Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

THE CHIEF CHARACTERS
forward and simple individualism of an Achilles would be useless. Aeneas
cannot cut a figure like Achilles because he must subordinate his individual
wishes and desires to the requirements of others; he must be the group hero, and
this is the quality which Virgil constantly stresses in him, his quality of pietas.
This involves Aeneas in situation after situation where he must weigh up conflicting
claims upon him, where he must ponder in anxious thought the proper
course of action. He does not stride magnificently through life: on the contrary
he is under constant emotional and intellectual pressure and only with extreme
difficulty and often against all the odds does he succeed in keeping on going.
The most obvious and important way in which Aeneas differs from a Homeric
hero is that he has devoted himself to a divine mission, he has accepted the will of
heaven that he should be the agent of Jupiter's plan for the future happiness and
prosperity of the human race under the civilizing rule of the Romans. This is
abundantly clear through the Aeneid: in line 2 Aeneas is 'an exile because of
fate' (fatoprofugus) and the poem is heavily laden with the concept of destiny
throughout. The contrast between Aeneas' personal wishes and his divine duty
is brought out especially clearly in his desertion of Dido (4.361 Italiam non
sponte sequor 'it is not of my own free will that I go to seek Italy', 6.460 inuitus,
regina, tuo de litore cessi' unwillingly, o queen, did I leave your land'), but it is a
perpetual theme throughout the whole action (e.g. 11.112 nee ueni, nisi fata
locum sedemque dedissent' and I should not be here, had not the fates allotted me
an abiding-place').
Two principal criticisms have been levelled at Aeneas as man of destiny, two
branches of the same objection: neither of them is true. One is that as man of
destiny he is possessed of such supernatural strength and resolution that interest
in him as an ordinary human being cannot be sustained: on the contrary, as we
shall see, he is often frail and uncertain and barely able to continue. The other is
that by accepting the divine destiny he sacrifices his free will. It would indeed be
possible to present a man in Aeneas' situation in that way, but Virgil has certainly
not done so. At each and every moment of the poem Aeneas is free to reject his
mission — to say ' Thus far and no further.' When Mercury appears to him in
Book 4 to tell him to leave Dido, he could refuse: he has to take the decision
what to do, and he decides to return to his mission and sacrifice Dido. In one
place the process of decision is presented to us in the most explicit terms — after
the Trojan women have set fire to their own ships and Jupiter, in response to
Aeneas' prayers, has quenched the fire Aeneas is so shaken by this turn of events
that he wonders whether to give up the whole mission (5.7006°.):
at pater Aeneas casu concussus acerbo
nunc hue ingentis, nunc illuc pectore curas
mutabat uersans, Siculisne resideret aruis
oblitus fatorum, Italasne capesseret oras.
347
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