War and Remembrance: Aeneid 12.544-60 and Aeneas' Memory of Troy

In its barest outline, Vergil’s Aeneid is the story of how Aeneas survives the Trojan War and finds his way to Italy where, before establishing a new home as destined, he is launched into a second war. Such an outline unjustly obscures the substance of the story—how loss and labor on the one hand, pietas and furor on the other, define the personal experience of the hero—and, admittedly, disregards the poem’s discourse about Augustan imperium and pax. Nevertheless the outline highlights a theme whose significance is articulated with the poem’s first word (arma), and it calls attention to the structuring of the poem into two halves, each having a war as a focal point. The Sibyl’s prophecy to Aeneas, which recalls the past war in Troy by identifying it with the future war in Latium (6.86–94), initiates a thematic and structural relationship between the two conflicts: ¹ the narrative of the war in Latium in books 7–12 recalls, often through inversion, that of the attack upon Troy’s capital in book 2.

In developing this relationship, Vergil exploits the fact that the fall of Troy, which precedes the present time frame of the poem, is represented as a story within the Aeneid, with Aeneas as narrator recalling (meminisse) the event for the Carthaginians (2.12). Furthermore, Vergil links the mnemonic experience of the poem’s external audience to that of its internal narrator, creating a causative chain of narration and memory: the poet’s story of the war in Latium constructs the reader’s memory of the battles in Troy, whose earlier narration by the poem’s hero is constructed through his memory of the event. This causative chain is circumscribed by the tenet that the genesis of epic poetry resides, at divine initiative, in the poet’s memory: Musa, mihi causas memora . . . (1.8). It also constitutes one facet of Vergil’s complex narrative strategy and has its own thematic and structural counterpart in the narrative technique of prophecy circumscribing the teleology of the epic. The Aeneid both embodies the deep sense of destiny that the poet’s contemporary audience had about its empire and constructs a kind of collective memory which, for that audience, would have been especially vivid in the wake of recent wars abroad and at home. Within and without, this epic is motivated by and motivates memory and in its genesis and generative force epitomizes the idea that memory is constructed.

The thematic and structural dynamic of war and remembrance is especially forceful for the hero and especially subtle for the reader at the pivotal moment when Aeneas undertakes the attack upon the Latin capital in the last book of the poem:

hic mentem Aeneae genetrix pulcherrima misit iret ut ad muros urbique adverteret agmen ocius et subita turbaret clade Latinos. ille ut vestigans diversa per agmina Turnum huc atque huc acies circumtulit, aspicit urbem immunem tanti belli atque impune quietam. continuo pugnae accendit maioris imago.

(12.554–60)

First Venus prompts Aeneas to attack; then Aeneas sees (aspicit, 558) the capital, not as yet a locus for battle. Imago (560) ends what begins with mens (554), linking the sight of the capital, from which it proceeds, to the influence of Venus on the hero’s thinking. One critic has suggested that Vergil was inconsistent when he gave Venus a part to play in initiating the attack, since Aeneas has the idea on his own in the ensuing verses. ² That both divine and human impulse govern an action is hardly unusual in this poem and need not of its own invite scrutiny. However, an element of ambiguity in 12.560 suggests that this case of double determination warrants closer attention. If we take imago strictly in the sense of “a representation to the imagination” or “mental picture” (OLD 6), our inclination is to equate it, as delimited by pugna, with the idea generated by Venus and articulated in 12.555–56. In this, the conventional reading, the battle envisioned by Aeneas refers to the imminent attack. Or so...