Aeneid, Book 2 — The Fall of Troy: Aeneas's Account

Reading Troy — chapter 40 of 74 · Aeneid, Book 2

Aeneid, Book 2 — The Fall of Troy: Aeneas's Account (The night of the sack of Troy, retold seven years later at Dido's banquet in Carthage; the streets, palaces, temples of Troy and the slopes of Ida)

Aeneas begins the narrative all Carthage has fallen silent to hear. His opening line — "Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem" — Dryden Englishes as "Great queen, what you command me to relate / Renews the sad remembrance of our fate"; the cycle's most famous narrator's preface, and the first time in the cycle we hear the sack told from the Trojan side.

He starts with the horse. The Greeks have built a great wooden offering on the plain and sailed away to Tenedos; the Trojans, drunk with hope, drag the horse into the city. Aeneas tells the entry of the horse, the warning of Laocoön, the killing of Laocoön and his sons by the two great sea-serpents — the cycle's most famous version of this scene, the one that produced the Vatican Laocoön statue and El Greco's painting. The Trojans take the death as Laocoön's punishment for the sacrilege of throwing a spear into a votive; Aeneas tells the moment as one of communal misreading. He tells Sinon, the Greek soldier left behind, captured and brought before Priam. He gives the full text of Sinon's deception-speech — the cycle's longest and most polished piece of strategic lying, in which Sinon claims to be a refugee from Odysseus's cruelty and convinces the Trojans that the horse is a votive offering whose acceptance will bring Athena's favour. Priam is moved; the city believes.

Aeneas tells his own night. Hector appears to him in vision as he sleeps — Hector mangled as he was when dragged behind the chariot, blood on his face, his beard fouled with dust. Hector tells him: "Flee, son of the goddess, take the household-gods, find new walls across the sea." Aeneas wakes; the city is already alight. He arms; he gathers a small company; they fight through the streets in the dark. He gives a hard-to-watch passage on his own failure to save the city: he and his men disguise themselves in Greek armour and kill Greeks for an hour, but the disguise costs them — Trojans kill them as Greeks; Greeks kill them when they recognise them. The hour's confusion ends with most of his small company dead. He fights his way to the palace.

The killing of Polites in front of Priam is one of the most-quoted passages in Latin literature. Aeneas tells how Pyrrhus chased the young son through the colonnades, struck him at the altar; how Priam, ancient and trembling, took up a heavy spear his arms could barely lift and cast it; how Pyrrhus dragged the king through his own son's blood to the altar of Zeus Herkeios and killed him there. Dryden's translation rises to the passage; the heroic couplets give it the formal weight of an indictment. Aeneas is bearing witness against the killer of his king. The cycle's most-cited scene of an old man dying at an altar gets its definitive form here.

Aeneas finds Helen hiding in the temple of Vesta — a scene whose authorship has been debated since antiquity (the so-called "Helen episode" is bracketed in some manuscripts). He raises his sword to kill her; his mother Venus appears and stops him; she shows him, with a goddess's sight, the gods themselves at work in the destruction — Neptune shaking the walls, Juno at the Scaean gate, Minerva on the citadel — and tells him that the city is fated. He must go.

He goes to his father's house. Anchises refuses to leave the burning city ("Let me die in my own home"); only when an omen comes — a tongue of flame plays around Ascanius's head without burning him, and a star falls toward Ida — does Anchises consent. Aeneas hoists his father onto his shoulder (Anchises is too old to walk; the household-gods, the Penates, are in a clay box on the old man's lap); he takes Ascanius by the hand; his wife Creusa follows behind. They leave the city by a back gate. Creusa is lost in the dark. Aeneas, when he discovers her absence, races back into the burning streets to find her; her phantom comes to him at last and speaks the cycle's most famous wife's farewell: Creusa was not meant to go to Italy; her fate was to die here; Aeneas will found a kingdom in the West and marry another woman; weep for her, but go. The phantom dissolves. Aeneas returns to the back gate.

He climbs Mount Ida with a small surviving company — his father on his shoulder, his son by the hand, the Penates, and the men and women who have come out with him through the smoke. They wait through the dawn. At sunset he goes down to a hidden harbour on the coast; ships are built or commandeered through the next weeks; by the time the wandering of Book 3 begins, Aeneas has perhaps two thousand survivors and a small fleet. Aeneas closes the night's narrative on the deck of his first ship as it leaves the Troad: the great smoke of the city is still rising on the horizon. The cycle's most famous foundation is being made out of the cycle's most famous ash.

Analysis

The cycle's only Trojan-perspective epic narrative

Aeneid 2 is the unique surviving long narrative of the sack of Troy from the Trojan side. Posthomerica 13 told the sack from outside, in the third person, with the Greek captains as its narrative pivots. Aeneid 2 tells it from inside, in the first person, with a survivor as its single narrator. The choice is structurally extraordinary. Virgil gives over an entire book of his twelve to a flashback in his hero's voice — almost a fifth of the poem — and the choice is the cycle's most pointed redistribution of narrative weight. Aeneas's first-person account is the Aeneid's main answer to the Iliad's third-person omniscience; the cycle's voice has changed.

The Laocoön scene canonised

Virgil's handling of the Laocoön episode is the canonical Western version. Quintus had it in Posthomerica 12; Virgil gives it the high formal treatment that becomes the Vatican statue (mid-1st century BCE, discovered in Rome 1506), El Greco's painting (1610), and every subsequent visual handling. The two serpents rising from the sea, the priest and his sons struggling, the death-cry that produces no warning the city will heed — Virgil's version is denser, more visually composed, more morally weighted than Quintus's. The line "I fear the Greeks even bringing gifts" — timeo Danaos et dona ferentis — appears in this book at line 49 and becomes one of the most-quoted Latin tags ever written. Dryden's English does most of the work the Latin does.

Sinon's deception-speech

The full text of Sinon's lying speech is one of the Aeneid's most virtuosic rhetorical performances. Sinon is the cycle's purest example of rhetoric used for harm; his speech is constructed of seven major moves, each tuned to a different Trojan anxiety. He claims to be a victim of Odysseus's cruelty (Odysseus is the Trojans' favourite villain — the speech is calibrated to that). He claims the Greeks built the horse as a substitute votive for the Palladium they stole. He claims the gods told the Greeks to leave Troy. He claims the horse was made too big to fit through the gates so the Trojans could not bring it inside (a reverse-psychology move that practically guarantees they will). Virgil's Sinon is a great character study of the persuader; he is the cycle's anti-Cassandra, the man whose words are believed because they are false, while the woman whose words are true is shut up. Dryden's English handles the speech with formal Augustan precision.

Priam at the altar

The killing of Priam is the Aeneid's most-quoted single scene and the cycle's definitive image of impious slaughter at a sacred site. Virgil's Pyrrhus-Neoptolemus is colder than Quintus's: he kills Polites in his father's sight precisely to torment the father, drags Priam through Polites's blood, makes the killing at the altar of Zeus Herkeios into a moral statement — the household-god is mocked, the supplication is refused, the king is slaughtered at his own hearth. The line "haec finis Priami fatorum" — "this was the end of Priam's fate, this his appointed close, with burning Troy before his eyes, and his great Asia fallen in the dust" — is one of Virgil's most-elegiac formulations. Dryden translates with characteristic Augustan weight. The contrast with Iliad 24's earlier Priam-and-killer scene — the old king in Achilles's tent, treated with reverence — is the cycle's deepest moral arc. The same king receives mercy from the father and butchery from the son.

The Helen episode

The so-called Helen episode (Aeneid 2.567-588) — Aeneas finding Helen hiding in the temple of Vesta, raising his sword to kill her, Venus stopping him — is one of the Aeneid's most disputed passages. Servius and other ancient commentators noted that some manuscripts omit it; Virgil's executors (Varius and Tucca) may have removed it as unfinished; modern editions usually include it bracketed. Whether or not the passage is Virgil's own final hand, it does narrative and theological work — it lets Venus show Aeneas the gods at the sack, which is the moment that resolves Aeneas's reluctance to leave. The motif of Aeneas at the temple raising the sword over Helen is older than this passage (probably from the lost Iliupersis tradition); Virgil's particular handling, with the gods' revealed presence, is its definitive shape regardless of authenticity.

Anchises, the Penates, the omens

The scene at Anchises's house is one of Virgil's most-imitated piety-tableaux. Anchises refuses to leave; the tongue of flame plays around Ascanius's head; a star falls in the direction of Ida. The omens convince the old man; he consents. The image of Aeneas hoisting his father onto his shoulder, the Penates (small clay images of the household-gods) in the old man's hands, Ascanius small at the father's side — became the central iconography of Roman pietas, painted on coins of Augustus, sculpted at every level of Roman public art. Bernini's Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius (1618-19) is the great post-Renaissance treatment. The cycle's most famous image of filial duty was constructed by Virgil to be just that.

Creusa's farewell

Creusa's phantom is one of the cycle's most-quoted farewell-scenes. The Trojan wife, dying somewhere off-stage in the burning city, returns as a shade to release Aeneas from grief and to give him the prophecy of his Italian future — he will reach the Tiber, he will marry another (a royal woman, in Italy), he will found a kingdom. The cycle's most consequential farewell is given in tender domestic terms ("do not grieve overlong; what you and I were is not what you must become"); Dryden's English translates with restraint. Creusa's release of Aeneas from her — her assurance that her death was her fate, not his abandonment — is one of Virgil's most morally serious uses of the supernatural. The phantom does the work the living wife cannot: she absolves the survivor.

Dryden at his best

Dryden's English in Book 2 is the translation at its strongest. The set-pieces — Sinon's speech, the killing of Priam, the farewell of Creusa — all benefit from the formal Augustan English the heroic couplet provides. The line-by-line correspondences are tighter here than elsewhere; Dryden seems to feel Virgil's gravity in the sack-night material and to give it his fullest range. Modern translations (Mandelbaum, Fitzgerald, Fagles) move faster and feel more like ordinary speech; Dryden's English feels like ceremony, which is what the material requires. For Book 2 in English, Dryden remains the canonical version.

What to watch for

• Book 3 will be the seven years of wandering, narrated by Aeneas in continuing first person to Dido.
• Book 4 will close the Carthage episode with Dido's suicide; everything in Book 2's storytelling is preparing the love that destroys her.
• The Penates Aeneas carries out here are the same Penates installed at Lavinium and eventually moved to Rome; their continuity is the Aeneid's main theological argument for Roman legitimacy.
• Anchises will not survive Book 3; he dies at Drepanum in Sicily before the storm of Book 1; the funeral games of Book 5 will be for him.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Aeneid 2 is the cycle's densest single book of intertextual conversation. The Laocoön episode answers Posthomerica 12's same scene, with Virgil's denser visual composition (the two serpents winding around the priest and his sons, the sea-foam, the failed warning) becoming the canonical Western version. The Sinon deception-speech answers Posthomerica 12's brief mention of Sinon: Virgil expands what Quintus glanced at, giving the cycle its definitive treatment of strategic lying. The killing of Priam at the altar is the direct counterpart of Posthomerica 13's same scene; the two versions agree on the major beats (Polites speared in front of his father, Priam casting his weak spear, the king dragged to the altar and killed there) but differ in moral colouring — Virgil's Pyrrhus is more deliberately cruel, more aware of his own desecration, than Quintus's. The Iliad 24 scene where Achilles received Priam in the tent and accepted his ransom is the deepest backward echo: the same king receives mercy from the father and butchery from the son. Hector's appearance in vision to Aeneas, mangled as he was when dragged behind the chariot, reaches back to Iliad 22-24 directly; Hector's blood-fouled beard is the Iliad's image carried forward to the Aeneid's narrative present. The Helen episode (whoever wrote it) echoes the lost Iliupersis tradition of Menelaus raising his sword over Helen — Aeneas in Vesta's temple is structurally the same gesture, displaced from Menelaus to a different Trojan and resolved by Venus instead of by erotic memory. The Penates Aeneas carries out reach all the way back to the Iliad's silent presence of household-religion; Virgil makes the household-gods the cycle's most consequential portable objects.

Forward echoes

Book 3 is the immediate sequel: the wanderings, narrated by Aeneas in continuing first person to Dido. Book 4 will close the Carthage episode with Dido's suicide; the love Cupid planted in Book 1 grows through this storytelling and burns in the next book. Aeneas's surviving company will sail through the Mediterranean, encounter the harpies, visit the widowed Andromache and her second husband Helenus at Buthrotum, lose Anchises at Drepanum in Sicily, and be caught by Juno's storm into Carthage. Book 5 will be the funeral games for the Anchises whose carrying-out Book 2 has just narrated. Book 6 will be the descent to the underworld, where Aeneas will meet his father again, meet Dido again (still grieving, still silent), meet Deiphobus (the mutilated husband Helen betrayed at the sack), and see the pageant of future Romans descended from him. Books 7-12 will be the Italian war, where the second half of the Aeneid will shadow the Iliad as the first half has shadowed the Odyssey. The Penates Aeneas carries out of Troy here will be installed at Lavinium, then moved to Alba Longa, then eventually to Rome; their continuity is the Aeneid's main theological argument for Rome's legitimacy as Troy's true heir. Bernini's Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius (1618-19) will give the carrying-out its most-reproduced sculptural form; the image is on Augustan coins, on the Ara Pacis, in countless reliefs and frescoes of Roman public art. The line timeo Danaos et dona ferentis (2.49) will become one of the most-quoted Latin tags in any later European language. The killing of Priam at the altar will produce the Western iconography of impious slaughter at a sacred site — Tiepolo, Pietro da Cortona, every neoclassical Salon painter.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Aeneas — narrator of the sack; fights through the streets; carries Anchises out; loses Creusa; reaches Ida with the survivors
• Anchises — refuses to leave the burning city; consents only after the omens; carried out on his son's shoulder
• Ascanius — small boy; the flame plays around his head as the divine sign; led out of Troy by his father's hand
• Creusa — Aeneas's wife; lost in the dark; her phantom speaks the cycle's most famous wife's farewell
• Priam — killed at the altar by Pyrrhus; the cycle's definitive sacrilege at a sacred site
• Hecuba — at the altar with her daughters as Priam dies; the cycle's queen taken into captivity
• Neoptolemus — Pyrrhus in Virgil; kills Polites in his father's sight; kills Priam at the altar
• Hector — appears in vision to Aeneas, mangled as he was dragged; commands Aeneas to flee
• Helen — hiding in the temple of Vesta; Aeneas almost kills her; Venus stops him (in the disputed Helen episode)
• Aphrodite — Venus; appears to her son; reveals the gods at the sack; commands him to leave

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — long dead; his merciful treatment of Priam in Iliad 24 stands in deliberate moral contrast to his son's at this altar
• Odysseus — present at the sack as in Posthomerica 13; Sinon's deception-speech invokes him as the Trojan villain
• Andromache — taken at the sack as Pyrrhus's captive; will reappear in Book 3 at Buthrotum
• Astyanax — thrown from the wall; the cycle's most-predicted single death
• Cassandra — dragged from the Palladium by Ajax the Lesser; the cycle's prophet now silenced
• Polyxena — held back at the sack for sacrifice on Achilles's tomb
• Paris — long dead; his theft of Helen the original cause
• Helenus — Cassandra's brother (no separate cast slot); will reappear in Book 3 at Buthrotum as Andromache's second husband

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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.