Virgil's Homeric Lens by Dekel Edan;

Author:Dekel, Edan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

4 Virgilian Reflection

Met’ Odusseôs

In his account of the origins of Rome, Dionysius of Halicarnassus reports the following curious story about Aeneas and Odysseus (Ant. Rom. 1.72.2):

ὁ δὲ τὰς ἱερείας τὰς ἐν Ἄργει καὶ τὰ καθ’

ἑκάστην πραχθέντα συναγαγὼν Αἰνείαν φησὶν

ἐκ Μολοττῶν εἰς Ἰταλίαν ἐλθόντα μετ’ Ὀδυσσέως

οἰκιστὴν γενέσθαι τῆς πόλεως, ὀνομάσαι δ’ αὐτὴν

ἀπὸ μιᾶς τῶν Ἰλιάδων Ῥώμης.

But the author of the history of the priestesses at Argos,

and of what happened under each of them, says that

Aeneas came into Italy from the land of the Molossians

and became the founder of the city with Odysseus,

which he named after Romê, one of the Trojan women.

The source Dionysius is referring to is the fourth-century BCE historian Hellanicus of Lesbos’ Priestesses of Hera in Argos (FGrHist 4 F 84). Later on, Dionysius says that Damastes of Sigeum and others agree with Hellanicus’ account (Ant. Rom. 1.72.3). If the attribution is correct, then this represents the earliest known version of the founding of Rome. Whether the precise details of this story make any sense within the morass of fragmentary information that constitutes the pre-Virgilian Aeneas legend has been discussed in detail by scholars,1 but the central idea that Aeneas founded the city “with Odysseus” (met’ Odusseôs) has a particular figurative resonance with my own argument. The notion of the Odyssey as a crucial partner in Virgil’s intertextual project is central to my thesis, but in the previous chapter, I attempted to demonstrate how this partnership is as much a rivalry as it is an alliance of narrative techniques. By navigating a middle path between slavish imitation and outright rejection of his Homeric model, Virgil establishes a system that mirrors the Odyssey’s own attitude toward the Iliad. The rivalry between Aeneas and Odysseus as narrators of their own postwar experiences takes its cue from Odysseus’ figurative competition with Demodocus’ quasi-Iliadic songs. Like both of those competitors, Aeneas tells a story that engages key moments in the Iliad without actually narrating any of the events from the poem. Even his earlier decipherment of the murals on the temple of Juno presents only an allusive account of key Iliadic moments and contains much that stands outside that tradition as well. Virgil reads the Iliad with the help of the Odyssey, and consequently, Aeneas defines the post-Iliadic experience together with Odysseus (met’ Odusseôs).

However, there is a variant in one of the older and better manuscripts of Dionysius that reads μετ’ Ὀδυσσέα with the accusative instead of genitive.2 Apart from the intriguing literal interpretation that Aeneas was only the second founder of Rome after Odysseus had already established the city (met’ Odussea), this alternative reflects another aspect of the Virgilian intertextual system. Both Aeneas and Odysseus are hurled into the Iliadic aftermath at the same point in fictive history, but they do not occupy the same place in the causal hierarchy. While the Iliadic prophecy of Poseidon requires the basic narrative of Aeneas’ survival, the Odyssey provides an even more immediate motivation by attributing the actual destruction of Troy to Odysseus. Although the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.