Fierce Groves for Doubtful Times

This paper examines the grove of Faunus (Aen. 7.81-91) as part of an Italy seen as liminal space in which the human is entwined with the natural and dangerous divine. The grove is fearsome in its connection to the Underworld but also the place where all Italy “seek answers when in doubtful situations” (7.85-6) and the priest converses with gods and the Underworld itself (7.90-91). The characterization of this landscape opens up new viewpoints for ecocriticism in general and studies of the poem. In a recent volume, Rigby and Goodbody point to Europe’s history of dense population and cultivation as facilitating “perspectives departing from traditional ecocritical assumptions about the dichotomy of nature and culture” (3). Vergil does the same by presenting an integration of wildness and culture, grounded in numinous landscapes.

The origins of environmentalism in the 19th century American West (Cronon, Mazel) resonate doubly with the tale of Aeneas entering Italy, but Vergil shows the land both as new territory and as ancestral homeland, far from “wilderness.” Furthermore, Vergil’s landscape is full of divinity that interacts with humanity, quite unlike the passivity of “wilderness” that does not respond to an individual entering it (Mazel 140). While Vergil localizes the relationship between gods and men in the landscape, he does not frame humans as an integral part of a natural world, which is a contrast to various scientific approaches and indigenous “cosmovisions” (Adamson & Monani). Nor, however, does this landscape participate in a duality of human versus nature, but rather in a potentially fragile alliance. Vergil’s wild Italy is strange, fearsome, and foundational, for it gives birth to Rome. This is ominous, as made explicit by the identification of Circe as an ancestor (7. 189-91), but not exclusively so, for this dea saeva (7.19), like any Roman god, brings gifts as well as danger (Segal; Moorton; Aresi).

The site of the future Rome also held a grove, frightening and numinous, but the emphasis there is on replacement (8.348). Kliszcz and Komorowska point to the contrast of aurea and horrida as signifying that “as humans put … their stamp on the wood, the respective space becomes better, closer to the divine” (46). The improvement is clear, but divinity is not solely in the golden, and there are costs to civilization. Armstrong (90) rightly highlights the ignorance of these earlier inhabitants (8.352) that echoes the uncertainty about Faunus’s role (83). There is also, however, a contrast between this fearful ignorance and the comfort of Faunus’ grove, suggesting that intimacy with the divine was lost. While the intimacy with land and god in Italy is presented as ambivalent, it thus speaks all the more, perhaps, to current interest in bridging the chasm between nature and human that is embedded in ecocriticism. Campbell (135) argues that our desire for lost intimacy with nature is central to ecocriticism. In the Aeneid, it is latent rather than lost, and it offers new ways of looking at landscapes human cultures exist in.