Homeric Effects in Vergil's Narrative by Barchiesi Alessandro; Marchesi Ilaria; Hardie Philip

Author:Barchiesi, Alessandro; Marchesi, Ilaria; Hardie, Philip
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

APPENDIX

The Lament of Juturna

At once sympathetic and blinded by love, compelled to act but conscious of her hopelessness, Juturna in Aeneid 12 embodies all the contradictions of Vergil’s heroic world. Before her intervention in the action that will bring only fruitless delay, this “goddess of ponds and sonorous streams” makes her appearance marked by passivity and grief:

… lacrimas oculis Iuturna profundit

terque quaterque manu pectus percussit honestum.

“Non lacrumis hoc tempus,” ait Saturnia Iuno;

“adcelera et fratrem, si quis modus, eripe morti …”

(12.154–57)

[Juturna’s eyes pour tears as she three and four times beat her noble breast with her hand. “This is no time for tears,” said Saturnian Juno. “Hurry and, if there’s any way, save your brother from death … ”]

Her silent weeping may recall another figure intermediate between the divine and human, Hercules in book 10,1 but the gesture that accompanies her weeping is typical of feminine goos (“lament”). Juturna knows full well that her brother’s end is nearing, but she tries to postpone it many times: after she abandons him, obeying heaven’s mandate, Turnus’s last link to life is broken—not unlike how, in the Iliad, the departure of his protector seals Hector’s fate (“… Hector’s final day sank / and finished down in Hades; Phoebus Apollo left him then”; 22.212–13). Between these two decisive focal points of action, the divine scene of reconciliation and the concluding duel, is an episode that has never particularly stirred the interest of Vergilian scholars: Juturna receiving the dark warning of Jupiter—his sending of the Dira—and raising a last protest against her brother’s fate. Reasons for this scene’s critical “misfortune” are not hard to divine. If epic must above all be action and choice, a plot involving human, heroic, and divine exploits, Juturna’s monologue is left outside this definition. Suspended between impotent protest and agonizing surrender, the expression of a character divinely omniscient but limited and overwhelmed by human emotions, this rhesis (“speech”) might seem like a simple moment of epic delay to critics determined to follow uncompromisingly the main thread of the Sendung (“mission”) of Rome. From this perspective, which privileges the “Olympian” mediation between Jupiter and Juno as the poem’s ideological axis, Juturna’s protest can only appear as a kind of unresolved remainder; more clearly still, Juturna’s sacrifice quickly sums up a price Juno has already decided to pay, one with its own important compensations in the renunciation Jupiter imposes on the Trojans. The perspective is not much different if we choose to begin with comparison to the Iliad: here too the episode is reduced to an ancillary function, petering out in the Apollo-Juturna parallelism already sketched out earlier. From a morphological perspective, it is not even clear how to label this speech that no one hears and leading to no choice; Heinze’s definition (“lament-monody used in an irregular situation”) is above all an admission of embarrassment, even if the terms lament and monody provide some concrete comparative concepts. So it seems the only way to proceed is to take at face value, without

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