Proceedings of the Virgil Society 21 (1993) 1-16

©1993

On Serial Narration and on the Julian Star

The Presidential Address 1992

ON SERIAL NARRATION

It is a great honour for me to have been elected President of the Virgil Society. My first task will be to thank those who, by their faith and their devotion, have revitalised the Society in recent years, and to congratu­late them on the obvious success of their efforts.

When I began to plan this Presidential Address I happened to be distressed by the prettifications of Homer in the verse translations of Lattimore, Fitzgerald and Fagles, and by the complaisance of Greek scholars in praising these versions and using them to teach Greek literature in translation. It seemed to me in these dark hours that the time had come to raise a voice to survey the range of translations of poetry from the crib to creative composition, each of which has its place, and to try to separate wheat from chaff. But when I came to write I soon discovered that anger is not a good basis for a fifty minute talk. Besides, those of us who translate are wiser not to theorise. We live in an age obsessed with the biography and the interview—even Radio Three is now full of fatuous chat when what we need is great music. The interest­ing thing about artisans and artists is their artefacts and their art. Translators, like plumbers, should not talk about their work, but do it.

Having abandoned the idea of offering the Virgil Society a survey of the translation continuum, I then decided to take some points from reviews of my own version of the Aeneid, published in March 1991, and see what could be learned from them. Many useful corrections have been offered, but few of them provide suitable material for a lecture. Virgin' for Virgil' is an error I do not wish to discuss in public. But some points of interest have been raised.

In one of his brilliant short reviews in Greece and Rome (38 [1991]

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224-6), Don Fowler discusses 1.469-73, where Aeneas is inspecting the frieze of the temple of Juno in Carthage:

nee procul hinc Rhesi niveis tentoria veils agnoscit lacrimans, primo quae prodita somno Tydides multa vastabat caede cruentus, ardentisque avertit equos in castra prius quam pabula gustassent Troiae Xanthumque bibissent...

He wept too when he recognised the white canvas of the tents of Rhesus nearby. It was the first sleep of the night. The tents had been betrayed, and were being torn down by Diomede, red with all the blood of the men he had slaughtered. He it was who stole the fiery horses and took them back to the Greek camp before they could crop the grass of Troy or drink the water of the Xanthus.

West (1991)

Still in tears he recognised in another scene the snow-white tents of Rhesus' encampment, betrayed to Diomede during the early hours of sleep and wrecked by him; and Diomede himself, bloody from the great massacre, was shown driving the fiery horses away to the Greek camp before they could taste the grass of Troyland and drink the water of Xanthus.

W.F. Jackson Knight (1956)

Fowler adduces two objections to West's version of this passage. The second is on line 471 'red with all the blood of the men he had slaugh­tered'. Fowler finds this "infuriating: surely we could have been allowed to work out the colour contrast for ourselves." This is wholesome criti­cism. Why did West not produce a literal translation like Jackson Knight's "and Diomede himself, bloody from the great massacre"? The answer, as far as I can remember, takes us into ground where discussion is not useful. There is an area of irreducible subjectivity in the assessment of translations. Each of us has our own sense of language, formed in the forests of our experience, and my sense of English is formed in Scottish forests. I could not write 'bloody from the great massacre' any more than I could write 'the soldier of hard Ulixes' which is what Fowler would

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accept for duri miles Ulixi (2.7). The soldier of hard Ulixes' and 'bloody from the great massacre' in our passage sound to my ear like translatese. But even if I were right to avoid 'bloody' and 'bloodstained' at 1.471 I could still be attacked for importing the word 'red'. My defence would be that this is an ekphrasis, a description of an imaginary work of art, and it is full of visual details, the Greeks pursued by the Trojans in 467, in 468 the Trojans pursued by Achilles high in his chariot with his crested helmet, Troilus in 474-8 dragged along on his back behind his chariot, his neck and hair trailing on the ground, the point of his spear inscribing the dust. So when at 471 Diomede is cruentus we see his blood-soaked body against the white canvas of the tents of Rhesus and remember that the white-red colour contrast is very common in Virgil. Fowler sees this naturally, but in my dullness I had not noticed it till I was at work on this passage. I was so thrilled with this that, in order to help others to see it, for cruentus I wrote 'red with blood'. As a result of the criticism I now see that this is wrong. I should have written something like 'soaked in blood' but at least I was not prettifying the original, rather striving officiously to bring out its character.

The worst crime is yet to come. At 472 Fowler objects to 'He it was who'. In this he is entirely justified and West is guilty of a lie. He lied because he saw a problem and settled for a wrong solution. What was Diomede doing on this frieze? Was he wrecking the tents of Rhesus or was he driving off the horses? Fowler puts it sharply, "We have vastabat and avertit and no way of reconciling the two moments in a single picture." West's false solution is to take vastabat as the depiction and avertit as a pendant explanation. 'He was tearing down the tents... This was the Diomede who went on to drive off the horses.' This is a spurious rationalisation. The effect, as Fowler says, is bathetic. And it is not in the Latin. There is no justification for emphasis upon Diomede in 472. He is not even named—ardentisque avertit equos. Jackson Knight clearly toiled over the same problem. He takes the depiction to be the driving off of the horses, happening after the tents have been wrecked. This is totally false to vastabat. The imperfect tense indicates what was going on, not what had already happened.

Fowler's solution is equally unsatisfactory. He explains the difficulty of reconciling the two moments in a single picture as the mingling of interpretation and description. What this means is not clear from the notice in Greece and Rome but in the Journal of Roman Studies 81(1981)

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he explains it by quoting from Eleanor Leach on 'The Rhetoric of Space' (1981), "the order of presentation creates confusion between the visual image and Aeneas' thoughts... This is clearest in the Troilus panel." So one of the two actions is description and the other is Aeneas' thoughts. Which, then, I ask, is which? Is Diomede tent-wrecking or horse-stealing? Fowler gives no answer but presumably he means that the imperfect vastabat indicates what is depicted and auertit hints that Aeneas is going on to think of what happened next. But there is no hint of any such focalisation in the text.

The solution is simple. In these lines we have what art historians call a technique of serial narration, whereby different moments in a narra­tive are depicted within the same frame, a strip cartoon without dividing lines. We know it from the narrative embroidered on the coverlet in Catullus 64, from the shield of Aeneas, on which at 8.696 Cleopatra is summoning her forces at Actium and a dozen lines later is seeing to the sails for her retreat. So here at 467 the Greeks are in flight and at 468 the Trojans. We see two stages in Diomede's raid on the camp of Rhesus and two stages in the duel between Achilles and Troilus. My favourite example is the assumption of Ganymede on the cloak presented to Cloanthus as winner of the boat race. On it, at 5.253, Ganymede is pursuing the deer— you can see his chest heaving and at 255 he is carried up to Olympus by the eagle of Jupiter—you can see and hear his dogs barking in auras:

intextusque puer frondosa regius Ida velocis iaculo cervos cursuque fatigat acer, anhelanti similis, quern praepes ab Ida sublimem pedibus rapuit lovis armiger uncis; longaevi palmas nequiquam ad sidera tendunt custodes, saevitque canum latratus in auras.

...and woven into it was the royal prince running with his javelin, and wearying the swift stags on the leafy slopes of Mount Ida. There he was, eager and breathless, so it seemed, and down from Ida plunged the bird that carries the thunder­bolt of Jupiter and carried him off in its hooked talons high into the heavens while the old men who were there as his guards stretched their hands in vain towards the stars and the dogs barked furiously up into the air.

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I wrote in the introduction to my translation that it admits defeat in every line and today's discussion has demonstrated that. Translation of poetry is impossible. Translators are a necessary evil. We have talked enough about them for one day and I should like to devote the rest of this talk to interpreting the Aeneid.

ON THE JULIAN STAR

In the weeks after the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March 44 BC, Rome was a divided and dangerous city. The games in honour of Caesar's victory goddess, ludi Victoriae Caesaris, were due in July but the Collegium he had set up and financed to conduct them, declined to act. In the middle of May Caesar's grand-nephew, the nineteen-year-old Octavian, came to Rome. As part of his bid to win over Caesar's veterans he decided to put on the games at his own expense, combining them with ludi Veneris Genetricis, games in honour of Venus the mother, the goddess who was foundress of the Julian family and therefore the ancestress of Julius Caesar and Octavian.

On each of the seven nights of these games "a comet was observed... The people believed that it meant that the soul of Caesar had been received among the immortal gods, and on this account this emblem has been added to the representation of his head which we have just dedi­cated in the Forum" (Pliny, Nat. Hist. 2.94). No wonder Octavian took the view that the comet was extremely favourable to himself, admodum faustus divo Augusto iudicatus ab ipso... and felt sibi ilium natum seque in eo nasci ("that it, the comet, had been born for himself, Octavian, and that he, Octavian, was being born in it" according to Wagenvoort in Studies in Roman Literature [Leiden 1956]).

The Julian Star was an important feature of Augustan iconography and my contention is that there are several sightings of it in the poetry of Virgil and Horace which are ignored or denied by the commentators.

1. Virgil Eclogue 9.46-50

Daphni, quid antiquos signorum aspicis ortus? ecce Dionaei processit Caesaris astrum,

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astrum quo segetes gauderent frugibus et quo duceret apricis in collibus uva colorem. insere, Daphni, piros: carpent tua poma nepotes. 50

Why look up at the risings of old stars, Daphnis? See, there has appeared the star of Caesar, offspring of Dione, the star by which the fields delight in crops, by which the grape takes on its colour in the sunny hills. Graft pears, Daphnis. Your descendants will pick your fruit.

Dione is the mother of Venus and Venus is the mother of the Julians. When we read that the Julian Star will enable the descendants of Daphnis to gather fruit from the trees he grafts this is an uncanny anticipation of the Pax Augusta which was to bring peace and prosperity to Italy after a century of bloody strife.

2. Horace Odes 1.12.45-8

crescit occulto velut arbor aevo 45 fama Marcelli; micat inter omnis lulium sidus velut inter ignis

luna minores.

The fame of Marceilus grows like a tree in imperceptible time. The Julian Star glitters among them all like the moon among the lesser fires.

Which Marceilus? We have just heard a roll-call of Republican heroes, including Numa, Brutus (indirectly at line 26 by reference to Tarquin and the fasces), Cato, Regulus, Paulus, Fabricius and Camillus. This list must lead us, as the same eight names inter alia do at Aeneid 6.778-855, to M. Claudius Marceilus, winner of the spolia opima and conqueror of the Insubrian Gauls, consul five times between 222 and 208 BC. But in this passage of the Aeneid the individual members of the families merge (see D. Feeney POPS 32 [1986] 5 ). So here, for the contemporary reader, the great Marceilus, conqueror of the Insubrian Gauls, must have merged into his brilliant namesake, the contemporary Marceilus, son of Augustus'

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sister Octavia, husband of Augustus' daughter Julia, adopted by Augus­tus in 25 BC. This beautifully fits the simile of the growing tree. The Marcelli had been eminent in the third and second centuries BC, then entered upon a period of obscurity, occulto aevo, to emerge for three consulships in the late Kepublic and then attain their crowning glory of union with the gens Iulia. Here therefore, Iulium sidus alludes to the whole Julian house and effects the transition to the praise of Augustus in the stanzas which follow.

This interpretation is often rejected, perhaps largely because of the influence of Syme. Nisbet and Hubbard put the case succinctly: "A direct reference to Julius Caesar is unlikely; in the twenties Julius Caesar was long dead, and played down in official utterances (Syme, The Roman Revolution 317 ff.) Even a reference to the Julian house as a whole is probably undesirable; it was Augustus himself who was pre-eminent, and everybody knew it." This interpretation cannot stand. The Julian Star cannot be mentioned without alluding to Julius and in this context its brilliance is closely associated with the fama Marcelli. The difficulty about Julius Caesar has been removed by the article on 'Julius Caesar in Augustan Rome' by P. White in Phoenix 42 (1988) 334-56.

3. Virgil Aeneid 8.678-81

hinc Augustus agens Italos in proelia Caesar cum patribus populoque, penatibus et magnis dis, stans celsa inpuppi, geminas cui tempora flammas 680 laeta vomunt patriumque aperitur vertice sidus.

On one side was Augustus Caesar leading the Italians into battle alongside the senators and the people of Rome, its Penates and its great gods. There he stood on the high poop of his ship with a double flame streaming from his radiant brow and his father's star rising over his head.

4. Virgil Aeneid 2.682-704

ecce levis summo de vertice visus Iuli

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fundere lumen apex, tactuque innoxia mollis lambere flamma comas et circum tempora pasci. nos pavidi trepidare metu crinemque flagrantem 685 excutere et sanctos restinguere fontibus ignis. At pater Anchises oculos ad sidera laetus extulit et caelo palmas cum voce tetendit: 'luppiter omnipotens, precibus si flecteris ullis, aspice nos, hoc tantum, et sipietate meremur, 690 da deinde auxilium, pater, atque haec omina firma.'

Vix ea fatus erat senior, subitoque fragore intonuit laevum, et de caelo lapsaper umbras Stella facem ducens multa cum luce cucurrit. illam summa super labentem culmina tecti 695 cernimus Idaea claram se condere silva signantem vias; turn longo limite sulcus dot lucem et late circum loca sulphure fumant. hie vero victus genitor se tollit ad auras adfaturque deos et sanctum sidus adorat. 700 'iam iam nulla mora est; sequor et qua ducitis adsum, di patrii; servate domum, servate nepotem. vestrum hoc augurium, vestroque in numine Troia est. cedo equidem nee, nate, tibi comes ire recuso.'

...when suddenly there came a great miracle. At the very moment when we were both holding lulus and he was there between our sorrowing faces, a light began to stream from the tip of the pointed cap he was wearing and the flame seemed to lick his soft hair and feed around his forehead but its touch did him no harm. We took fright and rushed to beat out the flames in his hair and quench the sacred fire with water, but Father Anchises, looking joyfully up to the stars of heaven and raising his hands palms upwards, lifted his voice in prayer: 'O Almighty Jupiter, if ever you yield to prayer, look down upon us, that is all we ask, and if we deserve anything for our devotion, give us help at last, Jupiter, and confirm this omen.'

Scarcely had he spoken when a sudden peal of thunder rang out on the left and a star fell from the sky, trailing a great torch of light in its course through the darkness. We watched

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it glide over the topmost pinnacles of the house and bury itself, still bright, in the woods of Mount Ida, leaving its path marked out behind it, a broad furrow of light and the whole place smoked all around with sulphur. Now at last my father was truly convinced. He rose up and addressed the gods, praying to the sacred star: 'There is now no more delay. Now I follow, O gods of my fathers. Wherever you lead, there am I. Preserve this house. Preserve my grandson. This is your sign. Troy is in your mighty hands. Anchises yields. I am willing to go with you, my son, and be your companion.'

After the auspicium oblativom the auspicium impetrativom. After the flames in lulus' hair at 682-6, the thunder and the meteor at 692-8. This meteor, the sanctum sidus to which Anchises prays at 700 is the lulium sidus we have just seen in Horace Odes 1.12 and the patrium sidus of 8.681. Line 702 is heavy with Julian details. The dipatrii are not simply the ancestral gods of Troy, they are also the gods of Anchises' ancestors, the gods of the Julians who are still protecting Augustus. The domus is not his doomed palace, but the gens Iulia, his family, (cf. Sergestusque domus tenet a quo Sergia nomen 5.121). This is why he prays not for his dutiful son Aeneas but for his grandson who carries the vital name lulus. The Troy which now in 703 enters into the protection of the gods is Troia renascens, the Troy which will be founded and refounded in Italy by Julians, by Aeneas, lulus, Romulus and Augustus.

When so many Julian elements come together at such a decisive moment in the family history, the only problem is that the Julian Star is not mentioned in the standard English commentaries. To this mystery three possible solutions present themselves: one is a reluctance to find a political message in a great poem; two is the influence of Syme's view of the Augustan attitude to Julius Caesar, as discussed above in Section 4; the third reason is that the lulium sidus in 44 BC was a comet, whereas what Anchises saw was a meteor. Against this view I shall argue in the next section.

5. Virgil Aeneid 5.519-34

amissa solus palma superabat Acestes

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qui tamen aerias telum contendit in auras 520 ostentans artemque pater arcumque sonantem. hie oculis subitum obicitur magnoque futurum augurio monstrum; docuit post exitus ingens seraque terrifici cecinerunt omina votes. namque volans liquidis in nubibus arsit harundo 525 signavitque viam flammis tenuisque recessit consumpta in ventos, caelo ceu saepe refixa transcurrunt crinemque volantia sidera ducunt. attonitis haesere animis superosque precati Trinacrii Teucrique viri, nee maximus omen 530 abnuit Aeneas, sed laetum amplexus Acesten muneribus cumulat magnis et talia fatur: (sume, pater, nam te voluit rex magnus Olympi talibus auspiciis exsortem ducere honores...'

Acestes alone remained and the victor's palm was lost to him, but he aimed an arrow high into the breezes of air to display his old skill and let the sound of his bow be heard. At this a sudden miracle appeared before their eyes, a mighty sign of what the future held in store. In times to come was the great fulfilment revealed and awesome prophets interpreted the omen to later ages. As it flew through the vaporous clouds, the arrow burst into flames and marked its path with fire till it was consumed and faded into thin air, like those stars that leave their appointed places and race across the sky trailing their blazing hair behind them as they fly. Sicilians and Trojans stood stock still in amazement, praying to the gods above, but mighty Aeneas welcomed the omen and embraced the exult­ant Acestes, heaping great gifts upon him and saying these words: 'Accept these, Father Acestes, for the Great King of Olympus has shown by this sign that he has willed you to receive honours beyond the lot of other men.'

Here at the games held by Aeneas in honour of his dead father Anchises, there is a sudden miracle, a mighty sign of what the future holds in store. The arrow of Acestes catches fire and is like a shooting star or comet. Now that his father is dead Aeneas is paterfamilias and

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priest. He accepts the omen (nee maximus omen abnuit Aeneas) and provides the interpretation. It means that Acestes is receiving particular honours. Just so, at the games held by Octavian in honour of his dead father Julius Caesar, there is a miracle, a comet blazing in the sky for seven nights. Octavian too accepts the omen, admodum faustus divo Augusto iudicatus ab ipso (Pliny, Nat. Hist. 2.93), and interprets it publicly as a sign of divine blessing. The arrow of Acestes is obviously a poetic precursor of the Julian Star, but the obvious has been denied, mainly because of the arguments of Richard Heinze (Virgils Epische Technik 165-9).

First, the Julian Star of 44 BC was a comet, a seven days' wonder, whereas the blazing arrow of Acestes is compared to a shooting star, a flash and it is gone. A shooting star cannot symbolise a new star in the sky, the star of Caesar. This argument falls because it takes too strict a view of the astronomy. Even in this passage, at lines 527-8, Virgil seems to conflate the two phenomena, in that caelo ceu saepe refixa transcurrunt refers to shooting stars whereas crinem...ducunt seems to allude to comets. In the passages cited in this paper there is a degree of flexibility in the use of the words for star. The cometes in Pliny is referred to as sidus crinitum. In the Eclogues it is astrum or signum. In Horace and Aeneid 6 it is sidus, In Aeneid 2 it is stella and sidus. But the crucial argument is from the actual surviving representations of the lulium sidus. In five coins minted between 40 and 36 BC a star appears in association with Julius Caesar and it is always a star. It does not appear as a comet till the coins of the moneyer M. Sanquinius in 17 BC (Weinstock, Divus Julius 378-9).

Weinstock here advances an explanation of this neglect of astronomi­cal distinctions in his discussion of the coins issued by Caesar in 48 BC showing Venus with a star in her hair. Caesar had adopted the star of his ancestress while he was still alive. "The comet then only served as a welcome confirmation of the existing symbol, made it acceptable to the populace and prompted Octavian to action." To object, therefore, that the wrong heavenly bodies are described in these passages in the Aeneid shows a misunderstanding of how images work in the age of Augustus. The visual image is not a logical proposition but a stimulus for a nexus of associations.

The second objection to seeing the Julian Star in our passage in book 5 is that "Caesar's comet is irrelevant in a context devoted to Acestes" (R.D. Williams in his commentary on book 5, following Heinze).

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This is an unimaginative argument. It should be remembered that Acestes had a Trojan mother (5.38); that he was a wild herdsman rather than a king till Aeneas founded a city with him (5.35-7); that it was founded on the orders of Jupiter himself who sent the sign of the blazing arrow (5.533, cf. 726, 747) as he had already sent the Julian Star at 2.693; that it was founded expressly to accommodate Trojans who had followed Aeneas from Troy; that Aeneas takes a leading part in founding it and in doing so makes sure that it includes Julian monuments. The star had shone to guide Anchises in book 2. It now shines in book 5 before the consecration of his tomb (5.755-61):

interea Aeneas urbem designat aratro sortiturque domos; hoc Ilium et haec loca Troiam esse iubet. gaudet regno Troianus Acestes indicitque forum et patribus dot iura vocatis. turn vicina astris Erycino in vertice sedes fundatur Veneri Idaliae, tumuloque sacerdos ac lucus late sacer additus Anchiseo.

Meanwhile Aeneas was ploughing the city bounds and allot­ting homes to his people. This was to be Ilium, and this was to be Troy. Trojan Acestes was delighting in his kingdom, choos­ing the site of the forum, summoning a senate and laying down a code of laws. Then they founded a temple to Venus of Ida, soaring to the stars on the peak of Mount Eryx, and appointed a priest to tend the tomb of Anchises, consecrating to his name a great grove all around it.

Two other factors make this an appropriate moment for a sighting of the Julian Star. First, Aeneas is leaving his own people behind, the women and the aged, the weak and those with no stomach for danger (715-6). It is vital that Virgil should make sure that it never crosses the minds of his readers that Father Aeneas is deserting his own people without repeated expressions of divine approval. The second factor is the future history of Segesta, a staunch ally of Rome in the First Punic War (Cicero, Verr. 4.72, Polybius 1.24, Diodorus Siculus 23.5) It is an appro­priate tribute to the Julians to associate them with the foundation of an ally of Rome and one of the chief glories of Roman history.

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The remaining objection to identifying the Julian Star in this passage in book 5 lies in the apparently gloomy language of 522-4. Here I follow Williams (on 523-4). "Much difficulty has been felt...over the apparent contrast between terrifici vates prophesying evil and Aeneas accepting the portent as a good omen... But...it is nowhere suggested that the omen was evil. The word terrifici refers to the natural awe which proph­ets inspire when they proclaim omens..." In other words the vates were terrifici because prophets are awesome. Another problem lies in sera.. .cecinerunt (525). This seems to be best explained as a variation upon the theme of docuit post (523). Just as Aeneas at 8.729-31 shoul­dered his prophetic shield, rejoicing, but not understanding the pro­phetic visions depicted on it, so here those who saw the portent of Acestes' arrow did not understand what it portended, and could not understand, until the great fulfilment gave enlightenment, when Segesta had its moment of glory in Roman eyes in the First Punic War, and again when the Julians rose to eminence with Julius Caesar and Augus­tus. When those times came, awesome prophets would expound this sign in a later age:

docuit post exitus ingens seraque terrifici cecinerunt omina vates.

6. Aeneid 10.267-75

at Rutulo regi ducibusque ea mira videri Ausoniis, donee versas ad litora puppis respiciunt totumque adlabi classibus aequor. ardet apex capiti tristisque a vertice flamma 270 funditur et vastos umbo vomit aureus ignis: non secus ac liquida si quando node cometae sanguinei lugubre rubent, out Sirius ardor ille sitim morbosque ferens mortalibus aegris nascitur et laevo contristat lumine caelum. 275

The Rutulian king and the leaders of Italy were amazed until they turned and saw a fleet making for the shore and a whole sea of ships coming in towards them. On the head of Aeneas

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there blazed a tongue of fire, baleful flames poured from his crest and the golden boss of his shield belched streams of fire, like the gloomy, blood-red glow of a comet on a clear night, or the dismal blaze of Sirius the Dogstar shedding its sinister light across the sky and bringing disease and thirst to suffer­ing mortals.

Since Romans as they walked around their city saw statues of Julius with a star above his head (Servius on Aeneid 8.681, Suetonius, Caes. 88), and since the same image appeared on the coins they tendered, when the Julian Aeneas comes to raise the siege of the hard-pressed Trojan camp and the flame pours from the crest of his helmet, there can be no doubt that this is an allusion to the Julian Star. Just so, as we have seen, flames poured from the forehead of Octavian at Actium and his father's star shone above his head at 8.680-1.

There are scholars who would deny this because of the gloom of the simile (lugubre...aegris...laevo contristat) Some would even use this passage to argue for some shade of an anti-Augustan interpretation of the Aeneid. Such interpretations collapse in view of the focalisation of the narrative at 267-8. Virgil is not saying that Aeneas is bringing drought and plague. This is how he seemed to his enemies, Turnus and the Rutulians:

at Rutulo regi ducibusque ea mira uideri Ausoniis...

He is as terrifying as Diomede was at Iliad 5.4-7 or Achilles at 18.205-6. There is nothing here to undermine our estimate of Aeneas. It is a good thing in war to frighten one's enemies.

7. Aeneid 6.777-80

quin et avo comitem sese Mavortius addet Romulus, Assaraci quern sanguinis Ilia mater educet. viden, ut geminae stant vertice cristae et pater ipse suo superum iam signat honore? 780

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And Romulus, son of Mars, will march at his grandfather's side. He will be of the stock of Assaracus, and his mother, who will rear him, will be Ilia. Do you see how the double crest stands on his head and the Father of the Gods himself already marks him with his own emblem?

"A cryptic allusion," writes Austin on 779, and refers to Henry who takes the line to refer to the helmet of Mars. But the only evidence for this is dubious and late (Valerius Maximus 1.8.6). Besides, this interpre­tation would lead us to positing an otherwise unattested emotional value for the helmet of Mars. The Virgil passage is more likely to explain the passage in Valerius Maximus than vice versa. Faute de mieux I note the nexus of Julian motifs (Romulus, Mavortius and Ilia, his parents, and Assaracus, the grandfather of Anchises) and compare 1.274-6 and 284 where Romulus' membership of the Julian race is again being exploited. Here in book 6, the geminae vertice cristae resemble the geminae flammae (8.680-1), belched from the forehead of Augustus at Actium:

geminas cui tempora flammas laeta vomunt patriumque aperitur vertice sidus.

In both passages, as at 2.689 and 5.533, the sign of favour is granted by the will of Jupiter.

8. Virgil Aeneid 1.286-90

nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar, imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris, Iulius, a magno demissum nomen Iulo. hunc tu olim caelo spoliis Orientis onustum accipies secura; vocabitur hie quoque votis. 290

From this noble stock there will be born a Trojan Caesar to bound his empire by Oceanus at the limits of the world and his fame by the stars. He will be called Julius, a name passed down to him from the great lulus. In time to come, have no

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fear, you will receive him in the sky, laden with the spoils of the east. He too will be called upon in prayer.

This explicit, though contested, reference to Julius Caesar may be taken minimally, as it normally is, to mean at line 287 that the gods will come to be aware of his fame. But this poem was written for people who were familiar with the Julian Star and the deification of Julius. Surely, in hearing this passage they will have thought of the star which some people believed was the soul of Caesar received among the immortal gods—eo sidere significari volgus credidit Caesaris animam inter deorum immortalium numina receptam (Pliny, Nat Hist. 2.94).

9. Aeneid 2.682-6 Given the above sightings of this Julian Star, if we look back to section 5 to the omen oblativom in book 2 and consider the name of the boy on whose head the flame appears, and the repeated association of the Julian Star with fire or flame, (Horace, Odes 1.12, 47; Aeneid 2.694; 5.525, 526; 8.680; 10.270, 271, 273), it is at least a possibility that the fire playing round the head of lulus at this critical moment in the history of the gens lulia was meant by Virgil to be seen as a precursor of the Julian Star, and was so perceived by contemporary readers. The fire, note, sanctos ignis (2.686) is holy, like the star, sanctum sidus (2.700).

CONCLUSION

If this paper is right, the lulium sidus will have appeared in the Aeneid on the head of Aeneas' son lulus and immediately afterwards in the sky in order to persuade his father Anchises to leave Troy; when Aeneas was celebrating the memory of his father and founding a city for his people at Segesta; when Aeneas returns to rescue his stricken people; above the head of Romulus; and finally above the head of Augustus at Actium. It all hangs together.

University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne DAVID WEST

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