THE WORMHOLES OF VIRGIL’S FASTI
When Aeneas rows up the Tiber and comes to the site of Rome, he sees the locals
sacrificing to Hercules in what will be/has become the Forum Boarium (Aen.
8.102 – 4):
Forte die sollemnem illo rex Arcas honorem
Amphitryoniadae magno diuisque ferebat
ante urbem in luco.
By chance on that day the Arcadian king was performing sacrifice to the great
son of Amphitryon and the gods, in front of the city, in a grove.Just by chance, on that day, says Virgil. Now, nothing really happens by chance in
the mapped-out and claustrophobic world of the Aeneid,and Aeneas’s arrival on
this day is no exception.
The day of sacrifice to Hercules Invictus at the Ara Maxima in the Forum
Boarium is what we call 12 August. In Virgil’s lifetime the month was not yet called
August, and it would not acquire the name until 8 b.c.e., when Virgil had been
dead for over ten years;^138 to him this day would have been pridie Idus Sextilis,the
day before the Ides of Sextilis. As many scholars have noted, in the year 29 b.c.e.
this was a very significant date for Augustus (although he was not to be called
“Augustus” for another seventeen months).^139 It was on this day that he took up
station outside the city of Rome on his return from the East, having defeated
Antonius and Cleopatra, ready to begin celebrating his triple triumph on the next
day.^140 The compressed layering of time provided by the identity of days reinforces
the feeling that this is the “same” day: Virgil insinuates that Aeneas is arriving
before the city on the very day that Octavian/Augustus will later arrive, on the
very day that Hercules is honored for his killing of the monster Cacus. There is
evidence that the coincidence is not simply one that appealed to Virgil, but was
designed by Octavian. Aiming to trump Antonius’s long-standing cultivation of
Hercules, and to associate himself with Hercules’ ideology of victory, Octavian
will have arranged for his arrival outside the city to coincide with the major feast
day of Hercules Invictus.^141
Virgil’s chronological flattening is a corollary to the typological parallels be-
tween Hercules, Aeneas, and Augustus: the prototypical actions of deliverance
that Hercules and Aeneas undertake in mythical time prefigure the actions of deliv-
The Wormholes of Virgil’s Fasti. 161