I THE TEMPLE OF JUNO

The first set of pictorial images, with which Aeneas is confronted on his journey, are the paintings depicting scenes of the Trojan War at the temple of Juno in Carthage. The very fact that these images are displayed in a temple dedicated to the divine archenemy of the Trojans inevitably suggests that their main objective must be to celebrate the Greek victory.Footnote ⁶ And indeed, all those scenes of the murals that recognizably point to specific episodes of the Trojan War portray the Greeks prevailing over the Trojans and their allies:Footnote ⁷ Diomedes killing Rhesus and abducting his horses; Achilles dragging Troilus’ corpse hanging down from the chariot; Minerva rejecting the peplos offered to her by the Trojan women and thus denying Troy her support; Hector's body dragged by Achilles around the city walls and ransomed by Priam; Achilles killing Memnon and Penthesilea.Footnote ⁸

There is a salient discrepancy, however, between the triumphal import that the murals seem so pointedly to convey in the context and Aeneas’ reaction to them. Seemingly unaware of Juno's presence, Aeneas cannot help but see the images from the Trojan perspective. He naturally identifies with the Trojan figures that he immediately recognizes (1.461 ‘en Priamus’), is moved to tears by what he sees, and even interprets the pictorial programme as a whole as an expression of the Carthaginians’ compassion with the fate of the defeated Trojans.Footnote ⁹ To him, in other words, this is not a triumphal monument to the Greek victory but rather a notional tombstone of Troy, which prompts him to re-live the tragedy of the city's fall and to mourn the victims.

The text thus seems to go out of its way to draw attention to the inherent ambivalence of the images. No doubt, the individual images possess a clear referential value in that they trigger specific memories of the Iliad and the epic cycle. And yet, when put together, they seem to possess no unified meaning of their own. In order to have a meaning, they first have to be activated by the viewer's memory, and this, depending on whether they are viewed by a pro-Greek or by a pro-Trojan recipient, can lead to radically different results. This is by no means to say that Aeneas’ understanding of the images cancels their triumphal significance for Juno. What it emphasizes instead is the obvious fact that, depending on the viewer's perspective, a triumphal monument can simultaneously function as a locus of mourning.Footnote ¹⁰

But Juno and Aeneas are obviously not the only viewers whom the text enables to endow these images with meaning. As readers of the Aeneid, we, too, are implicitly invited not only to ponder on the irony of the conflicting viewpoints enacted in the text, but also to construct and to evaluate our own mental images of the murals on the basis of Virgil's description. The first thing that springs to mind in this connection is that it is in fact impossible to tell for sure what the images would really look like or how they would be arranged in the temple in relation to each other. The viewing process is seemingly focalized in this passage through Aeneas’ perception, as we are constantly told of his emotional reactions to what he sees.Footnote ¹¹ As we have already observed, however, Aeneas is presented in this scene as a rather unreliable beholder (after all, he completely misses the monument's obvious triumphal intention).Footnote ¹² In addition, the text repeatedly, albeit rather subliminally, emphasizes the tension between his viewing and our reading.

To begin with, there is a notable discrepancy between Virgil's implication that the paintings depict the Trojan War chronologically as a linear visual narrative (1.456 ‘Iliacas ex ordine pugnas’) and Aeneas’ attention to single details (1.453 ‘singula dum lustrat’), which possibly takes a more erratic course. Of course, the process of viewing, like that of reading, does unfold in time.Footnote ¹³ Unlike reading, however, it is anything but pedantically linear. Rather, it is governed by patterned visual signposts and emotional attention-catchers, which can differ greatly for each individual viewer.Footnote ¹⁴ For this reason, Aeneas does not seem to be ‘reading’ the chronological visual narrative ‘ex ordine’ the way one would read the epic cycle,Footnote ¹⁵ but instead allows his gaze to follow his emotions when he, for instance, cries out in surprise, both pleasant and painful, upon his recognition of Priam (1.461 ‘en Priamus’), whom his gaze automatically picks out of a longer series of identifiable figures (1.459 ‘Atridas Priamumque et saevum ambobus Achillem’).Footnote ¹⁶

Further, there is a certain contrast between the general statement that Aeneas saw the images of the battles around Troy, in which the Greeks and the Trojans alternately gained the upper hand (1.466–8),Footnote ¹⁷ and the specifically identified scenes, beginning ‘nec procul hinc’ (1.469), which, as we have already seen, unanimously portray the Greeks as ruthless victors. The text provides here next to no clues as to what this arrangement as a whole would look like in situ (such markers as ‘nec procul hinc’, ‘parte alia’ and, especially, ‘interea’ are of rather little help), nor, in fact, is there any way of telling whether Aeneas sees exactly what Virgil makes us see, however darkly, and whether he sees it in the same order. As far as Aeneas’ viewing process is concerned, Virgil emphasizes only his emotional response to the images, rather than their order: quite conspicuously, the only tum that occurs in his description refers to Aeneas’ groaning at the sight of Hector's corpse, and not to the turning of his gaze to the next picture (1.485–7). This is perfectly understandable, as all these images activate Aeneas’ personal memories of his native city's tragic past, which his mind can retrieve at will without having meticulously to reconstruct their temporal succession, and which, moreover, already possess for him a preconceived emotional colouring. As a consequence, an image portraying a single episode easily triggers the memory of the whole sequence, which can then be emotionally reinforced by further images (cf. 1.464 ‘animum pictura pascit inani’). The order of the identifiable episodes of the Trojan War is, therefore, primarily intended to be appreciated by us: Virgil constructs his description in such a way as to guide our virtual gaze, to manipulate our memories of the epic tradition, and to encourage us to draw analogies between the complex ensuing patterns and the narrative context of the Aeneid.

Unsurprisingly, Virgil's description of the specific scenes, contrary to what he says earlier, does not reflect any chronological order.Footnote ¹⁸ What Virgil does instead is to make these episodes fall into a nearly symmetrical pattern, which seemingly serves as a visual enhancement of the triumphal purport of the monument as a whole. By emphasizing this symmetry, he in a way turns his text into a verbal approximation of a visual image: he urges us, as it were, to translate the unidirectional linear reading sequence of his description (‘ex ordine’, from left to right) into a two-directional repetitive viewing pattern (from the attention-catching, meaning-laden centre in both directions to the edges and then back again, as often as we would like), and thus to enact the process of viewing through reading.

The scene that most conspicuously stands out from the rest is, of course, the only one portraying a goddess — the statue of Minerva rejecting the offering of the peplos. To emphasize the singular thematic significance of this image, it is located more or less exactly in the middle of Virgil's verbal arrangement (four lines, 479–82, preceded by ten, 469–78, and followed by eleven, 483–93).Footnote ¹⁹ Obviously enough, the pictorial representation of the statue of Juno's most important divine ally, portrayed as expressly refusing to provide any assistance to the Trojans and thus ultimately sealing the future tragic fate of Troy, acquires in the context of Juno's temple the character of a mise en abîme, which further emphasizes the triumphal significance of the monument as a whole. The remaining images surrounding this central picture serve to strengthen the visual effect of this straightforward message. In Virgil's text, it is, rather tellingly, bordered by the images of Achilles killing two sons of Priam, Troilus and Hector (with the latter scene extended by the portrayal of Priam ransoming Hector), whose corpses are described as maltreated in a nearly identical manner.Footnote ²⁰ It is of utmost importance that these episodes not only form a symmetrical pair, but are also sometimes mentioned among the main reasons for the fall of Troy — along with the removal of the Palladium, the statue of Athena located in the middle of the description, from the Trojan citadel.Footnote ²¹ These three central images are in turn flanked by the representations of more marginal, but no less successful, military exploits by Greek heroes killing Trojan allies — Diomedes killing the Thracian Rhesus and Achilles killing the Ethiopian Memnon and the Amazon Penthesilea. The overall visual programme thus forms a perfectly coherent unity, both thematically and visually, with each pair of nearly symmetrical correspondences working in concert to stress the significance of the central image.

It has repeatedly been pointed out that individual scenes of the paintings in Juno's temple find numerous thematic parallels in the subsequent narrative of the Aeneid, as it were, proleptically anticipating some of its events.Footnote ²² But much more importantly, the images conjured up in Virgil's description spill over into the immediate narrative context and, by doing so, subtly urge us to apply to the text as a whole the same kind of translation of the linear reading into a more-dimensional virtual viewing as we have practised while reading the description itself.

The most stunning scene of the murals is the only one I have intentionally left unmentioned so far, because it not only undercuts the carefully constructed symmetry of the rest, but also blurs the boundary between the world of the image and the world of the viewer: between the mentions of Hector and Memnon, the text says that Aeneas saw a representation of himself (1.488 ‘se quoque principibus permixtum agnovit Achivis’). This line is not simply unique in the history of Graeco-Roman narrative in that it postulates an identity between the viewer and the subject of a pictorial representation.Footnote ²³ It is also clearly marked as sitting somewhat uncomfortably in the context. On a more superficial level, its hypothetical removal would restore the perfect formal symmetry of the remaining description (the four lines of the Pallas scene would then be flanked by ten lines on each side). But more crucially, unlike the descriptions of the remaining panels, its formulation is too vague to be unequivocally matched with any specific episode of the Trojan War.Footnote ²⁴ Instead of the system of transparent one-to-one correspondences displayed by the other images, ‘Aeneas mixed up with the Achaean leaders’ evokes memories of at least three different contexts of the Iliad, none of which, however, can make Aeneas perfectly fit into the symmetrical structure formed by the remaining scenes. Instead, each of these memories tentatively imposes an additional pattern on the pictorial programme as a whole, subtly diluting its seemingly incontrovertible triumphal tone in the process.

If we were to see in this line a reference to our first encounter with Aeneas in Iliad 5 (and, as I will show below, there are in fact a number of compelling reasons for us to remember this particular scene in the context), in which Diomedes attacks Aeneas and prides himself on abducting his horses (Hom., Il. 5.319–30), the panel would probably appear like a mirror image of the first scene in the series, in which Diomedes abducts Rhesus’ horses. As a consequence, the figure of Aeneas would almost mirror that of Rhesus and thus align itself with the rest of the Trojan victims. It would not fit this pattern entirely, however, because, unlike the rest of the Trojans and allies in the murals, Aeneas has obviously survived the war so that he can now see himself in the picture. A different tentative pattern would emerge if the mention of Aeneas were to make us think of his successful battles against the Greeks at Hector's side in the middle books.Footnote ²⁵ In this case, the representation would probably look like a continuation of the Hector sequence (by which it is immediately preceded). Aeneas’ viewing of these images would, however, shift the emphasis from the defeat of the greatest Trojan hero to Aeneas as a survivor ready to carry on Hector's fight. Aeneas’ final major appearance in the Iliad takes place in Book 20, where he is threatened and almost killed by Achilles (Hom., Il. 20.75–287), which, in the context of the murals, could in principle make him an integral part of the series of Achilles’ other Trojan victims (Troilus, Hector, Memnon, Penthesilea). But again, the parallel is an incomplete one at best, because in the same scene of the Iliad the gods decide to save Aeneas, lest Dardanus’ progeny may disappear, and by doing so, lay the foundation for the very possibility of the Aeneid.Footnote ²⁶

We can thus clearly see that Aeneas’ double presence here — both as a viewer and as an object of pictorial representation — undermines the seemingly transparent meaning of this triumphal monument, turning it into something that prompts not only joy but also mourning and that indicates continuation, or even reversal, rather than closure. Moreover, by serving in this scene as a living link between the pictorial representation of the Trojan War and the narrative of the Aeneid, Aeneas effectively imports this quality of the polysemic visual image into the very text that he inhabits. Aeneas’ presence in the murals activates memories of a variety of Homeric contexts and, as a result, destabilizes the finality of Juno's triumph, replacing it with Aeneas’ well-grounded ‘hope of rescue’ (1.451–2 ‘hic primum Aeneas sperare salutem / ausus’). As I will show now, the Aeneid as a whole similarly relies on intertextuality as a trope for the elusively image-like quality of its own narrative, using its transformation of the Greek epic tradition into a Roman epic as a metaphor for the transformation of the fall of Troy into the triumph of Rome.Footnote ²⁷

Not only individual images of the paintings, but also the context of their viewing by Aeneas can be regarded as a reminiscence of the Iliad. As I mentioned above, the figure of Aeneas surrounded by Greek generals could be read, among other things, as a reference to Diomedes attacking Aeneas and abducting his horses in Iliad 5, which would then visually echo the Rhesus scene mentioned first in Virgil's description.Footnote ²⁸ There are, however, further, more compelling, parallels between this Iliadic episode and the dramatic setting of Aeneid 1.Footnote ²⁹ Curiously enough, the way Aeneas is presented in the narrative strongly evokes some elements of his portrayal in Iliad 5: in the Aeneid, Aeneas is made invisible by Venus prior to his arrival in Carthage (1.411–14) and is only perceptible in the form of a mimetic (pictorial) image of the murals; similarly, the only reason why Aeneas survives Diomedes’ onslaught in the Iliad is that Aphrodite first makes him invisible by covering him with her peplos (Hom., Il. 5.311–17), and then, after she is wounded by Diomedes, Apollo hides him in his temple (νηός), creating a mimetic image (ɛἴδωλον) as a substitute (Hom., Il. 5.445–53). This indirectly suggested analogy produces quite palpable reverberations in the text — not only in Aeneas’ substitution by a similar mimetic image in Aeneid 10 (636–52). To begin with, the temple of Apollo conjured up by this evocation of the Iliadic context can be understood as a silent (and invisible) precursor of the visually perceptible materialization of the two temples of Apollo that will loom large in the further course of the narrative — the one in Cumae in Aeneid 6 and the one on the shield of Aeneas.Footnote ³⁰ More tangibly, when Aeneas, at the moment visible only as a picture, reappears from his invisibility, he is virtually transformed into a mimetic image of the Homeric Diomedes: prior to his aristeia in Iliad 5, Athena turns Diomedes into a god-like creature, awe-inspiring by his very appearance;Footnote ³¹ likewise, before revealing him to Dido, Venus makes Aeneas similar to a god (1.589 ‘deo similis’), or rather, to a statue thereof — made of ivory, silver, or Parian marble decorated with gold (1.592–3 ‘quale manus addunt ebori decus, aut ubi flavo / argentum Pariusve lapis circumdatur auro’). That Venus turns Aeneas into a dazzling artefact-like reminiscence of Diomedes, which would probably eclipse Diomedes’ portrayal in the murals, reads almost like an attempt to take revenge for wounding her and for defeating her son in the Iliad (Hom., Il. 5.330–42). This revenge will eventually come to fruition in Aeneid 11, where Diomedes, who, like Aeneas, has in the meantime migrated to Italy, will in fact acknowledge his defeat by refusing to fight alongside the Latins against such a strong warrior (11.252–95).Footnote ³² In other words, Aeneas’ intrusive presence in the murals (albeit rather marginal by comparison with their true protagonists, Diomedes and, even more so, Achilles, and as marginal as, by comparison with Hector, his presence in the Iliad itself) serves to adumbrate his gradual transformation in the Aeneid into a hero of Diomedes’, Hector's, and Achilles’ calibre.

Diomedes’ aristeia in Iliad 5 is, however, not the only episode of the Iliad evoked by Aeneas’ invisibility and beautification in Aeneid 1. We should not forget that the reasons for Aeneas’ disappearance from sight and for the subsequent embellishment of his looks are quite different from each other: Venus makes him invisible to protect him from the potentially inimical inhabitants of Juno's city, but she makes him similar to a god in order to increase the degree of his attractiveness to Dido.Footnote ³³ In Iliad 3, Aphrodite does a similar thing to Paris: she makes him disappear, in order to save him from being killed in a single combat with Menelaos, and then, enhancing his beauty and erotic appeal, transfers Ἀλέξανδρος θɛοɛιδής (Ηοm., Il. 3.16) into Helen's sleeping chamber.Footnote ³⁴ The ambivalent status, intertextually enacted here by the invisible/god-like Aeneas, between a noble Greek hero, who punishes his enemies’ injustice, and an effeminate Oriental, who unchains wars by stealing other people's wives, is echoed in the further course of the Aeneid, where Aeneas, on the one hand, acts like Achilles, using a shield elaborately wrought by Vulcan and avenging the death of a younger male companion,Footnote ³⁵ but, on the other, is perceived as a reincarnation of Paris by Iarbas in Aeneid 4 and then, in Aeneid 7, is compared to Paris while being unfavourably contrasted with Turnus, who has in turn already been explicitly identified with Achilles.Footnote ³⁶ Are we then to see Aeneas killing Turnus as Achilles killing Hector or as Paris killing Achilles?Footnote ³⁷ The ambivalence caused by Aeneas’ appearance in, and in front of, the murals in Aeneid 1 in fact anticipates this intentionally unresolved ambiguity, which, in the manner of the Iliad, prevents us from dividing up the characters of the Aeneid too neatly into good guys and bad guys.

The link between Aeneas’ and Paris’ disappearance / enhanced erotic appeal unleashes another complex chain of associations that takes us back to the murals. Among the gifts with which Aeneas presents Dido, there are two pieces of clothing that used to belong to Helen (1.648–50, a ‘palla’ and a ‘velamen, ornatus Argivae Helenae’), the one embroidered with golden figures, the other with saffron leaves. One of the things that this description indirectly evokes is, of course, the tapestry that Helen weaves before the single combat between Paris and Menelaos in Iliad 3. Incidentally, this tapestry provides a compositional prototype of a section of the murals at Juno's temple: Helen's bipartite design (Hom., Il. 3.126 δίπλακα), which depicts battles that the Trojans and the Achaeans fought because of her,Footnote ³⁸ is indeed quite similar to the Greeks and the Trojans portrayed on the murals as alternately attacking each other.Footnote ³⁹ At the same time, the lavishly adorned garments that Aeneas here gives to Dido hark back to the peplos presented by the Trojan women to Athena in the central scene of the murals, which in its original context in Iliad 6 is also linked to Helen: Paris is said to have obtained it on the same voyage as he abducted Helen from Sparta.Footnote ⁴⁰ The association between the Iliadic peplos and Helen's garments in the Aeneid is in fact even more cogent, as in the Iliad Paris brings it from Sidon, while Aeneas is at the moment being welcomed by Sidonia Dido in the urbs Sidonia.Footnote ⁴¹ From this perspective, Aeneas appears, as it were, to be returning the votive gift, rejected by Athena, to the place of its origin. Needless to say, the garments mentioned in the Aeneid cannot be identified with either of the two Iliadic objects.Footnote ⁴² What matters more, however, is that their juxtaposition with the images of the tragic fall of Troy in the murals makes them evoke memories of both Helen's tapestry and Athena's peplos, whereby Aeneas’ seemingly innocent present, like his rather inconspicuous presence in the murals, begins to develop quite an ominous significance for his host and her city.

Another salient characteristic of the paintings at Juno's temple is the particular prominence of horses (Rhesus’ horses, accorded an entire two lines of the description, as well as the horses dragging the corpses of Troilus and Hector). This emphasis on horses cannot help but draw attention to the notable absence of the horse that, more than any other, contributed to the eventual fall and destruction of Troy — namely the Trojan horse. Of course, this episode is left for Aeneas to tell in Book 2, and its absence here may simply be explained by the desire to avoid repetition. And yet its absence leaves a gaping void in the context — both because it strikes one as odd that the monument, seemingly so keen on celebrating Juno's (and Athena's) triumph over Troy, fails to depict the event that ultimately brought about the victory, and, even more crucially, because one of Demodocus’ songs at Alcinous’ banquet in Odyssey 8 (499–520) — the episode to which the scene of Aeneas’ viewing of the paintings structurally correspondsFootnote ⁴³ — has the Trojan horse as its theme. In other words, even though the Trojan horse is, strictly speaking, not there, we are probably meant to think of it as we read the description of the murals. It is, however, the comparison between Aeneas’ account of the fall of Troy in Aeneid 2 and Virgil's account of Aeneas’ stay in Carthage that finally allows us to fill in this gap. The Trojan horse, of course, still fails to materialize in the murals. Instead, Virgil's narrative of Aeneas’ arrival in Carthage in Aeneid 1 begins in hindsight to look like an anticipation of Aeneas’ narrative of the Trojan horse in Aeneid 2.

The Trojan horse is a particularly complex and fraught artefact, both subverting the naive expectation of harmony between the signifier and the signified (by its unabashedly literal discrepancy between content and appearance) and insidiously self-reflexive (created ‘divina Palladis arte’, 2.15, supposedly in order to give divine protection to the city by serving as a votive substitute for the stolen Palladium, 2.183–4). The Trojans’ tragic failure to perceive the ruse, despite Laocoon's express warning that this contraption is designed ‘to spy on the houses and to descend upon the city’ (2.47 ‘inspectura domos venturaque desuper urbi’) is further underscored by their welcoming response to Sinon's fictive account — a verbal equivalent of the Trojan horse: as is the case with any lie, its apparent content markedly diverges from its intended performative effect, while its success is based on the speaker's pretended similarity to the recipients, as Sinon portrays himself, like the Trojans, as a victim of the Achaeans (2.116–44). As a result, by taking both the Trojan horse and Sinon (cf. 2.148 ‘noster eris’) into the city, the Trojans themselves pave the way to their city's destruction.

Aeneas’ arrival in Carthage effectively anticipates some of the most salient details, as well as the overall performative effect, of the Trojan horse's and Sinon's introduction into Troy. By analogy with Laocoon's view of the Trojan horse's intended function, Aeneas begins his visit by inspecting the new city from above and then literally descending upon it from a hill.Footnote ⁴⁴ First, like the Greek warriors concealed within the Trojan horse, he is made invisible and contemplates, among other things, a painting (a mimetic substitute) of the Palladium, for which the Trojan horse is said to function as a symbolic substitute in Aeneid 2 (183–4). Then he is transformed, by means of Venus’ divine art, into an equivalent of a god-like statue — into an artistic image, which essentially continues to conceal him. When Dido first confronts him at Juno's temple, she is consequently as unaware of the content of this image as are the Trojans of the content of the Trojan horse when they bring it into the temple of Pallas. Furthermore, Aeneas gives Dido an ominous gift, which, as we have seen, indirectly alludes to the Trojans’ first futile attempt to propitiate Pallas. Aeneas’ account of the fall of Troy and his subsequent wanderings is of course a structural allusion to Odysseus’ apologoi at Alcinous’ banquetFootnote ⁴⁵ — to many Hellenistic and Roman readers of Homer a notorious epitome of self-evident fiction.Footnote ⁴⁶ Even though there is no indication in the text that Aeneas is telling fairy tales (on the contrary, it is essential for the overall functioning of the Aeneid that Aeneas’ account be perceived as truthful within its fictional universe), his performative success is based on the same foundation as that of Sinon's account: just as Sinon increases his credibility by effectively assimilating himself to his listeners, so Aeneas’ story of a refugee looking for a new city is essentially a story in which the Phoenician exile Dido can recognize herself.Footnote ⁴⁷ As a result, she, too, beguiled by beautiful images and moving stories, takes both the insidious gifts and their bringer into her city and pays for this foolhardy decision with her own life.Footnote ⁴⁸

The most important consequence of Aeneas’ notional anticipation of his own account is that it puts additional emphasis on the process of Carthage's transformation into an image of fallen Troy. Dido's funeral pyre, which Aeneas sees from his ship at the beginning of Aeneid 5, makes the entire city appear to be burning (5.3–4 ‘moenia […] quae iam infelicis Elissae / conlucent flammis’), which in turn evokes the image of burning Troy described by Aeneas in Book 2. Aeneas does not seem to know the cause of this conflagration (5.5 ‘causa latet’), while the immediate cause indicated in the text is the violation of Dido's love (5.5–7). But within the Aeneid’s timeless historical framework, these burning city walls simultaneously evoke one of the greatest Roman triumphs — the ultimate destruction of Carthage.Footnote ⁴⁹ To facilitate this connection, Carthage is already presented at the very beginning of the poem as a kind of anti-Rome (1.13 ‘Italiam contra’), which Aeneas’ descendents are destined to destroy (1.20–3). Moreover, Aeneas’ abandonment of Dido is explicitly mentioned as an aition of the future enmity between Carthage and Rome (4.624–9). For this reason, it hardly comes as a surprise that the funeral games for Anchises, which Aeneas celebrates on Sicily immediately after he leaves Libya, not only form an analogy with Achilles’ funerary games for Patroclos in Iliad 23,Footnote ⁵⁰ but also contain notable elements of a prophetically triumphal ritual, which in the context seems to celebrate both Aeneas’ future victories in Italy and the Romans’ conquest of Carthage: in addition to reminding one of a military parade demonstrating the superiority of the Trojan/Roman forces, they point to the origin of a few Roman aristocratic families (Memmii, Sergii, Cluentii, 5.114–23) and enact the aition of the so-called lusus Troiae — an Augustan circus game designed to promote military prowess and patriotism (5.577–602).Footnote ⁵¹ The verbal echo between Carthage, which, from the Roman perspective, is no more (1.12 ‘urbs antiqua fuit’), and the destruction of Troy (2.363 ‘urbs antiqua ruit’) further underscores Aeneas’ rôle as an aetiological harbinger of the Roman destruction of Carthage, which as a consequence turns into a notional re-enactment of the destruction of Troy by the Greeks.

The Carthage episode of the Aeneid thus enacts a gradual transformation of Juno's triumph over Troy into the Roman triumph over Carthage. This transformation is made possible by the semantic polyvalence of Aeneas’ seemingly marginal presence in the pictorial programme of Juno's triumphal monument. It is from this pictorial image that, like the Greek warriors from the Trojan horse, Aeneas gradually emerges in order to enact a notional aition of the future Roman victory. The subsequent course of the narrative is marked by Aeneas’ gradual development from a figurative impersonator of the Trojan horse into a proto-Roman empire-builder, whose activity is, among other things, metaphorically conceived of as the construction of a temple dedicated to Apollo.

II DAEDALUS' TEMPLE OF APOLLO IN CUMAE

Aeneas’ arrival in Italy is framed in a manner reminiscent of his arrival in Carthage, as one of the first things that Aeneas encounters in Cumae is also a temple decorated with a complex pictorial narrative. Like the temple of Juno, this temple is essentially a triumphal monument celebrating achievements of its creator: just as Juno dedicates her own implements of war to the temple built in celebration of her victory and decorated with the most crucial episodes that made that victory possible (1.16–17), so the archetypical Greek artist Daedalus, too, dedicates the wings, which allowed him to escape from Crete, to the temple of Apollo, which he builds ex voto for the successful completion of his flight and decorates with representations of his own most outstanding artistic accomplishments (6.14–33). The presentation of individual images here, as in Juno's temple, is anything but chronological. Rather, it is symmetrically distributed between the two temple doors (‘in foribus’) that correspond to two different locations (Athens and Crete), with the scenes pertaining to the Attic background of Daedalus’ artistic activity (the death of Androgeos and the yearly selection of seven prospective victims of the Minotaur, 6.20–2) on the one side, and the catalogue of Daedalus’ Cretan inventions on the other (‘contra’, 6.23–33) — the wooden cow to allow Pasiphae to copulate with the bull, the Labyrinth to incarcerate the offspring of this unholy union, and the thread to lead the Minotaur's killer Theseus out of the Labyrinth and thus to allow Ariadne's incipient love for him to come to fruition. In combination with Daedalus’ wings dedicated to Apollo, these pictorial representations, despite their highly disturbing character, indeed amount to a visually coherent triumphal celebration of Daedalus’ art.Footnote ⁵²

As is the case with the Carthaginian temple of Juno, however, the text immediately undermines the seemingly self-congratulatory tone of these images. Unlike in Book 1, the weakening of the optimistic message is initiated here not by Aeneas, who this time is not allowed to linger on the images at all (6.37 ‘non hoc ista sibi tempus spectacula poscit’), but by Virgil. For it is Virgil's poetic expression that inadvertently transforms Daedalus’ monumental celebration of his own art into a gravestone-like commemoration of the death of his son Icarus — by pointing, at the same time, to Daedalus’ overpowering grief as the cause of his failure to achieve that effect through images (6.30–1 ‘tu quoque magnam / partem opere in tanto, sineret dolor, Icare, haberes’):Footnote ⁵³ Daedalus’ two attempts to represent Icarus’ ‘fall’ (6.32 ‘casus’) result in nothing but the ‘falling’ of the father's otherwise so skilful hands (6.33 ‘bis patriae cecidere manus’). Daedalus’ grief is thus not directly visible in the monument, even though, as Virgil implies, it constitutes the indispensable subtext of its creation. Paradoxically, it is only Virgil's punning language that allows this repressed grief to come to the fore, in order to turn what seems at first to be a self-referentially celebratory monument to artistic skill into a locus of emotions that are as complex and as conflicting as those caused by Daedalus’ other, similarly lugubrious, creations.Footnote ⁵⁴ What Virgil's words do is analogous to the effect that Aeneas’ memory has on the paintings in Juno's Carthaginian temple. They also bring out the inherent ambiguity of the monument, which the images have in vain tried to suppress: for Daedalus’ wings (the votive gift around which the temple is built) are not only his greatest invention, but also the cause of his son's death. As we shall see, Virgil makes it excessively clear in the subsequent course of his narrative that, as a Roman builder of poetic triumphal temples, he is indeed no purveyor of the exemplary Greek sculptor's regrettable reluctance to give an artistic expression to his own conflicting emotions.

Daedalus serves here as a foil not only for Virgil, but also for Aeneas. On the one hand, Daedalus and Aeneas are both portrayed as refugees, who come to Italy under Apollo's protection, losing a loved one along the way. But on the other, unlike Daedalus, whose grief prevents him from creating an image of his dead son, Aeneas does not refrain from confronting his father's ‘tristis imago’ (6.695).Footnote ⁵⁵ It is particularly symptomatic in this connection that, prior to his descent into the underworld, which, like Daedalus’ Labyrinth, is easy to enter but almost impossible to leave,Footnote ⁵⁶ Aeneas pledges to build a marble temple dedicated to Apollo and Diana and to use it to preserve the Sibylline books (6.69–76). This promised temple is presented here not only as a reflection of Daedalus’ Cumean temple, but also as a recognizable anticipation of the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, to which Augustus famously transferred the Sibylline oracles.Footnote ⁵⁷ Since immediately after this pledge, the Sibyl predicts to Aeneas a victorious completion of the impending horrible wars (6.83–97), Aeneas’ future votive temple is clearly conceived of, like Augustus’ temple, as a triumphal monument.Footnote ⁵⁸ As a result, the two temples — Aeneas’ and Augustus’ — effectively merge into one.

In the immediate context of Book 6, however, Daedalus’ temple primarily serves as one of the elements in the series of symbolic transitions preparing Aeneas’ descent into the underworld. It is hardly coincidental in this connection that the images of Daedalus’ temple may appear in retrospect to anticipate the pronounced pictorial quality of the Virgilian underworld. It is indeed quite conspicuous that Virgil conceives of his underworld as a complex visual image — comparable in its manner of signification to the temple doors in Cumae and to the paintings in Carthage. Like these two pictorial programmes, the underworld exists as a simultaneous and changeless presence of multiple figures (from Greek epic heroes to Augustus) that in empirical reality, or in a literary narrative for that matter, could only come into (and go out of) existence sequentially over a period of time.Footnote ⁵⁹ And it is besides hardly surprising that Virgil presents his underworld as a metaphor not only for the timeless mode of signification characteristic of visual images, but also for the function of poetic memory. On the one hand, it is quite noteworthy that Virgil's Elysian fields are home, first and foremost, to those who perform memorable deeds (heroes) and to those who preserve memories of those deeds (poets).Footnote ⁶⁰ On the other, the very fact that the radical transcendence of time between Homeric Greece and Augustan Rome is achieved here on the basis of the idea of metempsychosis constitutes an ingenious intertextual gesture towards Virgil's Roman epic predecessor Ennius, who by means of his notorious somnia Pythagorea in the prologue to the Annals could present himself as a reincarnation of Homer.Footnote ⁶¹

Virgil, however, not only extends this composite Pythagorean vision of the Homeric and the Ennian epics into the time of Augustus, but also endows the resulting image with notable ritual and monumental overtones. The procession of Roman heroes, which Aeneas witnesses in the underworld, has sometimes been compared both to a triumphal procession and to a monumental memorialization thereof.Footnote ⁶² But the succession of heroes in the underworld does not simply look like a series of generic statues. Conspicuously enough, the division of the figures into descendents of Aeneas (= ancestors of Augustus) and other significant Roman statesmen clearly anticipates the arrangement of statues in a specific Augustan triumphal monument built after the completion of the Aeneid — namely on the Forum of Augustus.Footnote ⁶³ Besides, Anchises’ deictic gestures, coupled with his brief explanations of each figure's particular achievements in broadening the empire's boundaries, make the Heldenschau retrospectively appear like a virtual tour of the future Forum of Augustus, consisting in viewing the statues and reading both their identifying tituli and the elogia enumerating the represented figures’ deeds.Footnote ⁶⁴ Relying on his prophetic ability, Anchises transforms these statue-like — mute and essentially motionless — images into carriers of rich temporal and spatial information, which enables the viewer to see behind every figure a specific military campaign contributing to Rome's expansion — the process culminating in the figure of Augustus, which indeed stands for a veritable imperium sine fine, for Rome synonymous with the entire known world.Footnote ⁶⁵

What one is thus made to see by looking at this series of statue-like images is nothing less than the growth of the Roman Empire. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Anchises ultimately declares Rome to be a notional work of art and its rulers to be notional artists. What is more, he explicitly contrasts the characteristically Roman art of empire-building and just governance (6.651–3 ‘tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento / (hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem, / parcere subjectis et debellare superbos’) with the Greek arts, among which he singles out the creation of deceptively live-looking statues, traditionally associated with Daedalus (6.847–8 ‘excudent alii spirantia mollius aera / (credo equidem), vivos ducent de marmore vultus’).Footnote ⁶⁶ Aeneas, cast as a deceitful mimetic image — as a Trojan horse of sorts — in the first four books of the Aeneid, is implicitly presented here as such a proto-Roman artist, who as a consequence becomes radically opposed to Daedalus, the creator of clever subterfuges, of notional Trojan horses.Footnote ⁶⁷ In retrospect, this implied contrast between Aeneas and Daedalus makes the images on the doors of Apollo's temple in Cumae appear highly relevant to Aeneas’ ongoing transformation from a Greek artwork (and a Homeric epic hero) into the prototype of a Roman empire-builder: all these images — Pasiphae's wooden cow (a particularly scurrilous version of a Trojan-horse-like subterfuge, placed in an erotic context), the Labyrinth (a kind of man-made underworld), and the thread (a symbol both of the male hero's rescue by a woman and the woman's lovelorn tragedy, for Theseus ends up breaking Ariadne's heart in the same way as Aeneas breaks Dido's)Footnote ⁶⁸ — indeed echo different elements of Aeneas’ story, which he is in the process of leaving behind, as he proceeds to earn heroic glory in the triumphs of the Aeneid’s second half.

As was the case with Daedalus’ temple, the triumphal imagery of the Heldenschau is, however, thoroughly tinged with tragic overtones.Footnote ⁶⁹ The conjunction between triumph and grief particularly comes to the fore at the end of the scene, when Aeneas notices among the other heroes the figure of Augustus’ young heir Marcellus (6.863–6). The young Marcellus, unlike all other heroes frozen in the underworld at the moment of their highest glory, is presented here as if literally attending his own funeral.Footnote ⁷⁰ As if to stress both the contrast and the intimate connection between triumphs and funerals, this funerary procession is immediately preceded by the appearance of Marcellus’ namesake, M. Claudius Marcellus, who, wearing the spolia opima, is most emphatically portrayed as a triumphator.Footnote ⁷¹ This final image of the Heldenschau completes the transformation of the triumphal procession of future Roman heroes into a notional pompa funebris consisting of imagines of Marcellus’ (and Augustus’) ancestors.Footnote ⁷² As a result, what at first may appear to be just a locus of triumph again, as in Daedalus’ temple, becomes a locus of mourning as well. Unlike in Daedalus’ temple, however, the melancholy colouring is not an afterthought superimposed on the purportedly celebratory artefact by the narrator's poetic memory, but an integral part of a single emotionally complex prophetic vision.Footnote ⁷³

III THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO ON THE PALATINE

A similar intertwining between triumph and mourning also determines the progression of the Aeneid’s second half. And once again, the text underscores this inherent emotional ambivalence by evoking the image of a temple. This time, however, the image conjured up is not that of an imaginary artefact serving to arrange the reader's intertextual memories into a complex meaningful pattern, but that of a monument empirically familiar to Augustan readers — the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, whose construction has already been anticipated in Aeneas’ promise to the Sibyl in Aeneid 6 (69–76).

Aeneas’ advent in Pallanteum — the future site of Rome — in Aeneid 8 coincides with a celebration of the annual festival of Hercules based on the aetiological myth of Hercules’ murder of Cacus.Footnote ⁷⁴ Curiously enough, Aeneas gradually emerges in the course of this ceremony as a kind of Hercules redivivusFootnote ⁷⁵ and thus effectively fulfils the priests’ prayer soliciting Hercules to appear before them (8.302 ‘et nos et tua dexter adi pede sacra secundo’).Footnote ⁷⁶ What the priests’ prayer additionally implies is that Aeneas is now expected notionally to re-enact Hercules’ murder of Cacus. The subsequent narrative, in which Aeneas is made to fight against the Cacus-like figure of Mezentius (8.7 ‘contemptor deorum’), who poses a great threat to Pallanteum and whom Evander portrays as a veritable bloodthirsty monster (8.481–91), and against Turnus, whose cruelty, too, can occasionally be compared to that of Cacus,Footnote ⁷⁷ does reveal Aeneas as a worthy imitator of Hercules.

But there is a further level of re-enactment superimposed on the ritual framework of Aeneid 8. From the very first moment of Aeneas’ stay in Pallanteum, we are encouraged to exercise double vision — both to discern the future glory of Rome behind the descriptions of modest pre-historical living conditions and to see the primitive past behind the familiar lavish cityscape: what Aeneas sees when he disembarks from his ship are a citadel and a few scattered houses; what we are used to observing in the same location is ‘the Roman power that equals the sky’;Footnote ⁷⁸ but what the text makes us perceive is both at the same time.Footnote ⁷⁹ This elision of the temporal gap between the mythical past and the empirical present serves to pave the way for the introduction of the images of Augustus on the shield of Aeneas at the end of Book 8. The fact that Aeneas is portrayed here as holding in his hands images of several centuries of Roman history, simultaneously present within the narrow confines of a portable material object, clearly echoes and reifies Jupiter's timeless perception of myth and history in Book 1.Footnote ⁸⁰ But in juxtaposition, and by analogy, with the ritual setting of the Pallantean festival of Hercules, these images additionally emphasize the status of history as a re-enactment of myth.

The central image of the shield is tripartite: it consists of the representation of the naval battle of Actium in the middle (‘in medio’) flanked by the scenes depicting defeated Cleopatra fleeing to Egypt and Augustus celebrating a triumph in Rome.Footnote ⁸¹ It is quite noteworthy that the battle is presented here as taking place not only between its human protagonists, but also between the theriomorphic monstrous gods of Egypt (8.698 ‘deum monstra et latrator Anubis’) and the Graeco-Roman anthropomorphic gods, among whom it is, quite conspicuously, Apollo who delivers the decisive final blow (8.704–5). Even more importantly, the celebration of Augustus’ triumph, which involves sacrifices and the singing of hymns at three hundred Roman temples (8.714–19), finds its culmination at Apollo's temple on the Palatine, where Augustus is portrayed as receiving spoils from the entire conquered world (8.720–8).Footnote ⁸² Quite tellingly, with this localization of the triumphal ritual we find ourselves again at the place where Aeneas participated in the festival of Hercules.Footnote ⁸³ The unity of space, already emphatically stressed in the description of Aeneas’ tour of Pallanteum, indirectly turns Augustus’ triumph not only into a symbolic image of his victory,Footnote ⁸⁴ but also into a re-enactment of the myth-and-ritual conglomerate consisting of Hercules and Aeneas, which was established earlier in the book.Footnote ⁸⁵ This conjunction is further deepened by the way Augustus’ victory is presented in the description of the shield, where Augustus, too, is portrayed as defeating almost subhuman monsters.Footnote ⁸⁶ It thus begins to transpire that the relationship between the Aeneid and Augustus’ triumph over Antony and Cleopatra is analogous to that between the Herculeid performed in Pallanteum (8.288–302) and Aeneas’ triumph over Turnus: just as Aeneas ‘ritually’ re-enacts Hercules’ triumph over Cacus, so Augustus re-enacts both Hercules’ and Aeneas’ victories.Footnote ⁸⁷

It is of utmost significance that both the death of Pallas and the revenge that Aeneas takes for it on Turnus are effectively inscribed in the ritual framework of the triumphal celebrations of Aeneid 8. Naturally, Evander, sending his young son Pallas into battle as Aeneas’ companion in Aeneid 8, prays for his safe return, as he hopes for the triumphal conclusion of his son's involvement in this campaign (8.560–83). Before he is killed by Turnus, Pallas in effect echoes the priests’ prayer to Hercules in Aeneid 8 by asking the demigod to enable him to triumph over his enemy,Footnote ⁸⁸ while Aeneas bemoans the impending funeral as a tragic substitute for the triumph expected by Evander.Footnote ⁸⁹ Pallas’ funeral, which takes up a great portion of Aeneid 11, takes place at the future site of Augustus’ temple of Apollo on the Palatine, thus turning it, too, into a place that triggers conflicting emotions, not only joy, but also, in equal measure, grief.Footnote ⁹⁰

To underscore its emotional complexity at this juncture, the narrative once again engages with an intertextually polyvalent pictorial image. Conspicuously enough, Turnus’ killing of Pallas and Aeneas’ killing of Turnus are tied together by the image of the Danaids murdering their husbands, which decorates Pallas' golden sword-belt (10.497–8 ‘impressumque nefas: una sub nocte iugali / caesa manus iuvenum foede thalamique cruenti’): Turnus’ despoiling Pallas of this sword-belt is singled out by the text as a presage of Turnus’ own death (10.503–5 ‘Turno tempus erit magno cum optaverit emptum / intactum Pallanta, et cum spolia ista diemque / oderit’), while Aeneas’ recognition of these images in the final scene of the poem is presented as the primary reason for his decision to proceed with the killing of Turnus (12.940–52).

The image of the Danaids is intrinsically capable of triggering quite diverse associations.Footnote ⁹¹ By the time Virgil wrote the Aeneid, the myth had received two major interpretations in literature and art. The fifty daughters of Danaus, forced into marriage by their cousins, the sons of Danaus’ brother Aegyptus, and, on their father's instigation, killing them all but one on their wedding night, were, on the one hand, understood in the original Greek myth as an image of filial piety and justified self-defence.Footnote ⁹² On the other hand, in Roman poetry the Danaids inextricably belonged to the standard list of those punished for their unspeakable crimes by perennially toiling in the underworld — carrying water in sieve-like vessels.Footnote ⁹³ Although Virgil fails to mention the Danaids in his description of the underworld in Aeneid 6,Footnote ⁹⁴ he by and large seems to align himself with the Roman tradition by portraying the Danaids’ deed as an act of nefas. It is worth noting, however, that the unequivocally negative valuation of this motif in the Aeneid is primarily due to the dramatic context, which encourages one to draw connections between the Danaids’ murder of their husbands and Turnus’ murder of Pallas.Footnote ⁹⁵ Similarly, it is natural for Aeneas to associate the image of the Danaids with his memory of Pallas when he despoils Turnus of the baldric in the final scene of the poem (12.945–6 ‘oculis postquam monimenta doloris / exuviasque hausit’). It is, at the same time, equally conspicuous that Virgil allows us to view the image of the Danaids not only through the sympathetic eyes of someone moved by the nefas of Pallas’ death, but also from the perspectives both of Pallas himself and of Turnus, both of whom wear the baldric in succession and, for that reason, implicitly endow its imagery with a less negative meaning.

The baldric begins its travel through the final books of the Aeneid as Pallas’ possession. Now, is it at all conceivable that Pallas would have worn on his sword-belt either a representation of what he himself would have regarded as a nefas or a symbolic representation of himself as a potential victim? Quite unlikely per se, it becomes even more so, if one considers the Virgilian passage's most obvious Homeric intertext — the description of Heracles’ baldric in Odyssey 11. Here, the images on the baldric are clearly designed to instil fear in the enemy by their portrayal of dangerous animals, battles, and killings of men.Footnote ⁹⁶ These images, in other words, serve as a transparent expression of their carrier's frightening character as a warrior. The murderous Danaids are obviously no less threatening than the images on the Homeric baldric. For that reason, a similar effect could easily be read into the baldric worn by Virgil's Pallas, who, despite his emphatically stressed youthful femininity (comparable to that of the Danaids), is ready to fulfil his father's command to take up the sword (the way the Danaids do).Footnote ⁹⁷ Since immediately before his death Pallas prays to Hercules to assist him in killing and despoiling Turnus and since Turnus, as we shall see, is portrayed as brandishing the image of Io on his shield, which clearly stresses his links with Egypt (cf. the sons of Aegyptus), the image of the Danaids all the more appears like an expression of menace directed in the context specifically at Turnus.

The killing and despoiling of Pallas by Turnus is simultaneously an act of realignment of the baldric's images. Once in Turnus’ possession, the baldric is placed in a thoroughly different context and develops a different set of connotations. In fact, the Danaids become part of a significantly more coherent narrative unity here by being combined with the images on Turnus’ shield. Represented on that shield, as we learn from Aeneid 7, is the long story (‘argumentum ingens’) of Io — already transformed into a cow, guarded by Argus, and mourned by her inconsolable father Inachus.Footnote ⁹⁸ The emphasis on the ‘hugeness’ of the argumentum makes one think, in addition to the three elements singled out in the description, of the entire extent of the Io myth, as known for instance from Aeschylus — her wanderings around the world until she reaches Egypt, her ‘immaculate conception’ by Zeus’ touch, and her birth of Epaphos (Αesch., PV 640–876). When worn by Turnus next to his shield, the images of Danaus’ daughters, who, along with the sons of Aegyptus, belong to Epaphos’ rich mythological progeny, constitute a seamless continuation of this argumentum ingens. Moreover, when juxtaposed with the shield, the baldric effectively makes the story come full circle by depicting the return of the Danaids from Egypt to Io's hometown of Argos.Footnote ⁹⁹ Most importantly, however, both Io and Danaus count among Turnus’ ancestors.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As a result, Turnus ends up wearing on his body a cursory representation of the most salient moments of his family's tragic mythological past.Footnote ¹⁰¹ From this perspective, the Danaids almost naturally belong to Turnus, so that even the name of Turnus’ father Daunus begins to sound, in keeping with Virgil's usual propensity for poetic etymology,Footnote ¹⁰² like an etymological wordplay on the name of his distant ancestor Danaus: Turnus is not only a notional Danaid, but is also justifiably proud of it. In addition, irrespective of whether in Aeneas’, or the sympathetic reader's, eyes the Danaids appear like an epitome of Turnus’ nefas, to Turnus himself they are a particularly welcome addition to the overall pictorial programme of his armour, as they allow him to express more cogently his determination to kill Aeneas, who, at least from Turnus’ own perspective, is engaged, not unlike the sons of Aegyptus, in unlawfully forcing a marriage upon Lavinia.

The confrontation between Turnus and Aeneas in the last scene of the poem is simultaneously a confrontation between the pictorial programmes depicted on the two warriors’ shields — the Greek mythological past on the shield of Turnus and the Roman historical future on the shield of Aeneas; the quasi-cartographical emblem of the Greek East (the argumentum ingens of Io's journey from Greece to Egypt) on the shield of Turnus and the battle of Actium prominently positioned in the middle of the shield of Aeneas, flanked by the defeat of Egypt and the triumph of Rome. This clear distribution between past and future, as well as between East and West, is alone sufficient to encode symbolically the inevitability of Aeneas’ victory. In addition, the character of the images themselves underscores this inevitability even more. Since Turnus flaunts his connection with Egypt by carrying the image of Io on his shield, while Aeneas’ shield contains a depiction of Augustus’ triumph over Cleopatra, who emphatically looks like Isis, the mythological double of Io,Footnote ¹⁰³ Aeneas’ killing of Turnus becomes essentially an aetiological prefiguration of this Augustan triumphal imagery.

The image of the Danaids itself, however, fails to produce any clear-cut allegorical result in the context: Turnus can, with equal justification, be understood both as a son of Aegyptus (cf. his associations with Io and Cleopatra) and as a Danaid (by virtue of his genealogical link with Danaus), just as Aeneas can be cast both as a Danaid killing a son of AegyptusFootnote ¹⁰⁴ and as a just punisher sending the Danaids into the underworld to suffer eternally (cf. 12.932 ‘vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras’).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Such one-to-one identifications do not seem to be the point here, however. Now that both the war and the narrative are over, Aeneas, in contrast to Pallas and Turnus, can have no intention of using the baldric in battle and of communicating with its help a transparent menacing message to his enemies. Instead, he is concerned with nothing but returning the spoils that used to belong to Pallas (12.947–8 ‘tune hinc spoliis indute meorum / eripiare mihi?’). This is, conspicuously enough, Aeneas’ final action, which marks the end of the poem. The images on the baldric, in other words, can play no further rôle in the temporal progression of the narrative and can, for that reason, only be meaningfully combined with other static images — the images on Aeneas’ shield.

The final image of the poem (Aeneas’ despoiling of Turnus) visibly integrates the image of the Danaids into the pictorial programme of his shield and, more specifically, juxtaposes it with the image of the triumphal temple of Apollo on the Palatine. Moreover, the very act of Aeneas’ taking spoils explicitly reproduces the shield's image of Augustus accepting spoils at the threshold of that very temple. Aeneas can thus be perceived as symbolically dedicating the baldric to Apollo.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Most importantly, however, the Danaids in this context inevitably conjure up a memory of the portico of the Danaids — perhaps the most memorable part of the pictorial programme of Augustus’ temple of Apollo: according to Propertius, it was so dazzling that it could even make one forget a rendezvous with one's mistress.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The analogy may in fact be even more compelling, since the fifty (or forty-nine?) statues of the Danaids displayed between the columns of that portico are likely to have also been spoils plundered by Augustus’ army from some rich city of the Greek Orient.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ It thus begins to look as though, by combining the baldric with his shield, Aeneas in effect enacts the symbolic addition of the portico of the Danaids to the temple of Apollo and thus not only completes the building programme left unfinished on the shield by Vulcan, but also effectively fulfils the promise he gave the Sibyl in Book 6 (69–76). As a result, Aeneas forcefully transfers the image of the Danaids from Turnus’ mythological past into the reader's Augustan present.

Quite significantly, the effect of the figurative addition of the Danaids to the representation of Augustus’ temple of Apollo is similar to that produced by Aeneas as a viewer of the paintings in Juno's temple and by Virgil as a describer of the doors of Daedalus’ temple.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As we have seen, the triumphal images of the Carthaginian temple are made less straightforward by Aeneas’ presence both in and in front of them, while it is Virgil's language that turns Daedalus’ temple into a memorial not only of his artistic skill but also of his personal grief. In the case of the Palatine temple, Virgil achieves a similar effect by somewhat different means. He does not conjure up the mental image of an imaginary monument by describing it in detail. Instead, he stages within his narrative a symbolic drama of constructing a civil war memorial, which can most cogently convey the inextricable mixture of triumph and mourning. Of course, it is the image of the Danaids that in the last scene of the Aeneid triggers Aeneas’ final blow and becomes a symbol of his triumph. Thus, it could in principle be perceived as a further enhancement of the triumphal imagery of the shield. At the same time, this image arrives at the poem's finale burdened with emotionally complex memories of the unflinching determination to kill and to die in battle displayed by the young men on both sides of the war — by Pallas and by Turnus in equal measure. Both of them fight and die to defend their mutually exclusive ‘truths’. By travelling from the one to the other and by successively symbolizing both of these truths, the inherently tragic, incongruously split image of the Danaids, who murder their kin (cousins/husbands) to obey their father, cannot really be forced to function as a transparent moralizing allegory anymore. Instead, its integration into the triumphal context of the shield creates a multi-dimensional image that stages the recipient's encounter with the moral complexity of war in general and of civil war in particular — both its dire necessity and the high price one inevitably has to pay for embracing that necessity.

The figurative temple constructed by Virgil at the end of the Aeneid is thus, like the Carthaginian temple of Juno, Daedalus’ temple of Apollo, and Aeneas’ Heldenschau in the underworld, both a triumphal and a funerary monument. As always, Virgil's narrative and the pictorial images that he makes part of his narrative mutually complement each other. And it is precisely this tight nexus between narrative and image that allows Virgil to bridge the gap between the mythological past and the historical present. On the one hand, the inherently ambivalent image of the Danaids forces one to contemplate the war waged by Aeneas in Italy from different viewpoints at once — to celebrate Aeneas’ triumph, and yet to do so without losing the ability to sympathize with his enemies, who after all are also destined to become part of the common Latin people once the war is over.Footnote ¹¹⁰ On the other hand, the fact that the text emphatically enables us to mourn not only Pallas but also TurnusFootnote ¹¹¹ functions as a comment on the Augustan triumphal imagery, indirectly invoked in the last scene of the Aeneid, and thus turns Augustus’ victory at Actium, too, into an occasion for significantly more complex emotions than those implied by the purely celebratory temple description in the Georgics prologue.