- Years, Months, Days I: Eras and Anniversaries
down again. The future of Rome may not be locked in a perpetual Golden Age but
may be susceptible to the same vicissitudes undergone by the preceding empires.
Virgil opens up this possibility as Aeneas and Evander walk down what is later,
in the time of Virgil’s audience, to be the Roman Forum, proleptically described as
such by the poet, before the space has become that place: passim... armenta uide-
bant/Romanoque foro et lautis mugire Carinis(“They saw cattle everywhere, moo-
ing in the Roman Forum and the chic Carinae,” 8.360 – 61).^155 From our perspec-
tive it is easy enough to relish an abysmal irony in these words, since any modern
reader can reflect on the fact that the Roman Forum in medieval times returned to
the time of Evander and was for centuries yet again a place for cows to graze,
“Campo Vaccino.”^156 The irony does not work only for modern readers, however.
The site of Evander’s settlement is already littered with ruins, after all, in the form
of the fallen walls of the foundations of Janus and Saturn, which are pointed out to
Aeneas by his guide Evander (356 – 58): one of the many strange effects of the
book’s time compression is that we see the demigod Aeneas as a “modern” tourist,
indulging himself in the fashionable pursuit of visiting famous ruins, the “monu-
ments of men of earlier times” (uirum monimenta priorum,312).^157 When Aeneas
and Evander take a right turn out of the “Forum” at the top of the “Sacra Via” to
go up to Evander’s hut on the Palatine, they would go through one of the old gates
of the Palatine, the Porta Mugonia.^158 Virgil does not name the gate, but with
mugirein 361, he alludes to its name, “Moo-Gate,” reminding us of its obvious ety-
mology. He is also alluding to a Greek play on words that stands out in a group of
epigrams on scenes of the once great Greek cities of Argos and Mycenae, whose
day is gone, leaving them as haunts of herdsmen with their cows and goats.^159 The
gold of these cities has now gone (Anth. Pal.9.101.5; 103.1); their devastation is the
revenge of Troy (9.103.7 – 8; 104.5). In one of these poems one also sees the pun on
mooing. Mycenae is now “pasture for sheep and cattle,” and “of all my greatness I
have only my name” (103.5 – 6): Mycenae (Mukh'nai) shares the opening letters of
the Greek verb “to moo” (mukavomai), so that the imperial city really has become
“Moo-town,” with only its significant name left as a sign of its abandonment.^160
The cows wandering over the site of Rome, then, are at once a romantic image
of primal pastoral innocence and an emblem of postimperial desolation.^161 Aeneas
encounters ruins where we might expect him to find a clear ground. An eerie par-
allel is available in the journey of Lewis and Clark.^162 As they pole their way up the
Missouri River, the first white men apart from a handful of trappers ever to go that
far, it seems to them that they are entering an Eden, an unspoiled paradise with