Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative

Updated Edition

Alessandro Barchiesi, Ilaria Marchesi, Matt Fox

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400852482
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Antike & klassische Literaturkritik

The study of Homeric imitations in Vergil has one of the longest traditions in Western culture, starting from the very moment the Aeneid was circulated. Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative is the first English translation of one of the most important and influential modern studies in this tradition. In this revised and expanded edition, Alessandro Barchiesi advances innovative approaches even as he recuperates significant earlier interpretations, from Servius to G. N. Knauer.Approaching Homeric allusions in the Aeneid as "narrative effects" rather than glimpses of the creative mind of the author at work, Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative demonstrates how these allusions generate hesitations and questions, as well as insights and guidance, and how they participate in the creation of narrative meaning. The book also examines how layers of competing interpretations in Homer are relevant to the Aeneid, revealing again the richness of the Homeric tradition as a component of meaning in the Aeneid. Finally, Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative goes beyond previous studies of the Aeneid by distinguishing between two forms of Homeric intertextuality: reusing a text as an individual model or as a generic matrix.For this edition, a new chapter has been added, and in a new afterword the author puts the book in the context of changes in the study of Latin literature and intertextuality.A masterful work of classical scholarship, Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative also has valuable insights for the wider study of imitation, allusion, intertextuality, epic, and literary theory.

CHAPTER 1

THE DEATH OF PALLAS

Intertextuality and Transformation of the Epic Model

1. TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE PATROKLEIA

In the series of slaughters that occupies all of Aeneid 10, a compositional project gradually takes shape. Enough material is gathered here to fill several Iliadic books and nearly all the poem’s heroes are given their own lengthy aristeia punctuated by minor episodes. But still the reader is guided through this chaotic chain of events by a clarifying thread, since a familiar and already assimilated model gives light to navigate it. The tenth book “corresponds to the victorious events of Patroclus, to his death at the hand of Hector and the beginning of Achilles’ revenge.”¹ Pallas is based on Patroclus, Turnus on Hector, Aeneas on Achilles. Just like Achilles, Aeneas, after the death of his young friend, is driven by overwhelming desire for final vengeance.² As with Hector, Turnus’s victory is at once the peak of his success and, without his realizing it, the basis for his defeat. Like Patroclus, Pallas is dragged by desire for valor into a tragic combat against a stronger enemy—and the narrator’s passionate participation intentionally balances here the famous qualities of pathos found in Patroclus’s episode. But more than analyzing the mere content of the Vergilian debts, which in any case have already been sufficiently traced many times,³ what interests me here now is how the Latin poet goes about transforming a paradigmatic event of heroic epic like the Patrokleia.

If a reader finds in the web of the Homeric narrative a “guide” for deciphering the new narrative, this is not just confirmation of her role as epic addressee and witness to the renewal of a tradition: rather it is the first step toward a new, more sophisticated and critical, relationship with the epic action. The two texts present themselves to readers as though in immediate continuity, which makes the system of differences far more conspicuous. This dynamic of transformation—the intertextuality that generates the sense of the text—is not established without the reader’s active cooperation; indeed, it nearly coincides with the process of comprehension that the author envisioned.

A first example may be useful at this point, to sketch in outline the kind of analysis I will develop later. When young Lausus is killed, the poet develops Aeneas’s reaction with unusual psychological depth (et mentem subiit patriae pietatis imago [“an image of paternal care struck his mind”], 10.824): the victor groans in sorrow and extends his hand to address the dead as a sign of mourning;⁴ his words pay homage to the young man’s courage; he leaves to him the armor that made him so happy and, finally, not only grants him burial but also takes up the lifeless body in his own arms to return it to his comrades, encouraging them to approach without fear. This scene of great pathos constitutes a systematic reversal of a literary stereotype that the Vergilian text has already established in readers’ memory, both by its insistent repetition and its (“vertical”) appeal to the established typology of Homeric tradition. Epic scenes of death in battle normally entail, with fixed formulae: a triumphal euchos over the fallen body (the victor boasts of his courageous feat, addresses with derision the dead and his companions⁵), the stripping of the armor, sometimes accompanied by the theft and mistreatment of the corpse, and its abandonment to dogs and birds. More specifically, the image of Aeneas lifting the enemy’s body from the ground, unique both in Vergil’s poem and in the Homeric model itself,⁶ vividly symbolizes the concept of pietas and misericordia as integral parts of a new heroic ideal, one further defined by its very difference from the Homeric predecessor. And the model stands out all the more clearly thanks to the immediate context. A narrative parallel, in fact, clearly links Lausus to a warrior of the enemy camp, Pallas: both are young, valorous, of outstanding beauty, sons of fathers who love them as their sole comfort, and destined to die young from blows of a stronger and older adversary. The narrator explicitly juxtaposes them, in lines that also serve to foreshadow their fates:

Hinc Pallas instat et urget,

hinc contra Lausus, nec multum discrepat aetas,

egregii forma, sed quis fortuna negarat

in patriam reditus. Ipsos concurrere passus

haud tamen inter se magni regnator Olympi;

mox illos sua fata manent maiore sub hoste (10.433–38).

[Here Pallas hunts and harries, against him Lausus, both about the same age, each fine in form, but fortune denied them their homecoming. Yet the ruler of great Olympus did not suffer them to confront each other; their fates awaited them soon at the hand of a greater foe.]

It is clear now that the parallelism becomes an instrument of contrast: by killing Pallas, Turnus acts as a typical Homeric warrior, a negative counterpoint to Aeneas’s humanity.⁷ The juxtaposition of the two fates has a certain affinity with the thematic structure of the Patrokleia, where the consecutive deaths of Sarpedon and Patroclus seem to form a single complex marked by their shared tone of pathos. But most decisive is the transformation Vergil achieves by multiplying the cultural values that the text puts in play.

If the functional opposition of these two scenes is readily discernible, and even emphasized by the recurring polarity between the two chief antagonists Aeneas and Turnus, still perhaps a couple of less obvious observations can be made. First, it does not seem that we are meant simply to contrast the attitudes of the two main heroes and trace them back to distinct, opposing paradigms. I take it as given that the correct analysis of characters in a narrative involves comparing each character not with one other character more or less arbitrarily determined, but instead with the entire articulated complex that makes up the system of characters. From this angle, it becomes clear that Turnus’s behavior toward the enemy is shared by all the characters involved in the epic action and falls within the horizon of normal expectations that the text establishes through parallelism and repetitions of events (any battle scene of the Aeneid could be cited as example of this), whereas Aeneas’s behavior toward Lausus is entirely unique and thus “abnormal.” (Naturally it would be easy to jump to conclusions here: for Vergil’s Roman readers—the audience Vergil had in mind—if the concept of normality were suddenly overturned by its opposite, Aeneas’s abnormality could not but represent the arrival of authentic civility; but we will see momentarily that this may be too hasty a reading.) This observation may be confirmed by the fact that Aeneas’s gesture of pity not only contradicts but even lays waste to what Aeneas himself does on the battlefield, even in this very book. Indeed, after Pallas’s death Aeneas gives up any self-control and his actions recall, through explicit allusions, Achilles’ raging slaughter in the Iliad to avenge Patroclus (cf. books 20 and 21). Deaf to supplications, sarcastic and cruelly dismissive even of family bonds (cf. especially 10.595–601), even ready to ritually sacrifice prisoners (517ff.), pius Aeneas strides the battlefield like Aegaeon, who dared to challenge Jupiter’s thunderbolts, brandishing spears in his hundred arms.

It thus seems arbitrary to emphasize unilaterally the negative value that the synkrisis assumes with regard to Turnus alone.⁸ What matters is the construction of a complex system of perspectives that awaken the audience’s critical understanding through a continuous adjustment of “narrative distance.” In the prospective vision that the Vergilian text makes its readers adopt, the Homeric text acts not only as literary model (both as a complex of elements and structures to imitate and as a formal matrix for epic), but it is present also as a cultural model that has by now become relativized. (Intertextual significance involves precisely holding these two modes together in a single communicative act.) The Homeric world is not configured as the only possible one (nor, on the other hand, as a place of “uncivilized” values to be rejected), but instead assumes a “precivilized” quality. And indeed it is this intertextual mode that allows Vergil convincingly to evoke the heroes of distant, “primitive” Italy. It is not lost on anyone that Turnus, Mezentius, and Camilla are much more “Homeric” characters than Aeneas. Let us ask the question from the side of the positive protagonist. Contrary to the Homeric heroes—and this is quite a substantial difference—Aeneas is essentially a founder. If we consider the values of the protagonist and those of the world around him in the poem, we must conclude that Aeneas is a hero of a humanity that does not yet exist. For this reason he pays the price for his ambiguous relation to “barbarity”: in the name of constructive values that are firm but still far away in the future, his duty is to destroy; the darkest and most difficult moment in the process of foundation is reserved for him—the man of peace will instead be, as we can clearly gather, his son Ascanius/Iulus. After all, the nature of Italic barbarity also recalls two different ages at once, the Age of Saturn and the Iron Age, and thus includes both many outmoded values and, at the very same time, many germs of positive virtues.

The literary representation of this conflict could not help but foreshadow a system of disparities between characters in action such that it threatens the integrity of the values typical of archaic epic. In this sense, the orientation of the Aeneid toward the Augustan present risks not finding a point of synthesis with the Homeric tradition, since the juggling of values and ideologies was not easily accommodated by the epic form of horrida bella. Clearly, we are speaking here of cultural expectations that tend to push to a breaking point the communicative capacity of epic narration, already codified by Homer in the service of other values and quite different expectations.

With these premises, my argument aims to be immediately substantiated by textual evidence. Its main advantage with respect to other possible critical angles (which share a certain initial structural resemblance) seems to consist in being able to get directly into the work’s linguistic texture, in search of a functional nexus between imitation of Homer and poetic signification. In short, my inquiry pays attention to the relation between the transformation of the Homeric model (the moment of origin and construction of the new epic work)⁹ and what the Aeneid seeks to convey to its readers; and we might add that it may also involve Vergil’s attempt to construct a radically new “epic addressee.” An area particularly suited to this inquiry is a portion of the text where a maximum of Homeric redundancy occurs with a maximum of purposeful information: the episode of Pallas’s death in book 10, a complex synthesis of Homeric imitation and at the same time a turning point in the plot of the Aeneid.

2. HERCULES’ TEARS: THE HOMERIC MODEL AS STRATIFICATION (10.464–73)

By combining a scene of divine counsel with the narration of a duel, the epic poet both pauses the action and—as Homeric scholiasts already observed¹⁰—generates a particular state of expectation in the reader. Using this technique Vergil spotlights and foreshadows the episode of Pallas’s death. The youth’s prayer to his protector Hercules prior to battle is heard in heaven, but it cannot be fulfilled: hence this Olympian intermission, where Hercules sits silent, suppressing his grief and shedding useless tears, and Jupiter intervenes—father to son—to explain the great laws of fate governing human affairs. Homer had treated with a similar technique two important episodes: the duels between Hector and Achilles and, before that, in Iliad 16, between Sarpedon and Patroclus. The two scenes are built on parallel lines: twice Zeus is moved to pity and about to rescue from certain death a warrior (Sarpedon, Hector) to whom he is joined by a special bond. This intervention, analogous to so many others that dot the Trojan landscape, would put the god in conflict not only with the inevitability of moira (we know, after all, that in the Iliad these fated deaths are not the result of an iron-clad universal necessity, as is the case for Vergil’s Fates) but even with his own boulé. The conflict would be irreconcilable, since Zeus himself had already predicted the entire series of killings by inserting them into his overall plan: Patroclus will have to kill Sarpedon, son of Zeus, so that Hector will kill Patroclus and finally Achilles kill Hector. Twice, facing this crisis of the divine order, a goddess (Hera, Athena) intervenes and forces Zeus to accept the necessary unfolding of events. The two scenes thus appear to be marked by a theologically scandalous motif: the inferiority of Zeus.¹¹

The conflict is particularly acute in the dialogue preceding Sarpedon’s death. Twice Zeus has already saved his son from death in battle (Il. 5.662; 12.402ff.) by visibly revealing the intensity of his protective love. When in book 16 the god “sees and feels pity for” Sarpedon (431), we are prepared—thanks to the rigidity of the formulaic language—for a repetition of these events. In the Iliad, divine help is consistently mediated by ἐλεεῖν (“pity”), which generally involves a wholly private interest and active participation in the affairs of a mortal motivated by a blood-relation and a special devotion.¹² For an omnipotent being to feel pity normally entails acting in ways that change the course of mortal affairs. So Zeus’s words have a surprise in store for us. He pities Sarpedon and suffers for him, but his heart is torn between two irreconcilable alternatives: save his life or respect a predestined “plan.” Hera replies with a rhetorically sophisticated argument that sounds like a threat: if he spares Sarpedon’s life contrary to Fate, Zeus will be setting an example of insubordination for all the other gods who have seen and will see their own children die on the fields of Troy. It is a moment in which we witness the relative stability of Zeus’s power on Olympus and discern his dependence on a divine consensus that could even, in theory, suffer collapse. Thus the god must obey (οὐδ’ ἀπίθησε, 16.458): the help denied Sarpedon while alive will be somehow made up for with intervention by Apollo, who will at least prevent any violation to Sarpedon’s body. Zeus then rains down blood, bathing the battlefield on which Fate is about to unfold. The event reveals in an exemplary fashion a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introductory Note
• 1. The Death of Pallas: Intertextuality and Transformation of the Epic Model
• 2. The Structure of Aeneid 10
• 3. The Arms in the Sky: Diffraction of a Narrative Theme
• 4. The Death of Turnus: Genre Model and Example Model
• Appendix: The Lament of Juturna
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Select Index
• Select Index Locorum
• Index of Modern Authors