The Defeated King Seeks to Shame His Conqueror: Reading Aeneid, Book II

"Go thou from me to fate, / And to my father my foul deeds relate. / Now—die!"

This is the second of a twelve-part series on Virgil’s Aeneid that I am undertaking with my dear friend, Montana Classical College. The above recording is accompanied below by a short essay that outlines the most prominent of my thoughts on the reading. Montana is publishing his reaction on his own Substack as well.

The unnatural love triangle between politics, religion, and moralism animates modern Western civic life. “Religion” here is broadly conceived, encompassing not only self-acknowledged confessions of faith but also those who behave in religious ways without claiming one extant belief system or another, indeed often denigrating most or all such traditions as superstitious or otherwise backwards. This behavior is expressed primarily through a fervent conviction in the power of moralism, which relies on the capacity to shame and fear others as its actuating cudgel. Like kicked dogs, these others (you and me) must assent to the underpinnings of the moralism in question, because if we did not then the shame and the fear would be as toothless as Priam’s spear, as we shall soon see. In short, the potency of moralism relies on at least a modicum of moral consensus. If that consensus does not occur in the course of nature, then it must be enforced from outside this course before it can have its desired effects. This enforcement is executed at the hands of a state, which comes to be regarded or regards itself, whether through an appendant church or some other means, as the seat and vehicle of these moral suppositions, duties, and missions. Is this inevitable? Is the aforementioned love triangle inevitably a good or bad thing? Is it always as “unnatural” as it seems to be in the present day? These and other such questions are treated in Book II of Virgil’s Aeneid. I shall relate these treatments forthwith.

SYNOPSIS: Book Two of the Aeneid is a frame narrative, or a story within a story. The story is that of the fall of Troy, told by Aeneas to Dido and her court. It begins with the apparition of the famous Trojan horse—built according to the tricky plan of Ulysses to deceive the Trojans and win victory for the Greeks. The horse, left on the beach by the Greeks, who appear to have returned home in defeat, inspires immediate debate among the Trojans. Some, awestruck, want to bring it inside the walls. Others, such as the priest Laocoön, wisely warn that it is likely the centerpiece of a treacherous plot hatched by the perfidious Greeks. Then appears Sinon, a Greek who claims that the Greek chiefs meant to sacrifice him to the gods in order to secure their safe passage home. He explains that the horse was built to appease Minerva (Athena), who is angry with the Greeks for their insufficient piety after Ulysses and Diomedes daringly stole her Palladium from inside the walls of Troy (a famous albeit non-Homeric episode). The Greeks intend to return home for only as long as it takes to offer whatever quantity of holocausts is necessary to appease Athena, and then to return to finish the war. Then, sea serpents sent by Athena emerge from the water and kill Laocoön and his sons just as he is offering a sacrifice to Neptune (Poseidon). These events seal the Trojans’ resolve to bring the horse within the walls, thinking that they might win Athena’s favor to themselves if they do so. Despite obvious signs that enemy Greeks are hidden within the horse’s bosom, great pains are taken to bring the horse inside the city walls.

The subsequent events are well known. Sinon opens the horse, springing forth the most fearsome warriors of the Greek ranks deep within Troy’s fortifications. The Greeks had not returned home at all, but were hiding in their ships behind a nearby island, Tenedos. Worst of all, the Trojans had been celebrating their “victory” that evening, and given their state of late-night inebriation, are ill-prepared to defend their city. Aeneas, asleep, receives his warning from the ghost of Hector, whose likeness is still matted with the blood and grime that coated him at his death. Hector orders him to flee with the effigies of the household gods of Troy and to fulfill his destiny by founding a new city (he does not mention a specific location at this time). Aeneas disobeys this order, assembling instead a männerbund of fellow Trojans to fight the Greeks and, he hopes, to die in the attempt.

In the course of this effort, Aeneas witnesses the pitiful death of King Priam, beheaded mercilessly by Achilles’s son Pyrrhus (it is implied that by this point Achilles himself has already been killed by Paris), and heaped on the altar of Jupiter as an unholy oblation. After this, Aeneas catches sight of Helen and weighs the options of whether or not to kill her in retribution for her having set in motion the chain of events that led to the sack of his beloved Troy. In a scene reminiscent of the opening exchange of the Iliad between Achilles and Agamemnon, Venus stays her son’s hand and explains to him that it is the gods who have willed Troy’s doom, and thus that Helen does not deserve to be slain. She encourages him instead to seek out his family: his father, wife, and son. Doing so, Aeneas’s father, Ascanius, insists that he be left behind. Aeneas refuses and takes up arms to fight once again. But then Ascanius asks Jupiter for a sign to confirm his instinct that they should leave. A sign is immediately provided in form of a flaming tongue that settles above the head of little Iulus, as well as a shooting star that streaks across the sky. Aeneas is convinced, but he refuses to leave his father behind, carrying him on his back out of the city. With trusted companions, they make for an old temple dedicated to Ceres just outside the city walls. Aeneas, Ascanius, and Iulus make it, but wife Creusa is lost in the fray. Aeneas rushes back to look for her but finds only her ghost. Her ghost tells him that it was fated to be this way, and that he must go fulfill his destiny by founding a new city (reference is made to another woman looming in Aeneas’s future as well). Tragically, his attempts to hug her is unreciprocable, as she is only a phantom. He returns to Ceres’s temple, where many more Trojan refugees have thronged.

COMMENTARY: In Book Two, Aeneas must sacrifice his will to self-sacrifice. He is desperate to die for Troy but ultimately is moved to give up this desperation in service of a new mission. Thrice over Aeneas disobeys the instruction of wiser figures: first dead Hector who, being dead, seems to have advance knowledge of the Fates’ intentions; then his mother, immortal Venus, who, as we know from Book One, has been assured by Father Jupiter that Aeneas’s destiny lay in Italy; and lastly his own father, who insists not only that he be left behind but also that Aeneas and his family flee Troy. Aeneas refuses all three, anxious to give his life (“mortemque miserrimus opto” [655]) in service of Troy, despite his certainty that any hope of saving the city is lost. Is it possible to infer then that, in Aeneas’s mind, duty to his city trumps even piety to the gods (apart, it seems, from that owed to Jupiter)? (Likewise in Book XXIV of the Iliad, it seems that only the will of Zeus can cause Achilles to relent in his hatred of Hector, dead though he is.) We may already see Virgil’s political message beginning to be woven together here: that the construction and glorification of Rome and the will of the gods will not be distinct. Thus, Aeneas’s obligations to civic duty and piety, repeatedly in conflict while he is in Troy in Book Two, will have simultaneous fulfillment through Rome. Of particular significance is Venus’s demonstration to Aeneas that it is the gods who are (in Neptune’s case, literally) undermining Troy. Contrast this to the statement of Jupiter in Book One, who says that even gods antagonistic to Troy (Juno, Neptune) will have their wills reconciled by, through, and in Rome. Rome will thus come to represent a novel theological solution to what is perhaps the pagan pantheon’s biggest problem: faction among the gods and the concomitant difficulty for human beings to desire to act in a manner aligned to a divine will so divided. Rome will be the city where dutiful civic action is indistinct from a piety universal to all the gods. As we continue to read, we may expect that Aeneas’s religious disposition transforms in relation to the existence of some state or other to which he devotes his life.

In a book that may be rightly described as a whirlwind of heartrending depictions, to me the most emotionally powerful scene of all is that wherein Pyrrhus slays old king Priam. Priam, who had ruled all Asia, is subjected to the most humiliating of ends. The old man is forced to don his long-decommissioned armor. He pitifully chucks a spear at Pyrrhus, which is lucky to even stick in the Greek’s shield rather than bouncing impotently off. Pyrrhus has just killed one of Priam’s many sons, Polites, and Priam and Hecuba and many of the women of the court are forced to watch as poor Polites spits up his lifeblood and expires. Priam morally chides Pyrrhus for subjecting him to this, saying that his father, Achilles, would not have abided such dishonor. He even appeals to a concept that would have been unfamiliar to the Homeric heroes: the so-called “right of the supplicant” as per Fagles, and the “laws of nature and of nations” in Dryden’s rendering. The Latin is “Iura fidemque supplicis erubuit” – “He [Achilles] blushed at the rights and faith of the supplicant.” Pyrrhus replies, with all the indifference of youth, to the effect that Priam is welcome to inform Achilles of his son’s misbehavior himself—in Hell! “Referes ergo haec et nuntius ibis /Pelidae genitori. Illi mea tristia facta/degeneremque Neoptolemum narrare memento. /nunc morere” (547-50). He then stabs Priam through the heart and beheads him, offering the mangled “nameless” corpse upon the altar. Fagles’s notes inform us that this would have unfailingly recalled the image of Pompey’s headless body on the beaches of Alexandria to the contemporary reader, as he, too, was “king of Asia” and died beheaded, having lost everything. The scene is made all the more poignant by the fact that the women of the court, including Priam’s queen, Hecuba, witness this entire sequence from underneath a laurel tree that grows to the side of the altar.

Priam’s appeal comes across as pitiful, a loser’s last attempt to make his triumphant enemy “feel bad.” This last-ditch chucking of a moralistic spear ends in failure thanks to Pyrrhus’s devil-may-care attitude. But of particular interest is the tactic employed by Priam: to shame Pyrrhus by appealing to the legacy of his father, Achilles. Priam reports that he “blushed at the rights of the supplicant” … what rights? If we refer to our Homer, this is not what happened at all. Rather, the action of Priam’s ransom of Hector is set in motion by Zeus, who declares it his will that the body be ransomed. He sends Thetis to inform Achilles of this, who accepts this insurmountable reality without complaint. Priam, too, is informed of Zeus’s will, and he travels to Achilles camp. Before long, they are weeping in each other’s arms, because Achilles is moved to think of the impending grief his own father, knowing that his own death is nigh at hand. He is also impressed by what he sees as Priam’s courage, coming into the camp unguarded. But then he seems to revoke his sympathy, revealing that he is only doing this because Zeus has made his will known to him, and that he knows that a god has granted Priam safe passage into the camp, negating the need for special bravery. He threatens, more than once, to “break Zeus’s laws” by, at best, refuse to hand over the body, and at worst killing Priam. But ultimately he relents, praying to dead Patroclus for understanding and forgiveness. Clearly, were it not for the will of Zeus, Achilles had intended to keep the body indefinitely as a means of honoring his lost friend. Here, Achilles’s piety, like Aeneas’s in Book Two, is under tension against his duty not to his city, but to himself and to the memory of his friend.

So, this idea that Achilles had some kind of respect for the “rights of the suppliant” is a Virgilian invention. As already mentioned, the decision to include this invention appears strange because of how weak and helpless it makes Priam look. Was it the Roman way to, when defeated, complain pitifully that one’s foe was acting unfairly? Certainly not, but then again, Priam is not the hero of the story. Perhaps Virgil depicts it thus in order to emphasize the point that if one wants to make moral appeals, one has to be able to back it up with overwhelming force. Priam and his city are thus cautionary tales for the Romans not to become over reliant on what they wish or hope were true about the way of the world. Troy falls prey to this foible in wheeling in the horse, and Priam does the same in making a moralistic appeal in the face of death, forsaking the chance to die with some dignity. But, as Achilles and other historical examples might attest, military might and respect for a notion of rights may be inversely related. Will it be possible for Rome to reconcile these poles through the example of its founding hero? Stay tuned…