By Meghan Reedy
Over the course of fifty or so lines, Aeneas narrates two separate streams of events: He tells us what is happening in the city as a whole (250–67), and he tells us what is happening inside one Trojan sleeper’s dreams (268–97). Then, in 297–302, the two streams merge until the sleeper, Aeneas, wakes.
Each time he is about to begin one of these versions, he begins with a description or indication of the time, and each one is calibrated to the scale of events that follow. When he is about to narrate the events on a large scale––events that take place across the whole city––he begins with a large, all-encompassing description of the night: Vertitur interea caelum et ruit Oceano nox / involvens umbra magna terramque polumque / Myrmidonumque dolos (250–52). The preceding events and comments were the festivities the Trojans held in honor of the horse; they were dressing the city up with leafy swags––and interea celebrating keeps going while the heavens keep turning, vertitur caelum, and as night rushes up, rushes in from the encircling Ocean, it covers everything. With its huge darkness it rolls over the earth and the sky and the traps of the Myrmidons. What a trio of things: the earth and the sky and the traps of the Myrmidons. The passage first expands our view and then focuses our attention, even in the dark: the whole sky turns; the night’s darkness is huge, umbra magna, and then it covers the whole earth and even the topmost part of the sky. Then, we are reminded of the horse, which is small compared to the sky, and how it too is wrapped in deep night.
It is in this enveloping darkness that the Trojans sprawl sleeping on the fortifications, fusi per moenia, … , sopor fessos complectitur artus (252–53). In this darkness Sinon opens the horse, laxat claustra Sinon (259), and a series of named and famous Greeks emerge from its belly (261–4); they kill the guards, caeduntur vigiles (266); according to plan, they let in their friends, accipiunt socios (267). However, as is fitting in such a deep night, they do it all quietly––and the quiet is so thoroughly established at the start of this passage that it holds even when they do things like kill the guards. First of all, the Trojans are silent as they sleep, fusi per moenia Teucri conticuere (252–53). As the ships come over from Tenedos, they do so in the friendly silence of a soundless moon, tacitae per amica silentia lunae (255). When Sinon opens up the horse he also does that quietly and carefully, furtim (258). In 265, just as the last details of the plan are going into place, the whole city’s quiet is re-emphasized and deepened: urbem somno vinoque sepultam; Troy is quiet as the grave.
Then, with the great dark night and all this silent activity fresh in our minds, Aeneas restarts. He is about to describe one person’s––his own––dreams, and this time he begins with a small, gentle description of just one moment of night: Tempus erat quo prima quies mortalibus aegris / incipit et dono divum gratissima serpit (268–69). It’s that moment when sleep first comes, and look how welcome it is, how lovely: quies … dono divum gratissima. Rest comes as a gift from the gods, and it is the most pleasing thing, the most welcome to aching mortals. Our attention is drawn to how nice sleep feels when you’re tired––but then look too at that snakey verb, serpit; sleep slithers in, like the water-snakes slithered out of the sea, like the horse slithered into the city. With serpit a teeny chink is opened for the way sleep, as good as it feels, also leaves a person vulnerable.
But one doesn’t notice. No, one slips right through and into dreaming, which is where Aeneas takes us now: in somnis ecce ante oculos … (270). Even though we know oodles of activity goes on while Aeneas is having this dream, the dream moves at its own deliberate pace. Aeneas looks at Hector a long time, describes him and his wounds in great detail (270–80; only three fewer lines than the whole description of the Greeks’ furtive invasion in the prior passage). He speaks to Hector at great length (281–86, another six lines) but he says nothing important; he only voices his own muddled wonderings about why Hector looks so terrible and where he has been all this time. Then Hector, ignoring Aeneas’ empty questions, me quaerentem vana (287), speaks, also at length, explaining that Troy is busy being invaded and that he, Aeneas, should really leave (289–95, starting with heu, fuge, nate dea!). In the following two lines Hector brings some things out of the sanctuary … Aeneas’ dream continues …
Then, after the large blackness of night, filled with silent action; after the small welcome feeling of falling asleep, and the dreams it brings, the city and the sleeper finally come together in 298–302:
Diverso interea miscentur moenia luctu,
et magis atque magis, quamquam secreta parentis
Anchisae domus arboribusque obtecta recessit,
clarescunt sonitus armorumque ingruit horror,
excutior somno …
Here again, interea, meanwhile, puts what is about to be described into time simultaneously with what has been described in the lines immediately prior to these. While Aeneas has been dreaming, the quality of the action in the city has changed. It was quiet and deliberate––get out of the horse, kill the guards, let in the others––but now it is a free-for-all. The fortifications are all mixed up in changeable grief: diverso miscentur moenia luctu, and it is getting worse. It gets to be more and more, magis atque magis, and it gets all the way to Aeneas’ father’s house, where he’s sleeping, even though the house is secluded and tree-shaded, quamquam secreta parentis Anchisae domus arboribusque obtecta recessit (299–300). Finally, for the first time, it gets noisy, clarescunt sonitus, and the dreadfulness of armed violence gets closer and closer, armorumque ingruit horror (301). Notice how we only hear the noise of this nighttime invasion when Aeneas does, when he is suddenly shaken out of sleep, excutior somno (302).
What does this particular, repetitive way of telling this part of the story do? We see and hear his dream; we do not hear the mayhem until he suddenly does. However, we enter his experience with the added benefits of hindsight, or oversight. We know that Hector is appearing in Aeneas’ dream even as Troy is being overrun by Greeks. We feel the poignant tragedy of this coincidence––as Aeneas didn’t at the time; as he does now that he is telling the story afterwards.
Even once Aeneas tells us that he has woken up––finally shaken out of sleep by the clamor––still he does not quite know what is happening; all is confusion (diverso … luctu; miscentur 298). He climbs the roof and, having been woken by noise, stands with his ears pricked, listening, arrectis auribus adsto (303). What he hears sounds like a natural disaster––a crop-fire whipped up by wind (in segetem … flamma, 304), or a flood (rapidus … torrens, 305). It is difficult to wrap one’s mind around such extraordinary events. As would a shepherd witnessing fire or flood, so Aeneas stands frozen, uncomprehending: stupet inscius (307). Only in 309–10 does understanding dawn. Notice, however, how what he understands first is the overview, the general idea of what is happening––not a fire, not a flood, but Greek treachery, Danaum patescunt insidiae. Only then, having drawn us towards it all through this long, careful series of perspectives, does he describe actual buildings burning and name someone who has died.
Thus, after the bird’s eye view of 250–67, after the private dream of 268–97, and after the simile of 304–8, we are fully primed for Aeneas’ wild scrambling into the fray, arma amens capio … (314), ready to follow him, to forgive him anything, because we can feel what he feels when from 309 onwards the individual, Aeneas, is plunged into the bigger picture, Troy overrun.
Further Reading
Gransden, K.W. ‘The Fall of Troy’ in Virgil. Greece & Rome Studies, eds I. McAuslan and P. Walcot (Oxford, 1990)
Johnson, W.R. ‘Dis aliter visum: self-telling and theodicy in Aeneid 2’ in Reading Vergil’s Aeneid: An Interpretive Guide, ed. C. Perkell (Norman, OK, 1999) 50-63
Putnam, M. ‘The Poetry of the Aeneid’ (Cambridge, MA, 1965) 28-37
Ross, D.O. ‘Images of fallen Troy in the Aeneid in Style and Traditions: Studies in Honor of Wendell Clausen, eds. P. Knox and C. Foss (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1998) 121-9
Rossi, A. ‘The fall of tTroy: between tradition and genre’ in Clio and the Poeets: Augustan Poetry and the Traditions of Ancient Historiography, eds. D.S. Levene and D.P. Nelis (Leiden, 2002) 231-51
Rossi, A. Contexts of War: Manipulations of Genre in Virgilian Battle Narrative (Ann Arbor, 2004) 17-53