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and Trojans. Just as the Bacchae opens with this setup, so
the start of the second half of the Aeneid includes it as well.
Book VII is, after all, a new beginning, complete with an
invocation to the muse starting at line 37 and Vergil’s own
declaration that “a greater arrangement of things is
produced by me; I move a greater work” (maior rerum mihi
nascitur ordo, maius opus moveo, 7.44-45). The first half
of the epic and Aeneas’s lengthy journey are over: Book
VII begins the second half which focuses on events in Italy.
So alluding to the Bacchae’s beginning in this fresh start
bodes ill, since it is a tragedy striking for the unintentional
familial strife that ensues. Driven by Dionysus, the Theban
women and Pentheus’s mother and aunts ultimately tear
Pentheus apart – Agave, Ino, and Autonoë are so crazed
they do not even realize what they are doing. By making
the unintentional strife between Italians and Trojans
comparable to this familial strife, Vergil foreshadows the
violence that is to come in the second half of the Aeneid.
The reference to Euripides’s tragedy is ominous not
only because of the Bacchae’s own horrifying ending, but
also because it recalls earlier mentions of maddened
bacchantes in the Aeneid: namely, those in Book IV. Hints
of Pentheus’s story do appear interwoven in Dido’s fall:
she “raves like a bacchante” (bacchatur, 4.301) through the
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