All posts tagged Etruscans

The Aeneid by Virgil – books 10 to 12

Book 10 Pallas and Mezentius

A mighty conference of the gods is called on Mount Olympus. Jupiter is puzzled why war has broken out. Aeneas’s mother, Venus, makes a long complaint, saying the Trojans have faithfully done everything they were asked to, and yet Aeolus sank them in his storms, Iris drove the women mad on Sicily and now Allecto has come up from hell to stir up war. For heaven’s sake, please can he at least spare her grandson, Ascanius?

Juno, Jupiter’s wife and inveterate opponent of Aeneas and the Trojans, replies, twisting the truth and making it all look like the impious Trojans’ fault, denying that any Fates told him to come to Italy and blaming him for starting the war. Juno blames Venus for starting the entire thing when she helped Paris to abduct Menelaus’s lawful bride, Helen. She should have thought about her precious Trojans then. And now the Trojans are doing the same again, same as Paris, coming to a foreign country and ravishing away women pledged to local fiancées.

For the root of the war between the natives and Aeneas and the Trojans is that King Latinus, king of the area around the Tiber, has one daughter Lavinia and she had for some time been promised to virile young Turnus, king of the neighbouring Rutuli. But when Aeneas and his men arrive at his court, the king is warned by prophecies that he should break that marriage arrangement and give his daughter to the newcomer. Turnus is, understandably, enraged. And so the cause of the massacre and bloodshed which dominates the second half of the Aeneid is this fighting over a royal princess, and the rights to territory, inheritance, breeding and lineage which she represents. Obviously poor Lavinia has little or no say in the matter but, like Helen, can only watch helplessly as the strong men around her launch a prolonged and ruinous war.

Anyway, after Juno’s speech has muddied the issues, all the gods burst out in confused opinions until Jupiter silences them all and says he’s not interested in the rights and wrongs of the affair: he washes his hands of it. Let each man face his fortune. The Fates will find a way. Then he nods and the earth shakes, which is his way of making a final decision, and the conference of gods breaks up.

Back on earth, the Trojans are desperately defending their camp against the fierce attack of the besieging Rutulians. Meanwhile Aeneas has left them to sail north to meet the Etruscans led by King Tarchon who wants their treacherous former leader, Mezentius (who has fled to join Turnus in his fight against the Trojans) brought to justice. So Aeneas secures the Etruscans as allies. Then their joint fleet sails back south along the coast of Italy to the mouth of the river Tiber to rejoin the battle.

At which point Virgil writes a conventional invocation to the Muses of Mount Helicon, asking their help in describing the names and lineages of all the Etruscan warriors. Catalogue of the Etruscan leaders (the catalogue of warriors was a well known aspect of a good epic poem, as pioneered by Homer in the Iliad).

Aeneas is leading the fleet of the Etruscan allies when they are approached by frolicking nymphs who reveal that they are his former fleet which the goddess changed into sea nymphs. They explain she did this because the Rutulians were about to fire them and go on to tell him his son and the Trojans are in dire straits, besieged in their camp.

As dawn rises Aeneas’s fleet sail up the Tiber and arrive at the camp. He flashes his great shield in the sunlight and the Trojans in the camp roar with delight. The fleet rams into the banks of the river and warriors leap into the shallows or slide down oars to land.

A long passage describing the many Rutulians massacred. Young Pallas speaks to rally the Arcadians, and sets about his own massacres. Eventually Turnus tells all his troops to stand down and back away and walks into an open space for single combat with Pallas. Pallas calls on his city’s god, Hercules, and cast his spear, which breaches Turnus’s armour at the shoulder but only grazes him. Hercules up in heaven weeps. Jupiter tells him every man has his time. Then Turnus throws his spear which pierces Pallas’s shield, armour and chest, and he falls to the ground gouting out his life blood. Turnus stands over him and says his father (Evander) is well rewarded for his hospitality to the invaders.

Pallas’s body is carried back by Arcadians to the camp. Virgil editorialises that Turnus will rue the day he killed Pallas and stole his armour. Hearing of new friend’s son’s death, Aeneas goes on a turbo-charged killing spree, like a raging torrent, like a storm of black wind, killing without mercy, even warriors who clutch his knees and beg.

Meanwhile Juno goes to Jupiter and begs for the life of Turnus. Jupiter grants him a brief respite but says he cannot avoid his ultimate fate. So Juno flies down to the battlefield and creates a phantom effigy of Aeneas. She has Turnus confront him and the phantom Aeneas turn and run. Unable to believe his luck, Turnus sets off in pursuit. Phantom Aeneas jumps onto a ship moored to the bank and Turnus jumps after him but Juno immediately makes the phantom disappear, cuts the ship’s cables and quickly propels it out on the tide.

Meanwhile Aeneas roams the battlefield calling out for Turnus but Turnus is nowhere to be seen. He is on a ship being swept far from the battlefield. He calls out on Father Jupiter, asking why he is being submitted to this disgrace, pleading to be allowed to return to the battlefield, weeping for the humiliation of seeming to have run away in front of his own men and his allies. He tries to jump overboard to swim to shore but Juno prevents him, so then tries to throw himself on his sword, but Juno protects him, too. Eventually the ship touches land up the coast at the ancient city of his father, Daunus (10.689).

Turnus’s place is taken by Mezentius who goes on a similar sadistic killing spree, rejoicing in his power to kill. Pitiless Mars is dealing out death to both sides. The gods look on in pity and grief to see so many fine men suffering.

Finally Aeneas confronts Mezentius. This is Mezentius’s aristeia. The word aristeia is Greek and means ‘excellence’, by extension ‘moment of excellence’ or ‘moment of prowess’ (as Richard Jenkyns puts it, p.10). Greek literary critics analysed and named all aspects of their literary genres, different types of scene or incident or character. An aristeia is a scene in the conventions of epic poetry where a hero in battle has his finest moments (aristos = ‘best’). Very often an aristeia depicts the moment when a warrior both reaches his peak as a fighter but also meets his death at his physical and psychological peak. A climax to his career.

So Mezentius makes a prayer and bravely throws his spear. But it bounces off Aeneas’s shield and kills nearby Antores. Then Aeneas casts his spear which enters Mezentius’s groin. He is limping away as Aeneas closes in but then his son, Lausus, leaps between them. He parries a blow from Aeneas’s sword and all Lausus’s comrades raise a cheer and start pelting Aeneas with rocks and stones. Aeneas ducks and protects himself with his shield biding his time, and then, when the bombardment slackens, buries his sword up to the hilt in the young man’s midriff.

But as he watches Lausus’s beautiful young face bleach white of life, Aeneas is overcome with pity and holds his hand. When he is dead, he turns on Lausus’s colleagues and rails at them.

Meanwhile his father Mezentius is bathing his wound in the river, his armour half off, surrounded by his entourage. He hears lamenting approaching and then his colleagues bring in his dead son’s body on his shield. Mezentius laments that his bad behaviour led to them being exiled and contributed to the death of the only thing valuable to him.

So Mezentius has his horse Rhaebius brought to him, mounts him, and rides into the heart of the battle clutching two javelins. He rides round shouting Aeneas’s name till he confronts him and, riding round him three times, launches spear after spear at him. All these stick in Aeneas’s shield, till he is tired of this and throws his own javelin which hits the horse between the temples and brings it crashing down, pinning Mezentius to the ground.

Dazed, Mezentius, unable to move, makes a last request, that he be properly buried, alongside his son. Then Aeneas runs him through with his sword, and he pours out his life’s breath in wave after wave of blood all over his armour and the narrative just stops with no comment.

Book 11 Drances and Camilla

As so often in Virgil, I found the segue to the next book abrupt and unexplained. The sun is coming up but we never heard of it going down. Aeneas piously sets up the armour of the killed Mezentius, which is described in loving detail, at a shrine. Then he addresses his men at what Virgil calls ‘the hour of their triumph’ and tells them the majority of their work is now over.

None of this quite makes sense. Surely the ‘hour’ of their triumph was the day before when Turnus disappeared and he killed Mezentius? Why wait a night and a calm unfighting morning of hanging up armour before giving this speech?

This is just one of the puzzling places which I suspect Virgil knew he had to come back and adjust and finalise, and explains why he asked his friends to burn the poem.

First Aeneas tells them to bury their dead and he himself turns to address the body of beautiful young dead Pallas: ‘Oh the pity of it.’ Compare Wilfred Owen:

I mean the truth untold:
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

They place it on a soft wickerwork bier with a green canopy and Aeneas orders a thousand soldiers to escort the body back to his poor old father in a huge procession which includes arms, horses and captives taken from the enemy, Aeneas orders leaders of the army to carry inn their arms ‘tree trunks’ draped in weapons captured from the enemy and inscribed with their names; enemy chariots drenched in Rutulian blood and Pallas’s own warhorse. It is all sent off in a long funeral procession upriver towards Pallantium.

Then Aeneas marches back to the camp and his present concerns. Envoys come from the Latins and ask for a truce to bury their dead. Aeneas delivers a long gracious speech lamenting that it ever came to war, saying he came in peace, saying he could have fought Turnus in single combat to decide everything, but they are all the victims of ‘cruel Fortune’. Or, as the reader knows, Juno’s implacable hate.

Old Drances speaks in reply, saying Aeneas is wise and honourable, he’s never liked Turnus, they will go back to King Latinus and try and make peace. There follow a 12-day truce while both sides roam the hills to cut down trees to make funeral pyres for the dead.

The arrival of the procession at Pallantium. King Evander falls on his body weeping and delivers a long speech. This is a slightly uneasy moment for the poem because the obvious thing to do would be to have him bitterly regret taking Aeneas in and sending his son off to die in a pointless war. Instead Virgil has to tread carefully and make him proud of allying with Aeneas:

I would not wish to blame you, Trojans, nor our treaties, nor regret the joining of our right hands in friendship. (11.165)

And proud his son died in battle, after killing ‘thousands of Volscians’ (11.168). He would not wish his son any other kind of funeral than that of a brave warrior who fell in battle. And he tells the huge processions which has brought his son to return to the fight. And says Aeneas now owes the death of Turnus to him and his son. The logic of war.

Virgil describes a grim day full of burning funeral pyres, the living riding round each pyre three times, wailing, the hecatombs of animals slaughtered, the arms thrown onto the flames, the clamour of men and screaming of dying beasts. A black day of lamentation.

The Latins, on their side, bury their dead, but also build a mound of nameless corpses and burn it. Lamentation in the court of King Latinus where mothers lament the loss of so many sons and call on Turnus to fight it out in single combat. But others speak up for Turnus and his right to Lavinia, led by the queen, a sort of Juno figure.

The Latins had sent an embassy to King Diomede of the Aetolians asking for his help in the war but now they return empty handed. Diomede won’t help. Latinus loses heart. He calls a great council and asks the envoys to repeat what Diomede said. They repeat Diomede’s speech and it is noble and stirring. He describes how the siege of Troy in which he fought took so long solely because of the might of Hector and Aeneas, and the latter was the more pious (a very conscious bigging-up of the founder of Rome). And that the war was impious and that is why all of the Greek survivors have been swept by fate to the four corners of the earth or struck down, like proud Agamemnon, all cursed. He counts himself lucky to have survived, albeit exiled from his homeland, never to see his wife again, and building a new settlement in Italy. Therefore he won’t tempt fate a second time, he will not fight the Trojans again. Instead he advises Latinus to make peace with the Trojans and accept their evident destiny.

King Latinus then laments that they ever got involved in this war. This thought is taken much further by old Drances who, although he speaks for the Trojans, is portrayed as a shifty and sneaky courtier. In another sudden, unexpected and unexplained Jump, it now appears that Turnus – who we last saw raging aboard the ship Juno had lured him onto and being swept out at sea, before making landfall up the coast at the ancient city of his father, Daunus (10.689) – Turnus has magically reappeared in the court of King Latinus. This isn’t impossible or unlikely – obviously he’d make his way back to base. It’s just odd that it goes completely undescribed and even remarked on. Virgil makes no mention of his return journey, just as the very end of book 6 is strangely throwaway – in a dozen or so words Virgil tells us Aeneas made his way back to his ships and comrades. I think it’s loose ends like this that Virgil wanted to go carefully back through his poem and tie up and prompted his request to have it destroyed.

King Latinus proposes that they give a tract of land they own to the Trojans to settle and send 100 men bearing the branch of peace and gifts.

Drances (his voice was ‘always a force for discord’) accuses Turnus of ‘fatal recklessness’, says he is the sole cause of all this grief and lamentation, and says Turnus must accept the loss of his bride and her gift to Aeneas.

Infuriated Turnus refutes all his arguments, calls Drances a coward, says the Trojans have been twice defeated before, the dead have fallen nobly, this is the time to test their vigour and virtue, they must fight on, Italy has many more allies they can call on etc. If Aeneas challenges him to single combat, so be it. This is a moment for courage and glory.

Their great debate is interrupted when news arrives that Aeneas has brought his great army of Trojans and allies out of their camp, across the plain and is threatening their city. Turnus takes control, shouting instructions to his commanders and rousing the young men for renewed battle.

The mothers mount the battlements, the queen escorting young Lavinia, ‘the cause of all this suffering’. Poor young woman. Like Helen, made the scapegoat for thousands of toxic men hacking each other to death. A lot is written about Dido because her emotional suffering is fully dramatised. But next to nothing about poor Lavinia and the guilt and trauma she must be suffering.

While the women lament Turnus dresses in his glowing armour, tossing his head like a virile stallion at the peak of his powers. Camilla joins him and asks the honour of facing the enemy first. Turnus replies he has heard Aeneas is sending his light-armed cavalry into the plain, but bringing his forces on a secret route. Turnus plans to ambush them; Camilla can lead the armies which face the cavalry.

Cut to the goddess Diana, in heaven, who tells us Camilla’s life story, brought up in the wild by Metabus, rejected by his own people. When he had fled them he came to a raging river, dedicated his baby’s life to Diana, tied the baby Camilla to a javelin and threw it across the river to embed in a tree, then swam across himself and retrieved her. She was raised in the wild, fed on wild milk and berries, taught to handle weapons from childhood, dressed in a tiger skin.

Now Diana laments that she will die in this pointless war but sends one of her entourage of nymphs, Opis, down with arrows and instructions to avenge whoever kills Camilla.

The two cavalry forces line up on the plain in front of Latinum, then charge. The usual role call of huge warriors who hack each other to death. But the descriptions lead up to Camilla’s aristeia, her moment of warrior excellence, as she fells fighter after fighter, with mocking taunts.

All this rouses Tarchon leader of the Etruscans to fury and he berates his comrades as cowards, before killing Venulus, racing across the battlefield like fire.

Camilla is pursuing a man named Chloreus, but unknown to her Arruns is stalking her. He makes a prayer to Phoebus Apollo then throws his spear. It pierces Camilla’s chest, she falls and her life bleeds away as she has a last death speech to her closest companion, Acca, telling her to go fetch Aeneas. Then her spirit departs for the underworld.

Opis sees all this. Charged with avenging Camilla by Diana, she now speaks words of revenge, feathers her bow and shoots Arruns, who falls in the dust of the plain, while Opis flew back up to heaven.

Meanwhile the Latins break and flee back to their city pursued by the Trojans and their allies. Panic stricken Latins close the gates behind them, locking out many of their comrades who are crushed in the press or slaughtered. Mothers pack the ramparts and throw down rocks and logs onto the attackers.

Acca brings news of all this to Turnus who bitterly abandons his planned ambush in the woods, and turns his forces back towards the city. Moments later Aeneas and his forces enter the valley where Turnus had planned to ambush him. The fortunes of war. The two columns of troops hear each other and see each other’s dust but night is falling, it is too late for a battle. They both camp under the city walls.

Book 12 Truce and duel

Another one of those non-sequiturs or jumps. Book 11 ends with night falling and Turnus’s army apparently camped outside the city walls not far from Aeneas’s: ‘They both encamped before the city and built stockades on their ramparts’ (11.914).

But the first line of book 12 describes Turnus in the process of watching the Latin line broken and the tide of battle going against them, as if it was back in the middle of the fight, on the day Camilla is killed and the Trojans take heart. Not only that but, once he’s seen this, he turns and addresses King Latinus i.e. he is no longer in a camp outside the walls, but somewhere in the king’s chambers inside the city, maybe on the battlements.

Anyway, he tells Latinus to draw up a treaty, call for peace and allow Turnus to go out and fight Aeneas in single combat. Latinus gives a long winded reply, appears to vacillate, laments never being able to make his mind up. Queen Amata weighs in, still insisting that that Lavinia must marry Turnus, still seeing Turnus as the sole support for her family and kingship, and so weeping at the thought of him confronting Aeneas. Nonetheless, Turnus orders an officer, Idmon, to carry a challenge to Aeneas of single combat at dawn the next day.

At which point he ‘rushes back into the palace’ – so where were they all standing during this conversation? On the battlements?

Anyway, Turnus arrays himself in his magnificent armour – which seems a little pointless because the duel isn’t scheduled until the next morning. Next morning dawn comes and men from both sides set out the duelling field. But Juno, troublesome to the last, goes to see Juturna, a nymph and sister of Turnus, tells her he risks dying today and encouraging her to do whatever she can to save him.

Latinus arrives dressed in splendour. Devout Aeneas, Father of Rome, arrives and makes a great invocation to the gods and swears that if he loses the Trojans will withdraw, but that if he wins they will live in peace with the Latins. Latinus swears a similarly solemn vow, then they murder beasts and rip out their entrails while they’re still alive to festoon the altars. (God, the sadness of things.)

But remember Juturna? Now she takes the form of Camers and wanders through the Rutulians and Laurentines, telling them it is a shame to let Turnus die, a shame on them to let their lands be taken by the incomers, pointing out how few they are, how easy it would be to defeat them etc. And then she inspires an omen in the sky when an eagle swoops down on a swan and is carrying it away when a flock of smaller birds all attack it and force it to drop its prey i.e. Aeneas is the eagle, Turnus the beautiful swan, and the Rutulians and Laurentines the men she is whipping up to break the truce.

At the sight Tolumnius the augur cries out and throws his spear. It kills one of nine brothers and the other eight grab their swords and spears and run shouting towards the Laurentine ranks. And that is how easy it is to restart a war. The violence, the lust for violence, sitting just beneath the surface of things.

More slaughter. Aeneas tries to restore the peace, calling his men to stop fighting but out of nowhere an arrow strikes him. Turnus sees him withdrawing from the field and a wild hope inflames him. Turnus runs through his enemies, massacring and murdering.

Aeneas is helped limping to his camp by an entourage of soldiers and is attended by Iapyx but he can do nothing, the arrow is embedded deep. Meanwhile the raging Rutulians approach closer, the sound of battle gets louder, the cavalry rides up to the walls and arrows fly into the camp.

So Venus flies to Mount Ida and plucks the herb dittany, returns to the Trojans camp and, unseen, infuses the water with it, and with it panacea and juices of ambrosia. When washed with this the arrow comes out and Aeneas’s wound is healed. Iapyx immediately realises this was done by the power of some god.

So Aeneas takes his huge spear (there is much emphasis on the sheer size of this spear) and returns to the battlefield and the Rutulians quail and Juturna runs and hides. The Trojans pursue but Aeneas disdains to fight anyone except Turnus.

Once again Juturna intervenes, this time changing herself into the shape of Turnus’s charioteer, and deliberately driving Turnus away from the hottest parts of the battle. Aeneas doggedly tries to spy and chase him but is getting worn out when someone flings a spear at him which cuts off the plume of his helmet and he really loses it, going fighting mad. The poem matches the massacres and blood-lust frenzied killing of both Aeneas and Turnus.

Then Venus puts it into his head to attack the city of the Latins, terrify them and, if Turnus won’t confront him, burn it to the ground. He rallies his men and they storm the city, siege ladders, javelins, fire, cut to pieces the guards at the gate. Terror spreads in the city, some wanting to open the gates, others vowing to defend it and chucking rocks down on the besiegers.

Queen Amata thinks Turnus must be dead, and it’s her fault, and hangs herself. Lavinia is distraught and tears her golden hair and rosy cheeks. Latinus wanders the palace corridors strewing his hair with dirt and dust.

Far away on the battlefield Turnus hears the sounds of lamentation carried on the wind and pauses. Juturna tries to egg him on to fight but Turnus tells her he realised who she was some time ago, but acknowledges she is sent by some higher power. Now he is tired. He has seen too many of his comrades cut down. He is ready to die honourably and go down to the underworld with honour.

Saces rides up and tells him the city is under attack, Queen Amata is dead, the Trojans are storming the gates, they are throwing firebrands over the walls to torch it. Only he can save them!

Turnus tells his sister he recognises his destiny. The time has come. The fates are too strong. He abandons his grieving sister and runs across the battlefield up to the walls where the fighting is fiercest. He calls out to both sides to cease fire and proclaims he will keep the words of the treaty and fight in single combat.

Throughout the poem Aeneas has been getting bigger, as symbolised by his steadily swelling javelin. And now he is as immense as Mount Athos or Mount Eryx as he comes running towards Turnus. The two go straight into fierce combat without any pauses or fancy speeches. They throw spears then run on to attack each other with swords.

But when Turnus brings his down with a mighty crash is shatters on the armour of Vulcan. Weaponless he takes to flight and Aeneas chases him. The poem has become more punctuated with epic similes and now they come thick and fast and become evermore extended, stretching to a quarter and even a third of a page long, comparing the fighters to mountains, bulls, a stag chased by a hunting dog, as Aeneas flies after Turnus, threatening anyone who tries to help him with instant death.

Aeneas comes up to the tree stump where the spear he through at the start of the contest has stuck fast. While he is struggling to wangle it free Juturna (again) comes forward and gives Turnus the sword he has been seeking so long. So that now the two huge heroes can turn to face each other fully armed.

And now Jupiter makes a final speech to Juno, telling the end of her vendetta has come. She has brought pain and suffering and death on countless houses. Now is the time to give up her anger.

Juno finally acquiesces, but with just one demand. That the people of Latium not give up their name and be absorbed by the Trojans, but the reverse: that the descendants of the peace and marriages which will follow retain the name of Latins and Italians. And here, at the climax of the poem, Jupiter agrees. He will make them one people, Latins, speaking one tongue and no other race will be their equals in doing her honour.

Satisfied, Juno withdraws, and that clears the path for this long tale of violence, finally, to come to an end. Next the Father of the Gods sends down a Dira, one of the dire creatures which sharpen the fears of suffering mortals in times of plague or war. This flies down and takes the form of a bird and batters again and again into Turnus’s face. A strange numbness came over him and he melted with fear. Hardly fair, is it, but then nothing the gods do is fair.

Juturna recognises the dira for what it is and has a page-long lament at the bitterness of the eternal life she has been granted if it is to be spent for her dear brother, but she realises the game is up and plunges down into the depths of her river.

Back on the level of mortals, Aeneas continues his pursuit of Turnus, taunting him, saying this is not a race. Turnus halts and picks up an enormous rock, so big it would take 12 men of the modern age to lift it, and throws it at Aeneas. But his strength fails, his knees give way, he drops it and it rolls harmlessly away. Turnus is like one in a dream, unable to move, unable to escape. He looks around, at the soldiers surrounding him, up at the city, and trembles at the death that is upon him.

Then Aeneas throws his spear big as a tree which crashes like a thunderbolt through Turnus’s armour and pierces his thigh. On his knees Turnus stretches out his arms in supplication, begging Aeneas to think of his father, granting him victory and the hand of Lavinia but begging for mercy.

Aeneas hesitates, but then he catches sight of the baldric – the belt warriors wear over one shoulder and hang their swords from – which belonged to Pallas and which Turnus took from the beautiful young man’s body after he killed him. And the sight drives him wild with anger and he declares he is exacting vengeance for Pallas and plunges his sword up to the hilt in Turnus’s chest.

The limbs of Turnus were dissolved in cold and his life left him with a groan, fleeing in anger down to the shades.

Anger is the dominant mode, right to the bitter end.

Anger management

More than anything, more than love or destiny or patriotism or heroism, the poem is about anger. Almost all the characters are angry, almost all the time. Juno is furious at the Trojans, at Venus, and at Jupiter for protecting the Trojans. Venus is furious at the way her son is being treated. The Greeks who destroy Troy and massacre its population are driven by insensate rage. Dido has a brief spell of happiness and then is driven into a frenzy of anger at Aeneas’s betrayal. The Trojan women on Sicily are driven into wild fury by Juno. And Juno creates the entire second half of the book by commissioning Allecto to inspire wild anger in the hearts of Queen Amata, Turnus and then the farmers whose stag Ascanius kills. And once war escalates, then everyone is inspired to further fury by someone they loved or are related to being killed. And so the poem paints a terrifying picture of an entire world consumed with anger.

Anger is, after all, the subject of the Iliad, the first and greatest epic in the European tradition, whose opening words are:

Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilles

Maybe an epic poem is a long poem about male rage.

Sore loser

But then – when it comes down to it, the entire poem lasts so long because of a woman, because of Juno’s sustained opposition to Aeneas’s predestined fate. For 12 long books she opposes and delays his inevitable destiny. And for why? Her enmity stems from not being chosen as the most beautiful goddess by Paris. The Aeneid is so long because Juno was the sore loser in a beauty contest. Male rage and female fury.

Roman reviews

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by Simon on September 5, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 5, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/09/05/the-aeneid-virgil-books-10-to-12/

The Aeneid by Virgil – books 7 to 9

‘War is the business of men.’
(Turnus, book 7, line 445)

Book 7 War in Latium

Following the dictates of the gods Aeneas and his fellow Trojans are still en route to Italy where their destiny awaits.

They pause just long enough in Caetia to make a funeral pyre for Aeneas’s nurse, who dies here and whose name they give to this harbour, then they sail on. They avoid the island of Circe, who bewitches men and turns them into animals (so in Virgil her island is just off the coast of Italy? In Homer the implication is that it is in the far East, as far away as the Black Sea; but Apollonius of Rhodes, in his narrative of Jason and the Argonauts, places it just south of Elba, within sight of the coast of Tuscany. OK.)

Anyway, Circe is included in the narrative in order to transcend her and the whole world she comes from. Educated Romans had for centuries been aware of their cultural inferiority to the Greeks and had copied or stolen huge chunks of their culture. (I am particularly aware of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s self-imposed project of translating everything that he thought useful from Greek philosophy into Latin, inventing or redefining Latin words as he went in order to capture Greek technical terms. Then there’s the drama, copied straight from the Greek; the architecture ditto. And then this very poem, the Aeneid, copying form, tone and conventions from the Greek).

So the Romans had to find a way to justify their superiority to the Greeks and, by extension, to all the other peoples they had subjugated in the century and a half leading up to Augustus’s rule. They did so by talking about Rome’s unique ability to rule wisely and justly, in a way no other culture or empire could.

This partly explains why Virgil opens book 7 with a very conscious change of tone. Up till now, the first 6 books, have been dealing with adventures by sea and among the mythical legendary world of the Greeks, of all the Greek legends of great heroes and myths of gods and monsters. It is the half-magical world of Homer’s Odyssey.

With book 7 Aeneas finally ceases his sailing and the rest of the poem is about The Land. And in particular fighting for the land. It is about military conquest and this is the uniquely Roman sphere of achievement which without any doubt sets her apart from all other cultures of the Mediterranean. If the first half rehashes themes and images from the Odyssey, part two invokes the much more brutal, unforgiving world of the Iliad and the stern work of conquest which is the Romans’ destiny and métier.

All this explains the stern invocation to Erato, the muse of lyric poetry and mimic imitation:

Come now, Erato, and I shall tell of the kings of ancient Latium, of its history, of the state of this land when first the army of strangers beached their ships on the shores of Ausonia. I shall recall, too, the cause of the first battle – come, goddess, come and instruct your prophet. I shall speak of fearsome fighting, I shall speak of wars and of kings driven into the ways of death by their pride of spirit, of a band of fighting men from Etruria and the whole land of Hesperia under
arms. For me this is the birth of a higher order of things. This is a greater work I now set in motion.

Aeneas’s fleet sight the mouth of the river Thyber they have heard so much about and they sail into the river and the narrative introduces us to the people who live here. Old King Latinus is descended from Saturn but his son and heir died young. He has one marriageable daughter, Lavinia, and the kings of all the neighbouring tribes have vied for her hand, not least King Turnus.

Omens tell the Latins strangers have arrived; first a swarm of bees, then Lavinia is shrouded in flame, then Latinus late at nights hears words prophesying that the new arrivals will merge with his people to forge a race which will rule the entire world.

Aeneas and his men have anchored their ships and are eating, and are so hungry they eat the plate-shaped compacts of wheat which they used as containers or holders of their meal, when Ascanius bursts out that ‘they are eating their tables’. In a flash Aeneas realises this is the fulfilment of the prophecy his father made back in book 3: so they really have finished their journeying; this is their destined settlement place.

They send out messengers who quickly come to the city of the Latins, seeing their brave young men exercising. At the same time king Latinus hears confirmation of the arrival of the prophesied strangers. The embassy led by Ilioneus explains why they have come, their peaceful intention to settle. Latinus realises these are the stranger predicted by the prophecies, and their leader is the man fated to marry his daughter: ‘This Aeneas is the man the Fates demanded.’

BUT – Juno sees all this from heaven and is overcome with rage. Maybe it is fated that Aeneas will marry Lavinia but she, Juno, can drag it out for as long as possible and inflict as much damage, pain and grief as possible on all concerned first. She commissions Allecto, bringer of grief, to stir things up.

1. Allecto goes to Latinus’s palace and throws one of the snakes that grow on her head into the breast of Queen Amata. This poisons the queen and whips her up to a mad frenzy. She rails against the king and his passive acceptance of marriage of their daughter to a Trojan. Remember Paris who abducted Helen. At the first breath of trouble Aeneas will abduct their daughter. Also, she is promised in marriage to Turnus, who is king Latinus’s own flesh and blood etc. When the king demurs Amata goes hog crazy, running raving through the palace, out into the countryside, abducting her daughter and devoting her to the god Bacchus, sending word to all the women of Latinum to untie their hair and run wild with her in the woods.

2. Part two of the plan sees Allecto flying to the palace of Turnus, king of the Rutulians. She assumes the shape of an old priestess and warns Turnus the Aeneas is taking his place. Turnus poo-poohs this so Allecto reveals herself in her true size and shape, terrifying Turnus, then throws a flaming brand into his heart and inspires him with ‘the criminal madness of war’ (7.463), and he wakes to rant and rage and call for his armour and declare war on the newcomers.

3. Part three is Allecto flies off to find Ascanius out hunting. She inspires his hounds to track down the finest stag in the neighbourhood which has been patiently reared by hand by Silvia, the daughter of the local lord, Tyrrhus. Ascanius shoots it with an arrow and it runs home crying. The wife is distraught, the husband blows his horns to rally his neighbouring shepherds, the Trojans rally from their ships and the fighting escalates. Tyrrhus’s son is killed, then the wisest oldest landowner in the neighbourhood.

Latinus doesn’t want war, but most of his court including his wife, are furious for it, so he washes his hands of it and withdraws to his chamber. The Latins have a temple whose gates are opened when war is declared, unleashing the furies of war. Latinus refuses to open it so Juno comes down from heaven herself to do so. The fighting escalates. It is war!

Vast armies of allies rush to join the Latinums and Virgil enumerates their leaders and heritances and distinctive weapons and numbers. Like sands on the shore. Scores of thousands of fighting men, Turnus standing a head taller than all of them in a helmet graced by a chimaera, and last of all was Camilla the warrior maiden of the Volsci.

Book 8 Aeneas in Pallantium / Rome

‘Fortune that no man can resist, and Fate that no man can escape’
King Evander explaining how he ended up inhabiting his lands, 8.335)

Aeneas witnesses this vast mobilisation for a massive war and, characteristically, ‘great tides of grief flowed in his heart’. He is ‘heart sick at the sadness of war.’ He thought all his troubles were over. Seems like they’re only just beginning.

That night he has a vision of Old Father Tiber speaking to him. Tiber reassures him that this is the place he is destined to settle and that all will be well. Tells him to ally with the Arcadians. Tells him he will see a sow suckling 30 piglets, and these symbolise the thirty years until his son Ascanius founds the city of Alba Longa.

So Aeneas takes 2 ships of warriors and sails up the Tyber for a couple of days to the city of the Arcadians, which they have named Pallanteum (meaning belonging to Pallas Athena). He makes an alliance with their venerable king, Evander, based on their shared ancestry going back to the legendary Atlas, and the fact that Evander had, when a young man, met and admired Aeneas’s father, Anchises. Evander invites Aeneas to join the annual feast in honour of their founder Hercules.

Evander tells their founding legend, how they were terrorised by the foul monster Cacus until the latter made the mistake of stealing some of Hercules’s cattle as he was driving them by on his journey back from Gades/Cadiz in Spain. And so Hercules killed him in an epic fight. Evander’s people sing a page-long hymn to Hercules.

Evander then explains that the original people roundabouts were hunter-gatherers who had no agriculture until the god Saturn appeared, who inaugurated a Golden Age. But this was slowly degraded by the appearance of baser metals and the madness of war and the lust for possessions.

[This is interesting because it chimes with the Stonehenge exhibition and catalogue which depict the change from a hunter-gatherer society similar to that of the Native Peoples of North America, to the arrival of agriculture, which transformed human society; and then the ability to smelt and shape iron, which led to stronger weapons which led to an outburst of war and looting – ‘the madness of war and the lust for possessions’ 8.328. Much like the sequence of events related by King Evander to Aeneas.]

Only now, as Evander points out some of the features of the primitive settlement of Pallanteum do we realise that they are walking through the future site of Rome, for he indicates the cave of Lupercal, the Tarpeian Rock, the hill of the Capitol, the Janiculum, none of which had their later names yet. The idea is that the name Pallantium will evolve over time into Palatine, name of the prime hill of Rome. But for now, the future forum is filled with cattle lazily grazing. Evander invites Aeneas into his humble little house and they both sleep as night falls.

But his mother, the goddess Venus, is very worried about the armies gathering. She goes to her husband, the lame god of the forge, Vulcan, ‘took him gently in her white arms and caressed him, and caressed him again. Suddenly he caught fire as he always did’ and she persuades him to make a magnificent shield for her son. First they have sex and he falls asleep, sated. But in the middle of the night he wakes and flies down to the island of Vulcania, where his workshop is based in caverns like those beneath Mount Etna.

This is the beginning of the extraordinary and brilliant description of the forging of the mighty shield for Aeneas, totally modelled on Hephaestus’s forging of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, but brilliantly vivid and stirring in its own right. Vulcan gets his three Cyclopes to drop what they’re doing and create the greatest shield in the world.

While they crack on the scene shifts back to the humble house of Evander, next morning, when he and Aeneas wake and discuss politics. Evander tells him the warlike Lydians settled in the Etruscan mountains but suffered under a cruel ruler Mezentius till they rose up and drove him out. He ran off to the land of his guest-friend Turnus. The Etruscans are up in arms and want him, Mezentius, back, to punish. But a prophecy has said the Etrurians will never put themselves under an Italian leader. But an exile just arrived from Troy…Evander says he will put Aeneas at the head of this army, and all its other allies. ‘You, Aeneas, are the man the gods are asking for.’

Evander tells him he will give him 200 cavalry, and his son Pallas to be trained in the ways of war, who will bring 200 more. Aeneas is saddened that it has come to this but then his mother Venus sends a sudden flash of lightning and crash of thunder and the sky is filled with an Etruscan trumpet and they see a suit of armour glowing red in the sky. Aeneas realises it is a sign, Venus will send him heavenly armour as she promised.

So he accepts Evander’s commission and is dressed for war. He selects his strongest companions and sends the 2 ships he came in back down the river to alert Ascanius and the other Trojans of the arrangement.

Word gets round Pallanteum that was has come and mothers fret over their sons. ‘Mothers stood on the city walls full of dread.’ Virgil writes a moving speech for King Evander to deliver to his beloved son, born to him late in life, how he would prefer to die now than hear bad news about him. But he must go. It is destiny.

Aeneas and his forces ride out from Pallanteum, with Pallas looking magnificent in their centre. Not long after the come to the Etruscan forces in their camp, led by Tarcho, hail and greet them.

But somehow, in the vague way of Virgil’s, at the same time he is separate from all the others, in a copse and to him appears his mother, Venus, and lays the new-forged armour at the foot of an oak tree. The remaining 120 lines of the book (about 4 pages of the Penguin paperback) are devoted to a thrilling, visceral description of the many scenes from Roman history which Vulcan has moulded onto the mighty shield, ending with a vast diorama of the Battle of Actium in which Augustus Caesar and Antony are specifically named (and Cleopatra is castigated, ‘pale with the pallor of approaching death’) before we see the unprecedented three triumphant processions held by the victorious Augustus through Rome.

As in Book 6, the brown-nosing, the honours paid to Augustus (‘from his radiant forehead there streamed a double flame and his father’s star shone above his head’) are off the scale.

Obviously only a fraction of these scenes could fit on any actual shield but that’s not the point. Aeneas, as you might expect, marvels at the scenes depicted, without a clue what any of it means

Book 9 Nisus and Euryalus

Spiteful Juno sends Iris down to tell Turnus that Aeneas is away from his base camp at the mouth of the Tiber so this is a perfect time to attack. Turnus rouses his men and their allies and in a mighty host they approach the Trojan camp. However, Aeneas left explicit instructions for the Trojans not to engage, so they stay secure behind their walls.

Frustrated Turnus lights on the idea of burning their fleet which is riding at anchor on the Tiber. But, as it happens, back when Aeneas and the Trojans cut down the wood to build these ships, Cybele, god of the earth, went to Jupiter and begged that ships built from her holy grove would never suffer ruin. So Jupiter promised that once they had sailed across the seas they would be transformed into immortal goddesses. And so it is that as Turnus’s men set about torching the ships a great light is seen from the East and the voice of the goddess is heard and each ship turns into a sea nymph and dives into the sea like a dolphin!

Undaunted, Turnus rallies his men saying this only means the Trojans have lost all means of retreat. They crap on about Venus and destiny but now they are here in the land of Latium he, Turnus, will ensure they meet a different destiny – to be hacked down by his sword! He calls them cowards and assures them his siege won’t last ten years! and he sets armed guards over all the gates and settles his men in their own camp.

Cut to a pair of Trojans on guard duty, beautiful young Nisus and the even younger Euryalus, who hasn’t started shaving yet. Nisus has spotted a gap in the encircling army. He suggests to Euryalus that they sneak through the gap and go to find Aeneas and tell him of their encirclement. They find guards to take their spot and go suggest the plan to Ascanius and the generals. They are awed by the young men’s bravery, burst into tears, clasp them by their right hands and Ascanius promises them an extravagant amount of booty (Turnus’s horse and armour) as well as ‘twelve chosen matrons’. Who would not risk their life for ‘twelve chosen matrons’? They all exchange vows and accompany them to the gate out of which they will sneak but Virgil dashes our spirits by saying it was all ‘futile’, the wind scattered them like clouds.

So they sneak into the enemy camp, finding them all asleep after drinking wine late into the night. Nisus proceeds to massacre loads of them as they sleep, cutting their heads off, letting the black blood soak the earth.

They finally bring the slaughter to an end and sneak on beyond the camp but the shiny helmet Nisus is wearing gives them away to a mounted patrol which confronts them. They run off the road into a copse but the enemy know it well. Nisus gets clear but discovers Euryalus has been caught and goes back to rescue him. He sees Euryalus being bound prisoner and throws a spear at the Rutulians killing one, then another spear killing another. Their leader Volcens is infuriated and heads straight for Euryalus. Nisus breaks cover and yells that it was him who threw the spear, his friend is innocent but is too late and he watches Volcens plunge his sword into Euryalus, killing him on the spot. Demented with anger Nisus rushes upon the entire platoon, fighting on despite repeated wounds till he makes it through to Volcens and plunges his sword into his mouth before dropping dead.

Virgil writes a memorial saying as long as his poetry lives, so will their names live in glory.

Morning comes and the Rutulians are appalled to discover so many of their main leaders murdered in the night. They cut off Nisus and Euryalus’s heads, pin them on spears and parade them up and down in front of the Trojan ramparts.

Euryalus’s mother hears of his death and drops her loom and runs to the ramparts and delivers an impassioned lament. She is demoralising her side so is helped back to her tent.

Then the Rutulians attack and the Trojans defend their walls as they have had long bitter years of practice doing. Virgil calls on Calliope and the other muses to help him recount all the deeds performed that day, and proceeds to give a dense account of the men killed in a variety of ways on both sides, exactly in the manner of Homer, especially the first kill performed by young Ascanius, which requires a boastful address by his Rutulian victim (Numanus), and Ascanius’s prayer to the gods to make his arrow shoot true. Having killed his man Ascanius is praised by no less a figure than the god Apollo who, however, tells him to quit while he’s ahead, and it is always best to obey the god Apollo.

In the most notable incident the two huge brothers Pandarus and Bitias are so confident of their powers that they open their gate to let the raging Rutulians in and proceed to slaughter every one that comes through the gates. But when Turnus hears of this he quits fighting on another part of the field and runs to the gate where he kills several Trojans then fells Bitias with ‘an artillery spear’. Pandarus realises the tide has turned and so leans against the gate to shut it but in his haste locks Turnus on the inside. Then two square up to each other and make set-piece speeches of defiance. Pandarus throws his huge spear but the goddess Juno deflects it into the wall whereupon Turnus lifts his huge sword and brings it crashing down on Pandarus’s head, cleaving his skull in two with much splattering brains.

If Turnus had opened the gate and let his comrades swarm inside, the war would have ended then and there, but he is battle-mad and fights on, massacring scores of Trojans. However reinforcements come and he is overcome by sheer weight of numbers, exiting through the gate and fleeing. His helmet rang again and again with blows, the plume was torn from his helmet, and the boss of his shield destroyed.

But – in one of those events in Virgil which have a kind of dreamlike simplicity and impracticality, and also great abruptness – Turnus is described as jumping into the river Tiber in full body armour into the river Tiber which bears him up, washes the blood and gore away and carries him safely to his companions. Nothing about that is remotely plausible and it sheds back on the quite brutal realism of what came before the strange half-light of a dream.

The rule of three

In her death throes three times Dido lifts herself on her elbow, three times she falls back onto her pyre (4. 692). Three times Aeneas tries to embrace his father in the underworld (6.700). Three times Juturna beats her lovely breasts (12.155).

Into wind

Only towards the end did I begin to register how often things disappear into the wind, turn to air, or smoke, blown and vanishing on the wind. This is true of many of the people who appear in dreams or spirits of the dead who appear in the daylight.

Three times Aeneas tries to embrace his father in the underworld, but:

three times the phantom melted in his hands, as weightless as the wind… (6.702)

Or when, earlier, Aeneas has fled burning Troy but then realises he’s gotten separated from Creusa and goes back into the burning city, mad with grief, searching everywhere until her spirit appears before him and tells him to desist; it is fated by the gods; he must go and found a great city etc, and then:

She spoke and faded into the insubstantial air, leaving me there in tears and longing to reply. (2.790)

Sometimes it is their words, for example Arruns’ prayer to Apollo in book 11. He prays to Apollo to kill the scourge that is Camilla, and Apollo grants this bit; but also prays to return to the city of his fathers, and this part Apollo ‘scatters to the swift breezes of air’ (11.797), these words are seized by a sudden squall and blown far away to the winds of the south (11.798).

The restless, invisible wind is a powerful symbol off the evaporation, disappearance, vanishing into non-being, of human visions, words and wishes. They cremate their dead. All humans, eventually, go up in smoke.

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SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (2015) – 3 Historical overview

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard is divided into roughly three parts – the early legendary period (1200 to 500 BC), the republic (509 to 30 BC) and the empire (30 BC to where Beard chooses to end her account, in the year 212 AD).

It’s sort of predictable that most of the earliest history of ancient Rome, its foundation and early years, would be shrouded in legend and probably mostly fictional. It’s a more interesting point, and one Beard repeats a number of times, that a good deal of what you could call the early historical period, the 600s, 500s, 400s and even 300s BC, were still heavily distorted and fictionalised and glamorised by the authors of the first centuries BC and AD.

They projected the administrative ranks and classes and issues, the epic battles and even the grand architecture of the Rome of their own time, back onto earlier periods which probably consisted of little more than chieftains living in basic huts and leading cattle raids against nearby communities.

It was a world of chieftains and warrior bands, not of organised armies and foreign policy. (p.117)

For a fundamental learning to emerge from the first 200 pages of this book is that the first century BC and the first century AD were the classic period for great Roman writing, including the first extensive historical writing (Livy), detailed discussions of the Roman constitution and politics (Cicero),  Catullus’s love poetry, Caesar’s accounts of his war in Gaul, plays, poetry and so on (p.214).

The point being that modern historians think that many aspects of the accounts written during these centuries about the founding and early history of Rome hundreds of years earlier are very misleading. The rulers, warriors, wars and battles of the early centuries were exaggerated to heroic proportions, mixed with legend, and highly moralised to provide improving, educational stories to a 1st century audience.

It is clear that much of the tradition that has come down to us, far from reality, is a fascinating mythical projection of later Roman priorities and anxieties into the distant past. (p.100)

(This core idea, and the word ‘projected’, recur on pages 97, 100, 108, 141, 205).

The traditional, grand and impressive history of the founding and early years of ancient Rome, as it was written up by Rome’s first century propagandists, was repeated for centuries afterwards, inspiring all subsequent histories, countless poems and paintings and plays throughout the Western tradition. It was only in the twentieth century, with the advent of modern archaeological techniques, that virtually all these stories came, not so much to be questioned (historians had been sceptical about some of the taller tales even at the time) but to be definitively disproved by the evidence in the ground.

This process goes on to the present day, with ever-more advanced technology and computer analysis (and DNA analysis of bones and remains) contributing to a comprehensive overhaul of our image of ancient Rome. If you Google books about ancient Rome you’ll quickly discover that ones published even as recently as 2000 are now considered out of date because the archaeology is moving at such a pace and shedding ever-newer light on Rome’s origins and early development.

Now, Beard does take a lot of this on board. Her narrative frequently grinds to a halt while she tells us about important, recent archaeological discoveries, complete with photos and descriptions. The problem for the reader is that Beard doesn’t give a good clear detailed account of what the traditional story actually was before setting out to question and undermine it. She’ll write that the famous story about x has been thrown into doubt by recent finds under the Forum and you, as the reader, go: ‘Hang on, hang on, what famous story about x?’

In fact she uses the word ‘famous’ very liberally and often to describe things I’ve never heard of. I appreciate that this is because they are ‘famous’ in the world of Classics and ancient history, but surely the whole point of the book is to try and bring this world to outsiders, to people who know very little about it apart from the handful of clichés and stereotypes we call ‘general knowledge’.

What follows is my notes for myself on the key events from the traditional version.

1. Aeneas 1200 BC

Ancient legends associate Rome with the arrival of Aeneas, exile from Troy, around 1200 BC (ancient Greeks and Romans dated the Trojan War to what we now call the 12th or 11th centuries BC). Aeneas settled in central Italy and founded the line which led, centuries later, to King Numitor the maternal grandfather of the twins, Romulus and Remus.

Numerous variations on the Aeneas legend exist and were extensively reworked in the historical period i.e. from the 2nd century BC onwards. The version best known to the post-Roman world derives from the Aeneid, the great epic poem by Publius Vergilius Maro (70 BC to 19 AD). The Aeneid is maybe the most influential poem in Western literature (p.76).

The first six of the poem’s twelve books describe Aeneas’s journey from Troy to Rome, the second six describe Aeneas’s settlement in Italy in the region of what would (a lot later) come to be Rome. This process of settlement involved Aeneas in fierce fighting against local tribes (the Rutulians led by their king, Turnus) until he finally won the war, gained the territory and the hand of the beautiful Lavinia, daughter of another powerful local king, Latinus.

But Aeneas was not the actual founder of Rome. He founded a town he named Lavinium after his wife. It was his son, Ascanius, who was said to have founded another town in the area, Alba Longa, whose king, Numitor, some 400 years later, was to the maternal grandfather of the twins Romulus and Remus (p.77).

2. Romulus 750s BC

Beard speculates freely about the origins and meaning of the Romulus and Remus legend about the founding of Rome. Characteristically, she doesn’t explain it very well so I had to look it up on Wikipedia to get a clear understanding. Various versions are found in ancient texts, many of which contradict each other, but the consensus story is that:

Numitor was king of Alba Longa, a town a little south of what was to become Rome. He was overthrown by his brother Amulius. Numitor had a daughter, Rhea Silvia, who was a vestal virgin. She was made pregnant by the war god Mars and gave birth to twins. Seeing as they were descendants of the rightful (overthrown) king, Numitor, Amulius ordered the twins to be abandoned on the banks of the river Tiber (as Moses, Oedipus, Paris and so many other figures of legend are abandoned as children). Here they were discovered by a she-wolf who suckled them and kept them alive in a cave (later known as the Lupercal) until they were discovered and adopted by Faustulus, a shepherd and raised (like Paris) as simple shepherds. In time the twins grew into natural leaders of men and found themselves caught up in a conflict between Numitor and Amulius. They joined the forces of Numitor and helped restore him to his rightful throne of Alba Longa, during which process they were recognised as Numitor’s grandsons. Then they set off to found a city of their own, deciding to build it on the defensible hills by the Tiber where they founded Rome. They each set about building a citadel of their own, Romulus preferring the Palatine Hill (above the Lupercal cave), Remus preferring the Aventine Hill. When Remus mockingly jumped over the early foundations of Romulus’s wall, Romulus killed him (various versions supply other reasons why the pair fell out so badly). Romulus then went on to found the city of Rome, its institutions, government, military and religious traditions and reigned for many years as its first king.

Interpret this legend how you will. The story of founding brothers who fall out, with one murdering the other, is as old as Cain and Abel (p.64). And on this telling, Romulus and Remus are repeating the fraternal falling out of their grandfather and his brother, Numitor and Amulius. In my opinion these myths may be attempts by ancient peoples to structure and rationalise the kind of civil strife early societies were prone to.

Did any of this actually happen? Almost certainly not. The earliest written record of the legend dates from the late third century BC i.e. some 500 years after the events it purports to describe. Far from being a real person who founded Rome, Romulus is almost certainly a legendary invention and his name the result of what historians and linguists call ‘back formation’ i.e. starting with an established place and inventing a legendary figure who you claim it’s named after. Almost certainly ‘Roma’ came first and Romulus afterwards (p.71).

The suckling by the she-wolf is precisely the kind of odd, distinctive and uncanny detail of ancient myth which defies rationalisation. A quick amateur interpretation for a self-consciously warrior race like the Romans would be that the twins imbibed wolfish aggression and ferocity from their animal wetnurse. Same with their parentage, a vestal virgin (holiness and piety) impregnated by the God of War (speaks for itself).

Incidentally, what Beard refers to as the ‘famous’ statue of Romulus and Remus suckling from the she-wolf is a fake, in the sense that the figures of the suckling boys were made in the fifteenth century, a thousand years after the sculpture of the wolf.

Statue of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, currently in the Capitoline Museum. The statue is thought to be Etruscan, maybe from the fifth century BC while the twins are from the 15th century AD.

By the 1st century Roman historians had calculated a year for the founding of their city (in the third year of the sixth cycle of Olympic Games, p.71) and dated events ab urbe condita (AUC) or ‘since the city was founded’. Six hundred years later, in 525 AD when the monk Dionysius Exiguus first devised the system of dating events around the birth of Christ, into either ‘before Christ’ (BC) or ‘in the year of our Lord’ (anno domini or AD), he calculated the AUC date to be 753 BC, a Christian-era date which became enshrined in later tradition.

By contrast, during the republican period itself, historic events were dated by referring to the name of the consuls in power during a particular year. In the imperial period, government officials date events as in year 1, 2, 3 etc of each individual emperor. You can see why both these methods would eventually become very cumbersome, complicated and confusing. It’s surprising it took so long for the Christian authorities, in the shape of Dionysus, to come up with what, to us, appears the obvious, improved system.

3. The monarchy 750s to 509 BC

Seven improbably long-lived kings are said to have filled the period from 753 (the traditional date for the founding of the city) to 509 (the traditional date for the overthrow of the monarchy) (p.93, 96). Maybe seven kings to match the seven hills the city is supposedly founded on (?). Archaeologists and historians think the last 3 in the list were real people, but there’s debate over whether the first 4 were real or figures of legend:

  1. Romulus
  2. Numa Pompilius
  3. Tullus Hostilius
  4. Ancus Marcius
  5. Tarquinius Priscus
  6. Servius Tullius
  7. Tarquinius Superbus

4. End of the monarchy / founding of the republic 509 BC

The outrageous behaviour of the last king, Tarquin the Arrogant, prompted the population of Rome to rise up, overthrow him, and establish a republic. The spark for the revolution was, from an early point, associated with the legend of the rape of Lucretia.

Lucretia was a noblewoman in ancient Rome. She was raped by the son of the last king, Sextus Tarquinius and, out of shame, committed suicide by stabbing herself (p.122-3). Lucretia’s noble family and their allies rose up against Tarquinius and drove him and his family out of Rome although he didn’t give up without a fight, sparking a war against him and his followers which lasted up to a decade (p.125). As with other early legends there are no contemporary accounts, in fact the first written accounts of the story are only given by the Roman historian Livy (born 60 BC) and Greco-Roman historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus (born 59 BC) 450 years later.

There followed a period of transition during which it was agreed that the new republic would be ruled by an elected leader called a ‘consul’, himself advised by a ‘senate’ of elders and aristocrats. This quickly evolved into the notion of two consuls, each elected to serve for one year, a system Rome was to keep for the next 1,000 years. Collatinus, the husband of the raped suicide Lucretia was one of the first consuls (p.127).

Quite soon the Senate invented another innovation, the ability to elect a single leader, a ‘dictator’, to manage the republic during time of war. This was necessary because the early accounts describe how Rome was plunged almost immediately into a long series of wars with neighbouring tribes and people in Italy, for example the Etruscans, the Samnites, the Aquians, the Veii, the Senones, Umbri, Picentes and the Marsi.

5. The Conflict of the Orders 400s to 200s BC

In its earliest days political power was held by the wealthiest families, described as ‘patricians’ (Latin patricii) and sharply distinguished from the majority of the population who were described as ‘plebeians’ or ‘plebs’. Membership of the patrician class was hereditary and could only be achieved by birth.

The fifth century i.e. the 400s BC, were marked by a series of administrative reforms which slowly and arduously gave the plebeians equal power and say with the patricians (although it wasn’t until 366 that the first plebeian consul was elected).

The conflict between the patricians and plebeians in Rome is referred to as the Conflict of the Orders although, as Beard points out, the Latin ordines translates better as ‘social ranks’ (p.146). In our post-Marxist times it’s tempting to call it the Class War but that would also be wrong because a key point that emerges from Beard’s account is that the plebs in question weren’t necessarily poor: in fact many of them were richer than the patricians, it was more a question of nouveaux riches ‘new men’, who’d acquired military glory and/or wealth but were excluded from running the city by virtue of not being born into the right families.

The conflict took place over a very long period, from soon after the foundation of the republic, around 500 BC, down to 287 BC when patrician senators finally lost their last check over the Plebeian Council.

Really major moments were marked by a secessio when the entire population of plebeians left the city causing what was, in effect, a general strike. The first of these took place in 494, prompted by the plebeians’ widespread indebtedness to rich patrician lenders, and it successfully led to the establishment of a new body, the Concilium Plebis, and a new office of state, the tribunes of the people (tribuni plebis). There were at least five secessios.

Some of the main constitutional reforms from the period include:

450 BC drafting of the Twelve Tables, an early code of law (pages 139 to 145).

445 Lex Canuleia removing the ban on marriage between patricians and plebeians (lex is Latin for law, hence English words like ‘legal’)

443 BC The offices of the Tribuni militum consulari potestate were established. A collegium of three patrician or plebeian tribunes, one each from specific Roman tribes (the Titienses, the Ramnenses, and the Luceres) would hold the power of the consuls from year to year, subject to the Senate.

367 BC one of the consulships was opened to plebeians (p.148).

342 BC law passed making it mandatory for one of the two consuls to be a plebeian.

339 BC law passed making it mandatory for one of the two censors to be a plebeian

326 BC the system of enslavement for debt was abolished, establishing the principle that the liberty of the Roman citizen was an inalienable right (p.148).

300 BC half of the priesthoods (which were also state offices) must be plebeian.

287 BC Third Secession led to the Hortensian Law stating, among other things, that all plebiscites (measures passed in the Concilium Plebis) had the force of laws for the whole Roman state, removing from the Patrician senators their final check over the Plebeian Council. By depriving the Patricians of their final weapon over the Plebeians, it ensured that the Roman state didn’t become a democracy but rested firmly under the control of the new Patricio-Plebeian aristocracy.

The conflict marked the breakdown of the old aristocracy of birth and its replacement by an aristocracy based on i) the holding of political offices and ii) wealth, particularly land-based wealth. In Beard’s words, the Conflict of the Orders:

replaced a governing class defined by birth with one defined by wealth and achievement. (p.167)

The upshot of the Conflict of the Orders was not popular revolution but the creation of a new governing class, comprising rich plebeians and patricians. (p.189)

So it didn’t remove the hierarchical, class-based nature of Roman society, nor did it significantly improve the lives or prospects of the poorer members of society.

6. Consolidating power in Italy – Rome’s wars

This was a world where violence was endemic, skirmishes with neighbours were annual events, plunder was a significant revenue stream for everyone and disputes were resolved by force. (p.162)

Military campaigning was a defining feature of Roman life…the Roman tradition [viewed] war as the structuring principle of history…The Romans directed enormous resources to warfare and, even as victors, paid a huge price in human life…somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent of the Roman adult male population would have served in the legions each year…(pages 176 to 177)

It was a world of political conflict, shifting alliances and continuous, brutal interstate violence…(p.194)

The ancient world consisted of tribes, kingdoms and empires almost continually at war with each other. Rome was to eventually emerge as the most effective fighting state in the Mediterranean region. But first it took a century of fighting their neighbours to emerge as the strongest power in central, and then all of, Italy. And then the series of Punic Wars (264 to 146) to wear down and eliminate their main rival in the central Mediterranean. Carthage. Here are some of the key moments:

Conquest of Veii 396

396 BC Roman forces led by the dictator Marcus Furius Camillus conquered the nearby town of Veii. This probably involved relatively small numbers on both sides but was mythologised by later writers as a heroic conflict up there with the Trojan wars. For Beard its significance is that Rome didn’t just beat another city, it annexed it along with all its land. Soon afterwards, the Veii and three local tribes were included in the list of tribes who were allowed to become Roman citizens. Conquest and assimilation were to be the basis for Rome’s winning formula. It is no coincidence that around the same time as this Roman soldiers first earned a salary (from the Latin for ‘salt’) i.e. they stopped being glorified private militias and became something much more organised, centrally funded and administered (p.155).

Gauls take Rome 390 BC

Brennus was a chieftain of the Senones tribe of Cisalpine Gauls (where Cisalpine means this side of the Alps i.e. in Italy, as opposed to transalpine meaning the other side of the Alps i.e. in modern France) (incidentally that explains the newish word cisgender, meaning someone whose sense of personal identity aligns with their birth gender, as opposed to transgender meaning someone whose sense of personal identity is different from their birth sex: you can see how cis and trans retain the sense they had in ancient times of this side and that side of a border, in this case a psychological one to do with gender identity.)

Back to Brennus: in about 390 BC he defeated the Romans at the Battle of the Allia and went on to take Rome, holding it for several months (pages 138 and 155).

Brennus’s sack of Rome was the only time in 800 years the city was occupied by a non-Roman army before the fall of the city to the Visigoths in 410 AD and beard spends some time describing the how the memory grew in shame and trauma over the years, was exaggerated and lamented by 1st century writers, and routinely used as a benchmark of scandal and humiliation with which to attack contemporary politicians.

Latin War 341 to 338 (p.158)

The Samnite wars (p.158)

Fought against communities in the mountainous parts of central-south Italy (p.158).

  • First Samnite War 343 to 341
  • Second Samnite War 326 to 304
  • Third Samnite War 298 to 290

By the end of the Samnite wars over half the Italian peninsula was under Roman control, either directly or through alliances (p.159).

(334 to 323 Alexander the Great conquers from Greece to India, p.158)

Pyrrhic war 280 to 275

From the incursion of Pyrrhus in 280 BC to the final crushing of Carthage in 146 Rome was continuously at war with enemies in the Italian peninsula or overseas (p.175).

The Greek king Pyrrhus invades southern Italy but, despite a series of victories, his forces become so depleted that he moved on to Sicily (278 to 275) before returning to the mainland and being conclusively defeated by the Romans. He survived the final battle and withdrew the remnant of  his forces back to Greece (p.174).

The Pyrrhic War was the first time that Rome confronted the professional mercenary armies of the Hellenistic states of the eastern Mediterranean. Their victory sent waves around the eastern Mediterranean. As a result of the war, Rome confirmed its hegemony over southern Italy.

First Punic War 264 to 241

Rome against Carthage, fought almost entirely in the contested island of Sicily (p.175).

Second Punic war 219 to 202

When Hannibal Barca marched a Carthaginian army from Spain around the south of France and then over the Alps. This is covered in detail in Richard Miles’s book, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, from which I was surprised to learn that this wasn’t a one-year campaign, but that Hannibal and his army criss-crossed Italy for fifteen years (p.175). The campaign was most famous for the epic Battle of Cannae in 216 where Hannibal destroyed a Roman army, inflicting a reputed 70,000 casualties (p.180-2).

First Macedonian war 215 to 205

The Macedon wars were triggered by fears that their king would cross the short stretch of sea to Italy to come to Hannibal’s aid. So a Roman army was sent to fight him (p.176).

Second Macedonian war 200 to 197

Syrian war 192 to 188

Under Scipio Asiaticus the Romans defeated Antiochus ‘the Great’ of Syria (who had, as it happens, given a refuge to Hannibal in exile from Carthage) (p.176).

Third Macedonian war 172 to 168

Final Roman victory in this war effectively gave Rome control over all mainland Greece (p.176 and 196). The Greek historian Polybius commented that, in the 50 years up to 168 Rome had conquered the entire known world (p.199). When Aemilius Paulinus returned from defeating king Perseus of Macedon, was given a ‘triumph’ in 167, it took three days for the procession of loot to pass through Rome, including so much silver coin that 3,000 men were needed to carry it in 750 huge vessels (p.201).

War in Iberia 155 to 133

Carthage occupied southern Spain, not least to exploit the vast silver mines there which were worked by up to 40,000 slaves (p.196). Hannibal was the son of the Carthaginian general who first conquered it, which explains why he set out from Spain, not Africa, to attack Rome. During these years Rome sent legions to finally defeat and expel the Carthaginians from southern Spain.

Third Punic war 149 to 146

Short struggle which ended with the Romans under Publius Cornelius Scipio breaking into Carthage, burning and razing it to the ground, carrying off the population that survived into slavery. For which Scipio acquired the name ‘Africanus’ i.e. African (Carthage being in north Africa, under what is the modern city of Tunis) (p.209).

War with Jugurtha 118 to 106

Described on pages 264 to 268 as an example of the way Rome’s old constitution struggled to cope with managing a Mediterranean-wide empire. The mismanagement of the war led Sallust to compose The War Against Jugurtha a devastating indictment of Rome’s failure to quell this north African ruler.

The Social War 91 to 87

From the Latin bellum sociale meaning ‘war of the allies’, when Rome went to war with its several of its autonomous allies or socii (pages 234 to 239). The allies had for some time wanted full Roman citizenship, an issue which became more and more bitterly divisive. Things came to a head when the consul Marcus Livius Drusus suggested reforms grant the Italian allies Roman citizenship, giving them a greater say in the external policy of the Roman Republic. The Roman senatorial elite rejected his ideas and he was assassinated. At which point the allies realised there was no hope of reform and communities across Italy declared independence from Rome. When the rebels took Asculum, the first city to fall to them, they slaughtered every Roman they could find. The wives of the men who refused to join them were tortured and scalped. To which Rome replied with equal brutality. And so four long years of what, in many places, was in effect a civil war. According to Beard, the Social War was:

one of the deadliest and most puzzling conflicts in Roman history (p.234)

After defeating the various allies, Rome did indeed grant citizenship to all of peninsular Italy, at a stroke trebling the number of Roman citizens to about a million. The Social War led to a complete Romanisation of Italy (p.217) and the nearest thing to a nation state that ever existed in the ancient world (p.239).

Civil wars

Which brings us to the era of Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138 to 78 BC), Roman general and statesman who won the first large-scale civil war in Roman history and became the first man of the Republic to seize power through force. He was the first Roman general to march on Rome and take it by force, in 88, doing so to outlaw his enemy Gaius Marius. He did it again on his return from campaigning in the East, installing himself as dictator in Rome and embarking on a reign of terror which involved issuing proscriptions, or prices on the heads of thousands of men including a third of the Senate (pages 217 and 243). The point is that a general occupying Rome by force and bloodily wiping out his political opponents set a terrible precedent for the decades to come.

First Mithradatic war 89 to 85

The Greek king Mithradates VI of Pontus was to prove a comically irrepressible and obstinate foe (p.242).

Second Mithradatic war 83 to 81

It was during this war that General Sulla was appointed dictator by the Senate.

Third Mithradatic war 73 to 63

Revolt of Spartacus 73 to 71

Beard refers to Spartacus’s slave revolt three or four times (pages 217, 248, 249) but is not interested in the details of battles or outcomes. She uses it mainly to demonstrate modern ideas about the social make-up of the Italian countryside, in the sense that the rebellion can’t have lasted as long as it did if it was just slaves. Quite a lot of the rural poor and maybe lower middle classes must have joined it (page 217 and again on page 249).

Pompey the Great

During the 70s Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus was manoeuvring to become the most powerful Roman general. In the scope of his ambition based on his enormous achievement in remodelling Rome’s entire possessions in the East, Beard thinks ‘Pompey has a good claim to be called the first Roman emperor’ (p.274). Complex politicking led in 60 BC to Pompey joining Marcus Licinius Crassus (the man who led the army which finally defeated Spartacus) and Julius Caesar in a military-political alliance known as the First Triumvirate (p.218 and 279). The point about it was the way it aimed to circumvent all the careful checks and balances of the old republican constitution in order to vest absolute and permanent power in the hands of just three men.

The 50s were a decade of complex jockeying for power as the two main players fought for Rome in their respective arenas, Caesar conquering Gaul, Pompey in the East. Crassus died at the disastrous Battle of Carrhae in 53 against Rome’s long-time eastern enemy, the Parthian Empire. His death began the unravelling of the uneasy partnership between Pompey and Caesar.

Julius Caesar

In 49 Caesar marched his army back into Italy and crossed the river Rubicon, committing to war with Pompey, a civil war which led to Pompey’s death in 48 but which dragged on until the last of his supporters were vanquished in 45.

At which point Caesar had emerged as by the far the most powerful politician and military figure in Rome and was looking forward to consolidating his power and implementing a widespread programme of reforms, when he was assassinated in March 44, plunging Rome into another 15 years of civil war.

P.S.

It’s worth reiterating and emphasising that Beard’s book is not a military history. She doesn’t give detailed descriptions of any battles, doesn’t detail the progress of any specific campaign or war. She only mentions wars as ammunition for discussions about the historical and social questions and issues which is what she’s far more interested in. So to repeat an example given above, she refers to the Spartacus rebellion 3 or 4 times but gives hardly any detail about the man himself, about the life or conditions of gladiators, doesn’t give any sense of the campaigns or battles involved in the three-year-long conflict. Instead it’s only briefly mentioned in the context of broader discussions of poverty, social ranks, relationships with Rome’s Italian allies and so on. If you’re looking for good accounts of ancient Roman wars, battles, generals and so on, this is emphatically not the book for you.

Credit

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard was published in 2015 by Profile Books. All references are to the 2016 paperback edition.

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