Aeneid, Book 9 — The Trojan Camp Besieged; Nisus and Euryalus

Reading Troy — chapter 47 of 74 · Aeneid, Book 9

Aeneid, Book 9 — The Trojan Camp Besieged; Nisus and Euryalus (Days while Aeneas is at Pallanteum; the Trojan camp at the Tiber's mouth and the Rutulian-Italian siege-lines outside)

Juno sends Iris down to Turnus with the message that Aeneas is away with the Trojan ships — now is the time to attack the leaderless camp. Turnus moves at once. The Italian forces march on the Trojan camp; the cycle's pattern reverses for the first time — the Trojans, who have always been the besieged in their old city, are besieged again in their new camp, by an Italian Hector with no Achilles yet to face him.

Turnus reaches the wooden palisade. The Trojans, on orders Aeneas left, do not come out to fight; they man the walls. Turnus's first move is to attack the Trojan ships drawn up on the beach. He sends fire-bearers to burn them. The ships — built from pines cut on Mount Ida — are saved by Cybele, the great mother-goddess whose sacred forest those pines came from; she has long since obtained from Jupiter the privilege that her sacred trees, once turned to ships, will be transformed into sea-nymphs rather than burned. The fire-bearers' torches fall to the ground; the moorings snap; the ships dive into the sea and rise as nymphs (Virgil's most fantastical single transformation in the Aeneid, a passage some commentators find dissonant with the poem's general realism). The Italian forces take the omen badly.

Turnus retreats and orders a tighter siege. Through the day the Trojans hold the walls; the besiegers cannot break in; arrow-fire crosses the palisade. Night falls.

The book's centre is the night-raid. Two friends of the Trojan camp — Nisus the older man and Euryalus the beautiful younger boy — propose to the Trojan elders that they slip through the sleeping Rutulian camp by night and reach Aeneas at Pallanteum with the news of the siege. The elders, moved by the friendship as much as by the strategic value, consent. The two warriors arm. Euryalus has a mother in the camp; he does not say goodbye, fearing he could not bear it; Nisus is silent. The Trojan princes Ascanius and Iulus weep at the parting and give them gifts: Ascanius's own sword to Euryalus, a fine cloak.

They go out through the gate at midnight. The Rutulian camp is asleep from feasting. Nisus and Euryalus walk among the sleepers and start killing — at first because they must clear a path, then in a furious aristeia of throat-cutting that Virgil narrates with deliberate moral discomfort. They kill perhaps a dozen sleeping men, one after another, in a passage modelled on the Iliad 10 Doloneia of Diomedes and Odysseus but more morally weighted. Nisus pulls Euryalus back at last — they have stayed too long, dawn is coming, they must be moving. They take the spoils of one captain (a fine helmet with horsehair plume). They run.

The dawn light catches on the helmet. A passing Rutulian cavalry-patrol sees the gleam. Euryalus, weighted with the spoils, lags behind; he is taken alive. Nisus turns back. He hides in the woods and watches as the Rutulian captain Volcens prepares to kill Euryalus. He cannot bear it. He throws his spear from hiding and kills two Rutulians; Volcens, in rage, drives his sword through Euryalus's chest before Nisus can stop him. Nisus erupts from the woods, kills Volcens with a sword-blow, is killed by a circle of Rutulian spears; he falls forward across Euryalus's body. Virgil gives the pair the cycle's longest piece of mourner-narrator apostrophe: "Fortunate pair! If anything my song can do, no day shall ever take you from the memory of time, as long as the house of Aeneas dwells on the Capitoline rock or the Roman father holds the empire." It is the Aeneid's most-quoted single piece of authorial intervention.

The Rutulians return at dawn with the heads of the two friends on their spears. They parade them along the Trojan palisade. Euryalus's mother sees her son's head and breaks. Her lament is one of Virgil's most devastating small passages — the cycle's most-quoted Mater Euryali speech, taken up by every subsequent epic poet who has written a mother's lament for a son in war.

The day's battle resumes. Turnus presses the assault; Ascanius shoots a Rutulian boasting beneath the walls — his first kill, watched by the gods (Apollo and Jupiter both noting it; Apollo blesses the young archer); Pandarus and Bitias, two Trojan giant brothers, open one of the gates impulsively to engage in combat; Turnus rushes in alone through the open gate; he kills them; he is loose inside the Trojan camp. He cuts a long swath of Trojan dead — Phaleris, Gyges, Halys, Phegeus, Alcandrus, Halius, Noemon, Prytanis, and on through Virgil's longest single-book aristeia. The Trojans rally; they hem him in; Turnus, exhausted, leaps from the wall into the river and swims back to his own lines. The book closes with the Trojan camp held, but barely, and the Italian siege ongoing. Aeneas is still at Pallanteum. Book 10 will bring him back with the new shield.

Analysis

The Iliad 10 doubled

Aeneid 9 contains the cycle's most direct structural rhyme with Iliad 10, the Doloneia (the night-raid of Diomedes and Odysseus into the Trojan camp). Virgil knows his Homer; the rhyme is intentional. But Virgil's night-raid is morally darker than its Homeric original. Iliad 10's Diomedes and Odysseus interrogate the Trojan spy Dolon, kill him, then kill the new Thracian ally Rhesus and twelve of his men in their sleep, take Rhesus's horses, and return to their camp triumphant. Aeneid 9's Nisus and Euryalus kill sleeping men without interrogation, without strategic necessity beyond clearing a path, in a passage Virgil paints as a small frenzy. The reader's discomfort is structurally produced. The cycle's grimmer view of war is being signalled.

The friendship at the centre

What makes Aeneid 9 different from Iliad 10 is the love-relationship at the centre. Diomedes and Odysseus in the Iliad are competent warriors who work together because they were assigned to. Nisus and Euryalus in the Aeneid are a devoted pair — older man and beautiful younger boy, the classical pederastic friendship-pattern with strong erotic overtones that Virgil's Roman audience would have recognised without surprise. The pair was established in Aeneid 5's foot-race, where Nisus cheated to let Euryalus win; here the older man's love is the engine of the entire episode. He cannot bear to watch Euryalus die; he sacrifices himself trying to save him; he falls across his body. The cycle's most-mourned double death since Patroclus.

Mother Euryali

The Mater Euryali passage — Euryalus's mother seeing her son's head on a Rutulian spear and lamenting — is one of Virgil's most devastating small passages. Roman literature did not often give voice to ordinary women lamenting sons; the Aeneid is unusual among epics in giving us this scene at length. Her speech is one of the cycle's most-quoted pieces of female mourning, alongside Andromache's lament for Hector and Hecuba's for Polyxena. Virgil's authorial intervention immediately before — "fortunate pair" — is meant to soften the horror; the mother's lament restores it. The poem refuses to consent to its own consolation. The cycle's deepest acknowledgement that what is glorious for the poem is unbearable for those who loved the dead.

Cybele and the ships

The transformation of the Trojan ships into sea-nymphs is one of the Aeneid's most-debated single passages. Virgil's commentators from antiquity onward have found it dissonant with the poem's general realism (Macrobius's Saturnalia records ancient discomfort). Modern readers usually feel the same. The passage exists because the Greek-cycle tradition required some explanation for what happened to Aeneas's ships eventually (since they could not just have been burned and the Aeneadae somehow survived), and the Cybele-transformation was a tidy if magical solution. The cycle's most fantasy-touched single moment is in this book. Virgil seems to know it; he handles it briskly and moves on.

Ascanius's first kill

The first kill of Ascanius — the boy Iulus shooting the Rutulian Numanus, who has been boasting beneath the walls — is the Aeneid's most charged piece of generational transition. Apollo blesses the boy from heaven; Jupiter approves. The boy's mother (Creusa) is long dead; his father (Aeneas) is far away; his guardian (Ascanius's tutor) cannot stop him; he takes the shot. The kill marks the cycle's longest forward shadow: this boy will be the second king of Lavinium, the founder of Alba Longa, the ancestor of Romulus, the namesake (in the Augustan tradition) of Augustus's Iulian gens. The cycle's longest-acting genealogical fact — Augustus as the descendant of Aeneas through Ascanius — runs through this kill. Apollo's blessing is therefore one of the cycle's most politically pointed small moments.

Turnus's aristeia

The closing aristeia of Turnus inside the Trojan camp is one of the Aeneid's longest single battle-passages. Virgil pours his Iliadic vocabulary into it — the catalogue of Trojan dead, the simile-pairs, the formulaic kill-descriptions, the eventual exhaustion of even the great warrior, the leap into the river to escape. Turnus is being constructed here as the cycle's third great Iliadic-pattern warrior (after Hector and Achilles), with his own one-book aristeia. The cycle's morally serious choice is that the warrior whose aristeia we are following is not the protagonist. Virgil gives us Turnus's terror inside the camp from Turnus's perspective. The cycle's most-debated antagonist is being prepared, scene by scene, for the cycle's most-debated death in Book 12.

Dryden's night-raid

Dryden's English in the night-raid passages is one of his most balanced pieces of moral storytelling. The killings of the sleeping Rutulians are rendered with the formal weight of heroic couplets without making them sound glorious; the mourning passages are rendered with restraint; the Mater Euryali speech is given the formal cadence Virgil's Latin invites. The translator handles the morally difficult material without prurience and without exculpation; the cycle's most uncomfortable single battle-passage gets its proper unease in English. Dryden's Aeneid is at its quietest moral best in this book.

What to watch for

• Book 10 will give us the council of the gods, the return of Aeneas with the new shield and his Etruscan allies, and the death of Pallas at Turnus's hand — the cycle's structural Patroclus-death.
• Aeneid 10 also gives us the death of Lausus, Mezentius's beautiful young son, killed by Aeneas — one of the cycle's most-mourned young deaths.
• Book 11 will give us the funeral of Pallas, returned to Evander as a body; Evander's mourning is the cycle's most extended father's lament.
• Book 12 will close with Aeneas killing Turnus partly because he sees Pallas's swordbelt on him.
• Ascanius will not appear again in major action; his first kill is also his last in the Aeneid. The Augustan Iulian back-story has been formally planted.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Aeneid 9 is the cycle's most direct structural rhyme with Iliad 10, the Doloneia (night-raid of Diomedes and Odysseus into the Trojan camp). Both scenes follow the same beats: warriors slipping out of camp at night, infiltrating the enemy lines, killing sleeping men, taking spoils, returning at dawn. The differences are moral: Iliad 10's raid succeeds completely (Diomedes and Odysseus return with horses, glory, and no losses); Aeneid 9's raid fails catastrophically (Nisus and Euryalus die). Virgil's reader is meant to feel the gap. The Iliad 10 attribution-question (some ancient editors thought Book 10 not Homer's) is itself a cycle-level question — Aeneid 9 has none of that doubt about its placement. The Mater Euryali speech reaches back across the cycle to every previous mother's lament: Hecuba for Hector (Iliad 22, 24), Hecuba for Polyxena (Posthomerica 14), Andromache for Astyanax (Iliad 22, Posthomerica 13, Aeneid 3), Thetis for Achilles (Iliad 18, Posthomerica 3). The cycle's mothers form a chorus of grief, and Euryalus's mother joins it here. The siege of the Trojan camp by Turnus inverts the entire Iliad: the Trojans, who have been the besieged in their old city for ten years, are now besieged again in their new camp by an Italian who plays the structural role of an Iliad-Hector with no Achilles yet present to face him. The cycle's grimmest symmetry. Turnus's aristeia inside the camp is the cycle's longest single-book aristeia since Patroclus's in Iliad 16 and Eurypylus's in Posthomerica 6 — three structural rhymes of the warrior whose great day in the field is also setting up his death.

Forward echoes

Book 10 is the immediate sequel: Aeneas returns with the new shield and his Etruscan allies; the death of Pallas at Turnus's hand drives the cycle's structural Patroclus-death; the death of Lausus the beautiful young son of Mezentius at Aeneas's hand follows. Book 11 will give us the funeral of Pallas; Evander's lament will be the cycle's most extended father's lament. Book 12 will close with Aeneas killing Turnus partly because he sees Pallas's swordbelt on the antagonist's body. The chain of revenges that drives the Aeneid to its end therefore starts with Turnus's siege in Book 9 and with the deaths the siege occasions. Ascanius's first kill, blessed by Apollo, looks forward to the cycle's longest genealogical arc: the boy will be the founder of Alba Longa (Aeneid 1's prophecy of Jupiter) and the ancestor of the Iulian gens (Augustus's family); the cycle's most politically pointed small moment is in this book. Cybele's transformation of the ships into sea-nymphs is the cycle's most fantasy-touched single moment and will be the source of the Aeneid's most-debated piece of generic discomfort — the only major realism-violation in the poem; later commentators (Macrobius, modern scholars) have written long passages about it. The Nisus and Euryalus story becomes the cycle's most-rewritten same-sex friendship-pair in subsequent European literature; Statius's Thebaid, Dante's Inferno 15-16, Renaissance pastoral and every later treatment of devoted comrades reach back through this passage.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Turnus — leads the Italian siege of the Trojan camp; long aristeia inside the camp; leaps from the wall and swims to safety
• Ascanius — at the Trojan camp; shoots the boasting Rutulian Numanus — his first and only Aeneid kill, blessed by Apollo
• Aeneas — off-stage at Pallanteum; his absence is the book's structural condition
• Hera — Juno; sends Iris to alert Turnus to Aeneas's absence
• Iris — descends with Juno's message
• Zeus — Jupiter; consents to Cybele's transformation of the ships; approves Ascanius's first kill
• Apollo — descends to bless Ascanius's first kill

Mentioned / off-stage

• Pallas — at Pallanteum with Aeneas; will fall in Book 10
• Evander — at Pallanteum; will mourn his son in Book 11
• Achilles — long dead; the structural model of Iliad 10's Doloneia is in the night-raid
• Patroclus — long dead; the cycle's previous most-mourned double death is the structural template for Nisus-and-Euryalus
• Hector — long dead; the cycle's previous most direct besieger-of-a-foreign-camp pattern is reversed here with Turnus as the besieger
• Creusa — long dead; Ascanius's mother; his first kill happens with her father-only at the camp

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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.