1100 Virgil
It tells of adventures at sea, fabulous monsters, and
of the unhappy love of Dido, the queen of Carthage,
for Aeneas. The second half of The Aeneid, in con-
trast, describes a war, which, like the Trojan war of
the Iliad, is fought over a woman. When Latinus,
the king of Latium, offers his daughter and only
heir to Aeneas in marriage, he enrages Turnus, the
king of the Rutulians, inciting him to wage war on
the Trojan forces.
There is a deep ambiguity to Virgil, and a deep
melancholy. The new land that Aeneas seeks is in
Italy, the seat of the future Roman Empire. Aeneas
learns, when he voyages to the underworld in book
6, that his descendants will include Julius Caesar and
Augustus. Virgil thus seems to want to write a myth
celebrating the Roman Empire. Yet in the wake of
so much violence, sacrifice, and cruelty, the reader is
left to wonder whether the Age of Augustus is really
the promised “Golden Age.”
Anthony Adler
crueLty in The Aeneid
The theme of The Aeneid, announced in its first
lines, is Aeneas’s suffering. Virgil attributes this
suffering above all to the unforgiving rage of cruel
Juno. Juno is not just any goddess but the queen of
the gods, the second most powerful after Jove ( Jupi-
ter). Thus her cruelty, her tendency toward rage and
chaos, belongs to the very nature of things.
Juno’s cruelty is purely negative; it cannot create,
but can only destroy. When she schemes in book
7 to embroil Aeneas in a war with the peoples of
Italy, she knows that she is powerless to defeat the
will of Jupiter and change the course of history. She
can only delay the inevitable and cause destruction
to both sides. Unable to sway the heavens, she will
awaken the forces of hell.
Juno’s cruelty finds its most vivid expression in
the violent storm winds that she unleashes against
Aeneas’s fleet. But a more interesting and disturbing
form of cruelty consists in the storms that afflict the
human heart. The Trojan War, embroiling warriors
in senseless slaughter, was such a storm, and when
the Greeks finally take Troy, human cruelty is put on
full display. Thus, Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles,
butchers Polites right in front of his father, Priam,
the king of Troy, and then drags the frail king to an
altar, slaying him like a sacrificial animal in his own
son’s blood. Cruelty, the very name Neoptolemus (lit-
erally, “new soldier”) suggests, belongs most of all to
a younger generation that has lost its due reverence
for tradition and for the gods.
Immediately after witnessing Priam’s death,
Aeneas finds Helen, herself the cause of Troy’s
destruction, cowering at an altar. Consumed by
rage, he thinks of killing her. But his mother, Venus,
intervenes, turning him away from Troy and bidding
him return to his own family. Thus, he leaves behind
not only the city’s carnage but also the cruelty that
had threatened to consume him.
Yet escaping from one kind of cruelty only
exposes Aeneas to another that is more subtle but
no less severe. As he walks away from Troy with his
family, his wife, trailing a few steps behind, suddenly
vanishes. The gods, her ghost later tells Aeneas, for-
bade him to take her along. The old cruelty involved
the savage violence of those caught up in the fury of
war; it was of the present. The new cruelty belongs to
the past and the time to come; it is the cruelty of the
haunting memory of loss and the sacrifices that the
future demands. Nor can Aeneas himself avoid being
cruel to others. When Jove calls him away from Car-
thage, he abandons his lover, the queen Dido, who
succumbs to her all-consuming passion and takes
her own life. The sight of her funeral pyre haunts
him as he sails away, and when he encounters her
again as a shade in the kingdom of the dead, he tries
to calm her enduring rage and explain himself, but
she, unmoved by his words, flings herself away, still
his enemy, while he follows her with tears and pity.
Arriving in Italy, Aeneas finds himself at war
with enemies whose cruelty exceeds the cruelest of
the Greeks. The worst among them is Mezentius,
who tortures his victims by lashing them to corpses.
But a cruelty of fate far worse than human cruelty
makes Aeneas himself, the pious follower of Zeus’s
will, the cause of so much new suffering. Aeneas,
the noblest and most pious of the Trojans, comes
even to resemble Paris, the Trojan prince who, led
by Venus to steal away Helen, provoked the Trojan
War. While Aeneas receives Lavinia’s hand from her
father, Turnus considers her to be his betrothed, and
it is almost as if Aeneas has stolen her away from
him.