Aeneid, Book 5 — The Funeral Games for Anchises in Sicily

Reading Troy — chapter 43 of 74 · Aeneid, Book 5

Aeneid, Book 5 — The Funeral Games for Anchises in Sicily (Days after the departure from Carthage; on the western coast of Sicily at Drepanum, beside the tomb of Anchises buried at the end of Book 3)

The fleet, sailing north from Carthage, sees a great pillar of smoke rising over the African coast — Dido's pyre, though Aeneas does not know it is her. The winds turn south against him. He puts back in to Drepanum on Sicily's western tip, where his father Anchises was buried a year before. The Trojan exile-king Acestes (himself half-Trojan, descended from old Trojan settlers on Sicily) receives them with hospitality. Aeneas realises the anniversary of his father's death has just arrived. He proclaims funeral games.

The games occupy two-thirds of the book and are Virgil's most deliberate Iliadic-Posthomeric pastiche. The structure follows Iliad 23 and Posthomerica 4 exactly: a sequence of athletic and martial contests with named prizes, presided over by the chief mourner (Aeneas here, Achilles in Iliad 23, Nestor in Posthomerica 4), each contest both honouring the dead and revealing the surviving company's hierarchies and tempers.

The first contest is the ship-race — Virgil's substitution for Iliad 23's chariot-race, adapted to the seafaring context. Four ships compete around a marker-rock in the bay: Gyas's Chimaera, Cloanthus's Scylla, Mnestheus's Sea-Serpent, Sergestus's Centaur. Gyas leads; he is too cautious at the marker-rock and his pilot Menoetes oversails it; Gyas throws Menoetes overboard in fury (the man bobs up spluttering — Virgil's comic moment, the cycle's rare laughter); Cloanthus takes the lead by prayer to the sea-gods; Mnestheus drives the Sea-Serpent through to second; Sergestus crashes his ship on the marker and limps in last. The race is vividly rendered; Dryden's English carries the spray.

The second contest is the foot-race. Nisus leads; he slips on a patch of spilt sacrificial blood; he trips Salius behind him to let his friend Euryalus win. The cycle's friendship-pair Nisus-and-Euryalus is established here for the first time; the older man's love for the younger boy, his willingness to sabotage the field for him, is rendered with sympathy. Aeneas gives prizes to all and forgives the cheating. The third contest is boxing, an Iliadic standard; the fourth archery, where one archer (Acestes himself) shoots an arrow that catches fire in the air — Virgil reads the omen as a sign of Sicilian-Trojan kinship. The fifth contest is the equestrian display of the Trojan youth — Ascanius leads a stylised cavalry-parade ("the Trojan Game") that Virgil's Roman audience would have recognised as the lusus Troiae, an actual Augustan-era equestrian ceremony.

Juno, watching, sends Iris down to the Trojan women on the beach in disguise as one of their own. Iris-disguised inflames them with weariness at the wandering and the false hope of settling in Sicily; the women, urged by her, take torches and set fire to the fleet. Aeneas runs from the games; four ships are burned beyond saving before a sudden rain from heaven (Jupiter answering the prayer) quenches the rest. The Trojans realise what they have done; the women are ashamed.

Anchises appears to Aeneas in vision that night. He tells him: leave the unfit (the older women, the weaker men, the unwarlike) at Drepanum under Acestes's kingship; the rest must sail on to Italy. Anchises gives him the route — the Sibyl at Cumae, the descent to the underworld, the meeting in Elysium where Anchises himself will show his son the future. Aeneas obeys. A settlement is founded at Drepanum (Acesta, named for Acestes) for the left-behind; the fleet, lightened, sets out for the Italian coast.

The book closes at sea. Venus, fearing further trouble from Juno, asks Neptune to grant safe passage. Neptune consents but demands one life as the price ("unus pro multis dabitur"). The pilot Palinurus, at the helm in the night, is overcome by Sleep (a god sent for the purpose); he falls into the sea still gripping the tiller. Aeneas, waking, finds his pilot gone and his ship driving by itself. He laments Palinurus by name; he takes the helm. The fleet sails on toward Cumae. The book closes on the dawn over the Italian coast.

Analysis

The cycle's third funeral games

Aeneid 5 is the cycle's third funeral games — after Iliad 23 (Patroclus) and Posthomerica 4 (Achilles). Virgil's choice to include them is one of the Aeneid's most explicit pieces of genre-marking. He is telling his audience: this poem is a full epic, with the full set of epic elements; the funeral-games-for-a-fallen-comrade is one of those elements; here are mine. The structural triangulation is precise. Iliad 23's games are for the warrior Patroclus, killed in battle, and the prizes are the war-spoils; Posthomerica 4's games are for Achilles, killed by an arrow, and the prizes are the bride-gifts of Thetis brought up from the sea; Aeneid 5's games are for the old father Anchises, dead of old age, and the prizes are the goods of a settled household. Each set of games marks a different category of death, and the cycle's reader feels the gradation.

The ship-race as innovation

Virgil's most striking generic move is to substitute the ship-race for Iliad 23's chariot-race. The substitution is precisely matched to context: Aeneas's men are seafarers in their seventh year of wandering, not horsemen; the contest fits the world the poem describes. Virgil is also showing his audience that an epic poet can innovate within the form — the Aeneid is not slavishly Iliadic, even when it is most Iliadic. The detail-work of the ship-race is concrete: the marker-rock at the bay's entrance, the four ships' speeds and characters, Gyas's overcautiousness, Cloanthus's prayer, Mnestheus's gritty drive, Sergestus's wreck. Dryden's English renders the race vividly — sailing-vocabulary handled with Augustan precision.

Nisus and Euryalus established

The foot-race introduces Nisus and Euryalus, the cycle's most morally charged friendship-pair. Virgil is careful to plant them here without prejudice; the older Nisus's willingness to cheat for the younger Euryalus is shown as love, not corruption, and Aeneas's lenient handling sets the moral tone. In Book 9 the pair will undertake the night-raid through the Latin camp that ends in both their deaths, the cycle's most-mourned single death-of-friends-together since Patroclus. Virgil is here pre-loading the reader with sympathy. The cycle's later Roman tradition will read Nisus and Euryalus through the lens of Achilles-and-Patroclus and through every subsequent pair of devoted comrades — the structural rhyme is one of Virgil's strongest cross-Iliadic moves.

The burning of the ships

The burning of four ships by the Trojan women is one of the Aeneid's most unsettling small scenes. Juno's intervention through Iris is a continuation of her Book 1 hostility; the Trojan women's susceptibility is the cycle's quietest acknowledgement that not every Trojan survivor wants to keep wandering. Some want to settle on Sicilian beach, take Acestes's hospitality, end the journey. Anchises's posthumous advice — leave the weary at Drepanum — is one of the Aeneid's most realistic pieces of leadership-wisdom: not everyone is fit for the next stage of the mission, and the leader's job is to recognise who is not. The settlement at Acesta is the Aeneid's first Trojan-foundation outside Italy, an early scale-model of what Aeneas will build at Lavinium.

The visitation of Anchises

Anchises's nighttime visitation to his son is the Aeneid's most-charged piece of paternal communication so far. The old man, dead at the end of Book 3 with Aeneas weeping unable to finish the narration, reaches across the grave to give his son specific instructions: leave the unfit; sail to Cumae; consult the Sibyl; descend to the underworld; meet me in Elysium. The instructions structurally set up the entire next book, the underworld-descent of Aeneid 6 — the cycle's most theologically ambitious single book, where the father will show the son the parade of future Romans. Anchises is the Aeneid's most useful dead character; his role from Book 5 forward is to be his son's posthumous counsellor.

The death of Palinurus

The death of the pilot Palinurus is one of the cycle's quietest and most-resonant small deaths. Neptune demands one life as the price of safe passage; the pilot is the one chosen. The detail is Virgil's invention (no earlier tradition for Palinurus) and shows his ability to give a minor character a memorable fate. The pilot falls overboard at night, still gripping the tiller, drowns somewhere off the Italian coast; his shade will appear to Aeneas in Aeneid 6's underworld, asking for proper burial. The episode is the cycle's most explicit treatment of the principle that big achievements have small costs paid by unnamed people — Palinurus dies so Aeneas can land. Cape Palinurus on the Italian coast is named for him in Roman tradition; Virgil is offering an etiology.

Dryden's games

Dryden's English handles the long games-section with Augustan formality. The ship-race, the foot-race, the boxing, the archery, the lusus Troiae — each receives the heroic-couplet treatment, with the prize-distribution speeches and the formal rhetoric of contest-judgement rendered in the elevated register Virgil's Latin invites. The translator's strength in formal set-pieces serves the book well. The death of Palinurus at the close gets a quieter register — fewer flourishes, more direct narration; Dryden seems to know when to stop being formal.

The Augustan touches

The book is full of small Augustan-period touches that Virgil's audience would have caught. The lusus Troiae, the equestrian-ceremony Ascanius leads, was an actual Augustan-era ritual revived by the emperor; the burning of the ships and the founding of Acesta read as etiological cover-stories for known Sicilian settlements; Acestes the Trojan-Sicilian king is the legendary founder of Segesta, a real Sicilian city. Virgil is doing what he does throughout the Aeneid — weaving the legendary past into the Augustan present. His audience reads the lusus Troiae and sees the equestrian young Romans of their own day; reads Acestes and sees Segesta; reads the games and sees the Roman games that took the same form.

What to watch for

• Book 6 is the descent to the underworld and the cycle's most theologically ambitious book. Anchises's reunion with his son there is one of the Aeneid's most-quoted scenes.
• Nisus and Euryalus will die together in Book 9's night-raid; the friendship planted here is the cycle's most morally serious pair-bond.
• Palinurus's shade will appear in Aeneid 6 asking for burial; the small dead from this book reappear in the underworld.
• The funeral games for Anchises are the Aeneid's last full piece of ceremonial peace before the war begins. From Book 7 forward the poem is at war.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The book is the cycle's most explicit structural pastiche of Iliad 23 and Posthomerica 4. The contest-sequence — race, race, boxing, archery — is the Iliadic template; the ship-race substitution is Virgil's innovation within the form. The chief-mourner-presiding pattern is Iliadic: Achilles for Patroclus, Nestor for Achilles, Aeneas for Anchises. The omen of the burning arrow at the archery contest echoes the many bird-omens of Iliad and Posthomerica (Iliad 12's eagle, Posthomerica 12's Athena hawk-and-bird). The burning of the ships answers the Iliad's repeated fire-at-the-ships threat (Iliad 15-16, the Greek fire-crisis that brings Patroclus into Achilles's armour). The visitation of Anchises in vision echoes the Iliad's visitations (Patroclus's shade to Achilles in Iliad 23, Hector's shade to Aeneas in Aeneid 2) and forward-shadows the Aeneid 6 reunion in Elysium. The death of Palinurus reaches back to no specific cycle scene but answers the principle that runs through all of them: the gods' great plans are paid for by small people. Palinurus is the cycle's clearest version of the named-minor-character whose death is the price of a hero's success. The smoke of Dido's pyre seen at the book's opening reaches back across the cycle to every burning-city image — Troy in Iliad 22's prophecies, Troy in Posthomerica 13's sack, the burning camp in Iliad 16's crisis.

Forward echoes

Book 6 is the immediate sequel: the Sibyl at Cumae, the descent to the underworld, the reunion with Anchises, the pageant of future Romans, the silence of Dido. Nisus and Euryalus, established here, will die together in Book 9's night-raid — the cycle's most-mourned double death since Patroclus. Palinurus's shade will appear to Aeneas in Aeneid 6.337-383 begging burial; the small dead of this book reappear in the underworld. The lusus Troiae the boy Ascanius leads here is the equestrian ceremony Augustus revived in his own day; Virgil's audience would have watched their sons performing it; the cycle's most legendary equestrian display is also a contemporary Augustan ritual, and the bridge between legendary past and Augustan present is one of the Aeneid's most consistent threads. The settlement of Acesta is the Aeneid's first Trojan-foundation outside Italy; it is the prototype of every Trojan-diaspora foundation-story (Antenor at Patavium, Capys at Capua, Diomedes at Argyripa) and forms the cycle's larger pattern that the Trojan diaspora founded much of Mediterranean civilisation. The death of Palinurus also feeds Cape Palinurus on the Italian coast, named for him in Roman tradition; Virgil offers an etiology and Augustan Italian geography becomes Trojan-refugee biography. The book also closes the cycle's last full piece of ceremonial peace — from Book 7 forward the Aeneid is at war, and the second half of the poem will shadow the Iliad as the first half has shadowed the Odyssey. The funeral games of Anchises are therefore the cycle's last moment of organised peace before the long Italian war begins.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Aeneas — presides over the games for his father; settles the burning-of-ships crisis; takes the helm after Palinurus's death
• Anchises — the buried father; visits his son in vision; gives the route to Italy and the Sibyl
• Ascanius — leads the lusus Troiae equestrian display; the future of the line shown in stylised cavalry-parade
• Aphrodite — Venus; petitions Neptune for safe passage
• Hera — Juno; sends Iris to inflame the Trojan women to burn the ships
• Iris — descends in disguise; sets the women against the fleet
• Poseidon — Neptune; consents to safe passage; demands one life
• Zeus — Jupiter; sends the rain that quenches the burning ships

Mentioned / off-stage

• Dido — her pyre's smoke seen from the sea at the book's opening; Aeneas does not know it is her
• Achilles — the funeral games for Patroclus in Iliad 23 are the structural template
• Patroclus — the Iliadic original of the funeral-games-honouree

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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.