Aeneid, Book 3 — The Wanderings of Aeneas

Reading Troy — chapter 41 of 74 · Aeneid, Book 3

Aeneid, Book 3 — The Wanderings of Aeneas (Seven years between the fall of Troy and the storm of Aeneid 1; continued first-person narrative at Dido's banquet in Carthage; Thrace, Delos, Crete, the Strophades, Buthrotum, Sicily)

Aeneas continues his narrative. He left Troy with the survivors at sunset; through that winter and the next spring they built a fleet at the foot of Mount Ida. By summer they had twenty ships under sail. They first made landfall in Thrace, on the coast where Polydorus — Priam's youngest son, sent there for safekeeping with gold — had been murdered by the king Polymestor for his treasure. Aeneas tries to break a myrtle branch for an altar-garland and finds blood running from the broken stem; the buried Polydorus speaks from his grave warning him to leave the cursed shore. They re-embark.

They sail to Delos. The oracle of Apollo there speaks: "Seek out your ancient mother. There the house of Aeneas shall hold sway over all shores, and your children's children, and they who shall be born of them." Anchises, the old man, interprets the oracle as Crete — the Trojan founder Teucer came from Crete in the dim past, he thinks. They sail to Crete and begin to build a city. A plague breaks out; the household-gods, the Penates, speak to Aeneas in vision and correct his father: the "ancient mother" was Italy (whence the Trojan founder Dardanus originally came), not Crete. They re-embark.

They sail through the Aegean. At the Strophades islands they encounter the harpies — bird-women with women's faces who foul the food the Trojans prepare. Aeneas's men fight them; the harpy Celaeno curses the voyage with the prophecy that the Trojans will not found their city until they have eaten their own tables ("ye shall not gird your destined town with walls, until hunger compel you to gnaw the tables you eat from"). The prophecy is delivered with deliberate menace. They sail on.

They pass Ithaca (Aeneas's commentary: "we cursed the soil that bred fierce Ulysses"); they touch at Actium and hold athletic games (a small foreshadowing of Augustus's Actium victory of 31 BCE, the historical event Virgil's audience would recognise); they round Epirus. At Buthrotum, on the coast of what is now Albania, they find a small Trojan refugee kingdom: Helenus, Priam's seer-son, has been freed from captivity (by Pyrrhus's death at Delphi) and reigns over a fragment of the Trojan diaspora, with Andromache as his queen. The scene of Aeneas finding Andromache making libations at an empty tomb of Hector is one of the cycle's most moving moments. Andromache weeps; she gives them gifts; she tells the story of her transit (Pyrrhus's bed, Pyrrhus's death, Helenus inheriting both her and a portion of the kingdom).

Helenus prophesies. He speaks Aeneas's route: avoid the eastern coast of Italy (Greek colonies); circle south through the strait of Messina (avoid Scylla and Charybdis if possible); land on the western Italian coast; consult the Sibyl at Cumae; she will guide you further. He gives Aeneas the sign by which he will know his destined city: "Where you find a white sow with thirty piglets lying under an oak, there shall your city stand." They leave Buthrotum with rich gifts and the prophecy fixed.

They sail westward; they pass the foot of Italy (kneeling to the soil they will not yet claim); they pass through the strait (avoiding Charybdis by hugging the Sicilian coast); they round Mount Etna at night (and meet one of the Cyclopes-survivors of Polyphemus's tribe, Achaemenides, marooned by Odysseus and now begging passage — Aeneas takes him aboard, a Greek refugee from the cycle's other epic). They land at Drepanum on the western tip of Sicily. There Anchises dies. The narrative breaks; Aeneas's voice catches; he tells Dido that the loss of his father was the greatest single grief he had borne in all the wandering, greater than the loss of Creusa, greater than the loss of Troy itself. Anchises is buried in Sicily. The fleet leaves Drepanum and is at once caught by Juno's storm of Book 1. The narrative arrives back at its starting point. Aeneas falls silent. The book closes on Dido's hall with the guest finished and the queen already lost.

Analysis

The Odyssean book

Aeneid 3 is the Aeneid's most overtly Odyssean book. The wandering structure, the island-by-island episodes, the encounters with monsters (harpies, Cyclopes-relict), the consultation of oracles, the slow accretion of geographic knowledge — every element shadows the Odyssey's structural grammar. Virgil is being deliberate. He is showing his audience that Aeneas's wandering is the cycle's third great voyage (after Menelaus's in Odyssey 4 and Odysseus's in Odyssey 9-12), and that Aeneas can carry the Odyssean form because the form is bigger than its first exemplar. The book is also full of cycle-internal cross-references: Aeneas's path crosses Odysseus's; they meet a Cyclopes-survivor of an episode the Odyssey narrated; they pass Ithaca and curse it. Virgil knew his Odyssey by heart.

The buried Polydorus

The Polydorus episode is one of the cycle's small horrors. Polydorus was Priam's youngest son, sent to Thrace at the start of the war for safekeeping with gold, murdered by the host-king Polymestor when the gold was greater than the obligation. Euripides's Hecuba (424 BCE) is the great surviving dramatic treatment of his death and Hecuba's revenge on Polymestor. Virgil keeps the story brief but vivid: Aeneas pulls a myrtle branch and blood runs from the broken stem; the buried man speaks from the soil. The Aeneid uses Polydorus as the first sign that the Trojan exiles cannot found anywhere they touch — the world is full of bad ground, the right ground will be specifically Italy. The bleeding-tree motif goes back to Greek folktale and into all subsequent European literature (Dante's Inferno 13, the suicides as bleeding trees, is in direct dialogue with this passage).

Two oracles, two errors

Anchises's two consecutive misreadings — first Crete as the "ancient mother," then his early acceptance of the harpy Celaeno's curse as a permanent doom — are Virgil's quiet study of how prophecy fails its hearers. The Delos oracle was correct; Anchises read it wrong; the Penates had to come in vision to correct him. The eating-the-tables prophecy of Celaeno (Aeneid 3.255-257) will be fulfilled in Aeneid 7 in an unexpected way (the Trojans eat the bread "tables" they have used as plates), and only then will Aeneas realise it was not a curse but a route-marker. The cycle's pattern is precise: oracles speak truly, mortals interpret poorly, the truth is recognised only in retrospect. The Aeneid's Anchises will only become a reliable prophetic source after his death, in the Book 6 underworld scene.

Andromache at the empty tomb

The Buthrotum episode is one of the Aeneid's most morally serious set-pieces. Aeneas finds the widow of Hector — last seen at the sack being torn from Astyanax — now married to Helenus, the surviving Trojan seer, ruling a small replica Troy in Epirus. Andromache is making offerings at an empty tomb she has built for Hector ("Cenotaphium Hectoreum"). She weeps when she sees Aeneas; she asks after his life; she tells her own. The speech she gives Aeneas in Dryden's translation is one of the cycle's most painful pieces — the woman who has been Pyrrhus's bed-companion, then Pyrrhus's gift to his half-brother Helenus, now reigning as queen of a copy-city, with every street and every grove named for the dead places of the original Troy. Buthrotum is Troy as memory; it is the Trojan diaspora's first scale-model. Aeneid 3's Andromache is the cycle's deepest portrait of female survival under impossible conditions. Euripides's Andromache is the great dramatic counterpart; Virgil's quieter version is no less weighted.

Helenus's prophecy

Helenus's prophecy is the cycle's most precise piece of practical sailing advice. He tells Aeneas which sea-routes to take, which to avoid, which oracle to consult next (the Sibyl at Cumae, which delivers Book 6), and gives him the sign by which he will recognise his destined city (the white sow with thirty piglets under the oak). The detail of the sow comes from old Italian local-tradition; Virgil is splicing Roman foundation-folklore into Trojan-refugee narrative. The prophecy also looks forward to Aeneid 8's confirmation of the sign — Aeneas will indeed find the sow on the Italian coast and know his place. Helenus is the cycle's most useful seer; his post-Trojan life as the husband of Andromache and king of Buthrotum gives him the leisure his pre-sack life never allowed.

The Cyclopes-relict, Achaemenides

The Achaemenides episode is one of the Aeneid's most explicit cycle-crossovers. Achaemenides is a Greek soldier, marooned by Odysseus on Polyphemus's island when the rest of the crew escaped (Odyssey 9 narrates the escape but not the leaving-behind; Virgil invents the relict to bridge the two epics). He sees the Trojan ships, runs to the shore, throws himself on their mercy as a fellow human against the monster. Aeneas takes him aboard. The cycle's two enemies meet on neutral ground and recognise each other as survivors of the same divine cruelty. Virgil's moral is precise: the Trojan refugee shows the mercy to a Greek that Pyrrhus did not show to Priam. The Aeneid is here at its most morally elevated.

The death of Anchises

The death of Anchises is the book's emotional centre, placed at the very end where it gets the most weight. Aeneas's voice catches in the narration ("hic, pater optime, fessum / deseris, heu, tantis nequiquam erepte periclis!" — "here, best of fathers, you leave me weary, alas, snatched in vain from such great dangers!"). The loss of the father is named as the greatest grief, greater than Troy or Creusa. Virgil's choice to put Anchises's death at the end of Book 3 — and to have Aeneas weep telling it to Dido — is one of the cycle's most morally important moves. The man Dido is falling in love with is a man whose deepest grief is filial. Book 4's tragedy will partly be that he leaves Dido for the same filial duty (his father's posthumous instructions to seek Italy override his living-woman's love). The cycle's two great loves — Aeneas's for his father, Aeneas's for Dido — are placed in deliberate competition by this book's structure.

Dryden in the wandering

Dryden's English in Book 3 is at its episodic-formal best. The Polydorus passage gets its small chill; the Andromache scene gets its full weight; the death of Anchises gets the heroic-couplet weight of formal Augustan English mourning. The book also benefits from Dryden's care with technical sailing-vocabulary (the routes, the seamanship, the winds); the Aeneid 3 is the most concretely seafaring of the poem's twelve books, and Dryden's English keeps the practical detail clear without losing the formal register.

What to watch for

• Book 4 will close the Carthage episode with Dido's suicide; the narrative arc that began with Cupid's intervention in Book 1 ends there.
• The sow-with-thirty-piglets sign will be confirmed in Aeneid 8 at the site of Rome (the white sow gives birth, the omen marks the founding of Alba Longa thirty years after Lavinium).
• Andromache will not appear again, but Helenus's prophecy will be referenced through the second half of the poem.
• Anchises will reappear in the Book 6 underworld scene as the father showing his son the pageant of future Romans; the loss of Book 3 becomes the reunion of Book 6.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The book reaches back across all three preceding epics. The Polydorus episode reaches to the Iliad's brief mention of him (Iliad 20.407, killed by Achilles in some traditions; in Virgil's adopted tradition, sent to Thrace at the start of the war) and to Euripides's Hecuba, the great surviving dramatic treatment of his death and Hecuba's revenge. The Andromache scene at Buthrotum is the cycle's most direct continuation of the Iliad's Andromache: the woman who lamented Hector at the walls (Iliad 6, 22, 24), who was torn from Astyanax at the sack (Posthomerica 13, Aeneid 2), who became Pyrrhus's bed-companion and then Helenus's wife, is now seen in her widowed retirement making libations at an empty tomb of Hector. The cycle's most-tracked female arc reaches here its quietest closure. Helenus's prophecy completes the trajectory of the cycle's seer-pair, with Cassandra long since dead in Mycenae and Helenus alone surviving to give useful prophecies. The Achaemenides episode reaches across to Odyssey 9 directly: the relict-Greek is from the Cyclopes-encounter Odysseus narrated to Alcinous. The death of Anchises is the Aeneid's structural answer to the Iliad's many father-and-son deaths (Priam-Hector, Peleus-Achilles by anticipation, Nestor-Antilochus) and to Posthomerica 7's death of Phoenix in Achilles's tent — the cycle's old-age deaths continue here. The cursing of Ithaca is the cycle's most direct cross-epic side-comment; the Trojan refugee speaks of the Greek victor exactly as the Trojan war's victims would.

Forward echoes

Book 4 is the immediate sequel: the love Cupid planted in Book 1 and that has grown through the long storytelling of Books 2 and 3 now becomes the tragedy of Dido. The Aeneid's narrative present has caught up with itself at the end of Book 3; the future of the poem is now Italy, war, and foundation. The harpy Celaeno's eating-the-tables prophecy will be fulfilled in Aeneid 7.107-129 in an unexpected gentle way (the Trojans eat the wheaten "tables" they have used as plates), reframed from curse to route-marker; Virgil's pattern of prophecy-misread-then-recognised reaches its formal close there. The sow-with-thirty-piglets sign of Helenus will be confirmed in Aeneid 8.42-65 at the site of Rome; the white sow with her piglets will mark Lavinium, and Alba Longa will be founded thirty years (one for each piglet) after Lavinium. The death of Anchises set up here will be the occasion for Aeneid 5's funeral games (mirroring Iliad 23's games for Patroclus and Posthomerica 4's games for Achilles); the reunion with Anchises in Aeneid 6's underworld will be the structural answer to this loss. The visit to Buthrotum looks forward to the cycle's other Trojan-foundation traditions — Antenor at Patavium (mentioned in passing at Aeneid 1.242-249), Capys at Capua, Diomedes at Argyripa (Aeneid 11). The Trojan diaspora becomes, in the cycle's later tradition, the foundation-story for half the Mediterranean's cities; Buthrotum is its prototype. Andromache's quiet survival is one of the cycle's most-imitated images of female fortitude under impossible conditions, taken up by Racine's Andromaque (1667), by every neoclassical tragedy on the theme, and by countless other treatments.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Aeneas — continuing narrator; leads the fleet through seven years of wandering; loses his father at Drepanum
• Anchises — interprets oracles; dies at Drepanum in Sicily; Aeneas's deepest single grief
• Ascanius — small boy on the fleet through the wanderings
• Andromache — found at Buthrotum making libations at Hector's empty tomb; now Helenus's wife; the cycle's deepest portrait of female survival

Mentioned / off-stage

• Hector — the empty tomb at Buthrotum; Andromache's offerings are to him
• Astyanax — long dead; Andromache mourns him in the speech to Aeneas
• Neoptolemus — Pyrrhus; his bed-companion Andromache passed to Helenus on his death at Delphi
• Helen — at Sparta with Menelaus; not on Aeneas's route
• Priam — long dead; Polydorus was his youngest son
• Hecuba — long since dead (Euripides's Hecuba turns Polymestor on her own ground); not in this book
• Odysseus — Ithaca is passed and cursed; his marooning of Achaemenides on the Cyclopes' island is the cross-cycle hinge
• Polyphemus — the Cyclops Odysseus blinded; Achaemenides escapes from his island onto Aeneas's ship
• Creusa — long dead; her phantom-prophecy is being fulfilled by this wandering
• Dido — silent listener at the banquet; Cupid's love grown through the storytelling

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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.