Revolutions of Time. 165
unheard-of animals in unheard-of quantity, and natives living in a state of grace.
But the horse-riding Sioux they pass by have been living that nomadic horseback
life for no more than a hundred years, having only then domesticated the horse
imported by Spaniards from the Old World; and this new lifestyle is a modern
intrusion into that landscape. Colonizers are always prone to think that the natives
they meet are inhabiting a timeless zone, but the Sioux were not inhabiting a time-
less zone. As the expedition gets farther up the Missouri they pass by abandoned
villages of the Mandan, deserted by the few survivors of the whites’ measles and
smallpox.
The vertiginous sensations conjured up by these views forwards and back-
wards, or up and down the cycle, are condensed in the adverb Virgil deploys in his
description of the “now” golden Capitoline, “once (olim)bristling with woody
thickets” (aurea nunc, olim siluestribus horrida dumis,348). As Zetzel has pointed
out, olim(“at some indefinite point in past or future time”) can point in either
direction, either to the distant past of Evander’s day or to the distant future, when
the Capitol will once again resemble its then state.^163 Further, when the survivor of
the fall of Troy finds himself on the site of the future Rome, the theme of imperial
succession needs little pressure to be activated.^164 As the tears of the Homer-quot-
ing Scipio at the fall of Carthage showed, the transition of empire to Rome
inevitably carries with it the future prospect of Rome itself suffering the fate of all
previous holders of the imperium.^165 This is no idiosyncratic Virgilian subversion,
but the fruit of a powerfully informed historical and philosophical imagination
reflecting on a long-standing debate among his predecessors.^166 In Virgil’s case,
there is a characteristic wrestling between the apprehension that mutability cannot
be arrested and the urge to impose a definitive closure, with an end to time ’s pat-
terns of change and succession in an eternally existing Roman Empire.^167 As usual,
Virgil’s reception is reductive, fixing him as the advocate only of closure. Lucan
sends Caesar to the site of Troy in a parody of Aeneas’s tour, mocking Virgil’s pre-
tensions to finality and permanence by showing that the “old” Troy is an emblem
of what the “new” Troy will one day be (9.961 – 99); yet the passage aims to punc-
ture a Virgilian illusion that is not actually there.^168 The speech of Ovid ’s
Pythagoras, in the final book of the Metamorphoses,is more open-ended, and read-
able within this suggested Virgilian frame; Pythagoras prophesies the rise of
Rome, without spelling out the lesson to be drawn from the fates of all the other
great imperial cities he has listed just before (15.424 – 52).^169
The sense of chronological displacement generated in Aeneid8 is very disturb-