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The End of Epic: Camilla and the Revenge of Dido

2021; Boston University; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arn.2021.0019

2327-6436

Elizabeth Powers,

Classical Antiquity Studies

The End of Epic: Camilla and the Revenge of Dido ELIZABETH POWERS In the middle of Book 7 of The Aeneid is a scene that captures the harmonious balance, so Virgil intimates , that existed between nature and humans in Italy before the arrival of the invading Trojans. A large and beautiful stag, torn from its mother at birth and raised by the sons of the herdsman Tyrrhus, allows its antlers to be adorned by garlands, eats from the hand of their sister Silvia, and returns , after roaming in the woods by day, to the familiar door at night. This reverie of a timeless Italian day is broken when the stag, swimming in a stream, is startled by the hounds of a hunter, who, fired by lust for the hunt, shoots it with an arrow. Mortally wounded, the stag returns to the only home it knows, filling the shepherds’ house with its cries. The stag’s death may bring to mind the well-known Disney movie, when Bambi’s mother jumps over a log and is killed by a hunter, but we are in the world of epic, and the stakes are very high. The hunter is not just any hunter, but is Ascanius , son of Aeneas, and the killing of the stag sets in motion the all-out peninsular war between Trojans and the Italic confederates that will conclude the epic. Indeed, the deaths of the stag and, in Book 11, of the Volscian warrior Camilla herald the end of an entire order of life. Their common fate is poetically linked through the imagery of hunting: the stag is hunted, while Camilla’s vocation is that of huntress. As an infant already, a bow and arrow hung from her shoulder, and a tiger skin hung down her back from head to foot. The stag and Camilla also stand in a chiastic, or mirror, relationship with one another, a favorite device of Virgil’s. The stag, for arion 29.1 spring/summer 2021 92 the end of epic instance, was treated like a human (“accustomed to the table of its mistress”), whereas Camilla, torn as an infant from her mother, was nursed as if she were an animal, eating from the teat of a wild mare. The animal has attached itself to humanity , the human to nature. Such reversals recall other reversals, including the main reversal foreshadowed in The Aeneid: the rise of Rome out of the ruins of Troy. Civilization triumphs. In our present postcolonial moment, The Aeneid might be considered a literary prototype of the 19th-century doctrine of manifest destiny. In it, Roman rule was the preordained culmination of events set in motion in a heroic past, when Aeneas, charged by the gods with founding a new Troy in Latium, set forth from his burning homeland with a ragtag band of survivors of the Trojan war. It takes a while for Aeneas to assimilate this state of affairs, but in Book 6, during his journey to the underworld, it is brought home to him that it will be Rome’s job, by its strength, “to rule Earth’s peoples . . . to pacify, to impose the rule of law, to spare the conquered , battle down the proud” (851–53; 1151–54).* That the empire’s founding was linked to a people, even if a mythic or legendary one, a people even older than the Greeks (who had many settlements in the Mediterranean when Rome was still only a small foothold on a hill), so much the greater the achievement. Virgil, living at the height of Roman domination of the world—or at least of as much of the Earth as could be reached by Rome’s legionnaires—would seem to have approved. The Aeneid, after all, was almost an imperial commission. As the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Aesthetics puts it, it was written “to give meaning to the destiny of a people, asserting the implications of their history and recognizing the significance of contemporary events in relation to the past.” Alexander Pope, having translated the epic into heroic cou- *The English translations are from the Vintage Classics edition (1990) of The Aeneid by Robert Fitzgerald. The Latin line numbers...