Aeneid, Book 8 — Aeneas at the Site of Rome; the Shield Forged by Vulcan

Reading Troy — chapter 46 of 74 · Aeneid, Book 8

Aeneid, Book 8 — Aeneas at the Site of Rome; the Shield Forged by Vulcan (Days after the Italian war breaks out; the future site of Rome on the Palatine and the Capitoline; Vulcan's forge beneath Mount Etna)

Turnus is mustering Italy; the Trojans are besieged in their wooden camp at the Tiber's mouth. Aeneas, sleeping by the river, is visited by Tiberinus the river-god in a dream. The god tells him: sail upriver; you will find a small Greek-Arcadian settlement called Pallanteum, ruled by King Evander; ally with him; you will recognise the omen of your destined city (the white sow with thirty piglets) on the bank as you sail. Aeneas wakes; he sees the white sow with her piglets; he sacrifices her to Juno (Virgil's careful theological touch — the omen-animal is given to the goddess who has been the war's chief opposition). He takes two ships and sails up the Tiber with a small company.

He arrives at Pallanteum, a small settlement of huts on the Palatine and Capitoline hills — Virgil's audience would have recognised this as the future site of Rome. Evander is presiding over a sacrifice at the altar of Hercules. He welcomes the Trojans as kinsmen (Evander is descended from Greek-Arcadian stock, but tradition makes him hospitable to Trojan refugees). Aeneas declares himself the descendant of Dardanus, originally Italian. Evander gives him a long speech: this place was once ruled by Saturn (the golden age); the Latin people are descended from him; the site is sacred; he himself migrated here from Arcadia under prophecy. The two leaders are sworn allies. Evander gives Aeneas his only son Pallas as his companion and second-in-command — a young warrior, beautiful and untested. The Aeneid's most-mourned young man enters the poem here.

Evander takes Aeneas on a tour of the future site of Rome. They walk the Palatine; they pass the Cave of Cacus (where Hercules killed the cattle-stealing monster); they walk through what will be the Roman Forum; they pass the Carmental Gate and the Tarpeian Rock; they see the small wooden citadel that will become the Capitol. The tour is one of the Aeneid's most-loved set-pieces. Virgil's Augustan audience walked the same hills daily and recognised every site: the houses of the Roman senate, of Augustus himself, of the great Roman families — all standing where Evander's small huts of straw and thatch are described. The future grandeur of Rome is presented as a small Arcadian village in Aeneas's day. Virgil shows the seed and lets the audience supply the tree.

Meanwhile in heaven, Venus persuades Vulcan (her husband) to forge new armour for her son. The next scene is in Vulcan's forge beneath Mount Etna, where the Cyclopes-smiths are at work; Venus's visit is one of the cycle's most charming small interludes, with the goddess seducing her own husband in a way Virgil's audience would have recognised as a literary game (Aphrodite-and-Hephaestus in Iliad 18, where Thetis bought Achilles's new armour by Hephaestus's gratitude rather than by erotic persuasion). The work begins.

While the armour is being made, Evander tells Aeneas about Mezentius the exiled Etruscan tyrant — the same Mezentius Book 7 introduced in the catalogue. He was overthrown by his people for cruelty (he tied living men to corpses face-to-face and let them die of the rot — Virgil's most disturbing piece of pre-Roman political horror); he fled to Turnus; Etruria is now leaderless and seeking a foreign general. Evander tells Aeneas that the prophecy says only a foreigner can lead the Etruscans; Aeneas is the foreigner. Aeneas thus gains the Etruscan army by being recommended to it.

Venus brings the new armour. Aeneas takes it; Pallas and Evander watch. The shield is described in one of the cycle's most-imitated ekphrasis-passages — the structural parallel of Iliad 18's Shield of Achilles. Where Iliad 18 showed the universe (sun, moon, stars, two cities, fields, dancing), Aeneid 8 shows the future of Rome. The shield depicts: the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus; the rape of the Sabine women; Horatius Cocles at the bridge; Cloelia swimming the Tiber; the Capitol saved by the geese during the Gallic sack of 387 BCE; Catiline in punishment in the underworld; Cato giving laws to the just in Elysium; the battle of Actium in 31 BCE in central position (Augustus's defeat of Antony and Cleopatra, the founding political fact of the regime under which Virgil wrote); the triumph of Augustus after Actium, with three triumphs entering Rome on three successive days. Aeneas does not understand the images he sees; "he marvels at, and rejoices in, the picture, ignorant of the story" (Aeneid 8.730 — one of the Aeneid's most-quoted lines). The cycle's most charged piece of structural irony: the hero shoulders his own descendants' future without knowing what he carries.

The book closes with Aeneas back at the Tiber camp, his army strengthened by the Arcadian and Etruscan alliance, the new shield on his arm. The siege of the Trojan camp by Turnus will begin in Book 9.

Analysis

The cycle's most-loved Italian set-piece

Aeneid 8 is the Aeneid's most overtly Italian-loved book. Its central set-piece — Evander's tour of the future site of Rome — is one of the most-quoted passages in Western literature and one of Virgil's most consistent acts of historical-imaginative love. The book's emotional centre is not a death or a love-tragedy but a walk through a small village in legendary time that the Augustan reader knows as the great city of their day. Virgil is asking his audience to feel the gap between past and present — to see the small wooden citadel become the Capitol, the cattle-pasture become the Forum, the few thatched huts become the Roman senate's chamber. The cycle's most consistent piece of historical perspective.

The walk over the future Rome

Virgil's geographic detail in Evander's tour is precise. They walk from Pallanteum on the Palatine (small huts), through the Argiletum (a market street in Augustan Rome, named for the death of Argus), past the Cave of Cacus (an actual real cave on the Aventine the Augustan tourists could visit), through what will be the Forum, past the Carmental Gate (a real Augustan-period gate), past the Tarpeian Rock (from which Augustan-period traitors were thrown), up to the small wooden citadel that will be the Capitol. The Augustan reader walking these streets daily would have recognised every site. Virgil's strategy is to ground Aeneas's legendary visit in concrete contemporary geography, so that the past is felt as the same physical space as the present. The cycle's deepest experience of historical continuity.

Hercules and Cacus

The Hercules-and-Cacus story Evander tells is one of the Aeneid's most concentrated single piece of pre-Roman Italian mythology. Cacus was a fire-breathing monster, half-Vulcan's son, who lived in a cave on the Aventine and stole part of Hercules's cattle when the hero passed through Italy returning from one of his labours; Hercules killed him in a great wrestling-match. The story is Italian local-tradition (the Ara Maxima of Hercules, a real Roman cult-site at the foot of the Aventine, was said to have been founded by Evander to commemorate the kill). Virgil's choice to have Evander tell it to Aeneas does the cycle's quietest work of putting Aeneas in a heroic genealogy that runs through Hercules: the new founder will be the second great foreigner-hero to land in Italy and kill its monsters. Hercules killed Cacus the monster; Aeneas will kill Turnus the human champion; the structural rhyme is one of Book 8's quietest moves.

The little village and the great city

The aesthetic centre of the book is what Auden called the cycle's "Augustan pastoral" — the recognition that what is now great was once small, and that this is not regret but reverence. Evander apologises for his thatched hut; he tells Aeneas he should learn to despise wealth and live as the immortals lived in the old days; he gives Aeneas a bed of leaves and a bearskin. The cycle's most powerful man at this moment sleeps on a bearskin in a hut on the Palatine, where the palace of Augustus stood. Virgil's politics here is complicated — both reverence for the modest origins of the great city, and tacit acknowledgement that the great city has lost what the village had. The Augustan reader is meant to feel both the pride of how far Rome has come and the small grief of what was lost in the coming.

The Shield of Aeneas

The Shield of Aeneas is one of the most-studied set-pieces in classical literature, and the cycle's most direct structural rhyme with Iliad 18's Shield of Achilles. Where Iliad 18 showed the universal — sun, moon, two cities, a wedding, a dance, a vineyard, the river-of-the-world surrounding the rim — Aeneid 8 shows the historical-particular: Roman history from Romulus to Augustus's triple triumph. The two shields make the cycle's deepest single contrast. Homer's shield is anthropological (the human condition in general); Virgil's shield is political (one nation's specific destiny). Each is the right shield for its poem. The Iliad is about humans in war; the Aeneid is about a nation being founded. The shields image this difference precisely.

The Battle of Actium

The centerpiece of Aeneid 8's shield is the Battle of Actium, fought in 31 BCE — twelve years before Virgil composed this passage. Actium was the naval battle in which Octavian (the future Augustus) defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra, ending the long civil wars of the late Republic and founding the imperial regime under which Virgil wrote. Virgil places it at the shield's centre, with Augustus standing on the deck of his ship, his face calm, with the morning star above his head; opposite him stands Antony with the gods of Egypt and the barking dog Anubis; between them the gods of Rome on one side, the gods of Egypt on the other. The set-piece is one of the cycle's most contested pieces of political art: imperial propaganda for some readers, mournful historical reflection for others. Virgil's tone is finely balanced; the cycle's reader has been debating it for two thousand years.

"Ignorant of the story"

The book closes with one of the Aeneid's most-quoted lines: Aeneas shouldering the shield, marvelling at its pictures, "ignorant of the story" they tell — rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet, "ignorant of the things, he rejoices in the picture." The line is the cycle's most charged single piece of structural irony. The hero shoulders the future of his people without understanding it; the reader sees, the character does not. The line is one of Virgil's most-quoted moments of pure narrative perspective. Dryden's English: "The future race Aeneas might survey, / And, ignorant of the story, bears away."

Dryden in the village

Dryden's English in Book 8 is at its pastoral-Augustan best. The tour of Evander's village gets the formal heroic-couplet treatment without losing the gentleness of the small-scale subject; the ekphrasis of the shield gets the full formal weight; the Vulcan's-forge scene gets a small comic-erotic touch (Venus persuading Vulcan) that Dryden handles with characteristic Augustan poise. The translator is on his familiar formal ground throughout and the book benefits from the steady register.

What to watch for

• Book 9 will give us the Trojan camp besieged by Turnus in Aeneas's absence; the night-raid of Nisus and Euryalus.
• Book 10 will deliver the death of Pallas at Turnus's hand — the cycle's most-mourned young Trojan ally.
• The shield's images will be referenced throughout the remaining books; the Battle of Actium's central placement is the cycle's most political single image.
• Augustus's triple triumph (29 BCE — after Actium, three successive days of triumph for victories in Dalmatia, at Actium, and in Egypt) was the founding political ceremony of Virgil's Augustan present; the shield ends with it as the Aeneid's cosmological resting-point.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The Shield of Aeneas is the cycle's most direct single intertextual answer to a Homeric set-piece. Iliad 18.478-608, the Shield of Achilles, is the cycle's prior masterpiece of ekphrasis (the description of a work of visual art within an epic); Virgil's shield is structurally parallel and aesthetically opposed. Hephaestus made Achilles's shield in Iliad 18 because Thetis went to him with Achilles's old armour lost on Patroclus's body; Vulcan makes Aeneas's shield in Aeneid 8 because Venus persuades him through erotic appeal. The two scenes of the goddess-mother visiting the master-smith are deliberately parallel. The two shields' contents are deliberately opposed: Iliad 18 shows the universal human condition (sun, moon, two cities, a wedding, a dance, vineyard, the river-of-the-world); Aeneid 8 shows the historical-particular destiny of one nation (Romulus, the Sabines, the Capitol's geese, the rape of Cloelia, Catiline's punishment, Cato in Elysium, the Battle of Actium, Augustus's triple triumph). The cycle's deepest aesthetic-political contrast is in these two shields. The Hercules-and-Cacus story Evander tells reaches back to the broader Hercules-cycle and forward to Aeneas as the "second hero" of Italian foundation; Hercules's earlier slaying of the Italian monster prefigures Aeneas's later slaying of the Italian human champion. The white-sow-with-thirty-piglets omen is the fulfillment of Helenus's prophecy from Aeneid 3.389-393.

Forward echoes

Book 9 is the immediate sequel: Turnus besieges the Trojan camp in Aeneas's absence; the night-raid of Nisus and Euryalus (the friendship established in Aeneid 5) goes wrong; the two die together; the cycle's most-mourned double death since Patroclus. Book 10 will deliver the death of Pallas at Turnus's hand and the start of Aeneas's rage that drives the poem to its close. Pallas's death and Aeneas's response to it are the structural rhyme of Patroclus's death and Achilles's response — the Aeneid's central Iliadic move. Book 11 will give us the funeral of Pallas, returned to Evander as a body. Book 12 will close with Aeneas killing Turnus partly because he sees Pallas's swordbelt — the gift Pallas had received in Book 8 — on Turnus's body. The Pallanteum visit of this book therefore plants the cycle's culminating moral question: whether Aeneas's killing of Turnus at the close is justified or is the act of a man whose grief has overcome his piety. The shield's images extend the Aeneid's politics forward into Augustan present-day: Actium 31 BCE is the founding political battle of Virgil's contemporary regime; Augustus's triple triumph of 29 BCE is its founding ceremony. The shield is therefore the cycle's most direct piece of Augustan propaganda — or its most acute piece of historical reflection on the cost of Augustan peace, depending on the reader. The Hercules-and-Cacus story extends forward into Augustan period as the foundation-myth of the Ara Maxima at the foot of the Aventine, an actual Roman cult-site that Augustan visitors could see; Virgil grounds his pre-history in his audience's contemporary geography.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Aeneas — sails to Pallanteum; receives Evander's hospitality; tours the future site of Rome; receives the new shield
• Ascanius — at the Trojan camp (off-stage in this book)
• Evander — Arcadian-Greek king of Pallanteum on the future site of Rome; receives Aeneas; gives him his son Pallas; tells the Hercules-and-Cacus story
• Pallas — Evander's only son; given to Aeneas as companion; the Aeneid's most-mourned young man enters the poem here
• Aphrodite — Venus; persuades Vulcan to forge new armour for her son; delivers it to Aeneas
• Hephaestus — Vulcan; forges the new shield in his Etnan forge; the Iliad's master-smith returns for the Aeneid's set-piece

Mentioned / off-stage

• Hera — Juno; the white sow is sacrificed to her, the cycle's careful theological note
• Turnus — Rutulian prince mustering Italy against the Trojans; off-stage in this book
• Mezentius — the exiled Etruscan tyrant; Evander tells his back-story; will face Aeneas in Book 10
• Achilles — long dead; the Iliad 18 Shield of Achilles is the structural template for Aeneas's new shield
• Hector — long dead; in the underworld parade of Romans his descendant-Aeneas now bears the shield
• Anchises — long dead; his Book 6 instructions are bearing fruit in the new alliances of this book

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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.