Cast portrait: Anchises

Reading Troy — cast portrait · Anchises

This portrait is released the day Anchises's arc peaks in the cycle, after Aeneid VI — Descent to the Underworld. Read it as a coda — the full cross-cycle portrait, gathered after the moment.

Son of Capys; cousin of Priam through the Trojan royal line; lord of Dardania on the slopes of Mount Ida. In his youth he was so beautiful that Aphrodite herself lay with him on Ida (the story is the subject of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the longer of the two and one of the most beautiful pieces of archaic Greek literature outside the Homeric poems). She bore him a son, Aeneas. She made him promise never to tell anyone he had lain with a goddess; he told someone; Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt that left him lame for the rest of his life. By the time of the Iliad he is an old man — too old to fight — and by the Aeneid the burden his son carries on his shoulders out of burning Troy is at once a father, a representative of the entire Trojan past, and a half-divine memory.

In the Iliad

He is named twice. In Book 5, when Aphrodite descends to rescue Aeneas, he is the son's mother — and her descent is the closest the Iliad comes to acknowledging the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite's story. In Book 20, when Aeneas faces Achilles directly, he recites at length his own genealogy: "Anchises my father, son of Capys, son of Assaracus, son of Tros." The recital is the Iliad's strongest single forward-reference: the founder-line of Rome is being traced in the middle of a duel on the plain of Troy.

In the Aeneid

He is the Aeneid's presiding paternal figure. In Book 2 — the sack — he is in his house, old, lame, blind in the later tradition; Aeneas wants him to come, he refuses ("I will not leave my fathers' house, let the Greeks kill me here"); a sign is given (a small flame plays harmlessly around the head of the boy Ascanius); Anchises consents; Aeneas lifts him onto his shoulders, hands him the small bundled household gods (the Penates), takes Ascanius by the hand, and they walk out of the burning city (his wife Creusa, following, is lost in the smoke and dies). The piggyback scene is the cycle's most iconic single visual image. In Book 3 Anchises advises and prophesies through the long Mediterranean wanderings — Crete, Thrace, the Strophades, Buthrotum, Sicily — until he dies suddenly at Drepanum in western Sicily. His funeral games are held in Book 5. In Book 6 — the Aeneid's structural centre and the cycle's most cited single divine episode after the Iliad's Book 24 — Aeneas descends to the underworld at Cumae with the Sibyl and meets his father's shade in Elysium. Anchises gives him the great Roman prophecy: the parade of unborn Roman heroes (Romulus, the Caesars, the Marcelli, ending with Augustus and the recently dead young Marcellus, whose absence draws the Aeneid's most affecting single passage) and the speech that ends "you, Roman, remember: rule the nations with your might — these are your arts — make peace the custom, spare the conquered, war down the proud." Anchises is the Aeneid's voice of Rome's future.

Across the cycle

He does not appear in the Posthomerica or the Odyssey. Across the cycle Anchises is the cycle's portrait of the father whose past is what the son must carry into the future. Scholarly conversation centres on three things. First, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite — the longest surviving Homeric Hymn and the source of the Anchises-on-Ida story, which Virgil knew and assumed his readers knew; the Aeneid's silence about the affair is itself a sign of how widely it was known. Second, the iconographic standing of the piggyback scene: from late-archaic Attic black-figure vases through Etruscan terracottas, through the Aeneid's definition of it as the founding image of pietas, through Bernini's seventeenth-century marble group, the visual line is continuous and the scene is one of the half-dozen most-depicted images of the entire classical inheritance in Western art. Third, the great Book 6 prophecy — the Aeneid's most ambitious single section and the cycle's clearest single statement of Augustan ideology — was, even in Virgil's own lifetime, the part of the poem most directly anchored in the present (the dead Marcellus had been Augustus's nephew and chosen heir; when Virgil read Book 6 aloud in the imperial household, Augustus's sister Octavia is reported to have fainted at the Marcellus passage). The cycle gives Anchises the goddess on Ida in the past, the burden on his son's shoulders in the present of the Aeneid, and the parade of Roman ghosts in the underworld as the future Rome will inherit from him.

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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.