Putting Dido on the Map: Genre and Geography in Vergil's Underworld

Aeneas' final words to Dido appropriately refer to the impossibility of communication between them: "This is the last thing fate allows me to say to you (6.466)." But the literal-minded reader, oblivious for the moment of Aeneas' impending deification, may well think of the hero's own return to the underworld after his death. Won't that provide the opportunity for further conversation? The difficulty, as Servius explains it, is one of location; the two will dwell in different sections of the land of the dead. He interprets Aeneas' words as follows: "After death I will occupy another circle, that given to brave men, not to lovers" (quia post mortem tenebo alterum circulum, viris fortibus scilicet, non amantibus datum, Serv. ad Aen. 6.466). Servius' comment brings out one of the most essential features of the Vergilian underworld: it offers the legible geography that Aeneas has sought so long in his earthly wanderings. Where you are reveals who you are. Heroes and lovers, the good and the bad, occupy different realms, separated by clear natural boundaries and presided over by different judges.

Vergil's was by no means the first attempt to impose a spatial organization on legendary accounts of the underworld and its inhabitants, nor to use the divisions and boundaries of this geographical plan to provide a map of broader ethical and social categories. The influence particularly of Orphic and Pythagorean accounts of life after death and of Platonic eschatology on Vergil's reformulation of the Odyssean nekuia are vast issues that have received a proportionate amount of scholarly attention.² My interest here, however, lies not with the details and meanings of the particular topographical pattern the poet employs in book 6, but rather with the thematic significance acquired by the imagery of mapping itself. I begin from the assumption that the Aeneid's depiction of the underworld as a sequence of distinct geographic regions that also appear as administrative units under the jurisdiction of judges and obedient to the laws they give, can be profitably related not only to earlier philosophical and literary traditions concerning life after death, but also to a contemporary interest in the representation of space in Augustan Rome. Claude Nicolet has argued for an important transformation in the Roman conceptualization of space and power during the beginning of the principate. As never before, geography comes to provide a schema of imperium: territorial entities increasingly coincide with administrative ones so that abstract conceptions of power and authority take on defined spatial limits.³ Correspondingly, the map of the world, on which this mosaic of provinces and regiones is represented and articulated, becomes the ultimate manifestation of the breadth of Rome's imperial sway.

The connections between Vergil's poetic project and the construction of such representations of space are profound. They appear most clearly in the account of the shield of Aeneas in book 8, where the poet has adapted Homer's ecphrasis of the shield of Achilles, which, with its images of the stars and the spatial limits of the cosmos, itself formed a kind of world map, to produce a "map" whose boundaries are fixed by the extension of Rome's imperium. The river Araxes, "vexed at its bridge (8.728)," forms the last element of the ecphrasis just as, in the case of Homer's shield, the physical artifact itself is circumscribed by the river Ocean that bounds the cosmos.⁴ The temporal order (cf. ordine, 8.629) of Rome's wars simultaneously becomes a spatial progression from one river, the Tiber, beside which the first scenes narrated take place and where the twins whose nursing begins the ecphrasis were found, to another, the Araxes. The same set of spatial limits also governs the portion of Vergil's narrative within which the ecphrasis appears: book 8 begins with the epiphany of the god of the Tiber and ends with the shield's image of the Araxes.⁵

This essay will suggest that a similar thematic connection between the ordering of space within the narrative and the processes of...