Virgil's Double Cross: Chiasmus and the Aeneid

Virgil's historical experience of Rome's civil wars shapes episodes and larger frames of chiastic reversal in the Aeneid. He plots out the twin aristeiai of Aeneas and Turnus in Book 12.500-53 as one long, intricate chiasmus to insist upon the interchangeability of the two heroes and of their two contending sides. Chiasmus similarly enters into the application of the opening simile of the epic, 1.148-153, to the action it describes, destabilizing the relationship of the Aeneid to the simile's content: the quelling by words of the violence of civil strife. Virgil's framing of the second half of the poem by the visitations of Allecto and the Dira doubly inverts their Homeric equivalents, the descents of a peacekeeping Athena at the beginning of the Iliad and the end of the Odyssey. Through chiasmus, Virgil simultaneously posits, undoes, and creates critical distance upon his epic's aspirations to aesthetic totality.