The Place of Book 6 in the Poem

Hello, I'm Phillip Hardie.

And I'm a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.

And this is a short course on Book 6 of the Aeneid.

In this talk, I discuss the place of Aeneid 6

in the poem as a whole.

Aeneid 6 is the last book in the first half of the poem,

and the longest book in the first half.

It is set in Cumae in the Bay of Naples,

which had long been a Greek part of Italy in Virgil's day.

And our attention is drawn to this in the second line

where we read, Aeneas lands at the Euboean shore of Cumae.

Cumae had been founded from Chalcis,

a city in the Greek Island of Euboea in the eighth century

BC, centuries after Aeneas' visit.

But we soon discover that a Greek, Daedalus, has already

reached this place before Aeneas.

Although, on their wanderings from Troy,

the Trojans had already made a brief landing

in the south of Italy in Book 3,

but they left quickly to avoid meeting any Greeks, the race

that had destroyed Troy.

But Cumae is the first place in Italy

in which the Trojans spend any time, a whole book.

Italy had been their goal since the ghost of Aeneas' wife

had told him at the end of Book 2

that he must flee from the sacked city of Troy

to find a new home in the western land of Italy.

This arrival marks the end of the Trojans' wanderings,

The end of the Odyssean half of the Aeneid.

And in general, it's true that the Aeneid falls into halves.

The first, the wanderings of Aeneas,

based on the wanderings of Odysseus in

the Odyssey, and the second, the war in Italy based on the Iliad,

the story of the war at Troy.

But it's not quite the end of the Trojans’ journey.

In Book 7, they continue north up the coast

of Italy from the Bay of Naples to the mouth of the Tiber.

And then, in Aeneid 8, Aeneas travels up the Tiber

to the site of the future city of Rome,

which will be founded long after the lifetime of Aeneas.

Books 6 to 8 are the central books of the poem,

if not quite arithmetically,

the books in which we learn most about Italy and Rome.

Book 7 begins the second Illiadic half of the poem.

And in book 7, Juno, the Trojans’ implacable enemy,

engineers the outbreak of war in Italy.

Book 7 ends with a long catalogue of Italian peoples, the troops

who will fight Aeneas' Trojans.

And this catalogue of Italians balances

the parade of heroes, Roman heroes, at the end of book 6.

Book 8 is a kind of narrative pause in the story of the war.

And it ends with scenes of Roman history portrayed

on the divine shield of Aeneas.

And the Shield of Aeneas is itself

a pendant to the parade of Roman heroes at the end of book 6.

So we have three central books, each of which

ends with a pageant, the parade of heroes in book 6,

the catalogue of Italians in book 7,

and the shield of Aeneas in book 8.

Well, why Cumae?

As well as marking arrival in Italy,

Cumae is also the starting point for a journey, a journey

to the land of the dead.

Which is also, paradoxically, a journey

into the future in the shape of Aeneas'

vision of the unborn souls of great Romans.

Cumae is near one of the traditional entrances

to the underworld, Lake Avernus.

Lake Avernus is supposedly a lake

over which no birds can fly because of poisonous volcanic

fumes that arise from it.

And it's still a mysterious and atmospheric place today.

Some years ago a hotel on the shores of Lake Avernus

was raided by Italian police as a hideout of the mafia,

another kind of underworld.

Cumae has important religious associations in antiquity.

There's a temple of Apollo.

And it's the home of the Sibyl of Cumae,

one of a number of Sibyls, supernatural women

with prophetic powers, located at various places

in the Mediterranean world.

And it's the Sibyl who leads Aeneas into the underworld

through the entrance at Lake Avernus.

As well as a book that looks into the future,

Aeneid 6 is a book of the dead, a book

of funerals and mourning.

It's framed by two funerary epitaphs.

The last two lines of the previous book 5

are an epitaph in the mouth of Aeneas

for Palinurus, the Trojan helmsman who

has fallen into the sea.

And who will be found again in the underworld in book 6.

Aeneid 7, the next book, begins with a four-line epitaph

on Caieta, the aged nurse of Aeneas who

dies at the next stop on the coast on the way

to the mouth of the Tiber.

The place to which she gives her name

is still called Caieta today.

Book 6 itself is bookended by emotional passages

on the tragic deaths of two young men.

Firstly, the death and the legendary past

of Icarus the son of Daedalus, who fell into the sea

when he flew too close to the sun

on the wings made by his father and the wax melted.

At the end of the book, we have the death

and the historical future of Marcellus,

nephew of the emperor Augustus.

And these are two examples of a recurrent Virgilian

theme, the pathos of the premature deaths of young men

more commonly in battle.

Book 6 also contains a death in the present,

that of Misenus, one of Aeneas' heroic companions

who rashly challenged the sea god, Triton,

to a contest in music, in blowing the conch-shell trumpet.

And in Book 6, Misenus is honoured with an elaborate epic

funeral.

Deaths are endings.

Book 6 is also an ending in the sense

that it ends the first half of the poem,

ends the odyssey and wanderings of Aeneas,

and the Sibyl formally acknowledges this.

And at the same time, looks forward

to the second Iliadic half of the Aeneid,

when she tells Aeneas, "At long last, you

have finished with the great dangers of the sea,

the odysseyian wanderings.

But worse things remain for you on land,

the Iliadic war in Italy."

But Aeneid 6 is also an ending in the larger sense, in that it

offers a view forward to the end of the story

of which the adventures and sufferings of Aeneas

are only a part.

The story that goes from the sack of Troy

to the foundation of Rome and to the full realization

of Roman greatness in the person of Aeneas'

distant descendant, the first emperor,

Augustus, Virgil's patron.

Virgil engineers this grander ending through adaptation

of a major Homeric episode.

Descents to the underworld are a standard feature of epic poems

since Odysseus's visit to the land

of the dead in the Odyssey.

Aeneas' descent to the underworld

is at points modelled closely on the Homeric episode.

But in other respects, it's significantly different.

Firstly, Odysseus's visit to the land of the dead

comes in Book 11 of The Odyssey near the end of the first half

of the poem, The Odyssey's in 24 books,

and near the end of Odysseus' own narrative

of his wanderings, before he returns to his home

island, Ithaca, in book 13.

Virgil moves his underworld episode

to the very end of the first half of his epic.

Secondly, there are different motivations for the two visits.

Odysseus has persuaded Circe to let him and his men go home.

But Circe tells Odysseus that first, he

must go to the land of the dead, where the dead prophet

Tiresias will give him instructions

on how to find his way home.

Aeneas by contrast has been visited

by the ghost of his father, Anchises,

in the previous Book 5, who tells him to come and see him

in the underworld, where he, Aeneas, will learn about

the remaining stages, not of his own journey onwards

but about all the descendants who

will come after you and the city walls you are to be given, i.e.

the future history of Rome.

Thirdly, Odysseus will learn things

about the immediate future, his continuing journey.

Tiresias also tells him some things about his life

after returning to Ithaca, including a mysterious prophecy

about the manner of his death.

But this looks no further into the future than the lifetime

of the hero himself.

Virgil vastly expands the temporal perspective

with Anchises’ revelation of the history of Aeneas’

descendants down to Augustus, down

to the present day of Virgil and his first readers.

Fourthly, Virgil's Anchises, the father of Aeneas,

plays the part of Homer's Tiresias,

as the mouthpiece for prophecies of the future.

But Tiresias is not the only Homeric ghost behind Anchises.

Odysseus also sees the shade of his mother

Anticleia. His father, Laertes, of course, is still alive,

and Odysseus will be reunited with him right

at the end of the Odyssey.

Odysseus' meeting with his mother

is followed by a catalogue of ghosts of legendary heroines,

and this corresponds to the parade of heroes in Aeneid 6.

The point to bring out is Virgil's

very masculine reworking of the Homeric model.

Aeneas meets not his mother but his father,

And this is in keeping with a central importance

for the Aeneid as a whole of the theme of fathers and sons:

sons who die before their fathers,

but also sons who succeed in growing up,

sons who live to succeed their fathers.

Fathers and sons are, of course, important in the Homeric epics

too,

but arguably even more important

in Roman patriarchal society.

The parade of heroes is all about the continuity

of generations, as sons succeed fathers down

to Aeneas' most recent descendant, Augustus.

It's a very male-dominated view of history.

There is not a single woman in the parade of heroes.

And there is not a single woman in the Elysian Fields.