By Meghan Reedy
When Aeneas reaches his father Anchises in the fields of Elysium, the area of the underworld that is bright and warm (like the sunny shore the migrating birds were arriving at in the simile at 6.311–12), he has arrived at his destination. As the Sibyl explained to Charon, seeing his father was the purpose of Aeneas’ visit: ad genitorem imas Erebi descendit ad umbras (404). However, once he gets there, and once his father begins to speak, it seems incidental—a formality—that Anchises and Aeneas are even related.
We jump right in in 788 when Anchises is already speaking. Sometimes we have been able to supplement our understanding of what people say by looking closely at what they do or how they are feeling before they begin or after they finish talking, but with Anchises we are given less extra information than usual. Vergil inserts tiny snippets around Anchises’ words, and they are often variations on ‘he started/stopped speaking’. We are told, for example, that he kept speaking, sic pater Anchises, atque haec mirantibus addit: …, (854), and that after he had been through the details (quae postquam Anchises natum per singula duxit, 888) he got Aeneas all fired up for the glory to come, incenditque animum famae veninetis (889)—a statement which is followed by more of Anchises’ words, only this time reported rather than quoted. The one time we hear of an expression of emotion by Anchises, he weeps over Marcellus—more on that in the next essay.
Therefore, when Anchises is describing the kings of Rome to come, it isn’t really personal. There is nothing we can do but listen to what he says, and this task, I think, is not an easy matter. As you will have noticed, everything Anchises says has some allusive tie to people and events in Rome’s history—events that are in the past from Vergil’s perspective (and of course from our own). Thus, one important way to listen to what Anchises says is to listen, as it were, from outside the story. When we do that, we can verify or interpret what Anchises ‘predicts’ according what we know (or what our commentators help us to know) about Rome’s history from other sources (some that were available to Vergil, like Livy or Caesar, and some that weren’t, like Arrian … or our Roman History textbook). From this perspective, this speech Anchises makes is a complex puzzle that there is satisfaction in solving, a maze full of little prizes.
Inside the story, however, Aeneas is the person Anchises is saying all of this to, and Aeneas has no way at all to recognize or verify the people or events that Anchises is talking about. So, for example, when Anchises comes to the Second Punic war, he has this to say: quo fessum rapitis, Fabii? tu Maximus ille es, unus qui nobis conctando restituis rem (845–46). There are a number of illustrious Fabii, but he points out one of them—Fabius Maximus, whose nickname after the war was Cunctator, the Delayer, because of his tactic of ‘delaying’ Hannibal in Italy through skirmishes and irritating attacks on supply stores rather than pitched battles. So there is a little joke when Anchises says, ‘you’re the best,’ tu maximus ille es, because Maximus was his name, and there is another little joke because cunctando is what he did, and also suggests his nickname. There is another little joke in his opening question, quo fessum rapitis, Fabii?, because not only does he imply that there are so many Fabii that they are tiring him out, but chasing and tiring was how Fabius Maximus helped to debilitate Hannibal.
To Aeneas, this is nothing but impenetrable paradox. The greatest of the Fabii restored the republic by delaying … delaying what? restored it how? For that matter, what does rem in this instance mean? There is no republic yet …
When we keep Aeneas in mind as we read, that is, Anchises’ speech becomes bewildering—and in a very particular way it turns out that it is personal after all.
At the start of this section, Anchises makes a nodding reference to Aeneas as he directs his son’s attention to a particular person in the (vast!) crowd of ghosts: huc geminas nunc flecte acies, he says, hanc aspice gentem Romanosque tuos (788–89). Look over here, and see your Romans. He links Aeneas to what he’s pointing out again as points out Augustus in particular, hic vir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis (791)—this man, this one, is the one you’ve heard most often promised to you.
After this, Aeneas fades from view, and the sense that Anchises is speaking to anyone in particular, let alone to his son, dissipates. He offers his own allusive interpretation of Augustus (who will be like Hercules against the myth-beasts, 801–3; like Liber on his tiger-pulled chariot, 804–5) in the form of an inclusive-seeming question: dubitamus adhuc virtutem …? (806–7). He asks more questions as the speech continues. Who is that?, quis procul ille …? (808–9), but of course he also answers: he recognizes people, knows them by their distinguishing features, nosco crinis incanque menta regis Romani primam … (809–10). Again and again he asks questions like these (in 817–18; 841; 842–44; 845)—questions that are really aimed at, and inclusive of, not Aeneas at all … but us, we who like Anchises can see the people he points out. We (sometimes with help) can recognize them by their most famous deeds or accoutrements (as at 808–9), we want (or don’t want) to see what Brutus does (as at 817–18), we might have opinions about who to include or exclude from the list of Great Romans (as we are asked to do in 841 and in 842–44).
Anchises, however, begins to ignore us too as he increasingly speaks directly to the people he is ostensibly pointing out in the distance. He speaks to them emphatically, as when he addresses Julius Caesar, tuque prior, tu parce … sanguis meus! (834–35)—the way one might accidentally speak out loud at the theatre, trying to tell a character in a film or a play not to go through that door! Even some of those questions that seem to include us are couched more deeply in an apparent relationship between Anchises and the people he sees, quis te, magne Cato, … aut te, Cosse, relinquat? (841). We might be able to have an opinion, but it is by report—Anchises seems to speak to them directly, in person, and not in fact to care about what we think about it.
Still less, it seems, is he concerned with what Aeneas can possibly comprehend. To Aeneas himself, besides this bewildering and incomprehensible slough of introductions to people Aeneas has never seen and will never see, Anchises offers so far only the broadest, blandest advice: tu …, Romane, memento … pacique imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos (851–54). Actually, Aeneas may or may not even be explicitly included as the tu, Romane to whom Anchises speaks. He could as easily be speaking to his own internalized ideal, to any and every Roman, as to the flesh-and-blood son who has—at great cost—come to visit the ghost of his father.
Anchises, then, seems most invested, most personally committed, to these people-to-be. They are what is most vivid to him, most affecting, and for how vivid they seem to him, what is most striking is how opaque they are, not only to Aeneas, but to us. We who ostensibly are in the know still need to work it out—which Decii might he mean? Who took Corinth? How many Fabii is he talking about?
In the end, one might be left with a question that still needs answering by each of us, including Aeneas, including me, and including you: what use is all this talk of people we can’t really see or know, people gone before us and people yet to come? What use might it be for us to try to see them as they were or as they might one day be?
Further Reading
Clark, R.J. ‘How Vergil expanded the underworld in Aeneid 6’ Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 47 (2001) 103-16
Feeney, D. ‘History and revelation in Vergil’s Underworld’ Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 32 (1986) 1024
Galinsky, K. ‘Vergil’s uses of Libertas: Texts and Contexts’ Vergilius 52 (2006) 3-19
Goold, G.P. ‘The voice of Virgil: the pageant of Rome in Aeneid 6’ in Author and Audience in Latin Literature, eds. A.J. Woodman and J. Powell (Cambridge, 1992) 110-23, 241-5
Grebe, S. ‘Augustus’ divine authority and Vergil’s Aeneid’ Vergilius 50 (2004) 35-62
Habinek, T. ‘Science and tradition in Aeneid 6’ harvard Studies in Cassical Philology 92 (1989) 223-54
Leach, E.W. ‘Viewing the spectacula of Aeneid 6’ in Reading Virgil’s Aeneid, ed. C. Perkell (Norman, OK, 1999) 111-27
MacKay, L.A. ‘Three levels of meaning in Aeneid VI’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 86 (1955) 180-9
Segal, C. ‘Aeternum per saecula nomen: the golden bough and the tragedy of history. Part 2’ Arion 5 (1966) 34-72