Aeneid, Book 1 — The Storm; Aeneas Cast Ashore at Carthage

Reading Troy — chapter 39 of 74 · Aeneid, Book 1

Aeneid, Book 1 — The Storm; Aeneas Cast Ashore at Carthage (Seven years after the fall of Troy; the open Mediterranean off Sicily; the harbour and rising city of Carthage on the North African coast)

Virgil opens with the great announcing line — "Arms and the man I sing" in Dryden's English — and lays out the whole poem in a syllabus: a Trojan refugee driven by gods from his lost city to Italy, war-haunted, fated to found a race that would build Rome. The cause is Juno's old grievance: Troy's offences to her (Paris's judgement, the rape of Ganymede), and her foreknowledge that the people Aeneas will found will one day destroy her favourite city, Carthage. The Muse is asked to explain why a goddess could harbour such anger against a pious man.

The action begins on the open sea off Sicily. Aeneas's small fleet — seven years out from Troy, after the wanderings of Book 3 — is crossing toward the Italian coast. Juno goes to Aeolus, king of the winds, and bargains a storm out of him. Aeolus opens the cave where the winds are penned; they rush out and tear the sea. Three ships are dashed on the Syrtis rocks; three are driven into shallows and broken; one (the Lycian Orontes's) is swallowed whole. Aeneas, in despair at the storm's height, cries the cycle's most-quoted Trojan refugee line: O thrice and four times blessed are those who died at Troy under their fathers' eyes; he wishes Diomedes had killed him on the plain. Neptune raises his head from the deep, calms the winds with a word, scolds them in a famous simile that compares them to a mob a single grave man can quiet by his authority. Seven ships limp into a quiet bay on the coast of Africa.

Venus goes to Jupiter in heaven and pleads her son's case. Jupiter answers with one of the poem's most famous speeches: he reads the fate of Rome from the book of destiny. Aeneas will reach Italy; he will fight a war there; he will found Lavinium. His son Ascanius will move the kingdom to Alba Longa; thirty more kings will rule there; finally Romulus, son of a vestal-priestess and Mars, will found Rome on the Tiber. The Romans Jupiter foresees will rule the world without end ("imperium sine fine dedi" — Dryden translates with Augustan resonance). The age of Caesar Augustus, Jupiter says, will close the gates of war and bring peace.

Venus, in the guise of a Spartan huntress, meets her son on the shore as he and his loyal companion Achates scout the unknown country. She tells him where he has landed: Carthage, a new Phoenician city built by exiles from Tyre, whose queen Dido fled her brother Pygmalion (who murdered her husband Sychaeus for his gold) and founded the city by stratagem (the oxhide cut to strips, the ground enclosed). Venus reveals herself only as she leaves; Aeneas reproaches her ("why deceive your own son with shapes?"). She wraps him and Achates in a cloud of invisibility and sends them up to the city.

They reach Carthage's rising hill. The new city is a hive — Virgil's famous bee-simile renders the builders at work, masons, carpenters, judges, magistrates organising the new state. In the great temple of Juno that Dido is building, Aeneas finds the walls painted with scenes from the Trojan War — Priam, Achilles, Hector, the Greeks fighting at the ships. The painting is the cycle's most charged image of art-and-grief: a Trojan refugee finds his own dead family painted on a foreign temple's walls. He weeps — sunt lacrimae rerum, "there are tears for things" (later in the book, but the seed is here). Dido enters, golden, like Diana among nymphs (Virgil's first great simile of her). She is judging cases, distributing offices. The lost Trojans of the fleet — three ships Aeneas had thought drowned — are brought before her; she welcomes them and offers help. Aeneas reveals himself stepping out of the cloud; Dido is awed; she invites him to a banquet.

The book closes with the feast in Dido's palace. Venus, fearing Juno's continued malice, replaces Aeneas's son Ascanius with her own son Cupid in disguise. The disguised love-god sits in Dido's lap and breathes into her the fatal love that will be Book 4's catastrophe. At Dido's request, Aeneas begins to tell the story of the sack of Troy and his wanderings — Books 2 and 3 are his first-person narrative to her. The book ends on Dido already in love and Aeneas about to begin.

Analysis

Two openings in one

Aeneid 1 has two openings, and the reader needs to feel both. The first is the syllabus-opening: "Arms and the man I sing" lays out the entire poem in seven lines of Virgil's Latin (the first seven lines being one of the most often-memorised passages in Western literature). Dryden's English approximation does most of the work: a Trojan, driven by fate, persecuted by Juno, war-haunted, founding the race that will rule the world. The second opening is the lower-altitude one: the storm at sea off Sicily. The two openings work together to set the poem's altitude — the cosmic and the immediate, the world-historical and the wave-by-wave. Virgil's epic moves freely between the two registers throughout, and Book 1 trains the reader to expect both.

Dryden's heroic couplets and Virgil's hexameter

John Dryden's 1697 translation of the Aeneid is one of the great achievements of English verse. Dryden imposes the heroic couplet — iambic pentameter rhyming aa bb — on Virgil's dactylic hexameter; the imposition is total and the gains and losses are precise. Gains: a steady, formal music that matches the Augustan formality of Virgil's high style; a rhetorical close at every couplet that suits Virgil's love of sententious endings; a register elevated enough to carry the poem's solemnity without sounding bombastic. Losses: the long sentence-shapes of Virgil's hexameter, which can carry a single thought across six or eight or twelve lines, are forced into smaller units; the famous Virgilian enjambment is largely flattened; the rhyme sometimes drives small distortions of meaning. Dryden is the English Aeneid more than any other translator has been an English anything; modern readers may prefer Fitzgerald (1981, blank verse), Fagles (2006, looser blank verse), Mandelbaum (1971, blank verse), or Ruden (2008, alexandrines). But for the high formal register, Dryden remains canonical, and the Aeneid in Dryden's English has its own particular weight — Augustan answering Augustan.

The storm and its theology

The opening storm is one of the cycle's most theologically continuous events. Juno's grievance against Troy is older than the Iliad — her humiliation at Paris's judgement of beauty, her hatred of Ganymede's privileged status with Zeus, her dislike of Aeneas's mother Venus — and is also forward-looking: she knows Aeneas's people will one day destroy her Carthage (the historical Punic Wars of 264-146 BCE; Carthage finally razed by Scipio Aemilianus in 146). Virgil's Juno is therefore a goddess whose anger spans a thousand-year future the poem's audience knew well. The storm at sea continues theologically from the storm at Caphereus in Posthomerica 14 — both are the gods' answer to human violations — even though Virgil reframes it as Juno's grudge rather than Athena's wrath. Neptune's quieting of the storm in Book 1 is one of Virgil's most pointed political similes: he compares Neptune to a grave statesman quieting a riot by his presence alone, a comparison whose Augustan resonance was unmistakeable.

Jupiter's prophecy of Rome

Jupiter's speech to Venus is the Aeneid's first great political set-piece. It lays out the foundation-narrative — Lavinium, Alba Longa, the thirty kings, Romulus, eventually Augustus — in the formal manner of a prophecy read from the book of fate. Virgil's purpose is political: the speech embeds the poem in Augustus's recently consolidated regime (Virgil writing 29-19 BCE, after Actium, during Augustus's restoration). The line "imperium sine fine dedi" — "I have given them rule without end" — is the most famous formulation of Roman imperial ideology in ancient literature, and Dryden's English ("To them no bounds of empire I assign, / Nor term of years to their immortal line") catches its scale. The speech is also where the Aeneid most explicitly differs from the Homeric epics: Virgil's gods speak the future as fact, not as prophecy contested between Olympians. The plot is sealed at the top.

Dido in her city

Dido's first appearance is the cycle's most consequential character-entry since Helen's in Iliad 3. Virgil gives her one of the poem's most elaborate similes — like Diana among her nymphs by the Eurotas or on Cynthus, leading the dance, the goddess shining above the others — and her role is given: she is queen, judge, founder, an active administrator of a young city. The detail of her painting the Trojan war on her temple's walls is one of Virgil's deepest pieces of cross-cultural sympathy: Dido is the cycle's first non-Greek non-Trojan to know the war by reputation, and her interest is artistic rather than partisan. The art has reached Carthage; the dead are remembered in foreign paint. Aeneas weeping at the paintings is one of the cycle's most famous moments — sunt lacrimae rerum (Aeneid 1.462; "tears for things," "the world cries for what it has lost") is Virgil's most-quoted line after "arms and the man."

The bee simile

The bee simile of the Carthaginian builders is one of the Aeneid's most-imitated passages. The bees of a hive in spring, each at its task, the workers carrying loads in and out, the comb being shaped — Virgil's image of organised collective labour is at once realistic (he was the author of the Georgics's bee-book) and political (Carthage as the model city, busy and well-ordered). Dryden translates with characteristic Augustan formality. The simile carries a small grief: Aeneas, looking down on this city in his cloud of invisibility, sees what his own race does not yet have. Troy is ash; Rome is not yet a hut on the Palatine; Carthage is rising under his eyes. The cycle's most painful note in Book 1 is the unfairness of comparative founding-times.

Cupid and the fatal love

Venus's substitution of Cupid for Ascanius is the cycle's coldest moment of divine machination. Venus is protecting her son from Juno (she fears Juno will turn Dido against the Trojans), and her method is to bind Dido to Aeneas by erotic love before Juno can intervene. The cost will be paid in Book 4. Virgil's set-up is precise: the love that destroys Dido is not naturally born of Aeneas's appearance, but of a god's deliberate intervention. The cycle's most morally serious love-tragedy thus begins as a piece of Olympian political calculation. The reader is warned: this love is engineered.

What to watch for

• Books 2 and 3 are Aeneas's first-person account of the sack of Troy and the wanderings — a long flashback inside the larger narrative.
• Book 4 is the tragedy of Dido. The seeds planted in Book 1's last scene grow there.
• The first half of the Aeneid (Books 1-6) shadows the Odyssey (wandering, hospitality, descent to the underworld); the second half (Books 7-12) shadows the Iliad (war in Italy).
• Augustus's gates of war "closed" — Virgil's poem will leave this prophecy hanging at its end without quite closing them; the abrupt ending of Book 12 is the cycle's most discussed unresolved gesture.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The book is the cycle's most explicitly intertextual single performance. The opening line ("Arms and the man I sing") deliberately fuses the openings of the two Homeric epics: "arms" picks up the war-of-the-Iliad ("Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles"), and "the man" picks up the start of the Odyssey ("Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns"). Virgil's first words declare that his epic is the cycle's third — an Iliad-and-Odyssey in one. The storm at sea continues theologically from Posthomerica 14's Caphereus disaster: the gods are still angry, the fleet is still vulnerable, the human victims of the divine arithmetic are still paying. The Trojan walls painted on Dido's temple are a literal cycle-flashback: the Iliad's scenes (Priam, Achilles, Hector, the Greeks fighting at the ships) appear on Carthaginian masonry. Aeneas's weeping at his own past on these foreign walls is the cycle's most concentrated single image of how the Trojan war has already become world-literature inside the poem that re-tells it. Jupiter's prophecy of Rome reaches back to the Iliad 20.302-308 prophecy of Aeneas's survival and forward to the Aeneid's whole foundation-myth, completing an arc Homer began and Virgil finishes. Venus's appearance as a huntress is a direct echo of Athena's many disguised appearances to Odysseus in the Odyssey — Virgil is teaching the reader that the Aeneid's first half will shadow the Odyssey while the second will shadow the Iliad.

Forward echoes

Book 2 is the immediate sequel: Aeneas's first-person account of the sack of Troy, the cycle's most extensive Trojan-perspective narrative of the night the Posthomerica narrated from outside in Book 13. Book 3 will be the wanderings, the seven years between Troy and Carthage. Book 4 will be the tragedy of Dido that Book 1's last scene has already set in motion through Cupid's intervention. Book 5 will be the funeral games for Anchises in Sicily. Book 6 will be the descent to the underworld and the pageant of future Romans. Books 7-12 will be the Italian war. The first half of the Aeneid (1-6) is Odyssean in pattern (wandering, hospitality, descent); the second half (7-12) is Iliadic in pattern (war, single combat, the death of a young warrior, the killing of an enemy champion). Book 1 also looks forward to the Punic Wars of Roman history: Carthage rising under Aeneas's eyes is the city his descendants will, after 700 years, destroy; the structural irony is the poem's longest. Aeneas's "thrice and four times blessed" cry is one of the cycle's longest-echoed laments and is itself a forward translation of Odyssey 5.306 (Odysseus's similar cry in the storm Poseidon sends against him — "thrice and four times happy those Danaans who died at Troy"); Virgil is showing us that Aeneas's despair is the same despair as Odysseus's, sung in a Trojan instead of Greek voice. Sunt lacrimae rerum at 1.462 will be quoted by every subsequent epic poet in any European language. The bee-simile of the Carthaginian builders will be imitated by Milton (Paradise Lost I.768-775 of the demon-builders of Pandemonium) and by every English Augustan after Dryden.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Aeneas — seven years out from Troy; storm-tossed; cast ashore at Carthage; welcomed by Dido; begins his narrative
• Ascanius — Aeneas's son; switched at the feast with Cupid in disguise (off-stage in his real form)
• Dido — queen of Carthage; founder; judge; welcomes the Trojans; falls in love with Aeneas through Venus's machination
• Aphrodite — Venus; appears to her son as a Spartan huntress; pleads to Jupiter; sends Cupid to kindle Dido's love
• Zeus — Jupiter; speaks the prophecy of Rome to Venus
• Hera — Juno; petitions Aeolus to raise the storm; her old grudge is the book's driving force
• Aeolus — king of the winds; releases the storm at Juno's bargain
• Poseidon — Neptune; quiets the storm; the grave-statesman simile

Mentioned / off-stage

• Anchises — Aeneas's father; not yet revealed to have died on the wanderings; will figure in Books 3, 5, 6
• Creusa — Aeneas's first wife; lost at the sack of Troy; her phantom's farewell will figure in Book 2
• Achilles — painted on Dido's temple walls; the cycle's continuing presence
• Hector — painted on Dido's temple walls; will appear to Aeneas in vision in Book 2
• Priam — painted on Dido's temple walls; his death will be central to Aeneas's narrative
• Helen — painted on Dido's temple walls; will appear briefly in Aeneas's narrative
• Neoptolemus — painted on Dido's temple walls as Pyrrhus; will be central to Aeneas's narrative as Priam's killer

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.