–​47): “vicisti et victum tendere palmas Ausonii videre; tua est Lavinia coniunx,

23. Coleman 2000: 494. 24. Aen. 7.456–​66. 25. On the fire in Turnus’ eyes, with multiple precedents in Homer, see Mac Góráin 2017: 403–​ 7, 412. On fire in the eyes coded as a sign of anger, cf. Lucr. DRN 3.288–​89 est etiam calor ille animo, quem sumit, in ira /​cum feruescit et ex oculis micat acrius ardor, Sen. de Ira 1.1.4 irascentium eadem signa sunt: flagrant ac micant oculi. 26. Traina 1979 argues forcefully for the double-​sense of humilis in line 930, arguing that Turnus’ spatial position is at the same time an emblem of his humbled and defeated psychological state. He also points out that, although the adjective humilis might otherwise be taken as an accusative plural, thus agreeing with Turnus’ eyes (oculos), it is to be taken as a nominative, alongside supplex, as the first member of a common (but here unusually asyndetic) pair.

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ulterius ne tende odiis.” stetit acer in armis Aeneas volvens oculos dextramque repressit; et iam iamque magis cunctantem flectere sermo coeperat, infelix umero cum apparuit alto balteus et notis fulserunt cingula bullis Pallantis pueri, victum quem vulnere Turnus straverat atque umeris inimicum insigne gerebat. ille, oculis postquam saevi monumenta doloris exuviasque hausit, furiis accensus et ira terribilis . . . “You have defeated me, and the Ausonians have seen me defeated, reaching out to you with outstretched palms. Lavinia is yours to marry. Press on hating me no further!” Aeneas stood there, alert in arms, his eyes scanning, and he held back his hand. And as he hesitated, little by little Turnus’ speech had begun to dissuade him, when the luckless item met his gaze: a belt. Its strap flashed with studs that Aeneas recognized: it was that of the boy, Pallas. Wounded in defeat, Turnus had laid him low, then proceeded to wear his enemy’s badge of distinction on his shoulders. After his eyes had drunk in these spoils, monuments to a savage grief, Aeneas flared up in fury, and in a frightful rage he . . . We all know how it ends. Down in defeat, Turnus invites Aeneas to consider what the Ausonians (that is, Turnus’ own troops) see as they look on from the perimeter of their duel: their leader, down on the ground, reaching up in a gesture of surrender. For the Ausonians this is a picture of defeat, eliciting pity for a fallen leader, and sadness for their own cause. The Trojans see the same thing, but they see it differently. For them, the visual chiasm has their man on top. It is a sight to glory in. Nothing pitiful about it. My point in considering the separate emotional investments of those who look on is to suggest that Turnus’ words do more than assure Aeneas that the Ausonians are done with fighting, now that they have seen their leader signal his surrender and thus their collective defeat. Though he does not utter the word itself, Turnus is putting Aeneas in mind of his legendary reputation for pietas, the Latin word that gives us both “piety” and “pity” in English. He is calling on him to live up to his epithet by sparing a wounded and dejected fighter who now publicly acknowledges him, “pious Aeneas,” as the stronger man. Though humble on the surface, Turnus’ words of surrender convey a good deal of menace in what they imply. By pointing out that his Ausonian troops

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are watching, he is telling Aeneas not only that his troops see him, their leader, down on the ground, defeated, signaling his surrender. He is telling Aeneas that the Italians have their eyes on him; that they know what the iconography of the moment entails, and they can be expected to expect Aeneas to do what the situation demands by sparing their leader, because to do otherwise would be both pointless and badly received. As if to say: “If you kill me now, helpless as I am, now that killing me is completely pointless, they are watching, and they will not take it well.” In the end, Turnus’ humility, his being “down low” and “on bended knee,” is more a physical condition of his defeat, a spatial arrangement forced upon him by his injury, than it is an expression of humility inside. In bargaining with Aeneas the way he does, folding defiance into his plea, he remains Turnus to the end. Turnus’ plea is well crafted and packs a lot in. In the lines directly preceding those quoted above, Turnus invites Aeneas to consider the plight of his aged father, Daunus, whom Aeneas is about to deprive of his only son. To further his case, Turnus compares his concern for Daunus to that of Aeneas for his own dearly departed father, Anchises.27 All of which tugs at the “pity” side of Aeneas’ legendary pietas, doing so in the very terms that Aeneas himself made famous when he hoisted his father, Anchises, onto his back and carried him from the burning city of Troy. It is as if Turnus were waving a “Saint Aeneas” icon right in front of Aeneas’ eyes, one featuring Aeneas in his old iconic pose, performing his filial “duty” (toward Anchises) by taking “pity” (on Anchises) in one and the same act. The ideas in question are more than synonymous in Latin. They are the same word. Turnus’ crafty plea causes Aeneas to hesitate, but only for a moment. The trouble with Latin pietas is that it can mean things that Turnus definitely does not want Aeneas to think of as he contemplates sparing him or not. Commenting on the momentary hesitation elicited by Turnus’ words in line 940, Servius writes: “The entire point has to do with Aeneas’ glory/​fame, for the fact that he contemplates sparing (cogitat parcere) his enemy shows that he is pious, and by killing him he wears a badge of piety (pietatis gestat insigne), for it is out of consideration for Evander that he avenges the death of Pallas.” As Ralph Johnson saw more than fifty years ago, such are “the ironies of pietas” in Virgil’s Aeneid.28

27. Barchiesi 2015: 86–​90 points out that Turnus’s appeal (momentarily successful) evokes memories of Priam’s grief-​stricken supplication of Achilles in Iliad 24, the only episode in that poem where an enemy’s supplication is actually heeded. 28. Johnson 1965. For recent reflections on “conflicting pieties” in the Aeneid, see Thomas 2001: 110–​12 (“the pietas on which Aeneas settles is the one that eclipses other pieties and brings with it doom,” 112).

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On the one hand, the pietas that ticks away inside Aeneas calls on him to “pity” a fallen man by sparing him. On the other, that very same pietas urges him to fulfill his pious “duty” toward Evander by killing the fallen man. So which is it going to be? Near the end of the underworld parade of book 6, in describing the patriotically idealized qua “just” ways of Rome’s future wars to his son, Anchises puts the matter of sparing or not sparing in vertical terms: spare the submissive/​low (parcere subiectis) but bring down the haughty/​high (debellare superbos). It is upon seeing the “luckless belt” of Pallas that Aeneas turns from sparing to killing. Construed by him as a “badge of honor” (insigne) proudly worn by Turnus to celebrate Evander’s pain (saevi monumenta doloris, 945), the belt sparks a killing rage inside of Aeneas (furiis accensus, 946).29 Flashing out (fulserunt cingula, 947) from high on Turnus’ shoulder (umero cum apparuit alto, 941), it serves as a fire-​ starter, as if keeping, and spreading, the flame that went missing from Turnus’ eyes.30 Aeneas burns hot when he sees the belt because it is worn by a man who, for all of his pious talk about needing to show concern for an aged father (cura parentis), showed no concern for Pallas’ aged father, Evander. For Aeneas, the belt is not just a sad reminder of Pallas’ death (monumentum as “tomb”). It is an object proudly flaunted; a taunt celebrating Evander’s pain (monumentum as “victory monument”). Turnus’ plea was clever, and there is no reason to think it was not sincere. But it turns out that he made a serious rhetorical mistake when he urged Aeneas to let concern for a father’s misery touch his heart (miseri te si qua parentis | tangere cura potest, 932–​33). The grammar of the phrase parentis . . . cura is fatally open-​ended, lending itself to being heard in opposite ways. It can be heard to say “concern for a parent/​father” (objective genitive) by a son, which is what Turnus intends, but it can also be heard to say ‘a parent’s/​father’s concern’ (subjective genitive) for a son.31 Turnus had not considered that Aeneas’ protective regard for Pallas, as it

29. On Aeneas’ “savage pain/​grief ” as a reference to Juno’s murderous hatred of the Trojans at 1.25–​26, see Knox 1997: 233: “Circumstances have brought Aeneas to the point where he most resembles his most bitter foe.” On Turnus as superbus (“arrogant”) as he enters the final battle (12.326) and as he kills Pallas (10.514) and indulges in arrogant immoderation/​celebration, see Traina 1998: 99, and Putnam 1999: 215–​16. Cf. the naval crown worn by Agrippa at 8.683 (belli insigne superbum) to celebrate his naval victory at Naulochus, on which, see Baraz 2020: 175. 30. On flashing arms as a sign of pride, cf. Arruns at 11.854 fulgentem armis ac uana tumentem. 31. Cf. Aen. 1.646, where the same phrase is used subjectively, to refer to Aeneas’ love/​concern for his son, Ascanius: “his dear father’s entire concern was for Ascanius” (omnis in Ascanio cari stat cura parentis).

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had been enjoined upon him by Evander, was that of a father for a son.32 Even more glaringly, he forgot to make an exception of Evander: not only as the father of the boy he killed, but as a father-​figure to Aeneas himself. Just as there were too many competing pieties for Turnus to keep neatly corralled by his words, there are too many fathers, too many sons.

2.3.  The Grammar of Angles Taken As a means of illustrating the vertical spacing of power in the Roman imagination, the end of the Aeneid is rather too convenient to be regarded as decisive. After all, at this last decisive moment of the Aeneid, the story itself tells us all we need to know about who has power and who does not: one man, a weapon in his hand, bears down on another, wounded, bleeding, weaponless. The vertical layout does not carry the load here. It matches and supports the story, but it does not tell us anything about power dynamics that we did not already know. To put a Russian Formalist spin on this, the visual layout performs tasks of the syuzhet rather than of the fabula. Its main function, rather than to convey needed information, is to engage the visual imagination of hearers/​ readers by putting moving images into their heads that are recognizable, emotively powerful, and that make sense to them as proper applications of known visual codes. But there are numerous cases in Greek and Roman epic where highly elaborated visual spacings of persons and events claim our attention in ways that inflect the fabula itself by shifting how we think about what’s going on. In other words, they affect how we interpret what we are being told. They do this by setting moods around events, rather in the manner of background music in film, which directors use in rhetorical ways to build tension, bring back memories of earlier scenes and events, create nostalgia, supply information about the emotions of characters by saddening, brightening, eerifying, and so on, often with little or no help from the narrative itself. One can see an example of this in the ant simile studied in ­chapter 1 above, where Dido is revealed as the surprise viewer looking down from on high. Whereas the narrative, by referring to her sobs, tells us that she is emotionally “low” and distraught, the vertical spacing has her in a position of secure power, not just looking down, but despising the Romans as they “pillage” her stuff. Structured this way, the surprise reveal marks a pivotal shift in the story itself by tinging Dido’s sobs with suggestions of a confident and determined

32. On Aeneas as a father surrogate in his affections and protective regard for Pallas, see McGill 2020: 13 with notes.

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hatred. She is studying the scene below. Brooding. Whatever tears she may or may not have in her eyes as she looks out from her high spot, hers is a menacing glare from on high. Such is the mood set by the camerawork. Via the deft deployment of familiar, spatial codes, it tells us that the “ants,” so minuscule as they scurry away far below, are going to pay for what they have done to her. The story is turning in a new direction: toward revenge. To take just one other example of moods being set, and internal messages conveyed, via the vertical spacing of viewer and viewed, when in book 1 Aeneas goes to await Dido’s arrival at the temple of Juno, still under construction, Virgil takes care to situate Aeneas as a viewer low down, looking up at a massive temple on the rise: “down below the massive temple he walks his way around, studying the details, as he waits for Dido to arrive.” The temple’s massiveness had already been emphasized in the lead-​in to these lines (templum . . . ingens, 446). Here it is emphasized again by the hyperbaton separating “huge” from “temple” in line 453: sub ingenti lustrat dum singula templo. The visual impression instantiated by the line is that of a small man walking in the shadow of a massive temple that towers above him, looking up as he makes his way around it. In the next chapter I will discuss the details of what Aeneas sees as he makes his way around the temple, but here my point has to do with the general impression of weakness and vulnerability that is evoked by the vertical spacing, setting a mood that runs directly counter (as if in ironic contrast) to the narrative itself. In lines 451–​52 Virgil asserts that it was here, in the shadow of Juno’s temple, as he studied the specific works of art that met his eyes, “Aeneas first dared to hope for safety, and to be more confident in the face of his afflictions.” As pointed out by David Ross, “the reader, who knows the future of Carthage, cannot share in the hope and confidence offered by this ‘strange fortuity.’ ”33 While the narrative describes a man taking heart, now that he finally has something to feel good about, the visual impression is that of a man greatly reduced in size by the massiveness of the thing he is looking up at. He looks up at the temple, not realizing that it is looking down on him. Running counter to what is being asserted about Aeneas, the visual impression calls his confidence into question by playing a menacing tune. What Aeneas does not seem to realize at this point (how could he?) is that this is Juno’s temple, that Juno is out to destroy him, and that any hope he might happen to take from the things that he sees here is false hope; none of this is going to end well.

33. Ross 1998: 124.

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None of what I have said above about the further communicative and emotive effects of vertical spacing, looking up, down, and straight at, would seem strange to a seasoned film director. It is the stuff of Film Editing 101 (see Appendix, item 4). Why is it that, when Harry Potter and his friends enter Gringott’s in disguise in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, they pass under the menacing gaze of goblins who, though they are much the smaller creatures, glower down at them. Throughout the entire scene, the bigger creatures are made to seem smaller via a toggle between low-​angle shots that have them, Harry, Ron, and Hermione (whose sight we inhabit), looking up into eyes that look down on them, and high-​angle shots that show them looked down upon from the goblins’ higher line of sight. Why is it that, in the duel that takes place between Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort near the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Lord Voldemort is looked up at from below when he has the upper hand, but in the last two shots, when he loses control, he is looked down upon from above? Why, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, as Voldemort is about to hurl the killer curse at Harry Potter, do we look up into Lord Voldemort’s eyes as he glowers down toward his victim, who is not at his feet but at the opposite end of an open plain? The reason for these choices is rhetorical: viewing angles in film are encoded to convey messages about power and vulnerability, and because we expect the expressive possibilities of these angles to be used in ways that respect the story that is being told. In the basic vocabulary of film editing, a high-​angle shot of a person (that is, a shot that looks down toward someone from a spot higher up) helps establish a sense of that person’s weakness and/​or vulnerability, or to create a sense of impending threat. The person(s) looked down upon are made to seem smaller by this angle, and they do not have to look up toward the camera/​viewer for this to be the case. This is a truism rather than a universal truth. The camera might look up toward a weak person trapped at the top of a staircase, looking down on a killer climbing the stairs. But it is remarkable how often it is the case. Conversely, a low-​angle shot (looking up at someone from below, as with Lord Voldemort above) helps convey a sense of that person’s hugeness, power, and/​or security, or to create a sense of menace (think of Bette Davis stepping onto the stairway to look down on her guests in All about Eve, then delivering her famously menacing “fasten your seat belts” line). The single close-​up, that is, a shot framing a single person at eye-​level (a so-​ called eye line match shot), and from fairly close-​in, is used to connect viewers with the emotions of the person focused on, whatever those emotions might be. As if windows into the soul, the eyes function as the main expressive feature. If a viewer (usually a conversation partner) is spotted in the same frame (say, via an over-​the-​shoulder shot) looking at the person focused on, the shot emphasizes

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not just physical proximity, but emotional connection, whether for good or ill, between the viewer and the person being observed. A close-​up shot that leaves the viewer out of the frame (the single, eye-​level close-​up mentioned above) emphasizes the emotional detachment of viewer and viewed by featuring a person alone in his/​her thoughts, even though someone else is right there, looking with us, just outside of the frame. The “three-​angle” précis I have given above describes meaningful trends in usage rather than adamantine rules. One finds the emotive workings of shot angles talked about in these schematic and greatly oversimplified ways in trade manuals and online sites devoted to the basics of film editing for aspiring film-​ makers.34 For the most part, they are the givens of film-​making rather than the hard-​won insights of film theory, truisms concerning “what works” at a very basic level.35 The question is, Why do camera angles work this way? How is it that they can be counted on, if only “for the most part,” to produce these effects? Part of this has to do with habituation. Whatever proficiency we may have developed in intuiting what these highs and lows give us to think, feel, and infer has come to us through hundreds, if not thousands of hours of watching films, where shot angles are a key feature of the story’s cinematographic rhetoric. We have seen how the angles match and support the stories being told. Like a foreign language learned not from books but via immersion, the grammar of camera angles is acquired by long exposure. The deep psychology behind these practices is surprisingly under-​theorized and not often discussed. But it is generally assumed that our tendency to make inferences and react in predictable ways upon seeing persons positioned higher or lower than ourselves as we watch, or in relation to characters and objects on screen, has to do with the near universal experience of infants and young children looking up into the eyes of their parents and/​or other persons of authority for

34. For example, see Bowen 2018: 58–​65, Keast 2014: 71–​72, 86, 97, 128–​29. The standard reference manual on cinematography is Burum 2007. For basic bibliography on shot types and the relation of shot to shot, see Bordwell and Thompson 2010: 218–​22, 265–​68. Online sources are especially useful because they are fully illustrated by clips of the techniques under study. See especially Josh Matthews’ YouTube series “Understanding Movies 101,” and the “Studiobinder” film production website. An especially clear introduction to shot angles can be found at https://​www.photo​work​out.com/​cam​era-​ang​les/​. 35. Recent studies have given empirical weight to the truisms concerning the viewers’ perceptions of camera angles described above by quantifying the effects on viewers in controlled experiments. Sevenants-​d’Ydewalle 2006 demonstrates that there is a strong correlation between camera angles and perceptions of “potency,” and the study of Baranowski-​Hecht 2018 demonstrates that there are similarly strong correlations between camera angles and perceptions of “trustworthiness” (eye-​level shots rating as far more trustworthy than either high-​or low-​angle shots).

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signs of approval and disapproval.36 From many years of that experience, invested as it is with lasting emotional pull, we come to feel things about looking up into some person’s eyes. It is only when we have grown that we find ourselves looking down on others who “look up to” us, whether in a physical sense, or in the sense of showing respect. Be that as it may, my basic point is that there are strong commonalities to be observed between the ways in which vertical spacing is used in film and in the image work of ancient epics to create impressions of power and vulnerability, and that these impressions do not just decorate the story. They help tell it by inviting us to intuit things about the “why” of “how” we are being given to see things.37

2.4. The Other Side of High: Positioning Pathos I conclude this chapter by looking at the ways in which the standard vertical codes, such as I have described them above, are deliberately criss-​crossed in the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid to produce strong effects of helplessness and pathos, as well as to figure the events taking place as flipped versions of things remembered from Homer. Earlier in this chapter we spotted Aeneas atop his father’s roof, straining to make out what was going on in the distance when the battle for Troy was already well underway and its decisive moment long passed. Servius, we saw, felt compelled to explain the odd distance separating Aeneas from the fight at this crucial juncture of Troy’s fall. He was troubled by it. Whether his explanation merits credit or not, Servius was right to think that, set high on his father’s roof and much too far away, Aeneas was not where he needed to be when it mattered. But it turns out that, when it comes to Aeneas’ being oddly removed from big events in book 2, this is just the first instance of an ongoing pattern of his being positioned above the action as a listener and watcher (a camera) rather than in it as a fighter. In fact, according to the story that Aeneas himself tells, he spent a good deal of time, covering the central and most memorable events of the story that he tells, on a roof high above Priam’s palace, looking down on the battle taking place below. You might have thought he would be down there, right in the thick of things. Very odd.38 Why does he spend so much time “up there” in this

36. Young 2012: 103: “Such angles echo patterns from outside film. When we physically look down on someone (an adult to a child), we typically have a position of authority and vice versa.” 37. For an excellent study of “how films mobilize spatial perception and cognition for storytelling ends,” see Bordwell 1985, ­chapter 7, on “Narration and Space” (quoted here is 99). 38. Heinze 1993: 24: “There is something painful, almost comic, if one has to visualize Aeneas witnessing all these tragic happenings as an inactive spectator on the roof.” To play down this

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book, watching? These are the questions I wish to explore below as I work my way through Virgil’s visual realization of Troy’s fall. Once he realizes that his city is under attack, Aeneas descends from his father’s roof, grabs his battle gear, and heads off to find the fight. Along the way he runs into Panthus, priest of Apollo, who tells him that the fight has been lost (325). Heading out of town to make his escape, as if to model what Aeneas himself should be doing at this point, Panthus looks all the world like the icon that Aeneas has yet to fit himself to (“with sacred items in his hands and our conquered gods, he pulls a small grandchild along,” 320–​21).39 Now on a death mission, Aeneas heads toward the flame and the noise. On the way he teams up with several other Trojans, including Coroebus, a man hopelessly in love with Apollo’s priestess, Cassandra. Together they head toward the center of the city, killing as they go. They arrive just in time to see Cassandra dragged by the hair from Minerva’s temple. The fight to save her is fierce, but they are outnumbered. Most of the team gathered up by Aeneas, including Coroebus, die in the fight. With just two men left to fight with him, Aeneas sees that Priam’s palace is under siege. He leads them toward the palace, but upon arriving he sees that there is no way to get inside: the whole place is under siege, surrounded by Greeks. It is at this point that Aeneas remembers that there is a secret passage leading inside (453–​67): Limen erat caecaeque fores et pervius usus tectorum inter se Priami, postesque relicti a tergo, infelix qua se, dum regna manebant, saepius Andromache ferre incomitata solebat ad soceros et auo puerum Astyanacta trahebat. evado ad summi fastigia culminis, unde tela manu miseri iactabant inrita Teucri. turrim in praecipiti stantem summisque sub astra eductam tectis, unde omnis Troia videri et Danaum solitae naves et Achaica castra, adgressi ferro circum, qua summa labantis iuncturas tabulata dabant, convellimus altis

impression, Heinze argues that Aeneas’ role as narrator vanishes from our field of vision after line 506. 39. Hiding in his “pious” likeness to Aeneas is the fact that Panthus is a descendant of Dardanus who, according to his legend, brought the penates with him when he migrated eastward from Italy (via Samothrace) to the future site of Troy. On the legend of Dardanus in the Aeneid, see Reed 2007: 10–​13.

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sedibus impulimusque; ea lapsa repente ruinam cum sonitu trahit et Danaum super agmina late incidit. There was an entryway with hidden doors and a passage giving access to Priam’s rooms, connecting them. At the back was an abandoned doorway. While the kingdom still stood, unlucky Andromache used to go through it, unaccompanied, to visit her in-​laws, and she would bring the child Astyanax to his grandfather. I make my way up toward the peak of the highest roof. Miserable Teucrians were there pointlessly hurling spears. There was a tower standing over a sheer drop, rising from the roof tops up to the stars. From it the whole of Troy (i.e. the lower section of the city below the acropolis) was visible, as well as the Danaan ships and the camps of the Achaians. We attack the tower all around with swords, right where the top storeys presented joints that were coming loose. We wrench the tower free and shove it from its high foundations. With a crack it suddenly gave way and brought ruin down atop the Danaan troops far and wide, crushing them. Virgil goes to great lengths to explain both how and why Aeneas ends up on the roof of Priam’s palace. He needs to do this because the hero’s rooftop bombardment has no counterpart in earlier epic and, as a bookend to the big problem of where Aeneas was when the walls of Troy were first breached (Aeneas’ first remote rooftop scene, examined above), Virgil needs to explain where Aeneas was when Priam was finally killed, and why he was nowhere to be seen in the fight (Aeneas’ second remote rooftop scene). Priam’s remaining sons are all killed or captured in the final siege of Troy. One of them, Polites, is killed right before Priam’s eyes as Aeneas looks on (on the layering of watching eyes, see below). The complete decimation of Priam’s royal line leaves Aeneas, a second cousin to Priam’s royal sons, to take over and become the Trojan refugees’ new leader and bring them to the promised land.40 Given the way he landed, the story of “pious” Aeneas’ miraculous survival of Troy’s last night might easily be spun in reverse as a tale of impious betrayal. Any envious outsider might look on and think that Aeneas could not have planned it any better had he tried; or that maybe he did try. Earlier on, when Aeneas and his impromptu band were trying to rescue Cassandra, they were bombarded by Trojans hurling spears from the roof of Minerva’s temple (ex alto delubri culmine telis, 410). By the time they reached the temple, Aeneas and his small troop had switched into the uniforms of Greek 40. Myth has it that both Anchises and Priam are grandsons of Ilus, legendary founder of Troy.

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soldiers whom they had killed along the way. In the mayhem of the fight, their own men attacked them because they mistook them for Greeks. The rooftop becomes a battleground of last resort for desperate Trojans a second time when Aeneas and his two remaining men reach the tower on Priam’s roof. But the tale he tells of the battle he wages there is bedeviled by details that lend themselves to negative construal. Here we have a soldier, still dressed in a Greek uniform, “attacking” (adgressi) and hurtling down the highest, skyscraping structure of the very city that he is trying to protect. Taken by themselves, the optics are very bad. They are made considerably worse when one considers that the word for Troy’s upper city, the acropolis where the royal palaces of Priam and Hector were located in proximity to the temples of Apollo and Athena, is Πέργαμος in Homer’s Greek, Pergama in Virgil’s Latin. The name is commonly used as a part-​for-​whole stand-​in for the city itself. It derives from the Greek word πύργος, meaning “tower.” Through non-​Greek channels it comes into Latin as turris (and, incidentally, into German as -​burg, as it does in my last name). That is what Aeneas is attacking and tossing down: the πύργος of Πέργαμος, the tower’s tower, a stand-​in for the city itself.41 As if to make a weapon of the city itself, Aeneas himself takes the lead in hacking the tower down when he sees that the “futile missiles” (tela . . . inrita, 459, presumably the roof-​tiles and architectural fragments referred to in lines 445–​49) hurled down by the Trojans were doing no good. As David Quint has pointed out, strong connections are consistently drawn throughout the central scenes of Troy’s fall between Aeneas chopping down the tower, as if it were a massive old-​growth tree, and Pyrrhus, Achilles’ nefarious son, chopping through the massive gates of Priam’s palace, personally wielding the axe that gets the job done, then cutting down Priam as if he were a massive old-​growth tree.42 The ancient tree is the ancient city is the ancient man, and down with the ancient man goes his ancient family line.43 All of these once sacred and “towering” antiquities are desecrated and chopped to the ground on Troy’s last night. Such are some of the contradictory undercurrents that bedevil the story that Virgil writes as Aeneas’ own account of Troy’s fall. That story, as Aeneas himself tells it to Dido, acquits Aeneas of the charge of betrayal (not that this is its main purpose): it has him waking up to the battle when it was already lost (not so

41. On the felling of the tower as a prefiguration of Troy’s fall, and for the death of Priam, see Estevez 1981. 42. See Quint 2018: 40–​50. 43. On trees symbolizing family lines in the Aeneid, see Gowers 2011. On Aeneas as a “Pyrrhus redivivus” in book 12, see Putnam 1999: 218.

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good), but then taking big risks and killing as many Greeks as he could (very good). That said, Aeneas would have done well to have a lawyer present when he agreed to regale the Carthaginians with his tale, because he leaves open far too many doors for hostile construal. In lines 431–​34 he seems to protest too much by swearing aloud to the deceased city’s ashes that he did not avoid fighting the Greeks the night Troy fell (testor . . . nec tela nec ullas | uitasse uices Danaum, 432–​33). Time and again, he is too forthright for his own good. In fact, the very language that Aeneas uses to describe his upward traverse to Priam’s roof is itself oddly suggestive of dereliction. Once he has finished describing Andromache’s secret corridor as his way into the palace, offering a passage upward through its inner rooms, Aeneas says euado ad summi fastigia culminis, which I render above as “I make my way up toward the peak of the highest roof.” Easy enough. But you see at the front end of the Latin phrase a word that looks awfully like English “evade.” The verb can mean “climb to the top of ” (OLD euado 2b), and that is the literal sense that seems to be required here. But just as often it can mean “to escape (from undesirable conditions, events)” (OLD 5). An uncharitable audience might choose to hear the latter lurking inside the former, thus to imagine Aeneas “evading” the fight that took the life of Priam and the last of the king’s (almost comically many) sons to stand between Aeneas and the throne. And they might choose to remember that Aeneas has a history of evading big fights in order to not fight, yet again, another day. In book 20 of the Iliad, when Achilles is on a killing rampage in his search to find Hector, he comes across Aeneas. He taunts him for nurturing hopes that he might become king of Troy by defeating him (ἐλπόμενον Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξειν, 20.180), and he reminds him that Priam is in good health, and that he has sons of his own who are up to the job (εἰσὶν γάρ οἱ παῖδες, ὃ δ’ ἔμπεδος οὐδ’ ἀεσίφρων, 20.183). Achilles sees very bad motives lurking inside of Aeneas’ willingness to fight him: a desire for political power and riches. Whatever conspiracy theories existed in antiquity regarding Aeneas as a usurper of Priam’s throne, they began here, not with Homer per se, but with Achilles’ highly inflammatory and demeaning taunts. Before letting Aeneas have his say in turn, Achilles points out that the two of them had encountered each other as opponents once before, but that when Aeneas caught sight of him on that occasion he went running for his life. Achilles caps off his rant by warning that Zeus saved Aeneas that other time (ἀτὰρ σὲ Ζεὺς ἐρρύσατο, 20.194), but he won’t save him now. It turns out that he is right about this. In fact, Zeus does not save Aeneas this time. Poseidon does. Aeneas returns Achilles’ taunt by boasting that he has Aphrodite as a mother and Anchises as a father. He traces his mortal father’s ancestry all the way back to Dardanus to prove that both he and Hector share the same bloodlines and are of royal birth (20.215–​ 41). At that point he says that they should stop bickering and start fighting. Once

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the fight is engaged, things quickly go bad for Aeneas. When Achilles has him down and is about to kill him, Poseidon, citing the need to preserve the line of Dardanus through Aeneas (which is to say not through Hector or any of Priam’s sons), comes to his rescue. Thwarted by the god, Achilles is disgusted at being kept from killing Aeneas yet again, but only then does he realize that the impressive pedigree that Aeneas has just gone over in elaborate detail is no hollow boast (20.348–​49). Poseidon’s rescue of Aeneas in book 20 is the last of four such divine interventions to save Aeneas that are either mentioned or fully described by the Iliad. When in book 5, Diomedes is slaughtering everyone in his path, he comes across Aeneas and makes quick work of him (besides making off with his famous horses). He crushes Aeneas’ thigh with a giant boulder and, as he is about to finish him off, Aphrodite swoops down to protect her son, using her body as a shield (the first divine rescue). As she carries Aeneas off to safety, Diomedes attacks the goddess herself and wounds her wrist. She promptly drops her wounded son to the ground, but then Apollo steps in to wrap Aeneas in a dark mist, as if to make him disappear. But at this point Diomedes has divine powers of sight, given to him by Athena, and as Diomedes continues his pursuit Apollo sweeps Aeneas away from battle and conjures a “phantom” that resembles Aeneas for Diomedes to chase after (the second divine rescue). Homer says that Apollo landed Aeneas “on the holy heights of Pergamus” (Περγάμῳ ἐν ἱερῇ, 5.446) where he was nursed back to health by Leto and Artemis in the innermost chamber of Apollo’s temple. This puts Aeneas up on the acropolis, lying in bed, at the same time Paris is. Both men, we are told, tried to put up a fight. Neither asked to be spirited away. And yet, Paris catches hell for evading the fight in ways that Aeneas does not—​ except, that is, when Achilles taunts him for that other time when he ran away and Zeus came to his rescue (the third divine rescue), just before Poseidon comes to save him one last time (the fourth divine rescue). The numbers are very bad for Aeneas, and for Virgil who has to try to make a hero of this man. Is he an evasive coward, scheming his way to the top, or what? In the final Iliadic tally, Aeneas is conveniently swept away from the fight four times to cowardly Paris’ one. Virgil has serious work to do.44 Once before, in the famous, tag-​team rescue of Iliad book 5, Aeneas had gotten clear of battle by escaping to the citadel. But how do you do that when the citadel itself is the battleground? The secret passage that Aeneas describes has no

44. On the hero’s self-​narration of Troy’s final night in book 2 as a device exploited by Virgil to help surmount (not altogether successfully) the anti-​heroic and cowardly deficiencies that would necessarily be amplified by any third-​person account of Aeneas’ role in the battle, see Johnson 1999: 52–​54. Further on “Aeneas the Narrator,” see Quint 2018: 30–​36.

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precedent in earlier epic. Nor does the rooftop bombardment he engages in. In its own meta-​symbolic way, the novel passageway serves as a point of entry for both the poet and the character who describes it because it allows both Virgil and Aeneas to “get on top of ” an Iliadic battle scene in a way that had never been tried before—​though here I must add the cautionary phrase “so far as we know,” because it is possible that some scene(s) of rooftop fighting were featured in any number of epics concerning Troy’s last stand. Although the high spot where Aeneas goes to bring the tower down does not serve as a battleground in any earlier epic “so far as we know,” in the course of Homer’s Iliad, we go to places like this many times in order to gain panoptic views of events happening far below. As David Quint writes concerning Aeneas’ position on the roof of Priam’s palace: “we have learned to associate such elevation with the godlike vantage point of the omniscient narrator looking down on the action he or she recounts—​Helen’s review of the Greek troops from the Trojan battlements, the so-​called Teichoscopia, in Book 3 of the Iliad is an epic example.”45 Virgil reminds us that we have been here before—​not to fight, but to look—​when he has Aeneas say that from the tower that he was about to hack down: “the whole of Troy was visible, as well as the Danaan ships and the camps of the Achaians” (461–​62). In the Iliad, far-​seeing views such as the one Aeneas describes here are gained by gods looking down from the sky or from mountaintops nearby, and similar far-​seeing views, though considerably less sweeping, are gained by humans looking out from watchtowers (πύργοι) on top of Troy’s walls. But there is a rather big divide between the kind of watching that happens from these separate places, one divine, the other human. As gods look down on Troy from heaven, they do so from positions of extreme distance and utter security. This is especially true of Zeus. There is perhaps no better illustration of the power implications of vertical spacing than the image that Homer causes to flit before his listeners’ closed eyes at Iliad 11.81–​83:

45. Quint 2018: 37. Virgil takes his readers to high places to view sweeping vistas along with characters who climb on several occasions, e.g., also in the bee simile of book 1, the panoramic view of parading heroes in book 6, the upward traverse of Aeneas and Evander in book 8, and Augustus viewing a triumphal parade from his Palatine temple, also in book 8 (lines 720–​28). Vout 2012: 122 points out that such bird’s-​eye vistas of cities and their activities are, in fact, almost unknown in the canon of Greek and Roman art. The one major exception to this is the so-​called città dipinta fresco that was recently excavated beneath the Baths of Trajan on the Oppian Hill in Rome. La Rocca 2015 points out that Romans must have had little concept of Rome as a visual totality because their experience of civic space was one of clutter; of tight proximity, and partial and obstructed views. In his paper announcing the discovery of the città dipinta fresco, he observes that “a large and detailed urban view such as the ‘Painted City’ comes down to us as a unique survivor. The question we are left with is, just how traditional might large urban representation have been in pre-​Trajanic times?” (La Rocca 2001: 124).

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τῶν ἄλλων ἀπάνευθε καθέζετο κύδεϊ γαίων εἰσορόων Τρώων τε πόλιν καὶ νῆας Ἀχαιῶν χαλκοῦ τε στεροπήν, ὀλλύντάς τ’ ὀλλυμένους τε. Apart from the others sat Zeus, basking in glory as he looked at the city of the Trojans, the Achaean ships, and the flash of bronze, men killing and being killed. The humans kicking up dust far below are vulnerable and being mowed down like sheathes of barley (11.67–​69). Zeus hovers high above it all in total control, delighting in what he sees (the “banner harvest” metaphor belongs to him). The scene that plays out below him is one that he himself has set in motion, and he knows that if anything that happens down there displeases him or threatens his plans, he can, in an instant, put a stop to it. He has heralds and lesser gods on hand whom he can dispatch as messengers. Throughout the Iliad, at his bidding, they dart down from heaven like shooting stars. Though the distance separating Zeus from what he sees is enormous, it means nothing when it comes to the immediacy and ever-​presence of his powers. His is a controlling vision: one equally as powerful in what it can do as in what it can see.46 For Zeus, the ability to see all that happens below him on the plains of Troy is a power to relish in and do things with. For the humans who watch these same things from atop the walls of Troy, the ability to see all is a vehicle for delivering shocking jolts of pain and ever-​sharp reminders of their utter helplessness. It is when one is up high like the gods, looking down, that one resembles them the least. Ever since the third book of the Iliad (the teichoscopia scene mentioned by David Quint in the quote above), the watchtowers atop the walls of Troy were coded as looking spots for those deemed too frail to fight: old men, women, children.47 It is a place that mixes strong suggestions of power and security (having the “upper-​hand” ability to look down on others from a place of security, distant from the violence taking place below and beyond its reach) with equally strong suggestions of extreme vulnerability. The humans who look out from atop Troy’s wall, given who they are, can watch, but they cannot do; that is, they can do nothing other than give outward expression to their powerlessness by grieving, calling out in despair, lifting hands toward the heavens, fainting. Unlike Zeus or any of the more powerful Olympian gods, they are unable to breach the distance that separates them from 46. On the controlling gaze of Zeus, see Lovatt 2013: 33–​39. 47. For rooftops and towers as places for the mothers of soldiers and weak old men, cf. Aen. 12.131–​33.

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the killing taking place on the plains below. It is as if there were an invisible barrier set between them—​think of the gas station scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds: Tippi Hedron helplessly pounding on the glass as she looks on in horror as the man lights a match and tosses it onto a pool of gas that she sees at his feet, but he does not48 (for further examples of characters situated high and/​or far away as watchers, in order to symbolize/​emphasize the pathos of their watching, and the vulnerability of those who are watched, see Appendix, item 5). Only one time in the Iliad, just as Sarpedon is about to die at the hands of Patroclus, does Zeus get to experience something like what the far-​sighted but frail humans on top of Troy’s walls experience when they see their loved ones die (Iliad 16.419–​683). His hands are tied by fate. He must watch his son die. But the barrier that keeps him from saving his son is not completely impenetrable. Signaling his grief, he sends down a shower of blood, then dispatches a burial squad led by Apollo to spirit away the corpse. Such actions, though they fall short of saving the man, constitute a good deal more than the nothing that any given human watching from the walls could do, no matter if that human were as powerful and blessed by the gods as Priam, king of Troy, father of fifty sons. I mention Priam here because it is he, above all, who defines the category of the frail, pathos-​laden watcher who looks out from a tower on Troy’s walls. It is from that secure vantage point that he watches the deaths of one son after another, after another. Joining him as icons of that devastating experience are his wife, Hecuba, and daughter-​in-​law, Andromache. These three are featured as the principal watchers in book 22 of the Iliad (Andromache famously arriving late to the scene), where Hector is cut down by Achilles, and his corpse is strapped to the back of Achilles’ chariot to be abusively paraded about beneath their eyes. Much of the ugly and jarring cruelty that we are given to see in this book we take in through their eyes, as sights beheld by helpless watchers whom Achilles taunts with the spectacle of their loved one’s slaughter and continued abuse, forcing them to “eat this!” with their eyes. In both the Iliad and the Aeneid, the city of Troy is described as if it were a stepped pyramid, with power rising toward the top. On the acropolis that towers over the lower city (the Pergama that overlooks Troia) are located the temples of Apollo and Athena/​Minerva, and close to the temples are the royal Palaces of Priam, Hector, and Paris (see Iliad 6.317).49 This central apogee within the city 48. The scene’s construction, shot by shot, is analyzed by Bordwell and Thompson 2010: 228–​ 29. On the confusion of objective and subjective perspectives in the scene’s final (highly ironic and self-​referential) bird’s-​eye view, see Verstraten 2009: 120–​22. 49. Virgil’s Roman readers could readily relate the vertical spacing of power in the description of Troy to the structures of their own city; see Gowers 1995. The basic layout that Virgil

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takes on strong associations of female domesticity and privileged distance from war in book 6 of the Iliad, where Hector enters the city through the Scaean Gate, then goes up to the acropolis in full battle gear. There he first locates his mother, Hecuba, in the palace of Priam, and he commissions her to lead a delegation of women to Athena’s temple nearby to offer the goddess a new robe. He then goes to his brother’s palace, where he finds Paris polishing his armor in his bedroom. Not that it needed much polishing, for in the mismatched duel that pitted Paris against Menelaus in book 3, Paris was wrapped in a mist by Aphrodite and spirited away just as Menelaus was about to kill him. Conveniently, she landed him right in the one spot where he could display real prowess: in his bedroom with Helen. After berating him as a coward, Helen caves in to his seductions and they take to his bed. Paris is still there on his bed, polishing away, when Hector arrives. Upon seeing Paris biding his time, making decorative enhancements to his kit (Hector’s armor, in contrast, is caked with bloody grime), all the while Diomedes was killing every Trojan in sight in the plains before Troy, Hector excoriates his brother and tells him to gear up and get moving before Troy is sent up in flames (6.331). Helen tries to detain Hector, but he takes his leave and goes to his own palace, looking for his wife, Andromache, and their son, Astyanax, but he does not find them there because at that moment, says Homer, “she stood on the tower, with the boy and a servant beautifully dressed, wailing, shedding tears” (ἀλλ’ ἥ γε ξὺν παιδὶ καὶ ἀμφιπόλῳ ἐϋπέπλῳ | πύργῳ ἐφεστήκει γοόωσά τε μυρομένη τε, 6.372–​73). The reference is to the tower above the Scaean Gate. From there Andromache looks for her husband on the field of battle while he looks for her back in their bedroom. In book 22, she will be in her bedroom, making clothes for Hector, while he himself is being cut down before Priam’s eyes in front of the Scaean Gate. In the process of describing Aeneas’ curious “evasion” to the roof of Priam’s palace, where he cuts down the highly symbolic tower that once stretched to the stars, Virgil finds a clever way to remind us (once again, through Aeneas’ own words) that this is not a place where one would normally expect a Homeric warrior to go; that is, unless perhaps he were looking for his wife, his elderly parents, or his child. Aeneas says of the hidden corridor that took Aeneas up to the

describes is roughly that of a Mycenaean citadel fortress. At Mycenae, for example, outside the main lower gate of the palace are royal tombs (Tomb Circle B). The Lion Gate has a bastion on the right (as one enters) that serves as a watchtower. Access to the upper city is restricted by a second gate leading into to the king’s palace and to the temples that are directly adjacent to the palace (power, and the ability to see and be seen, rises toward the top). Whether there was a tower on the citadel is unknown. The main difference between the physical layout of Virgil’s Troy and the ruins of Mycenae is the orientation of the city: Mycenae’s main gate looks toward the land rather than the sea. The Bay of Argos is visible behind the palace rather than in front.

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tower: “While the kingdom still stood, unlucky Andromache used to go through it, unaccompanied, to visit her in-​laws, and she would bring the child Astyanax to his grandfather” (456–​57). This is, in other words, the king’s personal watchtower, rising high above his palace; the place where Priam could be found, looking out for his sons, and where all those just mentioned could gather to look out for Hector. Hector is the one who connects them all. In book 6 of the Iliad, Hector climbed to the citadel looking for these women and his son, not bothering to wash the blood from his hands or remove his helmet. Homer emphasizes the oddity of his being up there, rather than down fighting in the plains, by repeatedly having us visualize his bright, gleaming helmet, the scary item that causes Astyanax to cringe in fright. Priam, Hecuba, Andromache, Astyanax: these are the people who belong up there. Hector himself is out of place. He belongs below. By opening a hidden door to Priam’s roof, Virgil turns a watching spot into a battle spot. Up there, where warriors normally do not go, Aeneas does what warriors are supposed to do: he fights the enemy and obliterates a good number of them, giving every indication that he is determined to go down with the ship. That said, for the great bulk of his time on Priam’s roof, and for the better part of 100 lines of Virgil’s text, once Aeneas has sent the tower crashing down on his foes, all that he does up there is look down in horror, and watch. Narrative time freezes for him as an active warrior. It rolls slowly forward for him as a watcher. From his high vantage point, Aeneas has a wide-​angle view of the entire palace complex that allows him to see everything from the front of the palace to the back, and that is how he tells the story of what he sees taking place down below: Greek soldiers breaking in through the front and slaughtering their way toward the back. He sees everything, but can do nothing. After the tower comes down, the first thing to catch Aeneas’ eye is a bright flickering of reddish light at the front (2.469–​75): Vestibulum ante ipsum primoque in limine Pyrrhus exsultat telis et luce coruscus aëna: qualis ubi in lucem coluber mala gramina pastus, frigida sub terra tumidum quem bruma tegebat, nunc, positis novus exuviis nitidusque iuventa, lubrica convoluit sublato pectore terga arduus ad solem, et linguis micat ore trisulcis. Outside the entryway, at the palace’s front gate, Pyrrhus leaps about, flashing spears and glinting with brazen light, just as when a serpent enters the light. Fed fat on poisonous herbs, the freezing snows have kept him covered underground. But now, having shed his old skin, shining with renewed

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youth, he coils his(s) body and lifts(s) his(s) chest high toward the sun, and from his mouth it flicks a three-​pronged tongue.50 The soldier leaping about outside the palace gate, as if he were frenetically dancing (the so-​called Pyrrhic war dance51), is Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles. He also goes by the name Neoptolemus. As pointed out by James O’Hara in his study of etymological wordplay in Virgil, both Greek names are folded into the simile as visual expressions: the emphasis on the reddish hue of the flashing light that catches Aeneas’ attention (“glinting with brazen light,” i.e., bronze-​colored light) gives visual expression to the name Pyrrhus, which means “flame-​colored” or “redheaded” in Greek. Ultimately the name derives from Greek πῦρ “fire.” The reference to the snake’s being “new” (nouus) and “shiny with youth” (nitidus iuuenta) after its old skin has been shed calls to mind the adjectival element νέος “new” of the name Neoptolemos (“New War”).52 Etymologies only take us so far. They give us to understand what Virgil is playing at without telling us why he plays at it. Why use the hidden potentials of the man’s name here to put so much emphasis on fiery reddish light? It lies beyond the scope of this chapter to draw connections between the simile comparing Pyrrhus to a fiery serpent and the abundant fire and serpent imagery of book 2. That the connections are many, meaningful, and highly elaborated was brilliantly demonstrated by Bernard Knox more than seventy years ago, and others have since added key insights to his classic study.53 Instead, I want to draw connections with two famous similes found near the beginning of Iliad book 22, both of which have something to do with, and help make sense of, Virgil’s Pyrrhic serpent. As book 22 opens, Achilles breaks off his pursuit of Apollo, who had taken on the guise of Agenor, and races at breakneck speed toward the city itself. By this point in the story, the Trojans have all fled inside the city. Hector stands alone outside the city’s main gate, waiting for Achilles to arrive. Homer says that as Achilles came tearing toward the city, Priam was the first to spot him

50. In the English translation I have tried to imitate some of the hissing sounds that Virgil puts into play in the Latin (esp. in line 473). 51. The “flaming” Greek war dance was known as the πυρρίχιος or πυρρίχη. Both Achilles and Pyrrhus (among others) were credited with inventing it (Luc. Salt. 9). Achilles is said to have danced the Pyrrhic war dance around the tomb of Patroclus (Arist. Fr. 519 Rose ad Schol. Pind. P. 2.127). In Euripides’ Andromache, multiple connections (etymological and thematic) are made linking Pyrrhus to the dance; see Cairns 2012. On “leaping” as a characteristic of both Achilles and Pyrrhus in accounts of Troy’s fall, see Borthwick 1967: 18–​20. 52. See O’Hara 2017: 133–​34. 53. See Knox 1950.

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coming across the plain (“Old Priam was the first to catch sight of him with his eyes, beaming bright like a star,” τὸν δ’ ὃ γέρων Πρίαμος πρῶτος ἴδεν ὀφθαλμοῖσι | παμφαίνονθ’ ὥς τ’ ἀστέρ’, 22.25–​26). In the famous simile that follows, we are given not only to see what met Priam’s eyes, but to experience the dread he feels at seeing it.54 To Priam, the glare blazing from Achilles’ chest resembles the menacing glare of “Orion’s Dog,” referring to the Dog Star, Sirius, a baleful late-​summer sign (κακὸν δέ τε σῆμα, 30), marking the onset of pestilence (malaria’s peak season), and widespread devastation. As if a fire-​starter, heaven’s brightest star brings a killing “fever” (πυρετός, 31) to mortals. “In just this way did the bronze glare about Achilles’ chest as he ran (χαλκὸς ἔλαμπε, 32).” According to Iliad 19.12–​17, when presented with his newly forged divine armor, while all the other Myrmidons were struck with terror and were forced to look away, Achilles alone had the courage to look at it straight on, and “as he looked, rage took hold of him even more, and his eyes, like a glaring sun, blazed out terror from beneath his brow” (ὡς εἶδ’, ὥς μιν μᾶλλον ἔδυ χόλος, ἐν δέ οἱ ὄσσε /​ δεινὸν ὑπὸ βλεφάρων ὡς εἰ σέλας ἐξεφάανθεν, 19.16–​17). It is as if, in seeing the armor, Achilles had swallowed the sun. The brightness of the arms sears into him and stokes the fire inside, going from outside, to inside, then back out again through the eyes. What Priam sees heading his way is an irrepressible blaze of hate-​fueled anger. Both Priam, in spotting Achilles, and Aeneas, when he spots Pyrrhus, see a glint of “brazen” light that they construe as baleful, menacing, and pestilential—​for reasons that remain mysterious, Sirius is commonly described in ancient sources as having a reddish hue, thus the easy connection with shining bronze. In both cases, the similes describing what the tower-​watchers see characterize an Achilles figure (Achilles himself in the case of Priam, and Achilles’ son in the case Aeneas) via highly crafted light and heat imagery, and in both similes (that of the glinting star, and that of the glinting snake), the fiery and menacing potentials of names are explored.55 Homer/​Priam adds an extra note of menace to his description of the star by stopping short of naming it directly, treating it as “the star that must not be named.” While the star’s potentials as a “canine” menace are much on Priam’s mind—​he will soon describe to Hector how his frail and elderly body will be torn apart by dogs after the city falls—​everything about

54. De Jong 1985a: 266–​69 treats Homer’s Dog Star simile as the prime example of a simile that undergirds a secondary focalization already established by the text (understanding that Homer is the primary focalizer). See also de Jong 2004: 126: “The primary function of the simile is, of course, to illustrate Achilles’ swift and dazzling appearance. Yet, its secondary function is to express Priam’s feelings . . . at seeing Achilles running straight towards his son.” 55. On light imagery connecting the two similes, see Bowie 1990: 471 and 478.

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his description of the star is a kind of reverie on the name that he dares not speak, Σείριος, “the Scorcher.”56 Seeing the pestilence heading his way, Priam begs his son to come inside, painting agonizing pictures for him to consider of the fate that awaits him, the proud king of Troy, once the city has fallen and he is torn apart by dogs. Alongside her husband on the tower, Hecuba begs her son to take pity on her as well, and she, too, puts her son in mind of mutilation by dogs, this time as a visual projection of Hector’s own fate. But none of his parents’ pleas causes Hector to rethink his plan. Homer says that he stayed nailed to his spot, waiting for Achilles, “just as a mountain snake guarding his hole waits for a man. Having fed on deadly poisons, he is consumed by dreadful wrath, and he glares out menacingly as he coils around his hole” (22.93–​35). A snake at the gate. This is the more obvious of the two “Priamic” similes that Virgil builds into his “Aenean” simile comparing Pyrrhus to a menacing snake. The image of a snake bursting with poison recalls the second simile, while the pestilential menace of its brazen glare recalls the first. But even as Virgil lets both similes have their say, he gives his version a radical new turn by having it describe Pyrrhus, the Achillean menace who is attacking the gates, rather than Hector, the determined man who stands his ground, snake-​like, in front of them. The determined defender has become the menacing attacker. Virgil’s remade simile is a visual chiasm within a visual chiasm. Framing the simile that flips the snake from a positive (Hector defending the gate) to a negative (Pyrrhus attacking the gate) is the larger visual chiasm, already described, that situates Aeneas up high as a watcher, and Priam down low as a fighter. This swapping of high and low, by reversing the contents of highly encoded forms, produces contradictory effects of “helpless power” on one side (Aeneas as watcher), and “powerless help” on the other (Priam as fighter). In this case, the threat posed by the snaky menace at the gate is not to Hector, who is by now long deceased, but to Priam, who waits bravely, but helplessly inside. That is where we go next, once Pyrrhus breaks through the gate, toward the opposite, far end of the palace, where Priam (now in Hector’s role of intrepid snake guarding his hole) gears up and waits in full armor for “Achilles” to arrive. Behind him, huddled together like doves fleeing a tempest, are Hecuba and her daughters (for Pyrrhus’ “tunnel view” of the palace as something Aeneas imagines but cannot see, see Appendix, item 6). The mismatch of feeble, elderly Priam to energetic young Pyrrhus is radically more pronounced than was the slight mismatch of Hector to Achilles. That this

56. The connection between the “dog” of the simile and the “dogs” who tear his body apart is underscored via verbal repetition in lines 31 and 76.

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will not end well for Priam and the family he gears up to protect is a foregone conclusion. As if to remind us, one last time, that Aeneas and Priam are not where they should be, Virgil has Aeneas observe Polites, Priam’s last remaining son, already severely wounded, slip away from Pyrrhus at the front of the palace and escape toward the back, fleeing through the long porticoes and circling his way around the palace’s open courtyards (porticibus longis fugit et uacua atria lustrat, 528), with fiery Pyrrhus in “hot” pursuit (ardens . . . Pyrrhus, 529), lunging a spear toward his back: “he nearly has him, again nearly takes hold of him with his hand” (iam iamque manu tenet, 530). In film, one of the more common functions of the top-​down perspective (the “overhead shot”), when one or more persons are in the shot, is to show that they are at the mercy of their physical surroundings. When, as happens here, the shot looks down on persons inside an enclosed space, it lets us see that they are trapped, with nowhere to go. Such shots produce feelings of claustrophobia and anxiety for those whose movements are restricted.57 At last, Polites reaches the back of the palace where, wounded, he falls down at Priam’s feet and bleeds his life away. One last time, Priam has had the privilege of seeing a son die before his eyes, cut down by an Achilles figure who has chased him down. But Priam sees only the end of the chase. The big top-​down view of Polites’ lengthy, circuitous traverse from the front of the palace to the back belongs to Aeneas. Anyone who remembers what happens later in Iliad 22 understands that much of what Aeneas sees here as he looks down on the scene is a sickening replay of what Priam saw as he watched Achilles chase Hector around the city walls of Troy, then finally cut him down before the old man’s eyes as he peered down from the tower above the Scaean Gate. The whole of this last, decisive battle inside the palace walls is undergirded by Homeric memories that Virgil turns outside-​in. Just as he turned the tower from a watching spot to a battle spot via Andromache’s hidden door, via the gate that Pyrrhus crashes through, Virgil takes an external battle scene into the palace and lets it run amok inside, thus giving the most nefarious of battle-​hardened warriors a new place to do obscene things. In its own way, the palace’s front gate is the book’s second significant “meta”-​door to give Virgil new things to do with his story by giving him new places to go. By having his “new” Achilles burst through the gate and slash his way toward the most vulnerable members of Priam’s family, including the old king himself, Virgil opens new perspectives on what wars do, how they operate, and what they keep hidden away. This is a battle that gets deeply inside of us who watch it unfold because Virgil takes it to the far depths

57. See Keast 2014: 128–​29.

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of palace’s insides, to its inner sanctum; into the domestic space of grandparents, well-​dressed servants, children, and wives. Wars’ obscene realities, what they actually do to decent, vulnerable, and beautiful people, such as the ones just mentioned, are things commonly agonized over, but not directly shown, on the stage of tragedy. These same realities, hideous but true, are happily skipped over by patriotic martial epics that tell of brave Roman conquerors killing their way forward across lucrative barbarian realms. There were many such epics floating about in Virgil’s day. Virgil has no intention of adding another to the pile. Rather, as if to follow up on the shocking eventualities presaged by Homer near the end of the Iliad, but kept just beyond his epic’s range, Virgil takes his battle inside the palace walls in order to let Romans see “what else” and “what all” wars, even their wars for god and country, do to others. Tragedies do this by turning things inside-​out (there are no indoor scenes in Greek Tragedy, only indoor people whom circumstances force outside). Virgil does it by turning things outside-​in. The battle inside Priam’s palace serves as a symbol of the larger “inward turn” of the Aeneid itself, a turn toward the insides of characters, and toward letting characters swap places and perspectives with others. Perhaps the main instance of this in the Aeneid is the vertical swap between Priam and Aeneas in book 2. As we have seen, the criss-​crossing of their places qua perspectives and ill-​fitting roles taken on produces devastating effects. But there is a striking irony to be “enjoyed” here as well (scare-​quoted, because it is actually rather sick), in the fact that, to produce these effects, Virgil has put Aeneas in Priam’s helpless, high spot for one specific purpose: in order to have him watch Priam die.

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3.1.  The Temple Ecphrasis of Aeneid 1 I begin this chapter by working through yet another scene of intensive “looking” by Aeneas. As before, this scene finds him visually absorbed in the cruel particulars of war. But in this case the awful things that meet his eye are not actually happening in real time. Rather, they are frozen in place as decorative renderings of past struggles: a painted frieze on the walls of Juno’s temple in Carthage, depicting conquered “others” whom Aeneas recognizes not as “them” but as “us.” The main point I want to make about this much-​studied scene, the first large-​ scale ecphrasis of the Aeneid, has to do with the way that Aeneas engages actively, disgustedly, despairingly, and angrily with what he sees. Though commonly mistaken for Virgil’s account of what Aeneas saw painted on high (Aeneas down over here, looking at things x, y, and z up there), even though it is that in a slapdash sense, the whole of the ecphrasis is presented to us as quoted sight; that is, Virgil taking us into Aeneas’ head, letting us experience how Aeneas reckons with what he sees. Not simply “what’s there,” in other words, but a particular, highly motivated distortion of what’s there, summoned into existence by the specific story elements that Aeneas pounced upon and agonized over as he went touring his way through the big, continuous narrative picture (presumably a connected series of discrete episodes) on the temple walls. The ecphrasis, in other words, is not the story on the temple wall. It is the story that Aeneas spins from the story on the temple wall: a selective, reactionary view of the painted frieze, as agonized over by him. By rescuing smaller worlds of deep pathos and defeat from the singular big triumph that the temple frieze depicts, Aeneas lets us see that there are other, opposite, in fact defiantly oppositional ways of seeing and valuing the very same thing. Predisposed to do so as a battered Trojan refugee, he reads aggressively against the grain. By taking us (his Roman readers) into the trauma that Aeneas relives, step-​by-​step, as he tours the

Virgil’s Cinematic Art. Kirk Freudenburg, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197643242.003.0004

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site, Virgil invites us to consider what it might feel like, just a little (but perhaps much to the discomfort of the glibly patriotic Roman triumphalists among us), to have one’s pain, devastation, and disgrace done up as someone else’s glorious triumph. Among the big takeaways of the ecphrasis, a work of art that, as sculpted by Aeneas, is equal parts post-​classical (Alexandrian, neoteric) experimentation and postmodern hard truth, are whatever discomforts we might happen to feel at being made to re-​experience all of this with him. What one person (the victor) experiences as a singular big tale of martial glory, full of meaning, another (the victim) experiences (and re-​writes, re-​sculpts, re-​paints, etc.) as an ongoing, erratic series of tragedies, irredeemable as a story of divine providence or decent moral purpose. Given that what Aeneas sees in this case is a continuous narrative representing wars fought successfully and well, wars full of meaning for “some” at the expense of “others,” the ecphrasis has implications not only for Roman civic art in a general sense—​Romans, we must remember, did truly horrific things, such as the ones that Aeneas sees depicted on the frieze, and a great deal worse, in order to clear the way for the world that they sought to create—​but for the Aeneid itself, a work that makes a case for wars fought nobly and well, and for the very best of lasting causes. Now for the experience itself. Taking the ecphrasis in three main sections, this is what Aeneas first sees as he awaits Dido’s arrival (1.453–​65):   sub ingenti lustrat dum singula templo, reginam opperiens, dum, quae fortuna sit urbi, artificumque manus inter se operumque laborem miratur, videt Iliacas ex ordine pugnas, bellaque iam fama totum volgata per orbem, Atridas, Priamumque, et saeuum ambobus Achillem. Constitit, et lacrimans, “Quis iam locus” inquit “Achate, quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? En Priamus! Sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi; sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. Solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.” Sic ait, atque animum pictura pascit inani, multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine voltum. Namque videbat, uti bellantes Pergama circum hac fugerent Graii, premeret Troiana iuventus, hac Phryges, instaret curru cristatus Achilles. While he walks his way around down below the massive temple, studying the details, as he waits for the queen to arrive, while he marvels at the

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city’s wealth, the craftsmanship of its artisans and the works wrought by their mutual efforts, he sees the battles fought at Troy, one after another, in sequence, wars that were by now widespread by talk throughout the entire world. He sees the sons of Atreus, and Priam, and, savage to them both, Achilles. He stops, and with tears in his eyes he says, “what place is there now, Achates, what region on earth that is not filled with our toil? Look, there’s Priam! Even here does praiseworthiness receive its due. They weep over what has happened, and the transience of our lives touches their thoughts. No need to be afraid. This fame of ours will bring us some measure of safety.” He says these things, and feeds his mind on an empty picture. Groaning heavily, his face was awash in a flood of tears, for he was looking at how, as they waged wars around Pergamum, on one side the Greeks were fleeing, driven by Trojan youth, while on the other the Phrygians were fleeing, pressed hard by crest-​helmed Achilles on his chariot. Much of what I have to say about this passage has been said by others. More than sixty years ago, R. D. Williams pointed out that “the pictures are coming to us through the mind of the beholder, coloured and interpreted by his own emotions.”1 I have restated the case for this in my introductory remarks above, insisting that not only does Aeneas color what he sees via his emotions, he dwells on those things that he considers most salient and worth dwelling on, selecting as he goes. Many scholars have noted that Aeneas seems to misinterpret the frieze rather badly by treating it as a monument to Trojan sorrow rather than a celebration of Troy’s defeat.2 This is Juno’s temple, after all. The fall of Troy is her greatest triumph. That is why Troy’s destruction is pictured on the temple wall: not because the Carthaginians somehow feel compelled to remind viewers of the sorrows of Juno’s greatest enemy, but because they want to celebrate Juno’s magnificent powers in crushing them. The bloodier the representation the better. But Aeneas sees none of that. As Christine Perkell has pointed out, Aeneas’ own words indicate that what he lets us see is only a “partial viewing of the frieze” that leaves large sections of it under-​ or un-​described.3 Elsewhere I have argued that Aeneas’ failure to pick out a single god in the course of his sorrowful and disgusted reading the frieze is one of the scene’s most remarkable features.4 How can a frieze relating the events of 1. Williams 1960: 150. 2. For bibliography on Aeneas’ misreading of the frieze, see Perkell 1999: 46 footnote 42. 3. Perkell 1999: 46. Further on Aeneas’ selectivity, see Claussen 2002: 32. 4. Freudenburg 2017: 134–​35.

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Figure 3.1  Sculptures of the western pediment, Temple of Athena Aphaia in Aegina, c. 500 bce, as displayed in the Glyptothek Museum, Munich. The eastern pediment is less well preserved, but also features Athena as the largest figure at the center of a Trojan battle scene. Glyptothek.

Homer’s Iliad not have gods here and there at least, if not depicted in nearly every scene, looking down from Olympus, coaching heroes, and fighting battles? How can Juno not have been depicted on her own temple frieze as the central, and most eye-​catching figure of all? Consider the late-​archaic pedimental sculptures of the temple of Athena Aphaia on the island of Aegina, depicting warriors battling at Troy, with Athena in the very heart of the battle, dominating the center of the pediments on both sides (Figure 3.1). Gods must have been everywhere on the frieze that Aeneas studies, and yet they are nowhere in sight. Their absence, I suggest, is less a matter of Carthaginian (Semitic) artisans refusing to represent the divine than it is a matter of how Aeneas engages with the frieze from his own angry, and deeply traumatized, perspective. From that perspective he can see no gods orchestrating Troy’s destruction. He sees only a cruel and utterly “godless” mistake—​and that, no matter how many gods he may actually see before him on the frieze itself. Their absence from (his relating of ) the temple ecphrasis of book 1 becomes all the more pronounced when one considers how absurdly “theomachic” and god-​driven the depiction of Actium is on Aeneas’ shield in book 8.5 There, in poring over the details of the shield, Aeneas sees gods brightly pictured at the center of the work’s central scene, dominating a battle that many Romans remembered from their own lived experience. None of the combatants who fought at Actium (one suspects) could recall seeing massively large gods,

5. On theomachy in Roman epic, see Chaudhuri 2014.

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anthropomorphic, dog-​headed, or otherwise, clashing on either side. For those who fought the battle, it was all just the ugly mess of war. Obviously the change from book 1 to book 8 in Aeneas’ way of seeing things is drastic, and deserves further study. It may have something to do with Vulcan’s choice to depict future events in a (Homeric) mode that puts gods front and center. But it may also have to do with changes in Aeneas himself, or with the shield’s being for him not a reminder of past experiences (a monumentum), but a series of connected images that point to a future (Virgil’s own recent past) that Aeneas cannot begin to comprehend. Monuments do not remember, they “warn” and “remind.”6 By definition, they are cues to memory, and not the thing itself. As such, they do not “keep” memories as so many things collected and held in store. Recent studies of memory in Virgil have explored not only how the Aeneid crafts a new collective historical monument for Rome (looking especially at what gets played up, forgotten, and/​ or repressed in the process of monumentalization), but they have also shown how remembering is itself an act of construction: not a matter of calling up facts and experiences from the past (mere “recall” of stockpiled items), but an active process of reshaping the past and imposing fresh interpretations on those facts and experiences; a process more about doing (selecting, forgetting, re-​interpreting, re-​narrativizing) than receiving.7 In other words, it is not just the monuments’ artisans who create in the crafting of cultural reminders, but those who engage with their works are equally creative in the memories they make from those reminders.8 Perhaps the best example of the personally constructivist nature of “remembering” in the Aeneid is Aeneas’ personalized tour of the temple frieze at Carthage. Here Aeneas sees the war that destroyed his life painted as a strictly sequential narrative (ex ordine, 456), but he does not work through the events depicted in the order in which they are laid out.9 Instead, manning the camera, he picks out whatever details happen to catch his eye as something meaningful and worth

6. On monuments as reminders, cf. Cic. ad Caes. fr. 7 Shackleton Bailey (=​Nonius 47 Lindsay): sed ego quae monumenti ratio sit nomine ipso admoneor, ad memoriam magis spectare debet posteritatis, quam ad praesentis temporis gratiam. 7. See esp. Berlin 1998, Fowler 2000, Seider 2013, and Schiesaro 2015. 8. Barchiesi 1997: 275: “More than any other ancient poet Virgil stresses the importance of the viewing subject in the construction of visual meaning.” 9. The best analysis of the temporal anomalies of the ecphrasis is Squire 2016b: “For all their panoramic epic range, the ordo of these episodes nonetheless breaks chronology: Aeneas’ act of viewing rearranges the narrative order of established literary sequence” (229); see also Kirichenko 2013: 67–​69.

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dwelling on: an elderly king threatened by brutish violence on all sides; Greeks slaughtering men in their sleep, ambushing and killing mere children, terrifying pious Trojan women, and selling princely corpses to devastated relatives in return for piles of gold. Aeneas sees no heroism here, only Greek bloodthirstiness, greed, and brutality. As Alessandro Schiesaro has recently argued, in a brilliant reading of this scene as a study in the workings of memory, Aeneas is not (just) reading a story, he is telling one, using the images of the frieze as a series of “passive props for an active re-​enactment” of his past.10 What we end up with, then, is a version of Troy’s fall that is profoundly shaped by the viewer’s emotional state, told as a tragic tale where men who are otherwise the greatest of Greek heroes have nothing heroic about them. Instead they are devious killers and violent marauders, not because that is how they are represented on the frieze, but because that is the way that Aeneas remembers them. Aeneas’ way of seeing his past painted on the walls of Juno’s temple becomes his way of telling the story of Troy’s fall in book 2: as a crime pulled off by bloodthirsty liars who butcher children and relish in the slaughter of helpless old men; a story of monochrome “villains” (Sinon, Pyrrhus) who, like comic book characters, relish in the havoc they wreak, and the pain they cause. Nowhere else in the Aeneid does one encounter humans who are so utterly devoid of human complexity.11 The seeing of book 1 matches the telling of book 2 because it is itself a telling: the story of the lead-​up to Troy’s fall as told by the same man. The point is emphatically made in lines 458–​61 where, upon seeing Priam attacked by the sons of Atreus and Achilles, Aeneas stops in his tracks (constitit, 459) and addresses Achates with his famous lacrimae rerum (“tears of things”) expostulation, at the center of which he says, “look, there’s Priam!” (461). Though the image it conjures cannot be aligned with any specific moment in the Iliad, or in the larger tradition of “Homeric” poems, line 458, the line where Aeneas first catches sight of Priam, sketches a picture of the old man beset on both sides by hostile Greek forces, stuck between the sons of Atreus at the front of the line and Achilles at the line-​end (Atridas, Priamumque, et saeuum ambobus Achillem). The line, a compositional instantiation of both the content and visual layout of what Aeneas has zoomed in on, is a remake of line 7 of the Iliad, where Homer sets the same names at opposite ends of the line to create an aurally spatialized demonstration of the mutual hatred of Agamemnon and Achilles (Ἀτρείδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ

10. Schiesaro 2015: 168. 11. Elsewhere in the Aeneid one encounters demons and monsters (e.g., Allecto and Cacus) who relish unreservedly, and unproblematically, in mayhem and pain, but not humans.

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δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς, Il. 1.7).12 So great is their hatred for one another that these two men can barely be contained by the same line of hexameter verse. In Homer’s version, it is as if the two men push outward to occupy opposite sides of a room that hems them in. So visceral is their hatred of one another. In Virgil’s remake, the sons of Atreus (Agamemnon and Menelaus) and Achilles, though still at opposite ends of the line, still hating each other that much, push toward the center, bearing down on the old king. Their savagery toward Priam, it seems, is the one thing that they can, as it were, come together on. This rapid first sighting by Aeneas of a frail old man at the center of the violence that destroyed his world, his pouncing on that particular scene, sets the tone for the entire ecphrasis that follows, where the emphasis is on the nefarious cruelty of the Greeks, and fighters wildly mismatched (more on this below). His camerawork tells us how Aeneas centers his account of Troy’s fall, putting emphasis exactly where, as we have seen, he puts it in book 2: on the death of Priam.

3.2.  Aeneas the Neoteric Like an establishing shot in film, the opening of the ecphrasis lays out the general scene, giving a sense of where we are and putting some of the main characters in place. Having scanned the bigger picture, Aeneas then proceeds to zoom in on specific details (1.469–​87): Nec procul hinc Rhesi niveis tentoria velis adgnoscit lacrimans, primo quae prodita somno Tydides multa vastabat caede cruentus, ardentisque avertit equos in castra, prius quam pabula gustassent Troiae Xanthumque bibissent. Parte alia fugiens amissis Troilus armis, infelix puer atque impar congressus Achilli, fertur equis, curruque haeret resupinus inani, lora tenens tamen; huic cervixque comaeque trahuntur per terram, et versa pulvis inscribitur hasta. Interea ad templum non aequae Palladis ibant crinibus Iliades passis peplumque ferebant, suppliciter tristes et tunsae pectora palmis;

12. For other examples of the device used to suggest that the persons named are viscerally opposed to one another, see Freudenburg 2021 ad Hor. S. 2.4.554.

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diva solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat. Ter circum Iliacos raptaverat Hectora muros, exanimumque auro corpus vendebat Achilles. Tum vero ingentem gemitum dat pectore ab imo, ut spolia, ut currus, utque ipsum corpus amici, tendentemque manus Priamum conspexit inermis. Next, not far from this, tears welling, he recognizes the tents of Rhesus, their canvases white as snow. Having been betrayed right as sleep fell, the son of Tydeus was laying waste to them, covered in blood-​red gore. Then he makes off with the horses, blazing toward the Greek camp, before they could taste the grasses of Troy and drink from the river Xanthus. In another part, Troilus was running away, having left his weapons behind. Unlucky boy, he was no match for Achilles in battle. He is swept away by his horses and, flat on his back, clings to the empty chariot. Even so, he holds on to the reins. His neck and hair are dragged across the ground, and with the blunt end of his spear he inscribes the dust. Meanwhile the women of Troy, their hair let loose, were approaching Athena’s temple. She was no longer on their side. To supplicate her, they brought a cloak, and in sorrow they beat chests with hands. But the goddess turned away and kept her eyes fixed on the ground. Three times Achilles had dragged Hector around the walls of Troy, and he was selling his lifeless body for gold. At this point, Aeneas issues a heavy groan from deep in his chest, when he sees the spoils, the chariot, the corpse of his friend, and Priam stretching out weaponless hands. Once again, it all leads up to Priam. As mentioned previously, Aeneas sees only the worst of the worst: defenseless soldiers slaughtered in their sleep (Rhesus); a young, unarmed boy (Troilus) killed in an ambush by the greatest Greek warrior; disheveled elderly women (led by Hecuba) begging for mercy from an unmerciful god; Hector’s corpse abused, and Priam begging for the return of his son’s body. There are no beautiful deaths here. And if gods are strangely absent from the story that Aeneas tells, so are heroes, their brave deeds, and their noble causes. The bloodthirsty and anti-​heroic patterning of Aeneas’ account is easy to spot. But other patterns lurk under the surface that have much to tell us about why, out of ten years’ worth of war, Aeneas chooses to dwell on these specific scenes, and not others. The first of these hidden patterns was spotted already by Servius. In his comment on the words ex ordine (“in their sequential order”) in line 456, Servius writes:

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Hoc loco ostendit omnem pugnam esse depictam, sed haec tantum dicit quae aut Diomedes gessit aut Achilles, per quod excusatur Aeneas, si est a fortibus uictus. Here (Virgil) makes clear that the entire battle (for Troy) was depicted. But he tells only of those deeds that Diomedes or Achilles carried out because Aeneas is free of blame if he has been beaten by brave/​strong men. Once again, Servius finds Virgil attempting to exonerate his hero, pointing out that Aeneas can be excused for having lost the war if the warriors who defeated him were the best of the best: Diomedes and Achilles. Whether we choose to validate this explanation or not, there can be no doubt that at the core of Servius’ note is an astute insight: every event of the Trojan war that we are given to see by the ecphrasis is one in which either Diomedes or Achilles takes center stage as the lead doer of some cruel and/​or devious deed. This is true of Memnon and Penthesilea as well, who will round out the ecphrasis in the lines just beyond the ones I have quoted above (see below). Both were killed by Achilles. But Servius says nothing about the specific personal connection that links Aeneas to the fighters he names: these are the very men whom, on two separate occasions in books 5 and 20 of the Iliad (see the previous chapter), Aeneas had the temerity to challenge one-​on-​one, only to be easily outmatched. In both cases Aeneas is quickly wounded, then swept from the field of battle by gods who want him to survive. They receive special attention not merely because they are the best of the Greek best, but because they are most relevant to Aeneas himself: each had decisively beaten him, and it was because of them that he became the epic’s problematic quadruple Houdini. Their encounters with Aeneas had left an indelible stain on his reputation.13 Aeneas might have prevented some of what he sees, but he was not up to the job. But there is another hidden thread connecting the events that Aeneas focuses on that has to do not with their unheroic qualities per se, but with how they were handled by ancient scholars. All four of the scenes zoomed in on by Aeneas were discussed as problematic in some respect by ancient scholars. The first scene, picturing Diomedes murdering his way through Rhesus’ campsite, refers to events of Iliad 10, the so-​called Doloneia episode that featured Odysseus and Diomedes venturing out on a night raid in order to gain information and, for good measure, murdering huge numbers of enemies in their sleep and stealing their horses.

13. Cf. Aen. 12.52–​53 where Turnus construes Aeneas’ escape from Diomedes as mommy coming to the rescue of a cowardly son, within a larger discourse demeaning the Trojans as soft, effeminate, and slaves of autocratic rule.

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Given its unheroic contents, the book was bracketed as questionably Homeric by some ancient scholars, though apparently not by Hellenistic Alexandria’s most famous critic, Aristarchus.14 Concerning the second scene, depicting the young Trojan prince, Troilus, dragged behind his chariot, R. D. Williams points out that Troilus’ death was one of a “series of divine omens, portents, and prophecies associated with the doom of the city” and that three of the four scenes that capture Aeneas’ attention to form the center of his description are in some way ordained by fate as precursors to the city’s fall.15 Fate had it that, in order for Troy to fall: the horses of Rhesus must not drink from the river Xanthus; Minerva’s statue (the palladium) must be captured by the Greeks; Troilus must die. While Aeneas latches onto these scenes and centers his attention on them, it is not clear that he sees any of the divine necessity that they entail. In the early books of the Aeneid, before he is taken on the eye-​opening underworld tour of book 6, Aeneas is variously confused by and/​or oblivious of the big divine plan that centers on him. He tends to see the ruination of his life as he sees the events depicted on the frieze: as a godless mistake, indecipherable as the workings of a divine plan. The death of Troilus, a young son of Priam, brother of Polyxena (Achilles will kill her as well), presented a different problem for ancient scholars of Homer. The episode was related in the Cypria, a lost epic poem that began the series of “Homeric” prequels and sequels that constituted the so-​called Epic Cycle.16 The Cypria covered events that preceded those of Homer’s Iliad. One of the last events covered by the poem was Troilus’ death at the hands of Achilles. Drawing on the Cypria, numerous renderings of the scene in Greek art from the sixth century on depict Troilus as a very young man with long flowing hair. Some show Achilles fully armed, hiding in ambush and waiting to pounce as Troilus leads his horses to water. Some depictions have Achilles dragging Troilus by the hair to a nearby altar. As a visual template engrained in the minds of readers who imagine as they read, Achilles’ “sacrificial” slaughter of Troilus produces a chiasm in Virgil’s account of Priam’s death: “Achilles, father of Pyrrhus, sacrifices Priam’s son, Troilus,” becomes “Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, sacrifices Priam, Troilus’ father.” But, as if to stamp Achilles’ signature cruelty on yet another killing of one of

14. For the Doloneia in Alexandrian scholarship, see Bierl 2012: 140–​42. 15. Williams 1960: 149. 16. On the relevance of Cyclical epic to the scenes depicted on the frieze, see Barchiesi 1997: 273–​74 and 1999: 333–​34.

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Priam’s sons, Virgil’s reference to Troilus’ being dragged behind his chariot seems to be his own invention.17 The issue concerning Troilus that occupied some ancient scholars of Homer is this: in book 24 of the Iliad, when Priam laments the loss of so many sons cut down by Achilles, he mentions Troilus in line 257 (the only time that Troilus is mentioned in the Iliad) referring to him as ἱπποχάρμης, an epithet that can reasonably be taken to mean either “horse lover” or “fighter on horseback.” If one takes it to mean the latter, Troilus is being lamented not as a child, but as a warrior in his prime. The problem was picked up by the Aristarchan scholiast (Schol. A. ad Il. 24.257): Τρωΐλον ἱππιοχάρμην—​ὅτι ἐκ τοῦ εἰρῆσ θαι ἱππιοχάρμην τὸν Τρωΐλον οἱ νεώτεροι ἐφ’ ἵππου διωκόμενον αὐτὸν ἐποίησαν. καὶ οἱ μὲν παῖδα αὐτὸν ὑποτίθενται, Ὅμηρος δὲ διὰ τοῦ ἐπιθέτου τέλειον ἄνδρα ἐμφαίνει· οὐ γὰρ ἄλλος ἱππόμαχος λέγεται. Troilus fighter on horseback: [this phrase is marked as problematic] because from his being called Troilus fighter on horseback the neoterics have made him pursued while riding a horse. And while they hypothesize that he was a boy, Homer indicates with the epithet that he was a grown man, for no one else is called a horse-​battler [by him]. Other issues notwithstanding, the main problem has to do with Troilus’ age. Virgil has to make a choice: is he to describe Troilus as a mere boy, as the painters and poets subsequent to Homer (the “neoterics”) had it? Or is he to be treated as a grown man, as Homer seems to imply? Virgil goes hard in the direction of the neoterics by designating him, quite emphatically, an “unlucky boy” (infelix puer, 475), adding that he was completely outmatched by Achilles. The third of the four scenes that capture Aeneas’ attention recalls an event from the sixth book of Homer’s Iliad. Trojan women offer a cloak not to Minerva (Athena), but to the cult statue of the goddess inside her temple on the Trojan citadel. Oddly, the statue is said to turn away and keep her eyes fixed on the ground, as if the women were standing before the living goddess herself rather than a cult statue. Something similar happens in Homer’s original as well. Having asked the goddess to put an end to Diomedes’ rampage, the priestess, Theano, offers a cloak before Athena’s cult statue. Homer then adds (Il. 6.311): ὣς ἔφατ’ εὐχομένη, ἀνένευε δὲ Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη (“So she spoke in prayer, but Pallas Athena

17. Clausen 2002: 32: “The figure of Achilles dominates these scenes: ‘Achillem’ (458), ‘Achilles’ (468), ‘Achilli’ (475), ‘Achilles’ (484).”

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gave a nod of refusal”). The line was “athetized” by the famous Alexandrian scholar, Aristarchus; that is, he marked it as likely spurious, suspecting that it had been added to Homer’s original by a later hand. The notes of the A scholiast on Homer Iliad 6.311 record Aristarchus’ objections, indicating that he thought the line needlessly repetitious and uncharacteristic of Homer. As a parting summation, the commentator adds: “the idea of Athena nodding in refusal is ridiculous” (γελοία).18 The unspoken implication is that gods and goddesses nod (the example of Il. 1.527 is cited by the scholion) but their statues do not.19 The fourth scene in the set finds Aeneas looking at events that are covered in book 24 of the Iliad, where Zeus puts an end to Achilles’ unrelenting abuse of Hector’s corpse by demanding (via Thetis, Achilles’ mother) that he return the body to Priam for a proper burial. Concerning line 483, where Virgil/​Aeneas describes Achilles dragging Hector’s corpse around the walls of Troy, R. D. Williams notes in his commentary that, according to the Iliad, Achilles does not drag Hector’s corpse around the city of Troy, but around the tomb of Patroclus. To explain this discrepancy, he adds that “Virgil follows a later Greek version (Eur. Andr. 107f.) which emphasizes even more the cruelty of Achilles.” As was the case with Aeneas’ description of Troilus’s death, analyzed above, Aeneas’ description of the abuse of Hector’s corpse draws upon a post-​Homeric version of the story that put even more emphasis on an already emphatic level of cruelty meted out by Achilles. This time the reference is not to an Iliadic prequel, but to a Euripidean tragedy. In lines 107–​8 of the Andromache she, the grieving widow of Hector, asserts: τὸν περὶ τείχη | εἵλκυσε διφρεύων παῖς ἁλίας Θέτιδος (“the child of the sea goddess, Thetis, dragged him along as he drove his chariot around the city walls”). The perspective is that of the battered and aggrieved. Departing even more radically from the account of Iliad 24 is Aeneas’ version of the negotiation that took place between Priam and Achilles for the return of Hector’s body. The basics of the fabula are all there, but the syuzhet is altogether gutted of decency. As seen by Aeneas, what took place between Priam and his son’s killer was nothing more than a cold-​hearted financial transaction: Achilles making a killing off of his slaughter of Hector by taking advantage of the desperation of a helpless old man. It was precisely this “avaricious” aspect of Achilles’ interactions with Priam in Iliad 24 that Plato’s Socrates found so objectionable and worthy of censure. At Republic 390e, in the midst of a long list of morally 18. For Aristarchus’ objections to the passage, see Barchiesi 1998: 131, and Hunter 2018: 151. 19. Niehoff 2007: 181: “In his view it becomes Homer to ascribe to a deity a literal nodding in the case of assent, as he did in Il. 1.527 . . . on the other hand, a statue moving her head back also appeared ridiculous.” For Aeneas’ reception of the scene as a prophecy of Troy’s divinely ordained annihilation, see Barchiesi 1998: 132.

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opprobrious and undisciplined behaviors exhibited by Achilles in the Iliad, a list that includes his dragging Hector’s corpse around Patroclus’ tomb (391b), Socrates says to Adeimantus: “We will neither deem Achilles worthy of it, nor will we admit that he was so avaricious (οὕτω φιλοχρήματον) as to take gifts from Agamemnon and, even more, to accept payment for a corpse.” Aeneas reads the Iliad’s end the way Plato, one of Homer’s harshest critics, had his Socrates read it. In the one and only place in the Iliad where Homer describes Achilles connecting with the feelings of someone else and acting with compassion rather than rage, Aeneas sees only crass venality. In Homer’s account, Achilles has gained some perspective on his rage by the Iliad’s end. He shares Priam’s pain and behaves decently toward him, knowing that he himself will soon die. None of this comes through in Aeneas’ account.20 Much more could be said about the many hidden trends that run through Aeneas’ account of what he sees on the temple wall, but I will limit myself to one last point concerning the way that the events focused on by Aeneas foreshadow those to come in the second half of the Aeneid, where new characters can be found playing the old parts. As Steven Lowenstam has pointed out, the things that Aeneas takes out of sequence from his Trojan past are re-​encountered as the sequence of the poem’s second half: the Doloneia looks forward to the night raid of Nisus and Euryalus in book 9; the slaughter of Troilus looks forward to the deaths of Pallas and Lausus, young sons of devastated fathers, in book 10; the supplication of Athena/​Minerva by the Trojan women foreshadows Amata and the Italian matrons supplicating Minerva in book 11; and Priam’s supplication of Achilles foreshadows Turnus’ final entreaty of Aeneas in book 12.21 As at least two of these connections make clear (Penthesilea will add another; see below) if Aeneas indulges his hatred of Achilles to the full as he looks up at the frieze, brooding over “that man’s” many nefarious deeds, he does so not realizing that he himself will take on the alius Achilles (“another/​different Achilles”) role in the poem’s second half, sharing it in turns with his Rutulian enemy, Turnus.22

20. On Achilles censured as a problematic by ancient scholars, who deemed him self-​absorbed, violent, intransigent, etc., see Farrell 2021: passim, esp. 77–​81. 21. See Lowenstam 1993: 44–​48. Aeneas hates Achilles with all his soul as he pores over what he sees, not realizing that he will step into Achilles’ shoes in the epic’s second half, sharing the alius Achilles (“another/​different Achilles”) role with Turnus, and that he and his Trojans will do things that are every bit as horrendous as those pictured on the frieze. Beware of who you hate, because “he” might end up being “you.” 22. Quint 2018: 13: “In Books 10-​12, the roles are exchanged: it becomes clear that Aeneas himself is the true new Achilles of the poem.” The idea is first developed in full by Anderson 1957. In the case of the Italian matrons supplicating Minerva, he becomes an alius Tydides (“another/​ different Diomedes”).

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Given the horrors that these scenes foreshadow, many of which will be meted out by Aeneas and/​or his Trojan soldiers, his response to them produces a dramatic irony (the realization that we know more than he himself does) that warns against hating too glibly, because “that monstrous and irredeemable man” whom you loathe up there might end up being “you.” Such a switching of roles, and the larger interchangeability of “good guys” with “bad guys” that it entails, warns against landing too comfortably on any one side in in this poem. One final word on the problems that the temple ecphrasis presents to us, as onlookers who ponder for ourselves the grim reminders of his past that Aeneas gives us to see. In working through the many oversights and exaggerations that clutter Aeneas’ account of his past, we come to realize just how problematic, personally angled, and partial Aeneas’ account is. Because we happen to know things about these events that do not line up with what Aeneas (tendentiously, despairingly, bitterly) “remembers” of them, we sense that there is much more to be said about them than he is telling us; that the meanings he assigns to them are his, willed into convenience by the post-​traumatic story he needs to tell.23 As with the frieze, so with the Aeneid itself: meanings big and small depend on what you choose to focus on and play up as meaningful, and what else you choose to downplay, discredit, and/​or ignore. By showing us how this is done, Aeneas reflects us back to ourselves as we peer in on him as he reads, remembers, and reacts. Inside the war narrative that we read, we watch Aeneas reading a narrative of war. He is our mirror image. And there, in the mirror that he holds up to us, we see him not getting the story “wrong” so much as getting it to align; that is, to line up with what he knows and feels, and how he thinks the world works. In so doing, he shows us a reflection of ourselves willing this massive and complex story into convenience for ourselves, as we readers of the Aeneid have always done.

3.3.  Duces Feminae: Fade to Dido Picking up from the lines quoted above, the temple ecphrasis continues as follows (Aen. 1.488–​503): Se quoque principibus permixtum adgnovit Achivis, Eoasque acies et nigri Memnonis arma. Ducit Amazonidum lunatis agmina peltis

23. On “Romantic irony” having to do with readers being made aware of the failure of texts (even texts that “say I”) to contain selves in anything other than absurdly reduced forms, see Fowler 1994: 9, and Freudenburg 2010: 274–​76.

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Penthesilea furens, mediisque in milibus ardet, aurea subnectens exsertae cingula mammae, bellatrix, audetque viris concurrere virgo. Haec dum Dardanio Aeneae miranda videntur, dum stupet, obtutuque haeret defixus in uno, regina ad templum, forma pulcherrima Dido, incessit magna iuvenum stipante caterva. Qualis in Eurotae ripis aut per iuga Cynthi exercet Diana choros, quam mille secutae hinc atque hinc glomerantur oreades; illa pharetram fert umero, gradiensque deas supereminet omnis: Latonae tacitum pertemptant gaudia pectus: talis erat Dido, talem se laeta ferebat per medios. Himself as well, mixed in among the Achaean leaders, he recognizes, and troops from the east, and the arms of black Memnon. In a wild frenzy, Penthesilea leads troops of Amazon fighters with half-​moon shields, and in the midst of thousands she stands out brightly. Gold is the belt she cinches up under her exposed breast, she, a woman warrior, and a mere girl who dares to clash with men. While Aeneas looks upon these things in amazement, while he gapes, nailed to the spot in wide-​eyed gazing, the queen makes an entrance into the temple, Dido of the very lovely body, packed amid a huge troop of young men. Just as when Diana trains her dancers on the banks of the Eurotas or across the peaks of Mount Cynthus, and thousands of mountain-​nymphs follow and coalesce around her on this side and that, she carries a quiver on her shoulder, and as she walks she stands out above all the other goddesses. In her heart, Latona silently shudders with joy. Such was the impression Dido made, and in just this way did she delight in moving among them. The ecphrasis does not conclude. Rather, it breaks off with Aeneas dwelling on events that follow those of the Iliad but precede the fall of Troy proper. Dido’s entry pulls his attention away from the frieze toward her, an eye-​catching spectacle of transcendent power, beauty, and confidence. Of the last three persons observed by Aeneas before Dido arrives, two are acknowledged as “there,” but nothing is made of them, while the third absorbs his attention in great detail. As the first member of this lopsided trio, Aeneas sees himself “mixed in among” the Greek leaders (permixtum, 488). The language is vague, giving no clear indication of what Aeneas sees himself doing up there,

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blending in with his enemies. In his note on the line, Servius explains that the line either secretly touches on Aeneas’ betrayal of Troy (thus implying that Aeneas joins in with the Greeks), or that Virgil demonstrates Aeneas’ bravery by showing him under enemy fire (inter hostium tela versari). One could construe these same options differently: as a case of “both . . . and” rather than “either . . . or.” In either case, whatever Aeneas sees happening up there, he chooses not to dwell on it. His encounter with his own doings is oddly short-​shrifted.24 The two remaining members of the trio are Memnon and Penthesilea. Both of these exotic leaders of foreign troops were featured as stars in the “Homeric” Cyclical poem known as the Aethiopis, relating events that followed directly after those of the Iliad. Again, just as we saw with the Cypria, the poem was widely known in antiquity and its main events were much depicted in art, but almost nothing of the poem itself survives (a mere four fragments, with ample testimonia). According to what can be reassembled of their stories, Memnon and Penthesilea come late to the battle from the far ends of the earth: Memnon from Ethiopia, and Penthesileia from Scythia. Priam summons them to Troy after the death of Hector in a last-​ditch effort to save his city. Both bring their armies to Troy and fight valiantly for Priam’s cause: Memnon kills Antilochus, and some ancient sources have Penthesilea killing Machaon. But, in the end, both are cut down by Achilles. Their deaths evoked intense mourning even from the gods. As we saw in the previous chapter, the story theme around which ancient artists converged in depicting these heroes was not their fighting, but their dying at the feet of Achilles. Aeneas, in viewing the frieze, does not reach that common endpoint of their stories. He sees them at the front-​end of their stories, still leading their troops into the fight. And that is where Dido arrives, powerfully resembling them as she leads her Carthaginian throng, herself (like them) the very picture of exotic beauty and outstanding leadership. At the moment when Dido enters, Aeneas is staring intently at Penthesilea, the leader of the Amazon troops. First she catches his eye as a bright splash of frenzied battle-​rage, a leader who “burns bright among thousands of fighters” (mediisque in milibus ardet, 491). As with the snow-​white tents of Rhesus above, it is the brightness of Penthesilea’s depiction on the frieze that grabs Aeneas’ attention and draws him in for a closer look. Aeneas then zooms in to examine a 24. If Aeneas sees himself up there in the “late-​arriving” company of Memnon and Penthesilea, it may be because his own story is somehow wrapped up with theirs in ways that we can no longer understand. Whether or not that is the case, it is clear that the most famous moment of his own story, his iconic rescue of his father, son, and the tutelary gods of Troy, itself much represented in ancient art, takes place in the very last stages of the war. It makes sense that Aeneas should find himself there, among the latecomers, rather than earlier on, where his deeds are less noteworthy, and dulled by a certain tarnish.

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particularly bright feature glinting from her body: a belt of gold that keeps one breast covered, and the other exposed. The syntax of Virgil’s Latin here is wonderfully suggestive, with the spatial arrangement of the words serving as a metaphor for the spatial disposition of the young warrior herself. Line 492 features an artfully interlocked double-​hyperbaton, with the word for “golden” linking up to the word “belt” just in from the end of the line (aurea . . . cingula), and the word for “sticking out” linking up to “breast” at the line’s end (exsertae . . . mammae). In making the required connection between the words “golden” and “belt,” you see that the word for breast remains outside of the ligature (aurea subnectens exsertae cingula mammae), “jutting out” much too eye-​catchingly at the line end, just as it does on the girl herself. That is where Aeneas is staring, wide-​eyed, amazed, when Dido walks onto the scene. He is staring at Penthesilea’s breast. Virgil uses an especially strong verb of looking (obtueor) to suggest that Aeneas has by this point crossed the line that separates looking from ogling. The sexualizing of his gaze is further enhanced by the slowing effects of the line’s artfully interlocked pattern, which causes one to pause over it and take it in as a discrete work of art (a cinematic “freeze-​frame”). Such verbal qua visual special effects draw us into the emotional experience of Aeneas’ desire right as the story is about to make a big change in precisely that direction. As the hero stares at an exotic young Amazon leader with an artfully exposed breast, just as he allows himself to zoom in on her and freeze his gaze on her breast, he is shaken out of his reverie by the entrance of Dido surrounded by her own troop of young men. The first impression we have of Dido comes by way of a quasi-​Homeric formula: “Dido of the extremely lovely shape/​body” (forma pulcherrima Dido). The emphasis is on her striking physical beauty, not because that is crucial information we need to know, but because that is what first strikes Aeneas when he transfers his lingering gaze from Penthesilea to Dido.25 The formula does not so much inform us about Dido as it tells us where Aeneas’ eyes are now, and how his eyes have caught sight of her. It cues us to where this story is headed. Memnon dies at the very end of the Aethiopis, while Penthesilea dies somewhere earlier on in the epic. Had this been about their deaths, Aeneas’ last sighting should have been of Memnon rather than Penthesilea. But Aeneas sees them leading their troops into battle and still fighting. They have yet to encounter Achilles. Although Penthesilea is the daughter of Ares and Memnon the son of Eos (Dawn), Achilles kills them both. But in Penthesilea’s case, Achilles 25. Moskalew 1982: 77, n. 12: “The striking emphasis on Dido’s physical beauty echoes the offer of the nymph to Aeolus: forma pulcherrima Deiopeiae (1.72), and thereby hints at the role Dido is soon to play.”

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winds up being both her killer and her would-​be lover—​a fate that, according to some versions of the Troilus myth, she shares with Troilus (a youth of ἐρόεσσα μορφά “desirable shape/​body,” according to Ibycus).26 Stunned by her beauty, Achilles falls madly in love with Penthesilea right as he kills her. Their story of star-​crossed love had many creative tellings, and their last (perhaps their only) significant moment together, each staring in the other’s eyes right as Achilles leans into her with his sword, was one of the most popular themes of Greek and Roman art.27 Aeneas studies Penthesilea not at her death, but in her prime, as an exotic dux femina (“woman leader”) amid her troops. Thus, as Dido enters the frame and catches Aeneas’ attention, we observe one picture, that of the attractive Amazon, surrounded by her fighters, but shining out from among them, fading out, right as another picture, that of Dido of the very lovely body, surrounded by her attendants, but standing out above them, comes into view. The film equivalent of this visual changeover is called a “match cut” transition (see Appendix, item 7). That is, a transition from one shot to another shot that matches it in its action and/​or overall composition (as, for example, in the opening scene of Schindler’s List, where the smoke rising from the prayer candle transitions to [as if to become] the smoke rising from the train).28 Such transitions are commonly used to imply that hidden connections underlie the two scenes. The device itself does not make these connections. Rather, it cues us to draw them. That, I suggest, is what the device prompts us to do here. Many have seen this (the several formal and thematic similarities that link the two scenes are not hard to spot), and many have drawn meaningful connections from the “match cut” transition from Penthesilea to Dido.29 But there is one further effect of the artful transition that still deserves to be underscored, because it is so easily overlooked: in moving from one image to another that matches it both thematically and in formal layout, the visual transition prompts us not only to make connections between Penthesilea and Dido, but to carry forward Aeneas’ emotional

26. See Fantuzzi 2012: 15–​16. 27. For ancient sources on Penthesilea and Achilles, see Clausen 2002: 33, n. 19. 28. For match cut transitions as one of numerous “hooks” that carry forward some element at the end of one shot/​scene into the next, thus allowing viewers both to glide over boundaries and make meaningful connections between disparate story units, see Bordwell 2008. On the cognitive work performed by viewers in making sense of these transitions both as bridges and boundaries (aiding viewers in the process of segmentation), see Cutting-​Armstrong 2019. 29. See esp. Hardie 2014b: 51–​52, describing Aeneas as an interpreter/​reader within the text.

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investment in what he sees, as he transfers his lingering gaze from Penthesilea to Dido. He first sees Dido as he last saw Penthesilea, as an object of striking physical beauty. But he then goes on to note her effortless confidence as a leader, and the way that she is thronged by those who look up to her for guidance (note the vertical spacing). One lovely impassioned dux femina ensconced among a throng of followers blurs into another. But so does Aeneas’ emotional investment in what he sees: the precise way he lingers over Penthesilea on the frieze blurs into, and becomes, his first sighting of Dido. As I have suggested above, this is not “love” at first sight so much as it is “carnal fascination” at first sight (more on this below).30 But along with that fascination, and much to his credit, Aeneas sees more than an attractive body. As a further impression “carried over” from his observation of Penthesilea, he notes the way that Dido is fully in her element as a leader. But there is one other thing here: a foreboding of tragic consequences ahead that is not signaled in any way by Aeneas’ gaze because, given where his study of the frieze breaks off, it is not on his mind. Instead, this sense of future doom is something that we ourselves supply from our own further memories or Penthesilea’s story, perhaps already knowing what lies ahead for Dido and Aeneas. By far the most famous aspect of Penthesilea’s story is her tragic death at the hands of Achilles, a man whom she hates and wants dead, but whom she also, in the end, cannot resist loving from the bottom of her soul. What happened to her will, in its own new (once again chiastically reversed) way, blur its way forward into the life of Dido, the capable and confident queen who is soon to be done in by the beguiling and irresistibly loathsome man who is just about to step out of the temple’s shadow and into her life. Her Achilles is about to arrive.

30. As pointed out by Hardie 2002: 260–​61, the simile that describes Tereus’ first sighting of Philomela at Ovid Met. 6.451–​54 (“his lawless desire . . . fired by the vision of Philomela’s entry . . . lust at first sight’) strongly recalls the simile describing Aeneas’ first sighting of Dido in Aeneid 1.496–​503. In a subsequent study (Hardie 2014a: 70) he argues that “the violent flaring of lust in the watching Tereus brings out into the open what I believe is concealed in the Virgilian narrative of Dido’s first entry, the erotic effect on the watching Aeneas of this vision of glamorous female beauty.” As Starnone 2020: 157 points out, “nessun passaggio narrativo registra lo spostamento dello sguardo dell’eroe dalla pictura su cui è concentrato alla regina che Avanza verso il tempio”; cf. Fernandelli 1998: 170 “non una parola descrive esplicitamente la reazione psicologica dell’eroe all’apparire della regina.” Unlike Statius’ remake of the simile at Achilleid 1.293–​303 (a passage that makes explicit reference to Achilles’ catching sight of Deidamia then reacting powerfully to what he sees, leaving nothing to the imagination of the reader), Virgil’s more reticent approach requires readers to fill in for what Virgil leaves unsaid by “letting Aeneas’ gaze shift suddenly from the image of Penthesilea . . . to the matching real-​ life figure of the queen . . . to imply the transference to Dido of the hero’s amazement and admiration” (quoting Harrison 1989: 9–​10, n. 29). As an unsignaled, “associative transition from one regina to another,” see Heerink 2014: 77.

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As a sign of the intensity with which Aeneas studies Dido as he lingers upon her at the center of her grand entrance, the simile that structures her entry in terms of Diana’s advancing among her nymphs is impressively long. As we saw in ­chapter 1, the longer the visual simile, the more concentrated and all-​consuming the gaze. Scholars in antiquity found much to dislike about the simile—​rarely do they agree with such shared enthusiasm when it comes to deeming something badly done by Virgil.31 They all recognized the simile as a remake of Homer Od. 6.102–​9 where, in first catching sight of the Phaeacian princess, Nausikaa, playing ball with her friends, Homer/​Odysseus compares her to the goddess Artemis (Diana) advancing down the slopes of a high mountain, surrounded by her nymphs, and standing head-​and-​shoulders above them, causing her mother, Leto, to “delight in her heart” (γεγήθε δὲ τε φρένα Λητώ, Od. 6.106). Scholars deemed the simile beautifully suited to its original context in Homer, but a bad fit for the Aeneid, because Dido was no young virgin princess, nor was she playing with her friends in some remote spot. They cite other reasons as well, all of which have to do with the simile’s having been well done in Homer, but badly adapted by Virgil.32 Many modern scholars have taken issue with their ancient counterparts by drawing point-​by-​point connections (“multiple correspondences” in the by-​now famous coinage of David West33) between the simile and its new context in Virgil.34 They have shown the great care that Virgil takes in fitting the old image to its new frame by emphasizing the new ways that it fits rather than the old ways it does not. Matching Homer point-​for-​point, as if to replicate him, was never the point. But Damien Nelis has taken things in an entirely new direction by pointing out that the simile is not merely a remake of Homer’s famous simile in Odyssey 6, but a remake doubly focused, based in equal parts on Odysseus’ first sighting of Nausikaa, and on the remake of that same simile by Apollonius at Argonautica 3.876–​90: as Jason waits in the temple of Hecate for Medea to arrive, where they will meet in person for the first time, Medea sets out for the temple surrounded by her attendants, looking just like Diana surrounded by her nymphs as they

31. See Gellius 9.9.17, but note that Servius ad 497 takes Virgil’s critics to task for not understanding that similes do not have to agree point for point. 32. On the disapproval of ancient scholars, see Thornton 1985, Heslin 2005: 94–​97, and Starnone 2020: 163, 178–​204. 33. West 1969. 34. For the long history of scholars defending Virgil against what La Cerda dubbed the calumnia Probi, see Starnone 2020: 163–​204.

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accompany her chariot as she rides from her bath in the waters of the Parthenius river, or the Amnisus, to attend a festival in her honor.35 The hero waits in a scary foreign temple for the exotic royal woman (soon to be his lover) to arrive. Virgil gets that from Apollonius, not from Homer. What looks like a bad adaptation of Homer’s simile ends up being a good adaptation of Apollonius’ remake of that simile. Many such two-​tiered correspondences (that is, from Homer through Apollonius) lurk within Virgil’s simile, but among the more telling of these is Virgil’s naming of two possible locations for Diana’s nymph-​wrapped activities: either on the banks of the Eurotas, or on the peaks of Mount Cynthus.36 The first is a river in Sparta, and the second a mountain on the island of Delos. In his version of the simile, Homer locates Artemis’ hunting expedition on either of two mountains in wilds of southern Greece: Erymanthus in Elis or Taygetus near Sparta. For his part, Apollonius locates her bathing in either of two rivers, the Parthenius in Anatolia, or the Amnisus in Crete. He then describes her mounting a chariot to ride to a festival in her honor, attended by her nymphs, and riding high above them. As if to split the difference between these two earlier versions (two mountains in Homer, two rivers in Apollonius), Virgil names one river and one mountain peak. In addition, departing from both earlier versions of the simile, he describes Diana neither hunting nor bathing/​riding, but training her nymphs in sacred dance. By doing this, as we will see shortly, Virgil puts things into play that he will pick up on later in book 4, in a bookend simile of “the sighting of the beautiful beloved” that features a child of Leto on the slopes of Mount Cynthus, and a chorus of sacred dancers. Much of this may seem pedantic. But the point I want to make with all of this has to do not with the complicated literary background of the simile per se, but with what the simile does by evoking the wildly divided memories that it calls to mind. By mixing the imagery of two very different sources, that is, by pulling us in two opposite directions as we try to bring into focus what we are being given to see, the simile poses a fundamental question: who is Dido, the person inside the lovely form, whom we are now catching sight of for the first time? That is, how are we to think of her as someone with insides, given the conflicting signals of the simile that describes her? Is she an innocent Nausikaa, a beautiful young princess, piously devoted to her city, parents, and people, who helps the man she desires

35. On Virgil’s Dido-​Diana simile referring to models both in Homer and Apollonius, see Nelis 2001: 82–​86. That the simile was shared between Homer and Apollonius was noted already by Wilkins 1921: 170, n. 8, but the tendency has always been to focus only on the Homeric precedent. For a similar Homeric/​Apollonian intertextual blend, cf. the description of the Cyclopes manufacturing Jupiter’s thunderbolt at Aeneid 8.426–​32, on which see Casali 2006: 197–​98. 36. On the complex workings of “two-​tiered” allusions in Virgil, see Farrell 2021: 22–​25.

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but cannot have? Or is she a Medea, an exotic young princess, equally beautiful, who, overwhelmed by desires that she cannot control, turns against her family, her city, and people, to elope with her lover and spend her “wedding night” bedding down with him in a cave, and who, much later, once again undone by passions she cannot control, goes from being her lover’s helper to his hater and destroyer? By tugging in both directions simultaneously, the simile problematizes our perception of Dido from the very first moment she comes into view. It suggests that she is made of conflicted stuff (as real humans tend to be), and that whatever happens next with her might take a scary turn.

3.4.  Image Pairs: The Catullan Background Before ending this chapter, I would like to briefly examine the bookend simile of Aeneid 4, mentioned above, where the view that Aeneas takes of Dido as Diana is reciprocated by the view that she takes of him as Apollo. There is much to worry about in having things “pay off ” in this way; a rumbling of storms ahead. But before I get into the troubles signaled by what otherwise seems to be a very happy and optimistic simile, I would like to take a brief look at the visual structures of an earlier poem that had a profound influence on Virgil, not only on his portrayal of Dido as a character, but on his technique of balancing like images against one another to mark significant moments of opening and closure. The poem is Catullus 64, the so-​called epyllion (“little epic”) on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. It begins with the Argonauts sailing east with their captain, Jason, off to fetch the golden fleece. Having never seen a ship before, the goddesses of the sea rise up to see what’s going on. Standing on the prow of the Argo, Peleus takes one look at naked Thetis’ breasts and it is “love” at first sight (Catull. 64.12–​21): quae simul ac rostro ventosum proscidit aequor tortaque remigio spumis incanuit unda, emersere freti candenti e gurgite vultus aequoreae monstrum Nereides admirantes. illa, atque haud alia, viderunt luce marinas mortales oculis nudato corpore Nymphas nutricum tenus exstantes e gurgite cano. tum Thetidis Peleus incensus fertur amore, tum Thetis humanos non despexit hymenaeos, tum Thetidi pater ipse iugandum Pelea sensit. As soon as the ship cut into the windswept sea and the waters swirled white from the rowing of the oars, the daughters of Nereus raised their faces from

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the swirling foam, sea-​goddesses amazed at the monster. On that day, and never to happen again, with their eyes humans beheld nymphs of the sea, their bodies naked, rising from the white foam, all the way to their nipples. Right then Peleus was swept away, burning with love for Thetis. Right then, Thetis did not look down on marriage with a human. Right then, father Zeus himself decided that Peleus should be married to Thetis. From here we go immediately to their wedding, to the bed, to the coverlet on the bed, and then to the central panel on the coverlet, picturing Ariadne waking up on the beach, looking out at sea to catch one last glimpse of Jason sailing away. The transition from Peleus and Thetis to Theseus and Ariadne has a strong visual component, hinging on two carefully juxtaposed pictures: first we see the hero looking out from his ship, catching sight of a goddess standing out from the water, exposing her breasts. Then we behold an equally clothing-​challenged girl (Ariadne’s clothes have slipped off her body by this point) standing on the water’s edge looking out toward a hero departing in his ship. It is a visual chiasm, with one image (of “love” at first sight) fading out just as the other (of “love’s” last glance) fades in. The first mirrors the second as a proleptic mise en abyme. The word “love” is scare-​quoted above for a reason, perhaps already obvious. In ancient romance, the first thing to catch the young lover’s eyes upon unexpectedly sighting the girl of his dreams is not her breasts. Rather, he dwells on things higher up on her frame, then makes his way down to her beautiful white arms and ankles, decorously skipping over, or merely hinting at, whatever lovely features lie in between. Commonly it is the eyes that catch his attention (think of Propertius 1.1: Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis), not only because they are bright and beautiful, but because they are windows into the soul. The face, too, though a lovely feature of her physique, he studies for expressions of the person inside. He is smitten by the whole of her. Not so Peleus. He sees Thetis’ naked body and makes a visual beeline for her nipples. This is not the stuff of which deep and lasting relationships are made. It is the first indication of trouble ahead. Though Peleus and Thetis have the grandest of all weddings, their marriage quickly breaks apart because Thetis cannot tolerate the idea of being married to a human.37 But in that one instant, Catullus says, when she first laid eyes on Peleus, Thetis “did not look down on” (non despexit, 20) the idea of marrying a human. In using the verb despicere, Catullus toys with the picture he has just painted, which features Peleus looking down from the boat on her, and she looking up

37. Ormand 2004: 319: “In literature, Thetis always resents the fact that she has had to marry a mortal, Peleus.” See also Wasdin 2018: 157–​58, and Farrell 2021: 144.

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from the water at him. She, too, is instantly smitten, but her infatuation will not last. By debasing the decency codes of love at first sight, by immediately crossing the line that separates looking from leering, the opening picture hints at trouble ahead for Peleus and Thetis, and it looks forward to the picture that is its chiastic match on the cover of their marriage bed: Ariadne, in stunned disbelief, watching Theseus sail out of her life. Why picture a nasty breakup, love turning sour, recriminatory, even deadly, on a wedding bed? In the next chapter we will see wedding gifts functioning forebodingly, signaling trouble ahead for Aeneas and Dido, just as the wedding coverlet does here. But the more pressing point to be made concerns how Aeneas’ initial reaction to Dido resembles that of Theseus for Thetis, moving from Penthesilea’s exposed breast to Dido’s lovely body. He sees more of her than that, as mentioned above, but his first move is negatively coded and cannot be undone. As a bookend to the two mirror images that begin the ecphrasis, Catullus sets a second pair of matching images at its end by having the triumphal parade of Dionysus arriving to claim Ariadne as his bride give way to the wedding parade of Peleus and Thetis. All these visual manipulations, I suspect, are of an inter-​pictorial kind. That is, they depend on the preexistence of famous, canonical visual representations of the scenes they describe that anyone in Catullus’ audience could easily call before their mind’s eyes because they had seen them depicted many times in various artistic media. The images they conjure from the poem are keyed to visual memories that have been formed by mythological genre scenes. In fact, the depictions that open and close the ecphrasis, that of Ariadne waking up on shore, and that of Dionysus’ arriving to claim her, are two of the most common mythological depictions in the corpus of Roman wall painting.38

3.5.  Caving In to Desire: Dido’s Wedding Parade Although I have been using the metaphor of bookends throughout this chapter to describe the pairing of similes and the images they evoke, the more obvious metaphor for the payoff simile of Aeneid 4 is that of a twin sibling. Once again, as happens with its twin in book 1, the simile concludes a scene where Aeneas, this time as the standout member of a much larger crowd, patiently waits for Dido’s arrival. But in this case the focus turns from Dido, who dazzles onlookers at the head of a regal procession, to Aeneas as he steps forward to greet her. As follows (Aen. 4.133–​50):

38. See Elsner 2007.

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reginam thalamo cunctantem ad limina primi Poenorum exspectant, ostroque insignis et auro stat sonipes ac frena ferox spumantia mandit. tandem progreditur magna stipante caterva Sidoniam picto chlamydem circumdata limbo; cui pharetra ex auro, crines nodantur in aurum, aurea purpuream subnectit fibula vestem. nec non et Phrygii comites et laetus Iulus incedunt. ipse ante alios pulcherrimus omnis infert se socium Aeneas atque agmina iungit. qualis ubi hibernam Lyciam Xanthique fluenta deserit ac Delum maternam invisit Apollo instauratque choros, mixtique altaria circum Cretesque Dryopesque fremunt pictique Agathyrsi; ipse iugis Cynthi graditur mollique fluentem fronde premit crinem fingens atque implicat auro, tela sonant umeris: haud illo segnior ibat Aeneas, tantum egregio decus enitet ore. Outside the city gate, the Carthaginian leaders wait for their queen as she delays in her bedroom. Her steed stands ready, decked out in purple and gold, fiercely champing at the frothing reins. Finally, she steps forth, hemmed in by a huge crowd. She has wrapped herself in a Sidonian cloak with an embroidered hem. She sports a quiver made of gold, and her hair is knotted in gold. A golden brooch cinches up her purple dress. Iulus makes his way toward her, beaming with joy, accompanied by his Trojan escort. He himself, far lovelier than all the others, Aeneas goes to join her, and he brings his troops together with hers. Just as when he deserts Lycia in winter and leaves the waters of Xanthus behind, Apollo visits his mother’s island, Delos, and resumes the sacred dances. Blending around the altars, Cretans, Dryopians, and tattooed Agathyrsi raise a shout. He steps down from the heights of Mount Cynthus. On his flowing hair he presses a leafy crown, and he shapes his hair by pleating it with gold. The arrows clash noisily against his shoulders. No less bounding was Aeneas’ step, and just as much beauty beams from his outstanding face. The initial view is observed from a distance, where Aeneas and the Trojans stand, set back from the city and looking toward the main gate. There with his people, Aeneas sees what they all see: a gathering of Carthaginian leaders, Dido’s decked-​ out horse, and so on. But he is the principal viewer. We come to realize this when

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he steps forward to join Dido as she emerges from the city gate at the head of a grand entourage. It is at that point, once he has lingered on her magnificence, that the camera turns toward him. But before delving into the simile that looks him over, there are things to note about the way he first looks at her. The emphasis here is not on her beauty per se, but on her extreme wealth, her royal bearing, her regalia. Purple, the color of royalty, is mentioned three times in the passage. Gold five times. In fact, the more impressive of the two in terms of rarity and expense is the purple. Philip Hardie follows Wendell Clausen by pointing out that the threefold reference to gold in lines 138–​39 calls to mind a “sibling rivalry” of twin images in Callimachus’ Hymns: the gold-​slathered epiphany of Artemis in the Hymn to Artemis (Hymn 3.110–​12), and an equally golden epiphany in his Hymn to Apollo (Hymn 2.232–​ 34).39 What Aeneas sees is an “epiphanic” vision of eye-​piercing splendor. Once again, Dido is spotted as Artemis/​Diana. But, as Hardie indicates, she also appropriates the imagery of Apollo, her twin brother (more on this below).40 The paired colors, deep crimson set against bright gold, make for a vivid display, and they give an impression of extreme, and decidedly “Carthaginian” luxury (on purple and gold as Carthaginian commodities, see c­ hapter 4). All marvelously excessive. Given the lavishness of it all, one has to remind oneself that this is a hunting party. Why is Dido slathered in purple and gold? Is she going out to hunt, or is she heading off to a lavish royal ball? Or, perhaps, to a wedding? I pose the question because, as Lauren Caldwell has clearly demonstrated, set off as this scene is by a “marriage pact” agreed to by Venus and Juno at the front, and a “wedding night” spent in a cave at the back, the ceremonious joining of Dido to Aeneas as they head off to hunt “adheres to the sequence of events and trappings” of a Roman wedding, a central feature of which was the deductio in domum mariti (“escort to the home of the groom”).41 Nuptial imagery abounds throughout: Dido keeps everyone waiting in her bedroom, as chaste Roman brides do, before “finally” emerging, surrounded by her own escort, dressed magnificently, her hair done up in knotted pleats.42 There, as she leaves her city (the family home), she is met by Aeneas and his people (the groom’s escort), and off they all go as one, spending the day together until, when

39. See Hardie 2006: 29, and Clausen 2002: 41. 40. Hardie 2006: 29. 41. Caldwell 2008: 424. 42. The language and imagery of Virgil’s passage describing Dido’s arrival for the hunt is amply larded into Ausonius’ Cento nuptialis, a wedding poem composed of Virgilian phrases; cf. line 3, describing the bride’s arrival: tandem progreditur Veneris iustissima cura.

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darkness rolls in, the two of them peel off on their own to the cave (their wedding chamber) where they do their level best to produce a parvulus Aeneas as celebrants ululate and sing happy songs outside. Aeneas will later deny that he and Dido are married. And yet, here, without knowing it, he goes through all the requisite motions. Aeneas dwells on Dido’s wealth, and her regal bearing. Whether he sees her as his noble “bride” is one of the questions that the passage dangles but does not solve. When the camera turns to Aeneas himself, the first thing we note about him is that he stands out as “far lovelier than all the others” (ante alios pulcherrimus omnes, 141). This matches what he first noticed about Dido upon her arrival at Juno’s temple. She is paying back that primal observation. That what we see here is quoted sight might need some proving were it not for the adjective pulcherrimus “most lovely.” It is not an adjective that one normally finds assigned to a grown man, though it is used quite commonly of adolescents and young men. Grown men are not “lovely/​pretty.” Women and girls are. Often, young men are.43 In his note on the line Servius says that, even though the adjective is a better fit for Ascanius (licet Ascanio magis congruat), it is used of Aeneas because here he, not Ascanius, is the one being loved (quia amatur). Love is a young man’s game, as is pulchritudo “loveliness.” But here, oddly, the love object is the older of the two. Aeneas is being looked upon “as if ” in the context of young love. But looked at by whom? Servius (D) explains: “pulcherrimus comes from Dido’s heart. For that is the way that he looked/​seemed to her” (pulcherrimus ex animo Didonis: hoc enim ei uidebatur). I belabor this point, in this instance, to show how, with the tiniest of gestures, we can be pulled from one line of sight into another; in this case, from that of the viewer, Aeneas, who has just drunk in eyefuls of purple and gold, to the viewed, Dido, who now proceeds to look him over. The odd adjective itself is a suturing device, cueing us to the fact that Dido now wields the camera. Virgil does not need to add anything as elaborate as “and looking on with her eyes, Dido saw him, noting that he was extremely lovely.” Here the visual turnabout is cued, one shot sutured to the next, by a single “incongruent” word. Ancient epic is loaded with tiny trapdoors, like this one, that take us suddenly into the minds of characters who are there on the scene.44 Think of Odysseus,

43. Cf. Aen. 7.649–​50: Lausus, quo pulchrior alter /​non fuit excepto Laurentis corpore Turni. As pointed out by Traina 1998: 95, the several references to the physical beauty of Turnus in book 7 serve to assimilate his character to that of Achilles. 44. The most famous example of a perspectival trapdoor is Odysseus’ scar, which, when spotted by Eurycleia, causes her to think back on the story of how Odysseus received the injury in his youth. For the digression as a flashback that takes us into Eurycleia’s thoughts, see de Jong

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arriving back at his old house in Ithaca after so many years away at war. Homer tells us that, upon reaching the house, “he sat inside the doorway on a block made of ash, leaning against a door-​post made of cypress-​wood that, at one time, a builder expertly carved and lined up straight” (Od. 17.339–​41). Why do we need to know that the stoop he sits on is made of ash and the door-​post of cypress? Why give us the carpenter’s expert assessment of the front door, noting how straight and solid it is? The answer is right there, sitting on the block: Odysseus is the carpenter. He is the one noting these things. Homer does not inform us that “Odysseus noted that the block was made of ash-​wood” because he does not have to. The details themselves take us into Odysseus’ mind as he thinks to himself: “I built this house, and built it well. This block is made of ash. I remember that. The door-​frame is made of cypress.” All of which serves to remind us that Odysseus is a master-​designer and builder (the Trojan horse, the raft, the olive-​wood bed, etc.), and that one of the best weapons that he has for defeating the suitors is the house that he is just now stepping into. He knows everything about that house (where the entries and exits are, where the weapons are kept), and he is about to spring it as a trap. It turns out that knowing that the door-​frame is made of cypress is extremely important. It bears narrative weight by telling us where Odysseus’ thoughts are as he begins to craft a plan for the suitors’ demise. Besides calling to mind Aeneas’ first sighting of Dido, the adjective pulcherrimus looks ahead to the Apollo simile by marking Aeneas in terms of one of the god’s more unusual cultic epithets.45 What is “odd” when applied to Aeneas turns out to be not so odd when applied to Apollo, a god eternally youthful, always on the cusp of full maturity. Virgil will assign the epithet to the god himself at Aen. 3.118–​19: “he sacrificed . . . a bull to you, lovely Apollo” (mactauit . . . taurum tibi, pulcher Apollo). Commenting on the line, Servius says that some scholars objected to the epithet’s being assigned to Apollo because it was used of “pansies” (exsoletos) by ancient writers, and that in the works of Lucilius Apollo does not like being called pulcher. He is referring to Gaius Lucilius, a famous satirist whom the Romans regarded as the inventor of satire as a literary genre.46 Again Servius’

1985b. For sudden mismatches of narrator and focalizer signaling shifts in perspective (not necessarily visual), see Fowler 1990. 45. On pulcher as a common epithet of Apollo, see Miller 2009: 116. 46. In the first satire of his hexameter collection, Lucilius parodies the conventions of the epic concilium deorum by staging a meeting of the gods on Olympus that resembles a contentious meeting of the Roman senate. Little remains of the poem, but it seems that, at the heavenly senate meeting, Apollo (standing in for some effete and/​or stylish Roman senator, likely Appius Claudius Pulcher) objected to being called pulcher.

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note makes clear just how unusual it is for the adjective to be used of Aeneas, a grown man of mature age. As seen by Aeneas, Dido is an epiphanic vision of Diana. As seen by Dido, he is the epiphany of Apollo. Each sees the other as the epitome of late-​adolescent beauty; beauty on the cusp of marriage. That the two similes are to be read as a meaningful pair was obvious already to Virgil’s ancient commentators. In his study of the two similes, Wendell Clausen points out that, in the Argonautica, not only does Apollonius compare Medea to Artemis (as noted above), but that three books earlier he compares Jason, as he moves through the throng of his townspeople, to Apollo departing from one of his sacred shrines (naming Delos, Claros, Pytho, and Lycian Xanthus).47 The simile pair in Virgil reverses the order of the same simile pair in the Argonautica. And just as we saw was the case with the memories encroaching from Catullus 64, the dark repercussions of the affair of Jason and Medea do not stay locked away in their story. Rather, they make their way forward as figuring structures and forebodings, just as the story of Dido and Aeneas qua lovers is getting underway. Those who remember how things played out for Apollonius’ Medea and Catullus’ Ariadne know that the “heroes” of these background stories do not stick around: they take all the help they can get, have their way with the young woman, then leave her behind. They also know that the young women who have had their lives ruined by these cads do not let them sail off scot-​free. Their revenge schemes, fueled by fury, are fantastic, and they give their old lovers plenty to regret. With so many sacred shrines beckoning, the simile asserts, Apollo does not stay long in any one place. He “deserts/​abandons” Lycia in winter to visit Delos (deserit, 144). Aeneas deserts Carthage in winter to sail to Italy. Right from the start, the simile hints that the affair that is just about to get underway will not end well. Virgil’s ancient commentators saw problems of congruency in both the Diana and Apollo similes that required explanation and/​or censure. Servius is especially thoughtful in accounting for these mismatches not as gaffes on Virgil’s part, but as ways of hinting that something is fundamentally off with the relationship that will soon develop between Dido and Aeneas. For example, in his comments on line 144, he undertakes to explain why Virgil chose to compare Aeneas to Apollo. He says that “either it is because of the arrows, which were used for hunting, or actually because of the unhappy marriage that lies ahead, for as I said above, this divinity is hostile to marriage.” The extended commentary of Servius (D) then adds: “or he compares Aeneas to Apollo, as he

47. On the paired similes (Dido-​Diana/​Aeneas-​Apollo) reflecting a similar pair in Apollonius, see Clausen 1987: 15–​25, and 2002: 26–​46. Also Heslin 2005: 95.

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compares Dido to Diana in book one, in such wise that a marriage of siblings cannot happen.” Servius senses trouble here. In a context that strongly hints at marriage, he sees Virgil underscoring the indecency of the very idea that he has put into play. If Dido sees Aeneas as a handsome Apollo, that bodes ill for any prospect of marriage because Apollo, like his sister Diana, adamantly rejects marriage. He sleeps with lovers, but he does not marry them. For her part, Diana will have nothing to do with lovers—​unless the “Diana” in question is actually Jupiter in disguise. Even worse is the idea of Diana and Apollo tying the knot. Admittedly, this would be a case of supremely attractive divinities, ever on the cusp of marriage, coming together. But the idea is anathema because not only are they brother and sister, they are twins.48 Already before arriving at the construction site of Carthage in book 1, Aeneas had met a beautiful young local girl who seemed to him the very picture of the huntress, Diana. She turned out to be his mother. His luck in spotting Diana look-​alikes is worse than off. It is tinged with suggestions of incest.49 The characters inside the story let us see things the way they see them. And yet we see more than they do. As in the previous chapter, I end this one on a note of dramatic irony. In doing so, I look ahead to the next chapter, where we will see Dido and Aeneas happily together, celebrating the peaceful coming together of their peoples. That happy message, we will see, shines through at the end of book 1, where it is clouded by whispered misgivings, and it is prominent here as well, as a meaningful correspondence that links the Apollo simile to its frame. In the elaborate description of Dido’s arrival, the emphasis is not only on her wealth and regal bearing, but on the vastly different peoples who come together as participants in her hunt: Massylians from North Africa, Carthaginians from Phoenicia, Phrygians from Troy. Seeing Dido arrive, Aeneas joins her as an “ally” (socium, 142) and he brings his troops together with hers (agmina iungit, 142). For as much as this concerns Dido and Aeneas coming together as lovers (iungere is the province of Iuno, goddess of marriage), it concerns the coming together of their peoples. The language is that of political alliance. In later times, these same peoples, the Carthaginians and Massylians, will wage bitter wars against the Romans who descend from Aeneas. The harmony that binds them here does not last. Nearly all of the “breakup” problems that scholars have identified in both the simile and its setup concern Dido and Aeneas as

48. The one, major incestuous pair on the heights of Olympus is Jupiter and Juno. Not a happy marriage. 49. On the suggestive coding of the relationship of Dido and Aeneas as incestuous, see Hardie 2006.

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lovers. But theirs is a breakup with vast ramifications for the entire Mediterranean. Within the simile proper, we again we see far-​flung peoples, Cretans, Dryopians, and Agathyrsi, coming together. They have gathered around the altars of Apollo in Delos, waiting for the god to descend from the slopes of Mount Cynthus. As in the setup, the simile proper paints a scene of happy cooperation among peoples who come from very different places and live very different lives. For as ideal as this all seems as a picture of international harmony, there is a decidedly sour note sounded by one small and utterly incongruous feature of Apollo’s arrival. In bounding down the slopes of Mount Cynthus to restart the sacred dances performed in his honor, Apollo’s arrows clash noisily on his shoulders (tela sonant umeris, 149). We need to hear that noise and take it seriously. Only one other time in all of ancient literature is Apollo described in this way, barreling down a mountain, with arrows banging against his shoulders. It happens near the beginning of Homer’s Iliad. Having been called upon by his priest, Chryses, to pay back the insults that Agamemnon had heaped upon him when he went seeking reconciliation and the return of his daughter, Apollo bounds down from the peak of Mount Olympus, “wearing a quiver on his shoulders, and the arrows clanged against his shoulders as he raged” (ἔκλαγξαν δ’ ἄρ’ ὀϊστοὶ ἐπ’ ὤμων χωομένοιο, Il. 1.46–​47).50 He is not coming down from Olympus to start any dances. He comes as a bringer of plague. With those arrows that bang on his shoulders he mows down the Greeks in great piles. Put in the curious way that it is put, Aeneas’ Apollinine arrival clangs with the sound of doom. He is like the Dog Star, the bringer of plague, that Priam sees heading his way in Iliad 22. Dido sees only the godlike man, not the doom that he brings to her and her people. But the doom signaled by Apollo’s clanging arrows cuts both ways because, in this case, it is Dido, not Aeneas, who most resembles Apollo in the intricate braiding of her hair, her golden clasp, and the quiver she wears on her back.51 She is Apollo’s spitting image, his twin, and she, too, has ample piles of doom to mete out—​think of what Artemis/​Diana does to Actaeon, and to Niobe. Dido, pictured as she is, is not to be trifled with. She will make Aeneas pay dearly for his impiety toward her by leveling a curse, and by raging with a rage that will mow down tens of thousands of his Roman descendants, making them “a feast for dogs and birds” (Iliad 1.4–​5).

50. Further on the hostile Homeric note sounded by the phrase tela sonant umeris, see Otis 1995: 74–​75, and Weber 2002: 332. 51. Hardie 2006: 29: “Virgil intensifies the literary ‘twinning’ that already relates the two Callimachean hymns by making the Apollonian passage the primary model for golden Dido, who shares quiver and clasp with Apollo. The woman compared to Diana on her first appearance now appropriates the attributes of Apollo.”

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4.1.  Dido’s Visual Feast I begin this chapter by visiting one of the less-​traveled corners of the Aeneid: the magnificent feast that Dido lays out for Aeneas near the end of Aeneid book 1. Covering more than sixty lines at the end of the epic’s first book, the feast is rich in visual details, but it does not seem to “do” much, qua finale, other than set a dazzling backdrop for the story-​telling of book 2. Scholars have had little to say about it because the lush atmosphere generated by the passage appears to be largely for its own sake: a glossy surface (a luxuriance of syuzhet) that bears little narrative substance of its own (delivering a mere sliver of fabula). Other than the crucial kiss that Cupid, disguised as Ascanius, plants on Dido’s lips, the banquet offers little else that can be considered critical to the narrative itself, and thus it remains the least-​explored section of the Aeneid’s most read book. Like the several feasts that it recalls from earlier epic, most notably the Spartan wedding banquet that Telemachus crashes as a celebrity guest in Odyssey 4, and the prolonged story-​telling feast thrown by king Alcinous to honor his guest, Odysseus, in Odyssey 8–​13, Dido’s feast establishes a sumptuous setting for the telling of stories, but it carries only a slight story load of its own.1 People arrive, wine is poured, a kiss is given. The whole of it is very upbeat and hopeful. No one is betrayed or killed at this feast. No one drinks to excess and loses control, nor is anyone poisoned or cursed, and the hall does not go up in flames. Like the Homeric banquets that are its main models, this banquet detains the hero as a beholder, listener, and teller rather than as a doer. Or so it seems. It is my intention in the pages that follow to show that all of the explosive epic and tragic things that I have just said do not happen at this feast

1. For a thorough study of the many sumptuous feasts of ancient epic, see Bettenworth 2004.

Virgil’s Cinematic Art. Kirk Freudenburg, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197643242.003.0005

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do, in fact, happen. They lurk as dark suggestions foreboded under the glossy surface, bedeviling the lush visual details as so many symbols linked in a chain. The feast’s lush visual details help bring the surroundings into view by putting bright and exotic items before the mind’s eye: the clothing, the lamps, the gifts, the gold. But they do much more than establish a glossy mise en scène for happenings of lesser significance (gifts given, a feast enjoyed, glasses raised, etc.). Seen differently, these details are what happens at the feast. Taken not just for the scene they set, but for the darker images they evoke, the visuals of the feast tell a story of their own that runs counter to the glossy surface that they create (for filmic instances of visual and imagistic effects running counter to the story that is being told, see Appendix, item 8). On that surface, they paint a splendiferous scene: Trojans and Carthaginians basking in the glow of royal luxury, happily feasting together, celebrating their new alliance, and looking forward to a long and enduring friendship that will be characterized by cooperation, mutual trust, and lasting peace. All extremely lovely and hopeful. And yet it is all completely preposterous for being so utterly wrong. We already know what will happen to the celebrants’ pledges of lasting friendship, and to their hopes for enduring peace. We know that things do not end well for Dido and Aeneas—​this would have been true for many if not all in Virgil’s original audience as well. The irony of their being depicted so happy together, for this one hopeful moment, finds us respecting the fragility of it all, and wondering whether any of it can be trusted. Peered at more deeply, the gloss turns dim, and future tragedies come into view. Via images of pestilence, military assault, funerals, and fire, the fuller, truer stories of what happens to these people are told. Helped along by memories of earlier feasts, earlier breakups, earlier gifts, Dido’s agonizing death is foreshadowed, as well as the multiple destructions of her city and people at the hands of Aeneas’ descendants. Demonstrating all this will be the main project of this chapter. In the process of making these demonstrations, I will fold in a related study of how Virgil’s verbal imagery has been realized in numerous visual forms over time, in illustrations, paintings, sketches, and tapestries, by artists who represented the scene in their own ways, for their own purposes. It turns out that the history of the feast’s treatment as a genre scene in the visual arts is long and impressively full. Clearly, artists found much to work with here—​as if put to work by the text itself, taking up the challenge of its elaborate visual cues. In fact, the history of the scene’s depiction by painters is nearly as old as the story itself is. Already in one of the earliest extant manuscripts of the Aeneid, the Vergilius Romanus (Cod. Vat. lat. 3867), one sees Dido’s feast selected as one of few scenes in the first book to get painted in paint, right there among the Latin verses that paint it in words. As such, these visual

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renderings have much to tell us about how art and text relate, and how things seemed to those who listened and read this story at different times in the history of its reception. Among other things, these illustrations, sketches, paintings, and tapestries tell us what those who made them thought Carthaginians looked like; what kind of outfits Trojans wore in their imaginations; how deep the color “purple” was for them; what visual details of the text they regarded as most important. And so on. Throughout the history of the scene’s depiction in the visual arts, those who paint it put emphasis on certain things that they want to underscore and get exactly right; that is, certain respects in which they seem to have been nailed to the text. Other things they choose to de-​emphasize, and yet others they feel free to modernize, to work up as symbols, or to leave out altogether. As important documents in the reception (in fact, a long series of semi-​ disparate receptions) of Virgil’s Aeneid, these images make clear that no two persons or cultures have ever “seen” Virgil’s story in anything like the same way; that no matter how rich and detailed this text is in what it gives us to see, most of what we end up visualizing “from” the text is the product of our own imaginations: artwork of our own conjuring, made for our own purposes, in collaboration with Virgil’s text. What is true of Dido’s feast is equally true of every image and/​or scene that we have studied so far, lighting up in the mind’s eye as projections of Virgil’s text. Not only is your Dido not mine, nor could she ever be, even the cup she drinks from, no matter how highly elaborated its description in the text, is mostly something we conjure for ourselves, based, in part, on what Virgil says of the cup, the way that we are culturally and personally predisposed to picture cups (especially those of a fancier, jewel-​encrusted variety), and what we need that cup to communicate and mean. Despite being so richly detailed, Dido’s feast leaves most of what we are to make of it to the imagination. The basic elements of a painting or stage design are all there in some fashion (space, lighting, colors, furnishings, decorations, arrangement, and so on), as if waiting to be worked into nonverbal artistic media that can be looked and explored with the eyes. But what I want to “explore aloud” in this chapter by looking at several of the most significant visual renderings of the scene concerns the difficulties that we face in going from words on a page, and from things lighting up in the highly personalized theater of one’s own imagination, to images rendered for all to see in two dimensions (a painting, sketch, or tapestry) or three (a film set or stage design). By looking at how this scene has been rendered by different artists working in different media, we will see what sorts of things came to the fore for those who read it at different times, to make Dido’s feast, for them, a finale worthy of its book.

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4.2.  Picturing Virgil’s Words: Dido in the Middle I propose now that we take a close look at some lines of Latin, to see what images they conjure. As mentioned earlier, the main thing that “happens” at the banquet is that Cupid, disguised as Ascanius, kisses Dido as she snuggles him on her lap. The lines describing the god’s arrival are as follows (Virg. Aen. 1.695–​70): Iamque ibat dicto parens et dona Cupido regia portabat Tyriis, duce laetus Achate. Cum uenit, aulaeis iam se regina superbis aurea composuit sponda mediamque locauit. Iam pater Aeneas et iam Troiana iuuentus conueniunt, stratoque super discumbitur ostro. By this point, Cupid was making his way, as instructed. He carried regal gifts to the Tyrians, beaming with delight as Achates led the way. When he arrived, the queen was there, already having taken the center spot, where she was splayed out on a frame of gold, with tapestries hanging aloof. Next, father Aeneas, then the Trojan youth join the gathering, and they take their separate places, reclining atop coverlets of purple. The lines are rich in visual cues. But what do they actually give us to see? Somehow, we must center Dido in whatever pictures we conjure because the lines indicate that she located herself in the middle (mediamque locauit). But this is easier said than pictured because the phrase does not specify whether she is at the diametrical center of the dining hall, or centered in some other way, such as on the central couch (if this is a Roman triclinium) or in the center of the couch that she is reclining on. In fact, the feminine adjective mediam could be referring not to Dido at all, but to the couch itself, the sponda (“frame”) on which she reclines. The grammar could go either way. All these possibilities are made available by the phrase mediamque locavit. So how do we, as painters, paint it? In his comments on the “bedframe” of line 698, Servius says that “the ancients did not have semi-​circular couches (stibadia). Rather, they would banquet on three spread/​covered couches (tribus lectis), and thus one says that ‘the triclinium is spread.’ ” The semi-​circular sigma couch (stibadium) came into vogue well after Virgil’s day, displacing the triclinium (three separate couches arranged as an open-​ended square) to become the main furnishing/​arrangement of formal dining in late antiquity.2 The note makes clear that Servius imagines Dido’s dining 2. On the gradual shift from rectilinear triclinia to semi-​circular stibadia in Roman domestic architecture, see Dunbabin 1991, who notes (130): “By the fourth and fifth century, there is no

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hall not as anything uniquely Carthaginian, but a sumptuous Roman triclinium from days gone by.3 Because Roman dining habits had changed considerably since Virgil’s day, Servius feels a need to explain to his readers what a triclinium was, and how it was laid out. He does not explain how a mere three couches could accommodate the feast’s ample crowd (a feast requiring a staff of 200 waiters and waitresses to serve the food and wine, line 705), or how many three-​couch clusters were arranged throughout the hall. As “picturing” help, Servius’ comments are neither very helpful, nor terribly convincing. Servius goes on to explain what we are to make of Dido’s being “in the middle.” He explains that the phrase mediamque locauit (“she located herself in the middle”) puts Dido in the spot of the dominus within the typical triclinium. He writes: “for among our ancestors that was the master’s spot, as Sallust clearly indicates.” To prove his point, Servius goes on to quote a passage from Sallust’s Histories describing the exact positions of all the dinner guests at the party where Sertorius was murdered as he reclined as the guest of honor on the middle couch. It is not at all clear how Servius thinks this proves his point, because Sertorius was not in fact the dominus “host” of the dinner party where he was killed. Perperna was. As the guest of honor, Sertorius occupied the low seat on the middle couch, and Perperna, the host and mastermind of the murder, was right where he was expected to be, in the high spot on the low couch. Servius thus seems to mean dominus not in the sense of the master of the house or “host,” but the big shot in the room, or the guest of honor. In which case he is right about Sertorius’ being correctly situated on the middle couch. But how is it, then, that Dido occupies that spot in her own dining hall when Aeneas is the guest of honor? Something weird is afoot here, and you can see how Virgil’s Roman readers might have had trouble making sense of, and actually visualizing, what they were being asked to see. This is merely one of many problems that come with trying to realize Virgil’s words in paint. In Plate 4.1 we see the earliest pictorial representation of Dido’s feast: an illustration from the Vergilius Romanus manuscript mentioned above, which dates to the last years of the fifth century ce, roughly 100 years after Servius wrote his commentary. The manuscript illustration gets around the problem of depicting the overall dining hall scene by zooming in on Dido, Aeneas, and Ascanius as the central point of interest. The three diners recline on a stibadium, the single, continuous sigma couch, as opposed to the three couches of a Roman

doubt that, despite the occasional persistence of the triclinium layout, the fashion for the curving sigma-​couch had prevailed.” 3. Cf. Macr. 3.11.8, arguing that Dido pours her libation in triclinio.

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triclinium. In other words, the representation is of its own day, and quite regal, rather than a throwback to an earlier Roman time, as Servius had thought it had to be. In the picture, Dido is in the middle of the scene in nearly every conceivable way: in the middle of the couch, in the middle of the frame. The tapestries that form a backdrop behind the trio suggest that they are centered at the far back of the dining hall rather than in the room’s diametrical center, with the tapestries functioning as stage curtains and framing Dido at the center of the stage. The tapestries curve in slightly at the ends, matching the backside bend of the dining couch. This suggests that the queen and her honored guests are dining within a highly visible and “stagey” apsidal nook. The painter has put them at the far back of a regal basilica, dining within the central rear apse of a typical late antique triconch, at the far end of the hall’s long central axis, opposite the hall’s main entry.4 In Christian basilicas of the era, it is the apse behind the altar. That is what Dido’s being “in the middle” meant to one of the illustrators of the Vergilius Romanus manuscript. By painting her in the middle spot on a late antique stibadium, in the stagey apse at the back of the basilica, the painter represents her behaving regally and yet appropriately, ceding places of honor to her guests. On the Vergilius Romanus illustration, the seat of honor is, in fact, occupied not by Dido, but by Aeneas, who sits at the far left end of the couch as we look on, “on the right horn” (in dextro cornu) when considered from the other side.5 This is the place where Jesus, the dominus (“Lord” in yet another sense), reclines in late antique representations of the Last Supper. But this cannot have been the way the scene was conjured in the imaginations of Virgil’s first readers. When it came to fancy dining, they were triclinium people, not stibadium people. That said, the question of whether Servius is right to insist that Virgil’s first readers would have imagined Dido occupying the middle couch of a Roman triclinium is another matter altogether. Some, I suspect, would have conceptualized her placing herself “in the middle” in that way, in which case they would imagine her doing something very un-​Roman in a Roman space: grabbing the spotlight by usurping the place that would normally be reserved for the guest of honor. What is perhaps most striking about either of these options, whether as puzzled over by Servius or as painted by the illustrator, is that they are so narrowly Roman in what they are willing to allow. Neither seems even to consider the possibility that Dido’s banquet hall should be

4. See Vroom 2007 on the stibadium and triconch in late antiquity, with an illustration of a triconch stibadium on 321. 5. On the hierarchy of reclining spaces on the stibadium, see Vroom 2007: 324.

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considered a non-​Roman, Carthaginian space with its own rules imported from the east. That the queen might actually be at the dead center of the room, rather than on the center couch, or centered against the back wall, is apparently beyond conceiving. Whether as a breach of Roman protocols and/​or a sign of “typical” Phoenician haughtiness and exoticism, the queen’s occupying the center spot at her own feast would have seemed grandiose and somewhat scandalous to Virgil’s first readers.6 It is perhaps no wonder, then, that the tapestries that frame Dido toward the right side of line 697 are described as “arrogant” (aulaeis se regina superbis). In my translation above I take superbis to imply that the tapestries are set above her spatially (super), but the adjective superbus (this is the nominative form), while based on the idea of “above-​ness,” is never exclusively spatial in its sense.7 Rather, as in English words such as “haughty,” “uppity,” or “aloof,” it is loaded with strong moral overtones having to do with self-​aggrandizing “superior” attitudes, luxury, and expense (=​“magnificent” in a proud and showy way). Note how, in the Latin phrase quoted in the parentheses above, the two words, “arrogant” and “tapestries,” have been separated so as to enclose Dido, “the queen herself ” (se regina) within them. She is framed by them, and centered by them, as an object to behold within the line, just as she was in the room itself. But what is an artist to do with Virgil’s “arrogant” tapestries? Imagine that you are the set designer of Francesco Cavalli’s opera of 1640, La Didone, tasked with representing the interior of Dido’s palace, and trying to use Virgil as your guide. “Go tell the wardrobe people to make me some tapestries right away, and make sure that they are arrogant!” What would they come back with? Looking, once again, at the Vergilius Romanus illustration, we see tapestries of a deep sea blue in the background, in front of which are tapestries of lighter colors, gathered together and hung in festoon fashion. Here again, one notes how Dido is centered by the tapestries, just as she is in the text. Deep blue, purple, and gold

6. In his note on mediamque locauit, Tiberius Claudius Donatus (a grammarian contemporary with Servius, not to be confused with Aelius Donatus) is clearly struck by the showiness of Dido’s behavior: “(Virgil) represents the mistress of the feast (conuiuii dominam) actually reclining first, in a vain display fitting for a queen, at the very moment when she received such a great king, along with the rest of the Trojans, taking the very spot that the ancients regarded as the more desirable/​stronger (potior).” He then refers to Sallust’s account of Setorius’ dinner party, making clear (in a way that Servius does not) that Sertorius was located on the middle couch. 7. One sees the adjective superbus used, as it is here, to suggest loftiness and haughty Eastern wealth and magnificence at the same time at Aen. 3.2–​3: ceciditque superbum /​Ilium et omnis humo fumat Neptunia Troia.

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are the colors of arrogance in this case, and that fits pretty well with the banquet description as a whole, where purple and gold in particular predominate.8 Both in the text, and on the painting, these colors predominate not just because they have such strong associations with royal luxury in a general sense, but because they have such powerful associations with the Carthaginians in particular. The Latin adjective “Punic,” like the Greek adjective “Phoenix” from which it derives, is both an ethnic designation and a word that designates the color purple, for which the Phoenicians, the Punics, the “Purple People,” were famous. Their economic success was based on manufacturing purple dyes and trading goods in Tyrian purple, and in mining and transporting iron and precious metals (silver and gold) from the Iberian peninsula to the near east, and all points in between. Like the Phoenicians who gave rise to them, and whose name they continued to bear, the Carthaginians were masters of the sea. In fisheries scattered throughout the western Mediterranean, they salted, brined, and fermented fish, and they produced garum (a fermented sauce, also known as liquamen), which was valued as a kind of liquid gold, and shipped to all parts of Mediterranean world. It is no coincidence, then, that the deep blue of the tapestries is the same color that the sea god, Neptune, wears in folio 235 of the Vergilius Romanus manuscript, and that the same lighter hue of purple that one sees covering the couch is blended with the deeper blue of the tapestry in the churning sea waters of folio 77r.9 As painted by the illustrator of Dido’s feast in the Vergilius Romanus manuscript, the tapestries that hang behind Dido, and center her, tell a story of their own: drooping waves of gold and purple floating atop a deep blue sea. They are a study in Carthaginian economic might. The symbolism is already there in Virgil’s text, in the emphasis on purple and gold, but the illustrator pushes the point even further by adding deep sea blue to the color scheme, and by putting a fish (yet another luxury item with strong economic symbolism for the Carthaginians) on the plate that he/​she helpfully tilts upward toward us, in order to give us a better view of what Dido and her guests have been served. One last detail concerning the symbolism of the food. Set behind the fish plate, and easily overlooked, are three oysters on the half-​shell, one for each diner. These are luxury foods, certainly, but they do more here than imply regal decadence and excess. Although these oysters might seem to be the least Virgilian feature of the picture that the illustrator paints, they are, in fact, an extrapolation 8. Behind the coloration of Dido’s Carthage is a sustained emphasis on gold and “sea purple” (ἁλιπόρφυρα) in the description of Alkinoös’ palace in Odyssey book 6. 9. Bogensberger 2017: 239–​40 discusses the mention of “sea-​purple” in a papyrus letter of the late-​third or early-​second century bce, considering whether the term implies a specific shade of purple or refers merely to purple derived from the sea.

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from the text, and the most powerful economic symbol of all. While it is true that no specific food items are named by Virgil, other than the bread that is served along with the wine at the beginning of the meal, the oysters on the table are a Virgilian feature of the feast in a less obvious, non-​culinary way. Immediately after meeting Aeneas for the first time, Dido orders sacrifices to be made and a feast prepared to honor the arrival of Aeneas and the Trojans. I quote the passage in full because it provides a first glimpse of the splendor that awaits inside the palace (Aen. 1.637–​42): At domus interior regali splendida luxu instruitur, mediisque parant convivia tectis: arte laboratae vestes ostroque superbo, ingens argentum mensis, caelataque in auro fortia facta patrum, series longissima rerum per tot ducta viros antiqua ab origine gentis. Inside, the home shines with regal luxury, and a feast is prepared in the central hall: coverlets of arrogant purple, skillfully embroidered, and a mass of silver on the tables, with the brave deeds of (the queen’s) ancestors engraved in gold, a drawn-​out series of achievements, of so many men, traced back to the beginning of her family line. From these lines, we can see how the manuscript illustrator made the odd leap from the word “arrogant” (=​“magnificent” in a proud and showy way) in the text to the color purple that he/​she paints into the color scheme of the tapestries. In this earlier reference to “arrogant” cloth, it is the embroidered coverlets on which the diners recline that are said to be dyed the color of “arrogant purple” (ostroque superbo, 639). Tyrian purple existed in many shades and hues, and one sees three different expressions of it in the manuscript illustration of Dido’s feast.10 But inside the curious phrase that I have just quoted (look at the Latin closely) one sees that the word used to designate the color purple is not purpura; nor is it any form of the adjectives Punicus or puniceus. Rather, it is ostrum, a Latin word that both looks like it should mean, and actually does mean, “oyster.” This happens again at line 700 when Aeneas and the Trojans arrive at the feast and are said to “recline atop couches spread with purple” (stratoque super discumbitur ostro).

10. On the many shades and hues of Tyrian purple, see Vitruv. Arch. 7.13.1–​3, and Cooksey and Sinclair 2005.

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The purple dye for which the Carthaginians were so famous (the so-​called Tyrian purple mentioned above) was derived not from oysters, but from a sea snail, the murex brandaris, which was called πόρφυρα in Greek, purpura in Latin. The color is named after the sea snail. The Romans knew full well that sea snails, not oysters, were the source of the dye. But because, in Greek, the term ὄστρειον (from which the Latin terms ostreum and ostrum derive) designates a larger category of hard-​shelled mollusks, to which both oysters and sea snails were thought to belong, both the Greeks and the Romans were wont to use the word “oyster” in a very free sense, to designate both the animals in question (hard-​shelled mollusks, generally construed), and to name the dye that only a very few certain sea snails among them were harvested to produce.11 Thus, in their own sidelong way, the oysters on the table in the Vergilius Romanus illustration are all, at once, a luxury food, a color reference, and a symbol of Carthaginian ingenuity and economic power.

4.3.  Golden Dido Returning now to the earlier of the two passages quoted above, still trying to picture what Virgil’s words give us to see, what are we to make of the gold of Dido’s dining couch? Line 698 says, “she composed herself on a bed of gold, and located herself in the middle.” Although the line’s second clause has defied our attempts to pin it down (see above), the first clause seems straightforward enough. But difficulties lurk even here, because the Latin at the front of the line is actually equally problematic: aurea composuit sponda. In treating this phrase, modern commentaries routinely point out that the line’s emphatic lead adjective, “golden” (aurea), should be scanned not as three syllables (long, short, short; a dactyl) but two (long, long; a spondee): not au-​re-​a, in other words, but au-​rya, with the letters e and a coalescing into a long final syllable (a case of synizesis). They assert this, and it may be correct, but there is no compelling reason that it has to be taken this way. The adjective works equally well as a dactyl or a spondee. But it agrees with different things, depending on which way you take it. So which is it? Or, to give the old grammatical question a visual turn: what are we to imagine catching our eyes here, as the emphatically golden item that the text would have us see? If it is au-​re-​a, a dactyl ending in a short a, the adjective describes Dido, the subject of the sentence. If it is au-​rya, a spondee ending in long 11. Vitruv. Arch. 7.13.3: et quod ex concharum marinarum testis eximitur, ideo ostrum est vocitatum (“and because it is derived from the shells of sea conches it is called ‘oyster’ ”). A good introduction to the history of the manufacture of purple dyes in the ancient Mediterranean is Graves 2017.

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a, it describes the sponda, which, technically speaking, is not the dining couch per se, but the “frame” on which the mattress sits. So we have a choice to make. How are we to decide? Is Dido to be pictured as “golden”? If so, what might we take that to mean in picture form? Is she dressed in gold? Or is she golden in the sense of being dazzling and “pretty” (a common use of the term, as at Aen. 10.16, where Venus aurea recalls the “Golden Aphrodite” [χρυσέη Ἀφροδίτη] of Homer)? Or is it that she has hair of the color gold, with the adjective aurea designating her a blonde?12 Or maybe it is not Dido, but the frame of the dining couch that is gold. If that is the case, is it just the frame that is gold, or is this some kind of unusually dazzling couch, slathered in gold from top to bottom: frame, covers, pillows, the works (thus taking sponda as part for whole)? What, at first glance, seemed so straightforward (just pick up the brush and paint) ends up in a tangle of hard choices that have to be made. But one does have to choose (does one?). Personally, I like both options, and I see no way to decide the question of its having to be this, but definitely not that. Servius, who must be considered a weighty authority in such matters, has this to say in his comments on the line. si Dido aurea, pulchram significat, et est nominativus. si sponda aurea, septimus quidem est, sed synizesis fit, et spondeus est. If it is Dido who is golden, [the adjective aurea] is a nominative, and it means that she is pretty. If it is the bedframe that is gold, [the adjective aurea] is a septimus [this is Servius’ way of designating an instrumental ablative], but synizesis takes place, and it is a spondee. Servius allows for either option. So how do you paint your picture? In Plate 4.2 we see how Francois de Troy painted the scene in 170.13 Instead of trying to solve the grammatical puzzle in one way or the other, de Troy has Dido

12. Cf. the description of the Gauls as seen on the shield in Aen. 8.659 aurea caesaries ollis atque aurea vestis (“they had long hair of gold, and clothing of gold”). On the many possibilities of “Golden Dido” in this line, see Putnam 2018, putting special emphasis on the term’s erotic associations with Venus. 13. On French translations of Virgil from the sixteenth century, see 4510ff. of vol. 9 of Heyne 1819, and Kallendorf 2001: 133–​37. A few examples of eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century translations of the mediamque locavit passage (v.698) show a tremendous range in approach and attention to the Latin; cf. 1831 trans. of M. Villenave: “et déjà, sur un lit de pourpre et d’or, la reine s’est placée au milieu du banquet” (C. L. F. Panckouke, Paris). Here is the 1838 verse translation of Barthélémy: “au milieu d’une couche exhaussée. Sous un dais somptueux la reine s’est placée. Radieuse et foulant de splendides carreaux”; and M. de Segrais in a 1719 reprint of

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in gold and the bedframe in gold at the same time. The couch itself is covered in purple, and that fits well with what Virgil says about their being covered in “arrogant oyster,” and you will see that for de Troy purple is the color of arrogance for the tapestries as well. Glancing back at the Vergilius Romanus folio (Plate 4.1), we see that the artist paints a bedframe of gold topped by a purple cushion, and that Dido is herself a mix of gold and purple. The painting in Plate 4.3, by an unknown Lombard Painter, antedates de Troy’s depiction by nearly 200 years. Despite looking so suggestively of its own time and place, powerfully recalling depictions of the magi bringing gifts to the blessed virgin and her child, the painting has many solidly Virgilian features built into it. First, some of the more obvious of the non-​Virgilian features: to signify that they are Carthaginians, the men at the table wear turbans, and instead of reclining, the dinner guests are seated on chairs, so there can be no question of a bed, golden or otherwise. The base of the table, however, is made of gold. For her part, Dido catches attention by wearing red, not gold. Rather, it is Ascanius/​ Cupid who is dressed in gold, and he is already seated on her lap as the gifts arrive. He is a tiny child in this depiction, a cherub in gold dress, not the adolescent who borders on manhood in the Vergilius Romanus depiction. I will have more to say about this “straying age” problem below. Things are being compressed here, but the overall layout of the painting is remarkably like that of line 697: cum venit, aulaeis iam se regina superbis. As in the line, Dido is not at the center of the painting, the lead gifts are (note the V-​shape formed by the heads of gift-​givers and diners, with the tip of the V pointing down toward the golden cloak and crown). She is approached from the left (cum venit at the far left of the line), and caught sight of off-​right by those who approach, where she is centered by purple that frames her from above and behind (aulaeis iam se regina superbis). One sees the same layout in Romanelli’s 1630 version of the scene (Plate 4.4), with gift bearers coming in from the left, and Dido off-​ center toward the right, but centered within a frame of her own. As in the line, so in the Romanelli tapestry (pictured in Plate 4.4 are the assembled water color cartoons that were used as a template by the weavers, who reversed the image), the tapestries set their own center by rising and falling farther toward the right. The tapestries reach their apex directly above Dido, where two decorative swags come together and drop the tail-​end of the festoon that links them right over Dido’s head. The syntax of the line, it seems, expresses itself as the visual disposition of the scene.

his second edition of 1700: “Il vient, et sous le dais d’un ouvrage admirable, La Reine prend sa place au milieu de la table.”

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There is one word in line 697 that I have not yet touched upon: iam (“already”), the adverb that conditions composuit (“she composed”) in the next line. That minuscule word, iam, says an awful lot, because it suggests that when Ascanius (that is Cupid disguised as Ascanius) arrives with his gifts, Dido is already there, having “composed herself ” in such a way that she, and only she, catches his eye as he enters the room. She had arrived early, in other words, and took the time to situate herself in a certain way (the word componere suggests a purposeful, artful arrangement, and she is both the object of that verb as well as its subject), in order to compose herself or “splay herself out” as the center of attention. Here one might think of Cleopatra’s seduction of Marc Antony: reclining on a bed beneath a golden canopy, on a barge with purple sails, she invites him to “party” with her in a way that he cannot resist.14 The comparison is just one of many intertextual memories evoked by the details of Dido’s feast, the most important of which include the Homeric feasts mentioned above, and Medea spotting Jason for the first time at King Aetes’ reception in book 1 of the Argonautica.15 It is likely that many of these earlier textual feasts (along with who knows how many others) were known as paintings in Virgil’s day, that their recall in Virgil’s text is as much inter-​pictorial as it is intertextual. But the evidence we have for the existence of such paintings is slim. What we are left with is a likelihood that will always remain just that. For the moment, my point is that Dido, whether helped along by memories of Cleopatra or not, is already there when her first guests arrive, occupying center stage, done up as a bright splash of color that draws all eyes to her. Those arrogant aulaea are being used by her as stage curtains. In fact, by far the most common use of the noun aulaea in Latin is as a name for the stage curtains that were let down not to end plays in the ancient world, but to begin them.16 The curtain has dropped. Dido’s tragedy, it seems, has begun. But at this early stage of the drama she is in complete control of the show as its writer, director, and main actor.

14. Cleopatra’s ornate pleasure barge is described in elaborate detail by Plutarch at Life of Marcus Antonius 26. 15. For Eustathius (Macr. 5.2.13) the main point of comparison is with Alcinous’ banquet: ipsa autem Dido refert speciem regis Alcinoi conuiuium celebrantis (“Dido herself, however, brings back the look of king Alcinous celebrating his feast”). Dido herself became a popular subject of art in many media in antiquity; see Macr. 5.17.4–​7; on Virgil as a “painter,” see 5.11.19-​21.2. 16. Barchiesi 1993: 353: “when Dido is sitting in her magnificent dining-​hall, we see her profiled against aulaea . . . a luxurious setting, but the most common use of the word in Latin denotes curtains in a theater.” On Carthage troped as a dramatic stage in books 1 and 4, see Farrell 2021: 169–​72.

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Whereas the painters who render this scene always have Ascanius/​Cupid arriving among diners who are already in place and happily partying, Virgil’s text isolates Dido in a spotlight, and outside of that spotlight there is no one else there yet to be seen (even if they are there, we are not given to see them). Rather, as the text of lines 699–​708 makes clear, after Ascanius/​Cupid and Achates arrive with the gifts, Aeneas and the Trojans enter and take their places, and the servants (100 waiters and 100 waitresses) snap into action, bringing water for their hands, and loading the tables with food and drink.17 It is only at this point that the Tyrians arrive in a large happy throng to take their places. Again, it is hard to say how Virgil’s first readers would have reacted to all of this. Romans had very strict codes about receiving guests into their homes. Some, most notably clients at the early morning salutatio, would be expected to make their way to master of the house, and he would stay seated at the far back of his reception hall, letting them come all the way to him. But to receive a person of substance in such a fashion would be unthinkable. Rather, in a gratia-​ generating show of deference, one was required to rise, go to the entryway (or even to the very front of the house), and escort that person to his or her place. In a passage describing venerable Roman practices that had, much to his regret, largely fallen by the wayside by his own day, Valerius Maximus asserts that, as a show of modesty and due respect, younger guests were once expected to let their elders recline first at formal dinners, and that they were also expected to allow them to rise first at the end of the meal.18 Taken together, the evidence suggests that Dido’s behavior (failing to escort her honored guests inside, and her being the first to recline) is not just highly contrived and stagey, it is decidedly regal and un-​Roman.19 I want next to look at what happens once the tables have been set, and all the diners are reclining in place. The Carthaginians have just arrived and settled in on their couches (see the previous footnote). Virgil then adds (Aen. 1.709–​22):

17. “Next father Aeneas comes in, then the Trojan youth, and they take their separate places, reclining atop coverlets of purple. The servants provide water for their hands. They supply bread in baskets, and they bring hand-​towels with clipped nap. There were fifty female servants inside, whose task it was to set out a supply of food in a long line, and to keep the penates flaring with flame. There were another hundred who were waitresses, and an equal number of waiters, all the same age. These loaded the tables with feasts, and they set them with cups. And, of course, there were Tyrians there as well. They came thronging across the entryway in a happy crowd, and were urged to recline on couches colorfully embroidered” (Aen. 1.699–​708). 18. On these greeting protocols, see Freudenburg 2018: 224–​28. 19. On rising for arriving guests, and couches and reclining spaces assigned according to seniority, see Val. Max. II.1.9 and Julian Caesars 308.

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Mirantur dona Aeneae, mirantur Iulum flagrantisque dei voltus simulataque verba, pallamque et pictum croceo velamen acantho. Praecipue infelix, pesti devota futurae, expleri mentem nequit ardescitque tuendo Phoenissa, et pariter puero donisque movetur. Ille ubi complexu Aeneae colloque pependit et magnum falsi implevit genitoris amorem, reginam petit. haec oculis, haec pectore toto haeret et interdum gremio fovet, inscia Dido, insidat quantus miserae deus; at memor ille matris Acidaliae paulatim abolere Sychaeum incipit, et vivo temptat praevertere amore iam pridem resides animos desuetaque corda. They look in wonder at Aeneas’ gifts. In wonder they look at Iulus, amazed by the god’s blazing face, and his pretended words, the cloak, and the veil embroidered with acanthus designs of saffron red. Doomed to her future ruin, she is unable to fill her mind full, and by watching she begins to burn, Phoenissa, stirred in equal measure by the boy and his gifts. Once the boy had dangled from Aeneas’ neck, embracing him, and having filled his false father full with love, he goes after the queen. With her eyes she clings to him, and with her whole heart. At times Dido cuddles him in her breast, poor thing, not knowing what a huge god was on her lap. But he, mindful of his Acidalian mother, begins little by little to erase Sychaeus from her thoughts, and he attempts to turn her passions, so long idle, and her heart, so out of practice, toward a lover still alive. I will limit myself to a few highlights. First, the anaphora of mirantur . . . mirantur in line 709 (“they are amazed . . . they are amazed”). Just as was true of Aeneas upon seeing Carthage for the first time (miratur . . . miratur, 1.421–​22), the anaphora finds us looking not at the gifts that are being brought, but at the faces of those who have caught sight of them. It turns the camera from what is being looked upon to the beholders themselves, showing the amazement that registers on their faces. As such, the repeated words serve an important narrative purpose here, by letting us know that we are seeing things not necessarily as they are, but as they are being seen from a certain angle, by certain persons, who are there reckoning with, and being dazzled by what they see. Having turned to the faces of the Carthaginians as they fixate on Cupid and his gifts, the camera then turns back toward Cupid and closes in on the god’s face

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blazing bright (flagrantisque dei uoltus, 710), and we see that he is talking, mesmerizing with his speech as well (simulataque uerba, 710); not that we can make out the speech, because we are seeing him from within a tunnel of the Carthaginians’ visual fixation. Specific sounds are blocked out. Next we look down from his face to the gifts he carries in his hands: to the cloak and saffron veil (pallamque et pictum croceo velamen acantho, 711). Then the camera turns in the opposite direction, toward Dido, to catch her lingering on all of these same things in isolation. Line 712 makes clear that it is she “above all” (praecipue) who is dazzled by all of these sights. All along she has been lingering, zooming in with her eyes, and being affected by what she sees. When we are next told that Ascanius/​Cupid hangs from Aeneas’ neck, hugging him and filling him with love, we need to understand that we are in Dido’s emotional line of sight when we see this. We are fixating on the boy through her eyes, not just seeing what she sees, but experiencing the desire with which she sees it. She cannot take her eyes off of him. But note what has happened here. By the time we catch sight of Dido fixating on Cupid, a very big turnaround has taken place: a major reorienting of the scene’s main sightlines. When Ascanius/​Cupid arrived, Dido shone out as a bright blaze of color, splayed out under a luxurious canopy. She had set herself up in just that way to draw all eyes toward herself, as if to put herself in a spotlight, as the evening’s main show. But in following the anaphora’s prompt, mirantur . . . mirantur, we are no longer looking at her: we are noting the reaction of the bedazzled crowd. All eyes have turned away from Dido, and are now looking toward Ascanius/​Cupid and his gifts. These are now the overriding point of focus at the feast. In his rendition of the scene (Plate 4.4), Romanelli captures the exact moment when all eyes turn toward Cupid. Dido, as mentioned above, has a center spot of her own, toward the right side of the painting, but her eyes look down on Cupid, whose golden gifts and blazing hair are located at the exact center of the painting. He is being pointed at from three sides and looked at from all sides. The tapestry captures the very moment when the spotlight shifts, and Dido loses control of her show. It is the precise moment when she first begins to lose control of herself. She has gone from spectacle, and star of the show, to a star-​struck spectator, and it is as a spectator that she subsequently catches our attention again, lingering on Ascanius/​Cupid and his gifts, an unhappy woman, “doomed to her future ruin.” That translation of pesti devota futurae in line 712 is decent enough, but it does not take into account the active (self-​driven) possibilities of the word devota. As the passive participle of the verb deuoueo, the word can mean “destined,” “cursed,” or “doomed,” and that works well enough here, but the word can also mean “devoted to” or “zealously attached” or “given over to.” When used in the former sense (“doomed”), it is understood that some bigger force, such as a god, has devoted

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you to death, and that you have no say in the matter, and no knowledge of the destruction that awaits. But if it is devota in the (neither active or passive, but a so-​ called middle passive) sense of “zealously devoted,” the idea of external causation is no longer in play: it is understood that you have given yourself over to whatever it is that you are so attached to; that you have decided to do yourself in, which is the concept behind the Roman practice of deuotio (an individual warrior choosing to sacrifice himself for the greater cause). Here Dido’s devotion is, strikingly, directed toward the very “pestilence” or “plague” (the pestis) that will kill her. So here again we must ask ourselves: which is it? As she looks on, mesmerized by the god and his gifts, is Dido being ineluctably steered toward her doom by unseen powers, “cursed” by them? Is she Venus’ plaything, and a mere victim of the goddess’s schemes? Or is she choosing to indulge desires that she knows are dangerous, handing herself over to death, in love with, and unable to pull back from, the very disease that is killing her? I know of no better description of addiction, in any language, than Virgil’s description of Dido as pesti devota futurae. But here again, although I have described the core problem that the phrase presents as if it were a matter of our having to choose between this option or that, I want to insist that we leave the matter undecided, because there is no “better” or “correct” rendering of the phrase to be settled upon. That is not what the Latin gives us, and to take it as meaning one thing and not also the other ruins the effect of Virgil’s art. Rather, the phrase pulls this way and that, and that is as it should be. In so doing, it keeps us from knowing Dido too well; it keeps her difficult, inscrutable, and human.20 More on this below.

4.4.  On Keeping Dido Unfathomable Before returning to the visuals of Dido’s feast, I want to spend a few pages on the issue just raised, concerning inscrutability as an effect of good writing rather than a symptom (regrettable but fixable) of imprecise understanding. Taking one erotically charged example, I will demonstrate how the poised language of the Aeneid raises special problems for visual artists who do not have the luxury of keeping things inscrutable, or who, when dealing with persons and/​or situations that might either be this, or might just as reasonably be that, must find special ways to make us “see” two possibilities at once.

20. Traina 1998: 101 points out, within a larger discussion of Turnus’ being both driven from above and responsible for his behavior at the same time: “Virgil does not hide the responsibility of his characters who collaborate in their own ruin.” Further on Virgil’s characters as simultaneously driven by outside forces and internally self-​directed in their actions, see Tarrant 2012: 28–​29.

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But first, a few remarks on how meaningful inscrutabilities are realized in Latin in ways that are less practicable, and considerably less well developed, in ancient Greek. It all has to do with the lemonade that Latin writers managed to squeeze from the lemons of their language. The vocabulary of classical Latin is remarkably small compared to other languages of antiquity. Ancient Greek has many more words by far; a specific term for just about anything that one might want to say. This, the relative smallness of the vocabulary, makes Latin easier to learn than Greek, until you realize that it does not; that it is precisely this same thing, the smallness of the Latin vocabulary, that makes Latin so much harder to learn than Greek. But this is not to say that Latin is any less nuanced, fine-​grained, or expressive than Greek. That is not the case at all. Rather, to make words mean specific and highly nuanced things in Latin, one has to set those words up to say those things, and not other things, by way of what the Romans knew as iunctura, which has to do with the way that words are “joined in” to their larger contexts; how they are shaped by (for example) certain metaphors that are being put into play in the surrounding lines; by specific phraseology, by word order, by metrics, remembered uses, intertexts, and so on. There is nothing robotic or “mathematical” about any of this. Students learning the Latin language at an early stage are commonly (and regrettably) told that word order does not matter in Latin. They are told this about Greek as well. The truism is, at best, “somewhat” true for big picture meanings of sentences. But it is completely untrue for meanings that are shaded and/​ or multivalent, or for meanings that are to be appreciated as things that come into view over time, as over the course of a long periodic sentence. In fact, when it comes to nuance, and to the lived experience of a meaning’s being made, word order is everything in Latin. On the one hand (here is where the lemonade is made), Roman poets could make very wobbly and open-​ended words say exactly what they needed them to say, by situating them as part of a larger, interconnected whole. On the other, as we saw in the case of Dido’s being “doomed/​devoted” to the pestilence that would kill her, they could leave you short, by underspecifying; by not giving you sufficient contextual clues to tell you whether a word should be taken to mean this, or that. And that, the underspecifying that leaves readers with work to do, poised between options, is a very powerful tool in Virgil’s kit (and of Roman poetry more generally). Here is the erotically charged example that I promised above. Once again it concerns the inscrutability of Dido; her being a complicated human rather than a cartoon. I choose this particular example to make my point(s) because it beautifully illustrates how things left unclear in the text, where they are to be experienced for the pause they give, are “helpfully” clarified by painters who make of it not what they must, but what they will. The meaningful unclarity of Virgil’s

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text, in this case, has to do with the complexities of Latin word order within the hexameter line. When Dido and Aeneas get caught in the storm that sends their entire hunting party scrambling for cover, they take refuge in a cave where, we are informed by way of various hints and nudges (wet clothes needing to be gotten out of, fireworks in the sky, and thunder rumbling along), they engage in some pretty primal (Father Sky meets Mother Earth) sex—​something that had been missing from their lives for a very long time. To describe the way that these two lovers suddenly find themselves alone together, Virgil says (and here I make use of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of Aen. 4.165): “Now to the selfsame cave came Dido and the captain of the Trojans.” There is nothing wrong with this translation. It says what the Latin says. But the Latin itself is rather more provocative and problematic. In saying that the two of them happened upon the same cave, Virgil uses the following phrase to name the two-​person subject of the sentence: speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem. At first glance, by taking the words as they come (meaning as something that develops over time), the word dux (which Fitzgerald translates “captain”) seems to agree with Dido, rather than Aeneas. The same line can be taken to say, “with Dido taking the lead, she and the Trojan make their way to the very same cave.”21 But that is where things get spicy, because that way of reading the phrase puts Dido in charge of the lovemaking. It has her, a desiring woman, leading the way as dux, and undertaking to get her sexual needs met. But there are philologically sound ways to turn this around and put Aeneas back in charge. For example, one can argue that Dido is not a dux (a leader or general), Aeneas is, even though Dido is described as a dux femina (a woman leader) earlier in the same book (364). One might also point out that the adjective “Trojan” needs a noun to agree with it, and that the noun dux is right there as a likely candidate, even though the word Troianus occurs all by itself as a substantive adjective describing Aeneas as “the Trojan” on frequent occasions throughout the Aeneid, especially when Dido is furious at him. The adjective does not need a noun, unless you need it to need a noun. Furthermore, one might argue that the placement of a strong caesura in the third foot (the metrical pause after the word Dido) pulls the word dux toward Aeneas rather than Dido, even though the temptation to observe a pause (a diaeresis splitting the third foot from the fourth, at the exact middle of the line) between the words dux and et is also very strong, because et normally begins a new clause and does not follow things that belong to that clause. And so on.

21. On the inherent ambiguity of the phrase, see O’Hara 1997: 250, and Clausen 1987: 24.

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Such are the philological hoops that one has to jump through in order to make this sentence mean one thing and not the other. The Latin leaves you, as reader, with lots of work to do, and part of what is driving you to do that work, and to get one meaning set aside in favor of the other, is what that one meaning (the first instinct you have in reading the line) implies: it implies that Dido, now all drenched and breathing heavily, leads the way. “Come, Aeneas. I happen to know a nice cave—​oh, it’s right over here—​where we can, well, warm up a bit.” It puts Dido on top of the situation, taking charge of her erotic desires and saying, in essence: “look, I am going to be having sex with you now.” And we certainly do not want that. Unless, of course, we do want it. Dido, in Virgil’s Latin, is considerably more interesting and complex than she is in translation, where (as we saw above, in the case of her being “doomed/​devoted” to her future destruction) she tends to be flattened out and presented as a series of problems helpfully solved. This happens in paintings as well. In Plate 4.5, for example, one sees a visual rendition of the scene by Sebastiano Santi, an Italian artist of the nineteenth century who specialized in painting pious figural scenes for churches in northern Italy. Sebastiani has either chosen to play it safe in making what he wanted of Virgil’s Latin, or he has encountered the scene in an Italian translation where the problem did not present itself to him, because it had already been helpfully solved. Aeneas is clearly in charge in this image. His right hand he throws out in front of her as if to block her from stepping away, while with his left hand he urges her toward the entry. Dido’s overall look is decidedly un-​regal. She wears the head covering of a demure and chaste matron, and with the gestures of her hands and the look on her face she signals both mild shock and hesitation, as if to say, “oh, no! Really, do you think we should?” In clear and obvious contrast to the couple’s cave approach as painted by Santi is the version of the scene painted by Francesco Solimena more than 100 years before (see the cover image of this book), which has Dido in front, taking Aeneas by the hand and pointing him to the cave. One sees an even more purposeful and proactive Dido in the version painted by Johannes Heinrich Tischbein the Elder in 1757 (Plate 4.6). Tischbein’s Dido is scandalously over-​exposed—​her high-​ hemmed dress, golden belt, and bare breast are Amazonian accessories, privileging connections with the doomed warrior maidens, Penthesilea and Camilla. With her extended right arm she points toward the cave, and with her left she grabs Aeneas’ right wrist to lead him in that direction. In what will end up being an exact reversal of Santi’s saintly version of Dido, painted many decades later, Tischbein’s Dido tosses a bare leg in front of Aeneas, not he in front of her, as if to stop him from going any further, and it is Aeneas this time, not Dido, who raises a disbelieving hand to his chest, as if to say, “Really!? Do you think this is a good

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idea?” The fact that the storm, by this point, is already far in the distance and that the sun is shining down on them undercuts the idea they are being forced by dire circumstances to find shelter in the cave. That the servant behind Dido carries provisions for a party suggests that the “further possibilities” of the hunt may have been part of Dido’s plan all along. In Santi’s depiction, Aeneas leads the way (he is dux). In the versions of Solimena and Tischbein, it is Dido (she is dux). In his version of the scene (Plates 4.7 and 4.8), Romanelli shows both Dido and Aeneas moving in tandem. Rather than showing them at cross-​purposes, one stepping into the other, so as to block him/​her, both step in the same direction toward the cave. Neither looks toward the cave. Rather, their eyes are locked in on each other, as a sign of mutual attraction. Each holds one arm high and another low to keep Aeneas’ cape aloft over their heads, using it as a shared umbrella. One presumes that the cape will find its way onto the cave floor as their bed. Unlike the depictions examined above, Romanelli’s tapestry has no one urging, and no one hesitating. The double-​pull of the Latin is rendered not as a matter of “either/​or” but “both/​and”: it has not one dux, but two.

4.5.  Girl on Fire Returning now to Dido’s feast. According to the metaphor of line 713, Dido is drinking with her eyes, and cannot get her fill: expleri mentem nequit. Thucydides says that at the height of the plague in Athens, victims who burned with fever plunged into tanks of cold water and drank, trying to relieve a thirst that could not be quenched, no matter how much they drank.22 In his description of the plague Lucretius says that their thirst was “parched beyond all quenching” (insedabiliter sitis arida, 6.1175). Dido has caught this plague through her eyes, by gazing on the god’s blazing face, and through direct contact with him, as she cuddles him in her lap, not knowing how gigantic he actually is. That was the whole point of Cupid’s deceit: to get close, and to light her on fire. Here are Venus’s orders as she sends him off to make Dido fall in love (Aen. 1.684–​88): falle dolo, et notos pueri puer indue voltus, ut, cum te gremio accipiet laetissima Dido regalis inter mensas laticemque Lyaeum, cum dabit amplexus atque oscula dulcia figet, occultum inspires ignem fallasque veneno.

22. Thucydides 2.49.5.

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Deceive her with guile. A boy yourself, put on that boy’s look so that, when Dido takes you into her lap, bursting with joy amid the kingly tables and flowing wine, when she hugs you and puts her sweet lips to yours, you may breathe a secret fire into her, and poison her by guile. Figure 4.1 is an image of Dido’s feast from Sebastian Brant’s 1502 printed edition of Virgil’s complete works. The pages of Brant’s edition are laid out in such a way that small snatches of text are surrounded by a large protective frame of commentary on all sides: Servius, Landino, Calderini, and others. Every few

Figure 4.1  Woodcut illustration of Dido’s Feast, Sebastian Brant, 1502. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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pages one encounters a magnificent woodcut image in black and white, such as this one.23 In the upper-​left corner, Venus snatches up the real Ascanius and spirits him away. Farther below you see Cupid, disguised as Ascanius, fetching gifts from the ship (the diadem he is being handed by Achates is one of five gifts mentioned by Virgil).24 Then you see the same “Ascanius” figure yet a third time at the bottom left, now fully realized as Cupid: he has wings and his typical bow and arrow. But he also carries a strange device that he is not usually pictured with: a bellows. He has been sent to the feast in Ascanius’ place, in the words of lines 660–​61, “in order to set the queen ablaze, and entangle her bones in fire” (incendat reginam, atque ossibus implicet ignem). Normally, as in the depictions of the Romanelli and de Troy examined above, Cupid is pictured bringing gifts to this feast. But those gifts, as Virgil repeatedly makes clear, serve the function of fire-​starters (more on this below). The bellows that Cupid holds in his hands is a stand-​in for the gifts; a symbolic swap of five for one, stressing the gifts’ function in the story. Like the wings on Cupid’s back, the bellows cannot be seen by the guests. He is showing the bellows to us, while pointing it straight at Dido. What the guests see in his hands are the actual gifts, while we see a symbol for what those gifts do, and how they function in the story. The image makes clear that Cupid has already done what he was sent there to do: all eyes, by this point, are on Aeneas. Having just touched the wine to her lips, Dido hands the cup to Bitias. She stares into Aeneas’ eyes as he begins to tell his story. Although the gifts themselves are nowhere in sight, a reference to the embroidered velamen has been worked into the acanthus design of Iopas’ cloak. The plan, as laid out by Venus, was for Cupid to “breathe fire” into her (inspires ignem, 688) as everyone was drinking (inter mensas laticemque Lyaeum, 686), and that is exactly what happens. Dido, who famously abstains from drinking at this feast, in fact, can be spied drinking to excess here: she cannot “get her fill of ” what she sees, drinking it in with her eyes (the metaphor of line 713), and as the drafts heat her insides, she rapidly loses control. At the specific moment when she snuggles the god and kisses him with her sweet lips, he breathes fire into her, stoking

23. For a full description of the contents of Brant’s 1502 edition of Virgil’s complete works, and the context and early influence of its publication, see Frick 2019. Eastin 2016 is an excellent study of Brant’s humanist agenda, and the political messages of the book’s woodcut illustrations. On Brant’s woodcuts, within a larger study of Virgilian woodcuts and engravings from the late Renaissance on, see Kallendorf 2001. 24. For Brant’s tendency to sequentialize a series of events within a single woodcut, see Kallendorf 2001: 124.

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the embers into flame. That is why Brant puts a bellows in the picture rather than a torch, the fire item that one normally associates with Cupid. In the figurative details of his fire imagery, Virgil makes clear that Cupid is not setting a torch to Dido, as if to start a new fire; he is reviving a fire that died down long ago, but still smolders inside of her. The breathy kiss that Cupid plants on her lips serves to fan the embers of a fire that once burned bright for Sychaeus, the deceased husband to whom Dido swore to remain faithful. Near the center of the large passage quoted above, Virgil makes clear that the gifts are just as important in mesmerizing Dido and fanning the fire inside her as are the hugs and kisses of Cupid: “she is unable to fill her mind full, and by watching she begins to burn, Phoenissa, stirred in equal measure by the boy and his gifts” (714). Earlier in the book, when Aeneas orders the gifts to be brought from the ships, we are told that they are precious items of clothing and adornment, some with a shadowy past. The main items are a palla, that is, a woman’s outer cloak (a kind of cape that could be used as a wrap), and a velamen, which is a general word for a light wrap or cover, but tends to mean a veil when referring to an article of women’s clothing. Here is the complete inventory of the gifts (Aen. 1.647–​55): Munera praeterea, Iliacis erepta ruinis, ferre iubet, pallam signis auroque rigentem, et circumtextum croceo velamen acantho, ornatus Argivae Helenae, quos illa Mycenis, Pergama cum peteret inconcessosque hymenaeos, extulerat, matris Ledae mirabile donum: praeterea sceptrum, Ilione quod gesserat olim, maxima natarum Priami, colloque monile bacatum, et duplicem gemmis auroque coronam. In addition, he orders him (Achates) to bring gifts rescued from the ruins of Troy: a mantle stiff with designs in gold, and a light wrap/​veil stitched round with acanthus designs in saffron red, ornaments of Argive Helen that she had brought with her when she made her way from Mycenae to Pergamum in pursuit of an illicit marriage, the stunning gift of her mother, Leda. There was, in addition, the scepter that Ilione once bore, she the eldest of Priam’s daughters, and a pearl neck bracelet, and a double-​banded crown of jewels and gold. You see all of the items mentioned by the passage being offered to Dido (already entirely fixated on the boy) in the depiction of the Lombard Painter (Plate 4.3): being held out toward her by the young man who kneels out front is the

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crown and the cloak stiff with gold. The older stooped man behind him is Achates, who holds the necklace. Bringing up the rear is Aeneas himself, who stands tall, holding Ilione’s scepter and the bordered velamen with acanthus designs in saffron red. In the version of the scene painted by Francesco Solimena in the 1720s (Plate 4.9), one sees the saffron veil draped over Cupid’s shoulder and the gold-​encrusted cloak held out by the young man on his knees, while the crown, scepter, and necklace can be spied peeking out from the bowl that is just below Dido’s right hand. Wearing gold, Dido sits on a throne of gold, under tapestries of gold.25 In the rendition of the scene painted by Gerard de Lairesse in 1669 (Plate 4.10), one sees the red veil being held up by the man on his knees, his back toward the viewer. In front of him is Achates, holding the scepter, the crown, and the necklace. The one item that seems to be missing from the list is the golden palla, but it is there, already being worn by Dido and actively admired by the servant who has helped her put it on. Dido cuddles Cupid at the exact center of the painting, looking down at him. We are to understand that he has just brought this gift to her at the head of the procession, as yet more irresistible gold for golden Dido. The otherwise happy banquet is brooded over by Venus, who reclines on a storm cloud on the upper right, and the festive mood is significantly darkened even further by the tapestries (nearly black) that frame the entire scene. One sees all five gifts on the Romanelli tapestry pictured above in Plate 4.4, and one sees them again in a tapestry of the same era (Plate 4.11), where we see Aeneas holding the gold-​encrusted palla, while the other four gifts lie just below the knees of Cupid, their bearer, at the far right of the tapestry (see the enlarged inset image, Plate 4.12). The artists who depict the scene, many of them responding to earlier depictions and/​or operatic stagings rather than to Virgil’s text alone, are largely unencumbered in what they choose to show in certain matters, such as whether Dido reclines on a couch or is seated at table, or on a throne. But in the matter of the gifts, they show a strong tendency toward getting all five depicted, and not daring to deviate from Virgil’s list. Why they should all choose to be so meticulous about the gifts, even as they paint the feast taking place inside baroque-​era throne rooms and North Italian seaside villas, is a mystery. But it may have to do with the high regard they had for the symbolism of the gifts. Traffic in such items is the painters’ métier.

25. Arguing for a date in the late 1720s, Levey 1973: 389 suggests that Solimena’s depiction may have been influenced by the staging of Scarlatti’s opera La Didone delirante in 1696 and/​or Metastasio’s tragedy Didone abbandonata in 1724.

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There is much to be said about the ominous provenance of these gifts, especially the two items that had once belonged to Helen. Helen’s mother, Leda, had given her the golden cloak and saffron wrap/​veil, not as send-​off gifts for her new life as Paris’ adulterous live-​in lover in Troy, but as wedding gifts, fit for a queen, on the occasion of her marriage to Menelaus in Sparta. Helen takes them with her to Troy, as if to legitimate her adulterous affair as a marriage. In his comments on line 650, Servius says that these items are to be understood as “an omen of unhappiness to come, since she (Dido) is receiving the gifts of an adulteress” (omen infelicitatis futurae, cum adulterae suscipit munera).26 Of the final three items on the list, the scepter is said to have once belonged to Ilione, the eldest daughter of Priam, and a queen in her own right. The pearl necklace and the jewel-​encrusted crown are equally regal and may have belonged to her as well. According to her myth, Ilione had been given in marriage to the king of Thrace, Polymestor, and her life with him (Polymestor is one of mythology’s typically violent Thracian tyrants) was not a happy one. In his note on line 653, after working through the problem of whether the scepter had belonged to Ilione as queen of Thrace, or as princess of Troy, Servius (D) says that “although these gifts are suitable for a queen who is about to be married, they nonetheless seem to presage evils to come” (quamuis apta nupturae reginae sint munera, tamen futurorum malorum continere omen uidentur). In his comments on the next line, Servius (D) explains why he considers the items that had once belonged to Ilione so baleful in what they portend: “after the city of Troy was captured, she (Ilione) was thrown out by her husband, then committed suicide” (quae post captum Ilium eiecta a uiro manu sua interiit). There were many stories told about Ilione’s unhappy life with Polymestor, some giving other reasons for her suicide. But this is the one that matters most for the gifts that are being given. Not only are these regal items darkly portentous in a general “bad vibes” sense, they portend things that are highly specific to Dido.27 The ominous foreshadowings of the gifts that are specific to Dido can be tallied, roughly, as follows. First, concerning the items that once belonged to Helen. Here we have things that were worn by (1) a queen who betrayed both her husband and her country, when she was (2) overwhelmed by desire for (3) a Trojan prince who was just passing through. These actions are the cause of (4) genocidal

26. The word suscipit implies that Dido is the “next in line” to receive the gifts. Kirichenko 2013: 72–​73 draws associative connections between the palla and velamen and the tapestry woven by Helen in Il. 3, and the peplos offered to Athena in Il. 6, intertextual memories that, he suggests, “evoke an ominous significance for his (Aeneas’) host and her city” (73). 27. Pezzini 2019: 132–​33 points out that the gifts prefigure what will become of Dido as a new Helen, and a new Ilione.

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wars; and yet (5) the question of whether she was to blame for the destruction she caused, or had been “doomed” by forces beyond her control, was much debated, and never clearly settled.28 After Troy is sacked and left in ashes, Helen (6) returns to her former husband, Menelaus (as Dido returns to Sychaeus in the underworld). Then, moving on to the scepter of Ilione, here we have an item that belonged to yet another impassioned queen who, when (7) tossed aside by her cruel husband, (8) commits suicide. Many have noted the resemblances connecting the past of these items to the future that awaits Dido. But their use as incendiary devices has received little comment, largely because that function seems obvious enough: Dido sees the gifts and drinks them in with her eyes. They stir longings inside of her. A fire is lit. By the time the feast ends and Aeneas’ tale has been told, she is madly in love. The text tells us as much. And yet, we also know that the fires started at the feast do not “stay” metaphorical, either for Dido, or for her city: she goes up in flames, real ones, at the end of book 4, and her city is burnt to the ground many centuries after her death, all because of the fire that Cupid stirs inside of her at the feast, by breathing into her, and giving her baleful gifts.29 By stirring memories of these other, very real fires, the text opens up new ways of “recognizing” what it gives us to see. By referring not only to the passion that Dido feels (fire as metaphor), but to its consequences (fire as fire), the gifts come into view as things we have seen before.30 It was upon seeing the banquet scene as painted by de Lairesse, with Dido at the center, already wearing the golden palla (Plate 4.10), that something clicked in me about the further purposes of these gifts not merely as omens, but as fire-​ starters. That “click” happened because the picture brought specific memories to mind—​and whether de Lairesse intended his viewers to make the memory leap that I made is rather beside the point. To allow my own readers to come to that “aha!” moment for themselves, in the paragraph that follows I lay out the basic fabula elements of the specific earlier tale that de Lairesse’s painting found me 28. Even as he comments on the gifts, Servius (D) ad 651 goes into the question of whether Helen was seduced by Paris, or taken by violence after adamantly refusing his advances. 29. For another clear example of metaphors that do not “stay” metaphorical in the Aeneid, cf. the first four lines of book 4 where, now that she has fallen in love with Aeneas, Dido is described as suffering a wound in the chest (saucia . . . vulnus alit . . . infixi pectore), and being consumed by fire (carpitur igni). By the end of the book, these metaphors are no longer metaphorical. 30. On fire as a metaphor that fails to remain metaphorical in Dido’s case, see Quint 2018: ­chapter 3 passim, esp. 72: “She (Dido) has been burning with love from the start of Book 4, but that is a metaphor. Dido’s immediately ensuing curse (4.607f.), however, makes fantasy real, just as the pyre she has built will literally burn her dead body.”

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suddenly remembering, and thinking important. Not all of the elements align, but enough of them do, to help us think of Dido’s feast in remembered terms, as a case of déjà vu. Here is the fabula: adorable young children come bearing gifts to a royal princess. They bring her presents to defuse her hostility toward them, and to celebrate the princesses’ forthcoming marriage. When the children arrive at the palace with their gifts, everyone is delighted. Those inside greet them with hugs and kisses. At first the princess wants nothing to do with these adorable cherubs, but then she catches sight of the gifts that they bear: a gorgeous golden robe, and a crown, also of gold. She cannot resist. The princess takes the gifts and immediately puts them on, utterly delighted by the way they make her look. Then, as if seized by a sudden disease, she starts to foam at the mouth, and the blood drains from her face. She screams in pain as both the crown and the dress burst into flame. Not a metaphorical fire, in this case, but a real one. The princess goes up in a blaze of flame and smoke. It turns out that we have seen such gifts, and in fact these very gifts (a golden robe, a crown), used as fire-​starters before, sent by a vindictive Medea to Jason’s new bride.31 It is crucial to know this, because understanding that the older story inhabits the newer one tells us something important about Dido at this early stage of the Aeneid; it opens a window onto her vulnerability, and her innocence, giving us new ways of seeing her. The crucial takeaway from this is not that here, once again, we have Dido’s story aligning with that of Medea, as if that were, in itself, surprising. It is that, in this particular instance, the two stories do not actually align. Not at all. Yes, Dido is spotted here replaying a role from Euripides’ Medea, and engaging with the same deadly and seductive props. But she is not Medea; she is the victim of Medea, the royal young princess, Jason’s new bride, poisoned by guileful gifts, who goes up in a blaze of fire. We are familiar with Dido as Medea. We are not familiar with her as Medea’s victim. Artfully composed atop her bed, Dido is set aflame by love’s fire in book 1. The banquet prefigures her death upon yet another burning bed, the one she once shared with her lover, Aeneas, at the end of book 4. That bed becomes her funeral pyre. In Figure 4.2, one notes how Sebastian Brant has brought back the bellows in his depiction of Dido’s death (it lies at the base of the staircase, toward the viewer). By bringing the bellows back, Brant draws a connection between the gifts of book 1, and Dido’s fiery death in book 4. Its inclusion at the foot of Dido’s pyre 31. The idea is floated already in 1863 by John Connington in his commentary on the complete works of Virgil, the note on line 659, p. 96, of vol. 2. For a recent, detailed study connecting the gifts given to Dido to the gifts given by Medea to her rival, see Baraz 2009.

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Figure 4.2  Woodcut illustration of Dido’s Suicide, Sebastian Brant, 1502. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

is Brant’s final comment on what he saw the feast foreshadowing via its imagery of funerals, cremation, and death by fire. To give just two small examples of what Brant was picking up on, the phrase that I dwelt on above, iam composuit, “she had already composed herself,” can also be heard to say that she had already laid herself out, as if for burial. It is a mere matter of choosing between Oxford Latin Dictionary entries 4b (“to settle in a position of rest”) and 4c (“to lay out for burial”). This is not to say that any hard decisions have to be made here when it comes to translating the phrase: all contextual signs point to the former, since this is clearly a feast, not a funeral. And yet, the latter meaning haunts the phrase,

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and should be thought of as doing so—​not that it must, or that it always does, but because the word occurs within a larger context that is littered with funereal imagery. To take just one other example, in lines 726–​27 Virgil describes lamps and torches being lit to illumine the feast. There are a number of go-​to options for “torch” in Latin, but Virgil eschews them in favor of the relatively rare term funalia. The word is innocent enough, describing torches made of rope (funis), and yet it looks rather deadly to the eye, and smacks of funerals and corpses to the ear. In his note on the line, Servius speculates that “funerals are so-​called from these (sc. Rope torches), because our ancestors used to carry burning ropes in front of the dead” (unde et funera dicuntur, quod funes incensos mortuis praeferebant). The assertion is fanciful, but it shows where the odd term funalia would tend to lead the Roman mind, by looking and sounding funereal.32 Looking back at that crucial moment when Dido catches flame on her dining couch, ones sees that at that precise instant she is referred to by an alternate name: “and by watching, Phoenissa (the Phoenician woman) begins to burn” (ardescitque tuendo /​Phoenissa, 714). As if it were being led up to by a drumroll, the adjective is given emphasis by its postponement to the beginning of the next line. But why? Do we really need to be told that Dido is a Phoenician at this point, and to have that put to us so emphatically? The thing to be observed about her being named this way, at this particular moment, is that one cannot utter the word that names her without also naming what Dido so uncannily resembles at that very moment: the Phoenix, that mythical bird of purple and gold that composes its own fragrant funeral pyre, settles in on it, then bursts into flame. These phoenix-​like aspects of Dido have been explored elsewhere in her story by others, but I think that the metaphor is first activated already here. As I have suggested, it prefigures her death, but it also tells us something about her failure to stay dead; that is, how, through her curse, Dido will rise like a phoenix from the ashes, as an ongoing, un-​killable menace to Rome.33 Carthage will be destroyed by Rome not once, but many times, in many wars, fought in many places, including “New Carthage” in Spain. Staying with this last point, one notes that the lines describing Cupid’s fire-​ starting kiss are fraught with suggestions of military conquest: Cupid “attacks” Dido in these lines (reginam petit). Virgil says that she does not realize what a

32. Similarly, the word sponda (the “bedframe” on which Dido reclines) can also mean “funeral bier,” as at Mart. 10.5.9 Orciniana in sponda. 33. On Dido’s figuration as the phoenix, see esp. Quint 1993: 111–​13, and Quint 2018: 75–​81.

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huge god is “sitting on” her.34 That is the basic, literal meaning of the verb insidere, according to Oxford Latin Dictionary definition 1. But one sees in definition 2 that it means to “seize” or “occupy with armed forces.” Again, this is a case of the word’s meaning (and having to be translated as) the former, while hinting at the latter. Not only does this fire-​starting moment on the purple couch prefigure Dido’s death, it prefigures the destruction of Carthage that will be meted out by these same Trojans, repeatedly, many centuries in the future. The line just examined contains a question that it poses indirectly. Here is the same question, posed directly: “how big is the god who is sitting on/​laying siege to the poor woman?” (insidat quantus miserae deus). This is a meta question. I say this because it is the same question that readers of the Aeneid have always asked about Ascanius, Aeneas’ son, because Virgil tends to make him as big or small as he needs to in order to fit whatever role he needs to play in whatever scene he is in. Here, at the feast, he is described as an especially small and adorable child, small enough to snuggle with Dido and steal kisses from her while sitting on her lap. In book 4, presumably mere days or weeks later, this same little cherub is described leading troops of young Trojan hunters and chasing down wild animals on horseback, and in the Aeneid’s second half he is described as a young warrior fully fledged, fighting in battles. How can that be? How big is he, really? This pliability in Virgil’s verbal depiction of Ascanius raises a problem for those who want to paint him: they need to choose how big they will make him. One can see just how wildly their responses diverge by comparing the tiny child, a mere toddler, who sits on Dido’s lap in the depiction of the Lombard Painter (Plate 4.3), to the fully grown man who drinks wine beside Dido in the Vergilius Romanus illustration (Plate 4.1). Were he not commanding Dido’s attention so fixedly and positioned in a secondary spot (see above), Ascanius/​ Cupid would be virtually indistinguishable from Aeneas, who sits directly across from him. In addition, Ascanius/​Cupid has a halo that is slightly bigger than those of Dido and Aeneas, because it is the halo of a god, and theirs are not. The haloes ensconcing their heads are an effect of their being in his presence. Rather like the sun giving light to the moon, the god’s bright fire causes them to glow. To signal that they are conversing, both Aeneas and Dido raise their right hands, with two fingers extended. Although talking to one another, their eyes are fixed 34. Concerning the matter of the god’s size, there seems to be a reference to Euripides Troiades 940–​41, where Helen describes her seduction by Paris, who arrived in Sparta “with no small goddess at his side.” One wonders whether much of what we see happening at Dido’s feast alludes to some known version of a banquet scene in earlier literature (perhaps as early as the Cypria) where Helen, as hostess in Sparta, spies Paris and falls in love with him. Such a background story, if it did exist (I suspect it did), would also stand behind Medea’s seeing, and falling for Jason at her father’s banquet in Apollonius’ Argonautica.

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on Ascanius/​Cupid. By painting him large, in fact a mirror image of his father who sits across from him, the painter of the Vergilius Romanus illustration avoids the problem that the text seems to raise: of Dido’s being erotically fixated on a small child. She is falling in love with his father, whom he mirrors. Beware of Trojans bearing gifts: the phrase donis furentem describing Dido in line 659, and Cupid described as dona ferens in line 679, look ahead to the Greeks, dona ferentes (“bearing gifts”) early in the next book. Cupid’s gifts are themselves already a Trojan Horse: killer gifts that breach defenses and bring about the destruction of the city.35 At the end of the book 4, once Dido has stabbed herself on the pyre, the women of Dido’s house begin to scream, and soon enough the entire city resonates with loud wailing and the howling of women, “just as if,” Virgil says, “the entire city of Carthage were crashing down in ruin, with the enemy having been let inside” (non aliter quam si immissis ruat hostibus omnis /​Karthago, 669–​70). Carthage will be crushed by the Romans repeatedly. And yet, like the bird that names the people, it will not stay dead. It will repeatedly rise from the ashes. Even as Virgil writes these lines, Carthage was being rebuilt as a Roman city in North Africa, and a New Carthage was being rebuilt in Spain.36 There is much that I would like to conclude from all of this, but I will leave that to end of the next, and final chapter. The main purpose of this study of Dido’s feast has been to show how the sensory cues of Virgil’s description, the smallish details of colors, props, shifting sightlines, and so on, are not just decorations that visually enliven the stories being told. They do that, of course, but in so doing they conspire to tell stories of their own; stories that nuance, problematize, and sometimes run directly counter to, the stories that they color. We will see this happening again, in Virgil’s kaleidoscopic description of Camilla’s death.

35. The insight is well developed by Frangoulidis 1992. 36. On the rebuilding of Carthage as a Roman colony in the 20s bce, see Goldschmidt 2017: 368–​69. On the rebuilding of Carthago Nova in Spain, see Morgan and Shi 2015.

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Imagery as Counternarrative in the Death of Camilla

5.1.  Imagining Camilla In book 1, prompted by the mnemonics of Juno’s temple, Aeneas summons up a dire tale of despicable horrors, located in a recent past that he variously deplores, regrets, and hates. He does so not knowing that many of these same horrors await him in his future as well, as so many déjà vu cruelties that he will either experience yet again for himself, or inflict on others. Troilus, the “boy” on the wall, has much of the dying Pallas about him, the young prince whom Turnus kills and strips of his gear. But he also points ahead to Lausus, Mezentius’ young son, whom Aeneas himself kills in a fit of irrepressible Achillean rage. The last tragic image spotted on the temple wall, lingered over by Aeneas as he gazes up at the frieze, is that of Penthesilea, the Amazon warrior who met her demise shortly before Troy fell. As we saw in ­chapter 3, Dido’s resemblance to Penthesilea is emphasized by a “match cut” transition that momentarily overlays and doubles their images, one femina dux blurring into the other. But she also looks ahead, more distantly, to Camilla, the warrior maiden of the Aeneid’s second half. Like Penthesilea, her counterpart and template in the Epic Cycle, Camilla comes into the battle narrative rather late—​a point emphasized by her arriving last in the parade of Italian fighters at the end of book 7. When the camera finally turns to her in book 11, giving her a starring role, she dazzles brilliantly in the spotlight, but only for a little while. Her late-​arriving death, like that of Penthesilea in the Cyclic Aethiopis, leaves only one man to beat before the city at last falls. Unlike Penthesilea, Camilla has no life outside of Virgil. Not that we know of. Virgil seems to have invented Camilla, if not the whole of her, at least the better part of her, much as he did with Dido. Insofar as she is known to us at all, Camilla

Virgil’s Cinematic Art. Kirk Freudenburg, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197643242.003.0006

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is Virgil’s Camilla.1 Her many obvious resemblances to Penthesilea, as well as the clear matching of their roles as late-​arriving female warriors whose tragic deaths leave just one last man to kill (Memnon in the case of Penthesilea, Turnus in the case of Camilla) before the cities they fight for ultimately fall, suggest that Virgil models his Camilla rather closely on Penthesilea, whose story was known widely not only as a famous “Homeric” tale, but as a romantically eroticized “death throes” scene that was a favorite of visual artists working in various artistic media. Thus, while Virgil has no specific stories or pictures of any known Oscan warrior named Camilla that he can easily invoke to help us structure our visual sense of the young warrior girl he has in mind, he can rely on stories and pictures all the same. She is his Penthesilea, a known reference point that helps us bring her into view. A close and careful look at Camilla’s final moments is the final task of this book. Here again we will see that telling and looking pull in opposite directions and tell different stories: another case of a visual narrative that runs counter to the surface narrative that conveys it.

5.2.  Tracking Prey with Camilla In telling of Camilla’s death, Virgil paints the most vividly colored scene of the entire Aeneid.2 In the Latin below, I have emboldened and underlined the words that refer to colors, brightness, and hue, and to specific eye-​catching qualities of the things that are being described. If one were to imagine these same words not in black typescript, but inked in the colors that they name and lit up by the eye-​ catching visual properties that they refer to, the dappling of the page would be quite remarkable (Aen. 11.768–​82): Forte sacer Cybelo Chloreus olimque sacerdos insignis longe Phrygiis fulgebat in armis spumantemque agitabat equum, quem pellis aënis in plumam squamis auro conserta tegebat.

1. See Monreal 2015: 80–​81, 91–​92. De Luigi 2000 has recently made a case for connecting the Amazonomachy depicted on the temple of Mater Matuta at Satricum to a local Volscian tradition concerning Camilla. This would establish Camilla as a known mythological figure in the fifth century bce. The evidence is slight, but the case well made and to be taken seriously. Other scholars read the pictorial evidence provided by the temple as a reference to other, more famous, Amazon battles, such as those fought by Achilles, Hercules, and Theseus. If De Luigi’s argument is accepted, it would establish Camilla’s story as an old, and quite obscure, regional myth that Virgil (in the manner of a Latin Callimachus) rediscovers and heavily reworks along known lines, by bringing Camilla’s story into line with that of Penthesilea. 2. On the intense coloration of the Chloreus passage, see La Penna 2004: 242–​43.

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ipse peregrina ferrugine clarus et ostro spicula torquebat Lycio Gortynia cornu; aureus ex umeris erat arcus et aurea uati cassida; tum croceam chlamydemque sinusque crepantis carbaseos fuluo in nodum collegerat auro pictus acu tunicas et barbara tegmina crurum. hunc uirgo, siue ut templis praefigeret arma Troia, captiuo siue ut se ferret in auro uenatrix, unum ex omni certamine pugnae caeca sequebatur totumque incauta per agmen femineo praedae et spoliorum ardebat amore. Perchance a holy man from Mt. Cybelus, in a former time (Cybele’s) priest, Chloreus shone brightly in the distance, conspicuous in his Phrygian arms. He spurred a foaming horse covered in bronze scales that were sewn with gold to make a feathery pelt. He stood out bright in cinnabar red and purple as he shot Gortynian arrows from a Lycian horn-​bow. A bow of gold hung from his shoulders, and gold was the cassida (helmet) atop the seer’s head. His crocus-​colored chlamys, its carbasean (linen) folds noisily flapping, he had gathered into a knot with a yellow (brooch/​belt of ) gold.3 His tunic and barbarian leggings were patterned with needlework. Whether it was to mount those Trojan arms in a temple or to flaunt herself in captured gold, it was this man whom the virgin hunted. Out of the entire throng of battle it was he alone whom she blindly followed, and recklessly through the entire battalion she burned bright in her womanly lust for booty and spoils. The lighting of this scene is exceptionally bright. Objects glint and glare before the eyes, and the many colors they project are dappled and dazzling. To appreciate just how brightly lit this passage is, one can compare it to the much darker “night raid” scene of book 9 that culminates in the deaths of Nisus and Euryalus. There, the verse that marks the doomed pair’s departure from the Trojan camp emphasizes the gloom that envelops them as they head into the night (egressi . . . noctis per umbram, 314), and throughout the scene that ensues darkness is repeatedly emphasized both directly (nocti, 338, noctis in umbra, 373, ilice nigra, 381, tenebrae, 384, fraude . . . noctis, 397, etc.), and via a compensatory emphasis on hearing (audit . . . audit, 394, stridens 419) that is matched by references to difficulties of seeing (rara per occultos lucebat semita callis, 383, diuersi circumspiciunt, 416). Brought along as fellow viewers who struggle to see, readers trek through the dark 3. On the chlamys as symbol of oriental luxury, see Reed 2007: 120.

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with Nisus and Euryalus for thirty-​five lines before encountering their first color word: namely, the wine-​dark “purple” of the blood that the slain Rhoetus spews from his chest (purpuream uomit, 349). Such sparsity of color stands out when compared to the garishness of Camilla’s last hunt, especially when one considers that the first killing described in the Nisus and Euryalus episode is that of a figure who, like Chloreus in the passage quoted above, is notably ripe for close visual inspection: an ostentatious Etruscan, the augur king, Rhamnes, who lies passed out on a pile of rich tapestries. Reference is made to his being exotic and pompous, but the visual details are left unspecified, as if shrouded in the dark. In fact, as if to account for our being able to see the wine-​dark purple4 that spurts from Rhoetus’ chest, Virgil has Nisus take note of a fire that is slowly dying nearby (ibi ignem /​deficere extremum, 351–​52), and it is at that precise moment, when Nisus sees the fire, and the horses that are illuminated by it in the grass nearby, that he says to Euryalus “we should stop, because daylight, our enemy, is approaching” (“absistamus . . . nam lux inimica propinquat,” 355). As soon as those words are out of Nisus’ mouth, that is, once two sources of light (one waning, the other increasing) have been lit, Euryalus notes that they are surrounded by a treasure trove of silver and gold, and in his youthful enthusiasm for spoils that only now can he see glinting at his feet, he makes the fatal mistake of loading himself down with items that shine in the light, doing so right as the sun is beginning to rise. Returning to the bright light of Camilla’s last hunt, the colors that dapple the passage quoted above do not belong to Camilla herself, but to the garish Trojan character she is chasing, Chloreus, an arrow-​shooting priest from Mount Cybelus. His name is itself a color word, from the Greek χλορός, designating a bright shade of greenish yellow. Camilla spots him on the field of battle, something that is dead easy to do because this man, his chariot, and his horses are all slathered in vibrant colors that stand out from their dusty surroundings. But visually vibrant details, in this case, do more than prompt us to see the character that Virgil has in mind. Rather, they both manifest and enact his primary function in the narrative, even as they bring him into view. For it is precisely because Chloreus is so vibrantly colored and conspicuous that he catches Camilla’s attention and causes her to track him with her eyes.5

4. Rhoetus was caught hiding behind a giant crater (magnum . . . cratera, 346), a vessel used for mixing wine. To put us inside the wickedly humorous thoughts of his killer as he watches Rhoetus die, Virgil describes Rhoetus’ death in wine-​mixing terms: “he vomits out his purple soul and brings up/​brings to mind wine mixed with blood as he dies” (purpuream uomit ille animam et cum sanguine mixta /​uina refert moriens, 349–​50). 5. For a possible Cyclical background for Camilla’s erotic fall, cf. Horace’s description of Helen’s first-​sighting of Paris (a story that may have been told in the Cypria, perhaps in the context of

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In telling us what Camilla sees, the separate color bursts of the passage serve the function of a suturing device, with each color spotted designating a new visual point of interest that catches Camilla’s attention as she first catches sight of the man, then follows him across the battle plain. Virgil uses these colors and descriptive eye-​catchers to put us in Camilla’s hunting boots and to keep us moving with her as she, a native Italian huntress, follows Chloreus both with her eyes and with her feet. She is tracking him. The counterpart in film for what Virgil does here in words is the so-​called tracking shot, where the camera itself moves through the scene for an extended amount of time, often, as here, functioning as the eyes of one character who follows another traveling from place to place (see Appendix, item 9, as well as item 11, on the use of color[s]‌to mark and track a point of intense fixation by an onlooker). The tracking metaphor is particularly apt in Camilla’s case because that is exactly what she is doing: a skilled huntress, she is tracking the exotic prey that she has spotted and is closing in on with a view to a kill. Like so many other watchers in the Aeneid, Camilla is mesmerized by bright colors and shiny military hardware. Elsewhere in the epic, to have one’s attention grabbed in this way tends to be a very bad sign: Euryalus, for example, first hunting and stripping, then wearing the shiny gear that he has taken in the night raid of book 9; or Aeneas, staring at Penthesilea’s golden belt, a belt like the one sported by huntress Dido in book 4, each its own “Amazonian” symbol of sexual conquest and defeat.6 Or, perhaps most worrisome of all: Aeneas catching sight of the belt of Pallas in the poem’s very last lines. Whether for the one looking or the one looked upon, no obvious good ever comes of this, so there is a kind of tense foreboding that builds within the scene the longer that Camilla’s act of gazing is

a Spartan banquet) at Carm. 4.9.10–​16, putting strong emphasis on Helen’s passion as a fire started by the sight of Paris’ hair and his gold-​slathered clothes: spirat adhuc amor vivuntque commissi calores Aeoliae fidibus puellae. Non sola comptos arsit adulteri crines et aurum uestibus inlitum mirata regalisque cultus et comites Helene Lacaena “Having been committed to the lyre, the Aeolian girl’s (Sappho’s) desire still breathes and her hot passions still live. Spartan Helen was not the only girl to burn for an adulterer’s combed locks, marveling at his long hair and his clothes smeared with gold, his regal dress, and his kingly entourage.” 6. Hercules’ ninth labor was to retrieve the belt of the Amazon Hippolyte. As a symbol of sexual conquest, see Ogden 1996: 185, and cf. Ovid Met. 5.462–​72 where, unable to use words, the river Cyane displays Persephone’s belt floating on her waters in order to indicate that she was raped.

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drawn out. Rather like background music that crescendos ever more menacingly as it plays, each new visual detail gathered in by Camilla heightens the tension that tightens around her like a noose.

5.3.  Dressed to Kill: Clothing as Fire-​starter, Again But why is Camilla so mesmerized? Why should colors play such a significant role in her demise? Here it matters that Chloreus is coded as Asian, not only by his dress, but by his role as a priest of an eastern cult that Romans would always hold at arm’s length. He is the very picture of foppish and feminized eastern exoticism while Camilla, a young woman raised in the mountains of central Italy, wears nothing but a rider’s cape and a plain belted tunic that leaves one breast exposed. Earlier in book 11, her background as a wildling raised in the woods is conveyed in a decidedly Ovidian fashion, as a story told by Diana to Opis, one of her nymphs, as they ponder Camilla’s fate from a mountain perch high above the battle.7 As part of Camilla’s backstory, Diana says that, as an infant, Camilla was nursed on the milk of wild mares, and that when she first began to walk, her father dressed her from head to toe in a tiger skin (a miniature Hercules), and taught her to hunt with arrows and a sling. The background tale is patterned after stories of Achilles growing up in the wilds of Mount Pelion, educated by the centaur Chiron who, with a cave for a classroom, taught the young hero the arts of medicine, music, riding, and hunting.8 Within the “Achillean” background story that Diana tells, a connection is established between hunting and dressing in Camilla’s earliest youth: to hunt an exotic animal is to dress exotically (tiger jammies), and that is exactly what draws her to pursue Chloreus in the moments leading up to her death.9 The clothing worn by Chloreus is the stuff of clever and highly elaborated human design and technical manufacture: exotic Asian culture as opposed to Camilla’s own local Italian nature. The horse that Chloreus rides is a chimerical marvel, jumbling

7. Monreal 2015 has made a compelling case for eschewing the traditionally received “Ovidian” narrative scheme of Camilla’s backstory, that is, as an inset story told by one mythological character to another (Diana to Opis), in favor of a mixed narrative arrangement that has the narrating author (Virgil) interposing the story of Camilla’s infancy and youth within the heavenly conversation that takes place between Diana and Opis in order to provide the basis for Diana’s concern for Camilla. 8. Gildenhard and Henderson 2018: 452 points out that the story of Camilla’s upbringing in the wild “locks Camilla into place as another Achilles, who was entrusted for childcare to the centaur Chiron.” On the rugged upbringing of Achilles under the tutelage of Chiron, see Statius Achilleid 1.473–​81. 9. Noting that there are no tigers in Italy, Gildenhard and Henderson ad 11.576–​77 suggest that the tiger skin is an eastern luxury item that has made its way to the wilds of Italy. But cf. Statius Ach. 2.121–​25 where Achilles, in describing his youthful exploits in the wild, in what appears to be an ascending list, boasts of hunting deer, lynxes, bears, boars, tigers, and lions.

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features of mammals, birds, and fish (hide, feathers, scales: pellis . . . plumam squamis, 770–​71). Its hybridity is less a fact of the animal’s appearance than it is an expression of the confusion that Camilla experiences in trying to make sense of it. As a hunter, she knows all about skins and feathers and scales, but she has never seen all of them all jumbled onto a single beast. Flashing exotic shades of purple and red (peregrine ferrugine . . . et ostro, 772), trailed by a noisily flapping crocus-​ colored cape (775), and wearing intricately embroidered, multicolored tunic and pants (777), Chloreus himself is unlike any animal that Camilla has ever seen: a “bird-​man,” complete with pointy spikes and a horn (spicula . . . cornu, 773).10 For the huntress, Chloreus is the prey of her dreams, a once-​in-​a-​lifetime kill. She is determined to strip this hybrid beast of its magnificent skin. Although she is perhaps the most colorful and attractive character in the work’s second half, Camilla’s attractiveness, her ability to draw our attention, has nothing to do with the colors she sports on her frame. She is an innocent, a native Italian who knows nothing of elaborately dappled eastern ways, so when she sees Chloreus strutting in his glorious technicolor outfit she is like a child on her first birthday who has just been given her first taste of ice cream.11 Her eyes widen. Nothing can be the same as it was before. Though in black and white herself (Virgil makes no mention of her own dress in these lines), she greedily absorbs each new color that comes before her eyes. But, here again, in the careful visual depiction of Chloreus, we encounter an interesting riddle of focalization. There can be no doubt that we are tracking Chloreus through Camilla’s eyes in the lines quoted above. We are hunting with her. But the specific terms that are used to convey the details of his outfit are themselves foreign and “outlandish”: a golden cassida, and a crocus-​colored chlamys with noisily crinkling carabasean folds. And so on. Camilla has not seen any of these things before, so she cannot possibly know what names these items go by, or what any of these terms mean.12 The words themselves are exotic and wonderful, and by being so foreign and ear-​catching they serve a precise visual 10. Paschalis 1997: 367 points out that Chloreus shares his brightly colored name with a mysterious Greek bird that can no longer be identified. Horsfall 2003: 410 dismisses the observation as “wonderfully unhelpful.” 11. In her introductory parade appearance at 7.814–​16, Camilla sports a golden brooch and a purple cape. The outfit, while not extravagant, is eye-​catching, and demonstrates an interest in stylish dress. As pointed out by Boyd 1992: 221, the details of Camilla’s garb at the end of Virgil’s catalogue serve as a “harbinger of doom for the Italian cause” in that they bring to mind the exotic extravagance of the Carian fighters who appear near the end of Homer’s catalogue of Trojan allies (Il. 2.870–​73). 12. This is a version of the focalization problem discussed by de Jong 2004: 104, concerning Il. 3.191–​92, where Homer says that upon seeing Odysseus (Ὀδυσῆα ἰδὼν), Priam turns to Helen and asks her who he is (by supplying the name Odysseus, Homer “intrudes upon” the thoughts of the inset focalizer).

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purpose: they help us sense Camilla’s wonder at what she sees; her seeing things that are strange to her, and that she cannot possibly begin to name. The Trojans are at their most luxuriantly over-​cultured and other here.13 In fixating on Chloreus as she does, Camilla is caught in the act of losing her virginal Italian innocence. She has caught the eastern fever through her eyes. By the description’s end, it is no longer Chloreus who is the bright, eye-​catching object of our attention (“he shone brightly/​gleamed,” fulgebat, 769). She is. “Out of the entire throng of battle,” Virgil says, “it was he alone whom she blindly followed, and recklessly through the entire battalion she burned bright (ardebat) in her womanly lust for booty and spoils” (780–​28).14 The word ardebat turns the camera (we saw a similar turn of the camera, hinging on ardescit, marking a loss of control, at Dido’s feast). With it, we stop watching Chloreus through Camilla’s eyes and we start watching her, seeing what she herself cannot see as she “blindly” hunts her prey. Virgil’s use of the adjective “blind” (caeca, 781) here is especially ironic, given that Camilla is engaged in the most wide-​eyed consumption of color in the entire poem. And yet, it is with this word that he signals that Camilla is in danger. By this point, oblivious to her own conspicuity, Camilla does not realize that she herself is being watched, not just by us, as consumers of her story, but by someone on the inside who is hunting her as she closes in on Chloreus. Camilla, the language makes clear, has not just taken notice of a brightly colored man. She has caught fire. Brightly ablaze with “womanly lust,” she is determined to rip the clothes off of him. Clearly, by which I mean figuratively, there is something more going on here than Camilla’s discovering her inner shopper-​ girlfriend. The language is that of a sexual awakening: Camilla feeling a “womanly lust” (femineo . . . amore) that she has not felt before.15 And it is precisely here, in the understory of sexual desires first stirred at the moment of death, that we can actually see Camilla resembling Penthesilea quite strongly in the one most famous element of Penthesilea’s story: both young women die while burning with a lust that they feel too late, for the first time. Both are done in by their eyes.

13. Gildenhard and Henderson 2018: 521: “Chloreus personifies all of the national characteristics that Aeneas’ enemies like to ascribe to the arrivals from Phrygia—​from ritual emasculation . . . to effeminacy, from moral decay to indulgence in luxury.” On saffron-​colored garments coded as effeminate, see Stieber 2004: 155–​56. 14. On being “set aflame” emotionally by sight coded as female, barbarian, and non-​human, see LeVen 2021: 192–​94. 15. Serv. ad 11.777 remarks on the inordinate length of the description of Chloreus’ arms: “obviously the lengthy description of (Chloreus’) arms has as its aim that Camilla should seem to have had a good reason for being inflamed into lusting after them” (sane armorum longa descriptio illuc spectat, ut in eorum cupiditatem merito Camilla uideatur esse succensa).

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Clothing is heavily encoded in the Aeneid, carrying an especially large symbolic load for the female characters of the poem—​think of Juno negotiating with Jupiter in book 12, insisting that the Trojans lose their outrageous pants and wear the toga. Only when Juno makes this demand does one realize that Virgil’s Olympian gods are to be imagined wearing Roman clothes rather than Greek! Once again, spotted in the sartorial emphasis of Camilla’s demise, is the story of Achilles who, on the verge of manhood, was hidden away on the island of Scyros by his mother, Thetis, because she knew that he would die if he joined the Greeks at Troy. Thetis took the further step of dressing her son as a woman and hiding him in the company of other young women (the daughters of the king, Lycomedes). The ruse was exposed by Odysseus who, in order to entrap Achilles and force him to come out as a man, laid out a trove of fancy gifts before the girls: dresses, jewelry, and other finery. But in among these “womanly” items he also stashed a sword and a shield. The young women went for the finery, but Achilles, unable to hold back (this anticipates his role as the irrepressible Achilles of the Iliad), went for the weapons. Here, once again, there is a wicked (bordering on perverse) irony to be observed, in the fact that Camilla’s story is spun from both that of Penthesilea, the Amazon she resembles, and that of Penthesilea’s killer, Achilles (think back to c­ hapter 2: Aeneas climbing into Priam’s death-​watching spot, in order to watch Priam die). By being ensnared and overwhelmed by finery that she cannot resist, Camilla plays the part of Achilles in reverse: wielding weapons and fighting as a man among men, she spots the fancy clothes of Chloreus, and she cannot help herself. She must have them. Despite all the cross-​dressing and suggestions of gender bending that both stories involve, each ends on a conventionally gender-​conforming, binary note (at least as far as clothing codes are concerned): Achilles is found out as a man, Camilla as a woman.16 Each young hero is overcome by “natural” forces that cannot be repressed inside themselves, and in each case, that act of self-​discovery results in the discoverer’s own death.

16. Heyne 1820: 274 notes: etsi uirilis animi femina, tamen a cultu et ornatu intactam mentem non habuit (“although she was a woman of manly spirit, her mind was not untouched by dress and ornament”). On Camilla’s oscillation between gender roles, see Gildenhard and Henderson 2018: 30: “Camilla alternately endorses and distances herself from her femininity, which manifests itself not least in her adoption of different dress codes—​from solitary huntress and mistress of the woods dressed in hides to fashion-​conscious glamour girl and warrior queen glittering with gold.” One could flip the script on Camilla’s being undone by womanly desires, by arguing that in so doing she exposes the feminine (coded) side of any given traditional epic hero: the side that wants to strip a fancily prancing enemy of his gear and wear it as one’s own. Is it that she is done in by womanly desires, or by (suggestively homoerotic) manly desires?

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5.4.  The Death of Camilla as a Life Fully Lived One of the great hi-​tech moments of the Aeneid comes a few lines after those quoted above when, sadly, Camilla pays the price for her blind pursuit of Chloreus. From somewhere outside of her tunneled view, Arruns has caught sight of her as she “burns bright” in pursuit of Chloreus. Her lust has given her away, and turned her from hunter to hunted.17 In lines 799–​806, Arruns launches his spear. As follows: ergo ut missa manu sonitum dedit hasta per auras, conuertere animos acris oculosque tulere cuncti ad reginam Volsci. nihil ipsa nec aurae nec sonitus memor aut uenientis ab aethere teli, hasta sub exsertam donec perlata papillam haesit uirgineumque alte bibit acta cruorem. concurrunt trepidae comites dominamque ruentem suscipiunt. Sent from his hand, the shaft went hissing through the air. And thus all the Volscians took sharp notice, and all turned their eyes toward their queen. But she herself was unaware of the noise on the air, or of the shaft as it came falling from the sky, until it reached its mark, right beneath her exposed nipple. There it stuck, and when driven through, it drinks deep draughts of her pure virgin blood. Her attendants, frightened, come running, and they catch their mistress in mid-​fall. The spear is launched. Everyone can hear it hiss as it leaves Arruns’ hand and shoots through the air: ergo ut missa manu sonitum dedit hasta per auras /​conuertere animos acris oculosque tulere. But Camilla hears nothing. She is inside her tunnel, oblivious to her surroundings, “blindly” tracking her prey. All eyes turn to watch Camilla, as if to urge her to take notice, all the while the spear takes its own jolly time, the better part of five hexameter lines, to reach its mark. Here Virgil is using a slow-​motion device reminiscent of Homer, who often describes how a spear is launched, then penetrates this layer of clothing, then that, slowing everything down right as a fatal the blow (or near miss) hits its mark (for slow motion used to mark especially significant kills in films of war, see Appendix, item 10). But

17. Arruns is established as a hunter who stealthily tracks Camilla as prey at Aen. 11.766, immediately before Camilla first spots Chloreus and begins to track him: hac Arruns subit et tacitus uestigia lustrat.

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there are no layers to be penetrated in Camilla’s case, for Arruns has hit the young woman in her one most exposed spot. Here again, as we saw with Penthesilea in ­chapter 3, the exposure of the breast on the woman is marked spatially by the words on the page, with the interlocked word order serving as a kind of freeze frame that catches the precise moment when she is finally hit: hasta sub exsertam donec perlata papillam (803). Once again, jutting out at the very end of the ponderously slowed (heavily spondaic) line, we see the exposed breast (the papilla “nipple”) where the spear has struck. That is where our eyes are drawn. Then, in the next line, comes one of the most disturbing metaphors in all of Virgil: clinging to her breast, the spear “drinks” her virgin blood. The picture evoked by the metaphor is worthy of Lucan, or Persius, or a sick man’s dream.18 To see such a thing is awful. And to want to see it, to linger over it, perhaps even worse. It is an image that dares us to look at it straight on, to stick with the metaphor and not de-​metaphorize it by saying, “well, it’s just a metaphor. That spear is not a hissing, living thing, and it is not actually drinking blood from a dying girl’s breast. She is no suicidal Cleopatra, with venomous snakes hanging from her nipples, drawing blood as they poison her. This is Camilla, a warrior maiden nobly fallen in battle, bleeding from a wound in her breast. That is what this is, and how we are to see what we are being given to see.” And, of course, that is right.

5.5.  One Last Look: Visual Counternarrative, and the Humanness of Virgil’s “Heroes” Unless it isn’t. That is what I especially like about this particular ending to a particularly beautiful life. It is ugly, and every bit as jarring and awful as the sudden death of any such beautiful young woman would have to be. But it is that only if we allow it to be that. If nothing else, the death of Camilla reminds us that Virgil, no matter how classic and domesticated and clean he has long since been made to seem, can never quite manage to stay politely in his box.19 He has an outrageous and radically creative streak that his canonical status as a school text causes us to lose sight of, or to insist is not really there. But here, in the space of a

18. In fact, the image recalls the portentous nightmare of Aesch. Ch. 527–​ 34, where Clytemnestra dreams of nursing a snake that draws blood from her breast along with the milk. In the final play of the trilogy, Apollo compares the arrow that he aims at the Furies to a gleaming flying snake (Eum. 181). 19. For example, beyond the pious motherly associations that are figured into her final moment, an especially impolite association of Camilla’s exposed (literally “jutting forward” or “protruding,” exsertam) nipple is as a readable sign of sexual arousal.

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few well-​crafted lines, he has done some gorgeously devastating camera work that goes well beyond what any camera could ever do. Through visual cues that take us into what Camilla sees, and through metaphors that put us in touch with her desires, Virgil has us watch an innocent young girl come of age: she learns of brightly colored fabrics, and of cultures other than her own. She begins to feel the first flames of desire. She burns bright with lust that she cannot control. She is penetrated.20 She bleeds virgin blood. And in the last image that Virgil paints of her, Camilla cradles a baby, eagerly drinking at her breast. At that last moment, within the momentary freeze-​frame that captures her as a nursing mother, Camilla inhabits an iconic image that any Roman would recognize: that of the native Italian goddess Mater Matuta, divine protectress of nursing mothers. Not coincidentally (or so I strongly suspect), the goddess’s most famous shrine was at Satricum, in the heart of Volscian territory.21 Excavations at the site have unearthed not only an image of an amazon engaged in battle, but hundreds of votive statues representing the goddess as a nursing mother (kourotrophos).22 For the exiled Camilla, her death is a homecoming. Inside the story of Camilla’s tragic death, we see images of a life fully and happily lived. In the previous chapter, we saw a similar counter-​current on the underside of Dido’s feast, running in the opposite direction. At her feast, Dido falls in love. She is observed living life to the full. But under that glossy surface we spy images of her death, and the ruin of her people. No amount of cinematic hi-​tech, I suspect, could ever do what Virgil does to us in these tales. But there we have the key element in the equation: us. All the happiest moments of a life that a young girl might have lived, but never had the chance to live, are sequentialized inside the visual narrative of Camilla’s last tragic hunt. All the worst moments of a queen’s tragic demise, and the ruin of her people, are nested inside a tale of new friendships being forged, bright futures ahead, and a femina dux falling in love. In the end, Virgil is not technologically disadvantaged in what he can give us to

20. For the fatal spear wound to the breast pointing toward sexual penetration/​defloration, see Fowler 1987: 196–​97 and Oliensis 1997: 308. 21. I suspect that it is also not coincidental that the goddess’s shrine in Rome was rebuilt by Marcus Furius Camillus in 396 bce; see Livy AUC 5.14. On the iconography of the shrine at Satricum, which included depictions of a fighting amazon, see De Luigi 2000. Lurking somewhere in all this is the answer to why Virgil makes such deliberate, repeated connections between Camilla and the mothers or Latium who, as Ramsby 2010: 15 points out, “appear to greatly admire Camilla’s different kind of femininity.” Special thanks for this last observation are owed to Jay Lugardo, who wrote a very fine paper on how “motherhood follows Camilla wherever she goes” for my Aeneid class in the spring of 2021. 22. On the worship of Mater Matuta at her shrines at Satricum and in Rome, see Bispham-​ Smith 2000: 136–​52.

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see. Not at all. Through the various “close viewings” of this book, I hope to have demonstrated that perhaps the only thing limiting Virgil, in this regard, are the visual imaginations that we bring to the poem, and the assumptions that we too often make to put limits on him.

5.5.1  The Big in the Small: Toward a Philology of Close Seeing In the pages above, I hope to have shown that the smallish details of colors, props, shifting sightlines, and so on, all so easily overlooked as we read, are not just decorations that color the stories that are being told. Rather, they conspire to tell stories of their own; stories that nuance, problematize, and sometimes run directly counter to the stories that they color. The main purpose of this book has been to explore the cinematics of visualization in Virgil’s Aeneid, treating visual details not as decorative information but as cues for envisioning, here conceived as an ongoing process of gathering in, keeping track of, and making inferences from, the snippets of visual information that ancient narrative texts flash before us as we read/​hear. The book’s main procedure has been to ask two basic questions: who sees, and what is it that they/​we see? The first of these questions can be posed differently, as a matter of “who else” sees what we are being given to see. It can then be turned again, as a question of what they (the seers inside the story) are giving us to see about themselves by taking note of things the way they do. What, in other words, is revelatory about their way of seeing? What is its narrative value, its effect on our sense of the story being told? By paying attention to quoted sight, looking at things as they seem to characters inside the story, and noting how inset focalization might be signaled in manifold non-​explicit ways, such as by a sudden shift from a distant view to one much closer in, an odd emphasis on colors and the visual appearance of objects, a notable shift in a scene’s main sightlines, or an evaluative term oddly placed, I have attempted to unlock some of the internal, emotive content of what might otherwise be passed over as routine authorial observation and scene setting. Within those inner worlds that emerge as we imagine our way forward through Virgil’s text, we inhabit new perspectives, and we come upon fresh insights into the inner thoughts, emotions, and rationales of those whose sight we inhabit. Put simply, by going where these visual prompts take us, we have a much richer sense of how characters are invested in the activities that they are engaged in, and a much fuller knowledge about “what all” is going on. Much of what I have done in this book comes down to the small stuff, much of it quite old-​fashioned: grammar, syntax, imagery, intertextual engagements, interlocked hyperbata, word choice, emphasis, and synizesis. But, in concluding this book, I want to insist that we scholars who do such painstakingly “literary”

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things do them not for the sake of the small stuff. At some level, we bore down deeply, finding the big in the small, for a much bigger purpose: to defy the dishonesty, and the outrageous bigotries, of whatever current moment we happen to live in. And we do this, the fundamental work of the humanities, by refusing to discount and/​or leave unexplored the inherent complexity of the materials we study. In doing so, we both face up to and find value in un-​delusional and un-​easy versions of the world, where all flesh-​and-​blood humans exhibit an “overabundance” of character, the way Aeneas, Dido, and Camilla do; an overabundance that makes them difficult, contradictory, and forgivable. Aeneas, in a fit of piety, murders a beaten foe at the end of the Aeneid—​a last, contradictory act that departs diametrically from the script that Anchises urged him to memorize in the underworld, the one that says, “we Romans war down the proud, but spare the defeated.” Instead, abandoning the colonizers’ whitewashed slogan for what colonizers actually routinely do, Aeneas indulges in piety of a more visceral kind: piety as it was known from Roman history, as “meted out” on others, by a people who throve on violence, and who were prone to speaking of pietas one way, then delivering it in another: at the end of a spear. To illustrate this last point, I offer two parting images, the last of an image-​intensive book. Side by side in Figure 5.1 are two coins of 42–​40 bce. On the left is a gold aureus, depicting Sextus Pompey, son of Pompey the Great, and on the right is a silver denarius depicting a youthful Octavian who, in 40 bce, was still more than a dozen years away from being named Augustus. These men do not like each other. In fact, by the time these coins were issued, they (a)

(b)

Figure 5.1 (Left) RRC 511/​1, Aureus of 42–​40 bce, picturing a bearded Sextus Pompey. British Museum. (Right) RRC 525/​2, Denarius of 40 bce, picturing a bearded Octavian. American Numismatic Society.

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had been at war with one another for several years, neck-​deep in a fight inherited from their fathers that would last several years more. Two young warlords, sons of warlords, fight for supremacy. Their cause is hardly unassailable or easily sanitized, but the coins minted by these warlords tell of decent causes honorably pursued, and for the very best of Roman reasons. On his coin, the words embracing Octavian’s head declare that he is “the son of divine Julius” (actually he was Julius Caesar’s grandnephew, adopted by him in his will), and those surrounding Pompey on his refer to him as “Great, Pious, three times emperor.” One man has the senate, and his father’s “Greatness,” on his side. The other has the backing of a newly minted Roman god. Through the titles inscribed on these coins, both men advertise connections to their famous murdered fathers, one “Great,” the other “Divine.” By sporting beards and longish hair, they indicate that they are in mourning for those fathers, still grieving, four to six years after their deaths. Each man is a picture-​ perfect specimen of Roman pietas. By this point, now several years after Caesar’s miraculous ascension into the heavens, each man is trying to “out-​Roman” and “out-​pious” the other by killing him. Via the encodings of their coins, each man asserts: “you and your people killed my father, so I am duty-​bound to kill you, along with however many thousands of our fellow Romans I need to kill in order to get the job done.” Only then, once his father’s killers have been killed (in the many tens of thousands—​though it is best to leave that unmentioned), can the poor grieving survivor declare his father successfully avenged and make his way to the barber for a long-​overdue haircut and a shave.23 Virgil isn’t being “dark” or “light,” “pro” or “anti,” by ending the Aeneid the way he ends it. He is just stating the obvious. If “in the end” Rome’s founding father, Aeneas, is consumed by a bloodlust that causes him to lose sight of his pious cause and to hack fathers down atop their sons on the same bloody pile, it is because that is who he is, because that is what Romans do.24 It is a fact of their history, and he is the auctor who gives rise to their conflicted kind by taking in the highs and lows of the Heldenschau (“hero show”) that Anchises gives him to see in the underworld, a master class in who Romans are, and what they do: a people steadily committed to their (and their gods’) own communal/​familial cause, except when they fly off into fits of brother killing brother for the sake of avenging a father, or in the name of some other bloody piety. To rid Aeneas of

23. Further on pietas as a pretext for unspeakable atrocities, with specific reference to Octavian, see Tarrant 2012: 26–​27. 24. On the savagery of Aeneas, undisguised by the text of the Aeneid, but routinely downplayed by commentators since antiquity, see Knox 1997.

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his Achillean furor would be to rob Rome of Romulus and Caesar, and to rid the Heldenschau of Romulus and Caesar would be to rob Aeneas of his Achillean furor.25 My point here is not to locate some New Critical unity that helps harmonize the poem’s two halves and explain away its (and its main character’s) spectacular contradictions (Anchises says one high-​sounding thing, but Aeneas, overcome by rage, does another). Rather, it is to underscore the poem’s capacity to scrutinize Roman readers by means of Aeneas’ character, by noting that his cruelties and contradictions are, in the end, a reflection upon themselves. Such is the world of Virgil’s Aeneid: Dido, who, in a wonderful “Double Cross” (to borrow David Quint’s incisive term) is Medea, as well as Medea’s victim, doomed by the gods, while knowing full well that she pursues her own destruction. Camilla, chaste and sexless, lusting herself to death, equal parts Penthesilea, and Penthesilea’s killer. Aeneas, the pious and merciful killer. And so on. Virgil’s Aeneid teaches us these basic lessons about “The Humanness of Heroes” (the title of Michael Putnam’s famous study of Virgil’s characters26) by offering its difficulties as an antidote to the easy hatreds, and political sloganeering of Virgil’s own day, and of our own. It does this by forcing us to make hard decisions for ourselves, or to leave things undecided, as we read, and by showing us the personal investments that we make, in order to make the Aeneid mean what we take it to mean.

25. I develop this point in much greater detail in Freudenburg 2017. 26. Putnam 2012.

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Classic Film Edits and Common Cinematographic Methods, with Counterparts in Ancient Epic

Nearly all of the film scenes referred to below are available online and easily accessed for viewing via a simple search of the film’s director and/​or title plus a short description of the scene in question (e.g., Hitchcock, Birds, Diner Scene). Most scenes are from widely known popular films, and film classics. They have been chosen from among many thousands of possibilities because they offer apt comparisons to the visual techniques of the ancient epic passages that are analyzed in the pages above, and because they are, in many cases, famous examples of the techniques in question. 1. The shot/​reverse shot edit, used to establish and explore a character’s point of view. The shot/​reverse shot edit, discussed in the analysis of Aeneid 12 (see ­chapter 1, pp. 19–21), is the most basic suturing device in film. The device takes many forms, and any given film will provide dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of its being used to establish and explore a character’s point of view. An extraordinary (bordering on outrageous) example of the device’s use can be observed in the diner scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), where one is presented with a rapid-​fire series of shot/​reverse shot jump cuts (fully fourteen shot/​reverse shot edits, thus twenty-​eight separate shots) in the space of sixty seconds, as the camera moves back and forth from Tippi Hedren’s face to the scene that takes place outside the window in front of her, tracking her visual attention to the man who lights his cigarette, then tosses his match onto the gasoline that spills at his feet. 2. The scene-​or story-​initiating visual transition from omniscient panorama to ground-​level point of view (POV). At Iliad 3.1–​28 (see ­chapter 1, pp. 22–25) one moves from a distant, high-​angle panoramic view of two armies marching

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toward one another to a ground-​level, frontal view of one of the two armies as seen from the opposite side. The visual shift signals the transition from an impersonal, establishing view to that of a character within the larger panoptic scene. Compare the way in which the opening credits give way to the first scene of the 1953 American Western Shane, directed by George Stevens. As the credits roll to an end, one sees a cowboy riding across a valley far in the distance below. To mark the film’s beginning qua narrative, the view then transitions to a much closer, eye-​line view, first of a deer spotted frontally at the edge of a lake, then (as the deer runs away, exiting the scene) of the same cowboy riding in from behind the spot that the deer has vacated, moving directly toward the camera. A reverse shot follows, revealing that what we have just been given to see is the eye-​line view of Billy, the young boy who has spotted Shane while tracking the now-​vanished deer near the edge of his father’s ranch. 3. The pull-​back “surprise” reveal. At Aeneid 4.397–​411, near the end of the lengthy simile that describes the Trojans loading and launching their ships (see ­chapter 1, pp. 35–36), as the work scene is pulled back from and the Trojan workers recede in the distance (going from working individuals to a thin, black line of minuscule “ants”), Dido is revealed as the distant viewer through whose eyes all the activities just described have been viewed. The filmic analogue for this is the “pull-​back reveal” shot, which, as the camera is drawn back from things in the distance to things closer to the point from which the shot is filmed, exposes someone inside the scene who was not known to be there until the reveal is made. The opening shot of the 2019 World War I film 1917 (directed by Sam Mendes, with Roger Deakins in charge of the cinematography, for which he won an Oscar) is a pull-​back reveal that devolves into a single, nine-​minute long tracking shot: looking out over bright field of flowers that lies far in the distance, the camera pulls back toward the viewer to reveal first one sleeping soldier, then a second. They are not revealed as watchers, but as they get up and move toward the camera, the camera pulls back and continues to move with them as they make their way from the edge of the beautiful meadow into the increasingly more disturbing ugliness and chaos of the trenches. For the pull-​back shot resulting in the surprise reveal of a menacing watcher, horror films and slasher films offer countless examples, but perhaps the most famous example of all occurs at end of the exploding gas station scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 thriller, The Birds. The scene ends with a panoptic “bird’s-​eye” view of the gas station burning far below, and as the shot ends, birds fly into frame and hover far above the scene. Thus, what at first seemed like a shot offered by an omniscient narrator, ends up being a point-​of-​view shot, a bird’s-​eye view oddly literalized in that it shows the point of view of actual birds who, in this instance, are the main protagonists of the story, the ones who have caused the fire that rages down below. The surprise reveal serves the purposes not only of a meta-​referential pun (it is certainly that).

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Rather, it contributes to the narrative by suggesting intentionality on the part of the birds, offering them as a menacing, knowing threat, hovering far above the havoc that they have caused. 4. Power dynamics established via vertical disparities, and via faces being looked up to or down upon. The spatial encoding of power that Virgil manipulates at the end of the Aeneid via the visual layout of the final scene, that is, with Turnus, down on the ground, looking up, and Aeneas, high above him, glowering down (­chapter 2, pp. 48–64), has countless analogues in film. A particularly obvious (some might say too obvious) illustration of the power dynamics that are expressed by the highs and lows of characters (i.e., their verticality in relation to others in the scene), and by their being made to look up to or down upon someone, can be seen in the ups and downs of a short but decisive scene of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, 2007). In the scene, midway through the film, Professor McGonagall (Maggie Smith) and Delores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) get into a heated discussion about who has the power to discipline the school’s students. The two professors begin to argue as they approach and walk up a stairway that leads from the dining hall. At the beginning of their encounter, Professor McGonagall boldly asserts her superior authority in the matter, thinking she has the upper hand. At this point, though the two characters stand toe-​to-​toe on the same step, they are wildly mismatched in size: Professor McGonagall, much the taller of the two, looks down upon Professor Umbridge as she tells her off. Asserting herself, Umbridge then rises to the next step, putting her at eye-​level with her opponent, but McGonagall then steps up as well, once again rising well above her opponent, and looking down at her. At this point, Umbridge adopts a menacing tone, and she accuses Professor McGonagall of disloyalty. Rattled by the charge, McGonagall retreats to the step below, bringing herself even with Umbridge, and now face-​to-​face with her. Asserting herself, Umbridge then advances one step higher, a move that puts her a full head above McGonagall and looking down at her. By this point, their roles have completely reversed, the weaker and shorter having become the stronger and taller. It is at this point that Umbridge makes a menacing announcement to the crowd of students who have gathered at the foot of the stairway (they are the lowest and most vulnerable of all), telling them that things were about to change at Hogwarts. 5. Characters situated high and/​or far away as watchers, in order to symbolize/​emphasize the pathos of their watching, and the vulnerability of those who are watched. At Aeneid 2.506–​558 (see ­chapter 2, pp. 71–79), the death of Priam is described by Aeneas, whose placement high above the scene renders him helpless and unable to intervene on Priam’s behalf. For the distant, high-​ angle shot (extreme long shot), used to represent the helplessness of watchers who peer from afar, emphasizing the pathos of the watchers and the vulnerability of those who are looked upon, a classic example is the “caught in the act” scene

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of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 mystery thriller, Rear Window. In the scene, Lisa (played by Grace Kelly) has entered the apartment of the suspected murderer, Lars Thorwald (played by Raymond Burr), in order to gather evidence. Her boyfriend, Jeff (played by Jimmy Stewart), and his housekeeper, Stella (Thelma Ritter), watch Lisa search Thorwald’s apartment from the rear window of Jeff ’s apartment, which is directly across from Thorwald’s apartment on the other side of the complex’s central court. When Thorwald unexpectedly returns to his apartment, those who watch from the rear window across the court have no way to alert Lisa to the nefarious man’s arrival, and they can offer no help. Desperate, they call the police, and for the better part of two minutes they watch helplessly as Thorwald discovers Lisa, apprehends her, then begins physically assaulting her. Throughout the scene the camera repeatedly swivels to the watchers in order to show the pathos and panic that shows on their faces. One sees a similar “pathetic” placement of helpless watchers in the “Girl in the Red Coat” scene of Schindler’s List (see item 11 below) and near the end of the 2010 film True Grit (directed by Joel and Ethan Coen), when LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) and Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) watch the final showdown that takes place between Rooster Cogburn ( Jeff Bridges) and Ned Pepper’s gang from the top of a cliff, 400 yards away. The distance is miraculously breached, and Cogburn’s imminent death averted, by a shot from LaBoeuf ’s Sharp’s rifle. 6. Characters, situated as watchers, giving us to see what they imagine as they look, rather than (or in some cases along with) what they actually see. At Aeneid 2.453–​558 (see ­chapter 2, pp. 74–78), Aeneas, functioning as a visual conduit (i.e., the narrating character as a camera), is situated high above the scene that he describes, and yet at lines 483–​90 he gives us to see the long, ground-​level, “tunnel” view that Pyrrhus has of Priam’s palace once he has chopped a hole into the gate and peered through the opening. Aeneas, in fact, sees all that Pyrrhus himself sees, but he cannot possibly see it from the horizontal, ground-​level perspective that he gives us to see as he describes what Pyrrhus sees as he peers through the hole. For a filmic version of a character seeing things imaginatively, as someone else might see it, from an angle and/​or perspective that the character himself/​herself cannot possibly have, one can compare the backside ogling scene of the 1971 Australian survival film Walkabout, directed by Nicolas Roeg. Near the beginning of the film, a father drives his two children into the outback for a picnic. The daughter is a physically mature adolescent, dressed alluringly in a schoolgirl’s uniform. As the father sits behind the wheel of the car, his daughter opens the hood of the car, a Volkswagen with the storage trunk in front rather than in the back, and she begins to pull things out of the trunk. For a very brief moment, the camera observes the girl from behind, lingering provocatively over her physique as she bends forward over the car. The next shot is that of the father’s face as he sits, pensively weighing his thoughts inside the car—​a reverse

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shot that offers him as the viewer, as if ogling her from behind, even though he cannot possibly be looking at her from behind, or even from in front, because the hood of the car is raised, blocking his view. Because the father has already been established as a lascivious ogler of his daughter in an earlier scene, the backside ogling of the girl as she bends over the car is, in fact, easily intuited by viewers as the perspective of the father, that is, what he is actively pondering as he sits inside the car, where he cannot, in fact, see her. The shot takes us into his lustful thoughts, into what he is pondering, right as he is about to pull out a gun and start shooting, first at his children (missing), then turning the gun on himself. 7. The match cut transition, used to imply that connections underlie two separate (and seemingly quite disparate) scenes. In c­hapter 3 (see pp. 97–98), the matching visual contours of what Aeneas sees when he focuses first on Penthesilea, then on Dido, is described in terms of a filmic match cut edit. In discussing that transition, the candle smoke that gives way to the train smoke at the opening of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) is given as a particularly well-​known example. But perhaps the most famous of all match cut transitions in film takes place near the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968), namely, when the bone that is thrown high into the air by a primitive human gives way to a bone-​shaped orbital satellite floating in space. The match cut transition implies that there are deep, underlying connections to be made between the scenes, which viewers must intuit for themselves. 8. The use of visual and imagistic effects that run counter to the story that is being told. In the descriptions of Dido’s feast and Camilla’s death, visual imagery conspires to produce messages that run counter to the stories that are being told (see ­chapter 4, pp. 111–112, and c­ hapter 5, pp. 153–155). Cinematographers have developed numerous visual means for conveying messages that run counter to the narrative, such as via the use of heavily shadowed lighting (and eerie music) to throw suspicion on a character who might otherwise seem happy and harmless, thus visually preparing for some later, “darker” revelations about the person’s true character. One of the most celebrated instances of a film’s visuals countervailing the story that is being told is the “rain on the window” scene of the 1967 new realist crime film In Cold Blood (directed by Richard Brooks, with cinematography directed by Conrad Hall). In the scene, on the eve of his execution, the convicted murderer, Perry Smith (played by Robert Blake) stands in a dark room in front of a window, telling stories to the prison chaplain about his troubled relationship with his abusive father, a man whom he admits to both loving and hating. As the title of the film suggests, Perry is a cold-​blooded character. Throughout the film he is remorseless, incapable of expressing sorrow or regret for his crimes. And yet, as he stands in front of the window telling his story (often smiling as he tells it), shadows resembling tears continuously pour down his face, as light coming in from outside is refracted by the rain that runs down the window panes. The

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character’s hardened attitude suggests insouciance, even as a river of tears runs down his face. 9. The tracking or “dolly” shot, used to bring viewers inside the action with a character. At Aeneid 11.768–​82, occupying Camilla’s line of sight, viewers/​readers catch sight of the colorful horseman Chloreus, then track his movements as he rides across the field of battle (see ­chapter 5, pp. 144–151). The clear analogue in film for this type of continuous visual pursuit of a moving person or thing is the so-​called tracking shot, often referred to as a dolly shot. Famous examples include the young boy’s tricycle ride around the corridors of the empty hotel in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), and Henry Hill’s (played by Ray Liotta) labyrinthine entrance into the Copa Cabana in Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). An extreme example of the device can be seen in the film 1917 (see item 4 above), an entire film that, in tracking the dangerous odyssey of the lead character, Lance Corporal Schofield (played by George MacKay) from place to place, gives the impression of having been filmed as one continuous shot. 10. The special use of slow motion (marking an especially significant kill) in films of war. In ­chapter 5 (pp. 152–153), the moment of Camilla’s death is described as taking place in slow motion. Connections are drawn with similar slow-​motion effects in Homer’s Iliad. As in ancient martial epic, so too in modern war films, slow motion is commonly used to dwell on, and enhance the significance of, an exceptional kill. One sees a particularly famous example of this in the scene that provided the photographic “cruciform” still that was used for the poster advertisements of Oliver Stone’s 1986 Vietnam War film, Platoon. The scene in which Sergeant Elias (played by Willem Dafoe) is killed lasts for more than three minutes. Whereas the final pursuit and killing of Sergeant Elias, which all takes place at ground level, is filmed entirely in slow motion (including his famous cruciform fall), the reverse shots that cut to the faces of those who watch from the helicopter are filmed entirely at live-​action speed. 11. Color used to mark (and track) the point of intense fixation of an onlooker. Chapter 5 (pp. 144–148) opens with an analysis of the most color-​intensive passage of the Aeneid (Aen. 11.768–​82). In the passage, Camilla catches sight of an enemy warrior, Chloreus, whose bright, multicolored gear causes him to stand out from his surroundings as a particular point of focus for her to follow with her eyes. The continued emphasis on the warrior’s panoply of colors serves to underscore Camilla’s ongoing visual fixation on Chloreus. A filmic analogue for this use of color to define and track the point of focus of an onlooker who is emotionally absorbed in what she sees is the famous “Girl in the Red Coat” scene of Schindler’s List (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg. In the scene, Oskar Schindler (played by Liam Neeson) looks out over the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw from a secure position high on a nearby hill. As Nazi troops violently clear the site of its inhabitants, amid the mayhem Schindler spots a young girl walking alone, weaving in

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and out of the panicked crowd. She stands out as a moving splash of red against a background that is entirely in black and white (her coat is the only colored item in the scene). Frequent reverse shots show Schindler, intensely worried, fixating on the girl, visually tracking her movements from one side of the mayhem to the other, until eventually he loses sight of her as she ducks into a building. The fact that her coat still glows red when she climbs the stairs and goes to hide under her bed lets us know that Schindler is still mentally fixated on her; that, although he can no longer physically see her, her image has been seared into his mind.

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Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Note: Figures and plates are indicated by an italic f and pl following the page number. Achilles, 51–52, 67, 68–69, 72, 75–77, 81–82, 85–86, 88, 91–92, 96–97, 98, 148–51 hated by Aeneas, 85–86, 87, 98 Aeneas as betrayer of Troy, 47–48, 68, 88, 94–95 as evader of battle, 67–69, 73–74 likened to Apollo, 103–10 as listener, 46–48 piety of (see pietas) as story-teller, 67–68, 85–86, 93 as viewed by Dido, 106–8 as viewer, 29–38, 56–57, 60–61, 64–79, 80–101, 104–6 Aeneid artistic reception of, 112–13 ideological questions raised by, 81, 93, 156–58 timescapes of, 31–33, 38 versification and visual syntax of, 96 (see also hyperbaton) visual rhetoric of, 5 Aethiopis, 94, 96–97, 143 Alexander. See Paris Amazons, 95–96, 97. See also Camilla; Penthesilea

anaphora, 125, 126 Andromache, 72, 73–74, 91 ants simile of, 34–38, 60–61 Roman symbolism of, 37–38 Aphrodite. See also Venus in the Iliad, 69 in the Aeneid (see Venus) Apollo, 69, 71–72, 75–76, 101 Aeneas likened to, 103–10 Apollonius, 99–100, 108 apostrophic questions, 36–37 Ariadne, 37, 102–3 Aristarchus, 88–89 arrogance, 117–18 Artemis. See Diana Ascanius. See Iulus Athena. See Minerva Augustus. See Octavian   Bakker, Egbert, 3 bees, 29–33 Roman symbolism of, 32–33, 38 Bordwell, David, 9–10 Brant, Sebastian, 132–33, 132f, 138–40, 139f

178

178 breasts. See also Amazons as viewed objects, 94, 95–96, 101, 102–3, 130–31, 148, 152–53, 154   Caldwell, Lauren, 105 Callimachus, 105 Camilla, 130–31, 143–45, 146–53, 158 Carthage destruction of, 37–38, 140–41, 142 Phoenician founding of, 31–33 Roman rebuilding of, 31–32, 38 as viewed by Aeneas, 29–33 Carthaginians depictions of, 122 in Roman thought, 117 Casetti, Francesco, 10–11 Cassandra, 65, 66–67 Catullus, 37–38, 41–42, 101–3, 108 Cavalli, Francesco, 117–18 chiasm as visual device, 29, 38, 48, 51–56, 64, 77–78, 79, 89–90, 98 Chloreus, 145, 146, 148–52 Clausen, Wendell, 105, 107–8 Cleopatra, 123, 153 close seeing, 155–58 close-up, 36, 62–63 clothing, 148–50, 151 cognitivism, 9–10, 19n.5, 26n.11 colonization, 31–33 colors blue, 117–18 economic symbolism of, 118 gold, 105, 117–18, 120–27 purple, 105, 117–18, 119–20, 121–22, 145–46 saffron, 125 vibrant/bright, 146–48, 150, 151 constructivism, 10 Coroebus, 65 counter-vision

Index in epic, 61, 111–12, 153–58 in film, 163–64 Cupid, 111, 114, 122, 123, 124, 125–26, 133–34 Cypria, 89–90, 95   Dardanus, 65n.39, 68–69 Davis, Bette, 62 de Jong, Irene, 12–14 despicere, 48–50, 102–3 de Troy, Francois, 114–115pl, 121–22 Diana, 148 Dido likened to, 99–100, 103–10 Dido “cave wedding” of, 105–6, 129–31 feast of (see feast of Dido) her first appearance in the Aeneid, 93–101 as listener, 67–68 regal behavior of, 124 suicide of, 136 as viewed by Aeneas, 93–101, 106 as viewer, 35–36, 60–61, 125–26 wedding parade of, 103–10 Diomedes in the Aeneid, 69, 87, 88–89 as flash flood, 39–40, 47 (see also similes) Dionysus, 103 Doloneia, 88–89, 92 dramatic irony, 93, 109 dux femina, 97–98, 129, 143, 154–55   Eclogues, 47–48 ecphrasis, 80–94, 143 enactivism. See cognitivism Ennius’ Annales, 40–41, 43–44 epic. See also Aeneid; Epic Cycle; Homer; Virgil interiority of, 12–13, 25–27, 155 narratology of, 11–12, 155

179

Index Epic Cycle, 31, 51–52, 89–90, 94, 143. See also Aethiopis; Cypria establishing shot, 86 Euripides, 91, 138 Evander, 58–60 eye line match shot. See close-up eyes and erotic fixation, 96, 126–27, 150 as expressive features in epic, 56, 102 as expressive features in film, 62–63   fabula/syuzhet, 60–61, 91, 111 feast of Dido, 111–13, 150 artistic renderings of, 112–13 Homeric modeling of, 111 Feeney, Denis, 39–40, 42 film editing techniques of, 5–8, 9–10, 19–21, 35–36, 48–49 (see also Bordwell; close-up; establishing shot; focalization; framing; freeze-frame; high-angle shot; low-angle shot; match cut transition; overhead shot; over-the-shoulder shot; panning; pull-back; pull-back: with surprise reveal; shot/reverse shot edit; suture; tracking shot; vertical spacing; zoom) theoretical approaches to, 5–8 (see also Bordwell; Casetti; suture) fire imagery, 75–77, 78, 125–26, 131–42, 150 fire-starters, 75–76. See also gifts fish, 118–19 focalization devices of, 12 embedded, 12–13, 18–19, 24–25 (see also quoted sight) in film, 12, 19–21, 25 in similes, 27n.13 focalizers. See viewers

179

foreboding/foreshadowing, 98, 136–37 framing, 36, 62–63 freeze-frame, 96   Georgics, 32–33, 47 gifts (given to Dido), 134–38, 142 as fire-starters, 138 foreshadowings of, 136–37 Giusti, Elena, 37–38 gladiators imagery of, 52–53, 54f, 55–56, 55f gods in ecphrastic representation, 82–84 gold. See also colors   Hardie, Philip, 105 Harry Potter films, 62 Hector, 28–29, 72–73, 75–78, 87, 91–92 Hecuba, 72–74, 77–78 Heldenschau, 157–58 Helen, 72–73, 136 high-angle shot, 48–49, 62–64 Hitchcock, Alfred, 71–72, 159, 160–62 Homer as model for Lucretius, 44–45 as model for Virgil, 31n.17, 46–47, 64, 69–70, 76–79, 85–86, 99–100, 110, 111 optic poetics of, 3–4 visual rhetoric of, 12–14, 21–29, 99 Homeric scholia, 88–90. See also Aristarchus hunting metaphor, 147, 148–49, 152–53 hyperbaton, 16–18, 96   Ilione, 136 imagination, 3, 8 incest, 109 inuidia, 50 Iulus, 106, 111 artistic depictions of, 141–42 iunctio dextrarum, 55

180

180

Index

Julius Caesar, 156–57 Juno, 82–83, 109 Juturna, 15, 17–18   Kalliope, 2–3   Lairesse, Gerard, 114–115pl, 135, 137–38 Latin language, 128–29 double meanings of, 67–68, 117, 126–27, 128–30, 138–41 visual syntax of, 95–96, 117, 122, 152–53 Lausus, 92 Leto, 99 lighting, 145–46 locus amoenus, 45–​46, 47–48 Lombard Painter (anonymous), 114–115pl, 122, 134–35, 141–42 low-angle shot, 48–49, 62–64 Lowenstam, Steven, 92 Lucretius atomic theory of, 39–40, 41–43 Epicurean agenda of, 39–40 imitator of Ennius, 40–41 plague in, 131 similes of, 39–40 visual rhetoric of, 39–48   match cut transition, 97–98, 163 Mater Matuta, 154 Medea, 99–100, 108, 123, 138, 158 Memnon, 51–52, 54f, 94, 96–97, 143–44 Memory, 3, 84–85. See also monuments Menelaus, 23–27, 72–73 Minerva, 90–91, 92 monuments, 84 music in film, 60–61, 147–48   Narratology theoretical approaches to, 9–10 (see also Bordwell; de Jong)

Nausikaa, 99–101 Nelis, Damien, 99–100 Neoterics, 41–42, 80–81, 88. See also Catullus stylistic devices of, 16 Nisus and Euryalus, 92, 145–46, 147–48 nobility Roman visual spacing of, 48–51, 156–57   Odysseus, 88–89, 106–7 O’Hara, James, 75 Orpheus, 1–3 overhead shot, 78 over-the-shoulder shot, 36, 62–63 oysters, 118–20, 121–22   Pallas, 59–60, 92 panning, 35–36. See also pull-back Panthus, 65 Paris in Homer’s Iliad, 23–27, 69, 72–73 Peleus and Thetis marriage of, 101–3 Penthesilea, 51–52, 53f, 92, 94, 96–98, 130–31, 143–44, 150, 152–53, 158 Pergama, 67, 72–73 Perkell, Christine, 82–83 pestis/pestilence. See plague phantasia, 3 Phoenicians. See Carthaginians Phoenissa, 140 phoenix, 118, 140 pietas, 58–60, 66, 156–57 plague, 110, 112, 126–27, 128, 131, 150 Plato, 91 Polites, 66, 78 Poseidon, 68–69 Priam, 64–69, 71–72, 73–74, 81–82, 85–86, 87, 90, 91 as viewer, 75–78

18

Index pull-back, 43–44, 45–46. See also panning with surprise reveal, 35–36, 160–61 purple. See colors Putnam, Michael, 158 Pyrrhus, 67, 74–75, 76–78   Quint, David, 67, 69–70, 158 quoted sight, 23–25, 80   readers as viewers, 8, 10–14, 20 (see also imagination) Rhesus, 87, 88–89 Romanelli, Giovanni Francesco, 114–115pl, 122, 126, 131, 135 rooftop as battleground, 66–67, 69–70, 73–74 as viewing space, 66, 70, 71, 73–74 Russian Formalism. See fabula/syuzhet   salutatio, 124 Santi, Sebastiano, 114–115pl, 130–31 Sarpedon, 68–69 Saturnian meter, 40 Schiesaro, Alessandro, 84–85 Schindler’s List, 97–98 Scholiasts. See Homeric scholia Servius, 47–48, 58–59, 64, 87–88, 106, 108–9, 114–17, 121, 136, 140 Sextus Pompey, 156–57 shepherds as viewers, 21–22, 23, 43, 45–46, 47–48 shot angles. See high angle shot; low-angle shot psychology of, 63–64 shot/reverse shot edit, 19–20, 24, 159 sightline shift, 56, 106–7, 126 similes, 15–16, 17–18, 19n.4, 21n.8, 26–28, 29–38, 42–48, 99–101 bookending of, 29, 34, 38, 101–3

181

length of, 27–28, 99 paired as twins, 103–10 simultaneity, 24 Sirius, 76–77 slow motion, 152–53, 164 snake imagery, 74–75, 77–78 Solimena, Francesco, 130–31, 134–35 sound coalescent (rumble, roar), 44–45, 46–47 sound effects in epic, 17–18, 43–44, 75n.50, 152–53 star imagery, 75–77. See also Sirius stibadium, 114–17 sudden reveals, 35–36, 160–61 superbus. See arrogance suture, 15–38, 106, 147. See also shot/ reverse shot edit in film theory, 5–8, 19–21 synizesis, 120   tapestries, 116, 117–18 as stage curtains, 123 Tarrant, Richard, 17 Theocritus, 16–17 theory of mind, 13n.25 Thracians, 2–3 Tischbein, Johannes Heinrich the Elder, 114–115pl, 130–31 tracking shot, 147, 164 tragedy, 79, 91, 123, 138 tree symbolism, 67 triclinium, 114–15, 116–17 Troilus, 87, 89–90, 92, 96–97 Troy fall of, 64–79 tower of, 66–67 vertical spacing of, 72–73 Turnus, 15, 17, 18–19, 50–59, 92   uidetur double sense of, 4–5, 13–14

182

182 Valerius Maximus, 124 Venus, 127, 135 Vergilius Romanus, 114–115pl, 112–13, 115–16, 117–19, 120, 121–22, 141–42 vertical spacing in epic, 48–64, 97–98 in film, 62–64, 161 viewers embedded, 11–14 implied, 11 Virgil. See Aeneid; Eclogues; Georgics vision coalescent (blurred), 42–44, 45–46 cognitive theories of, 9

Index epiphanic, 108 in Latin Poetry, 4–5 narrative value of, 107, 111–12, 155 rhetoric of, 5, 9–10 running counter to story (see counter-vision)   West, David, 99–100 Williams, R. D., 34, 82, 89, 91   Zeus as omniscient viewer, 70–72 zoom. See also panning; pull-back in film, 36 in narrative, 35, 96

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184

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