This is to suggest, on the vexed question of V's relationship with Augustus, that A is portrayed as someone who had no alternative but to break with moral traditions symbolised by paternal authority. The rest of us have to make the best of what he has done.
Augustus was rather rich in fathers, though none of them was entirely satisfactory. His natural father died when he was young. His step-father, Marcius Philippus, joined his mother, Atia, in suggesting that the young adventurer should not adopt Caesar's name and inheritance. Rejecting this advice, he acquired Caesar the Dictator as a post-mortem adoptive father and in this role he avenged his father's death, though some say that he distanced himself from his father's dictatorial career. In the process of establishing himself, Caesar Junior ingratiated himself with the committed Republican Cicero and came to call him 'father' - in this role he eventually consented to the father-figure's death. So he managed to be both Orestes and Oedipus. Aeneas is an image of Augustus, and himself quite rich in filial relationships, but these relationships fail to fit with those of Augustus. Aeneas takes the advice of his mother as Augustus did not. He has three main father figures, Anchises, Priam and Jupiter. One he saves, one he abandons and one he can scarcely understand. Venus reveals Jupiter to Aeneas only once, identifying him as 'father', but showing him as a terrifying destroyer. (Jupiter was everyone's father, but the word has special force from daughter and grandson contemplating the beloved city in flames.) Aeneas is shown as someone forced back, in the moment of truth, on personal and independent - 'existential' - judgement. I'm suggesting that the 'imaging' is achieved by giving Aeneas complex fiiial relationships, not corresponding in form to those of Augustus but corresponding in the way that the son is compelled to make, among the demand and needs of the different father-figures, a way that is authentically his own. The narrative of Book II could have been adapted, I suppose, to have Aeneas arrive on the scene of Priam's slaughter and kill some Greeks on the spot as a gesture of revenge. But V prefers to have Aeneas' ability to make the Greeks pay for their misdeeds completely exhausted by the time that Priam dies. He does not arrange for Priam himself, as the murderous Greeks break in, to release Aeneas - for whom, according to Homer, he had never cared - from his personal and political obligations as loyal Trojan. The appropriate words of release are spoken earlier and later by the ghosts of his sons Hector and Deiphobus. In a sense V anticipates the existentialists in pointing to the way in which political and personal loyalties become tangled up in moments of crisis, with the virtue of pietas - the pursuit of one's natural and habitual loyalties - becoming ambivalent. We see Aeneas at his least obedient to supernatural (which, if Jupiter is controlling things, is also paternal) authority. He takes little immediate notice of Hector's instruction to snatch himself from the flames or of Panthus' solemn statement that the existence of Troy is already over. He does receive a portent from Jupiter approving the flight from Troy, but this, unusually for the Aeneid, is a sign confirming his decision, not dictating it. The thunderbolt wins Anchises over to Aeneas' plans but this fact reminds us that here the father is following the son. Aeneas has allowed Venus to remove his motivation to attack Helen, though Venus achieves this by explaining that 'the Father himself', not Helen, is to blame. So the Fall give Aeneas a sort of existentialist experience, being forced back on his own power of authentic decision. The relationship with Priam and the Kingdom of Troy, culminating in abandonment seems to reflect Augustus' relationship with Cicero and with the Republic. Cicero more than anyone spoke for the ideals of the Republic, which under traditional morality Augustus as a loyal Roman had a supreme duty to protect, and his death marked its end almost as surely as Priam's death marked the end of Troy. In that Aeneas is the image of Augustus, V does not seem to say that Augustus, when he entered Roman politics in a chaotic moment, was (as yet) a king by divine election but that he just had to take his own decisions in his own way - we can only be grateful that he turned out to be so effective. This picture seems consistent with that suggested in the Georgics, where the gods are earnestly requested 'at least not to stop this young man from rescuing a world overthrown'. This formula too presents the future Augustus as a son-figure, going his own way unless the gods stop him, dealing with the undead legacy of the corrupt father-figure, Laomedon. To question the inheritance from one's fathers is to question traditional morality. I still think that the reference to Augustus as 'the often promised man' against the run of the story in Book VI is an allusion to Cicero's repeated words of promise on the future Augustus' behalf in Philippic V, with their impressive and impressively ironic fulfilment. Cicero, his imagination confined within republican norms, just had not known how Promised Men behave and how far they will go. They fulfil the promise in their own way; they cannot remain entirely loyal to their fathers. V and Aug himself were aware of this. - Martin Hughes ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
