Brayden Hirsch, Boston University
Vergil’s attentiveness to aural detail has been well-known for some time (Roiron 1908, Whately 1954, Fratantuono 2014, Thomas 2014), but the effects of this attentiveness are far from obvious. After all, interpreters tend to attribute disparate functions to the sounds of the poem, treating them either as agents of vividness, scattered throughout multisensory descriptive passages (the majority view), or alternatively as privations, non-sights with which the poet makes “darkness visible” (e.g. in Burke’s Enquiry, or Johnson 1976). Both observations may well capture an aspect of how Vergil describes sounds. However, it is the idea that Vergil appeals to sounds for vividness which seems to currently dominate, as recent interpreters (influenced by Shafer 1977) have attempted to recollect the disparate aural details of the poem into a vivid “soundscape” (Curtis 2017, Butler 2018, Hope 2018). However valuable, our abstraction of “soundscape” does not necessarily illuminate Vergil’s poetic technique itself, and so here I propose an alternate approach, considering the relation of Vergilian sound effects to a particular thematic element of the Aeneid: blindness.
Although interpreters have frequently noted a blindness motif in Book 3 (Putnam 1990, Gibson 1999), the role of sound effects in constructing this motif remains underappreciated. As the Trojans wander “blindly” on the open sea (3.200-4, 706), the idea of sailing by what they can hear across the water, but cannot clearly see, becomes constituitive of the drama of the book. Both the Harpies and Scylla are noisy creatures who emerge from their figuratively “blind” hiding-places (caecis latebris at 232 and 424); the Trojans hear the roar of Mt. Etna, but only from afar (555-77); at the climax of the book it is the sound of oars which alerts blind Polyphemus to the Trojans’ presence (666-74). I suggest that the poet arranges the sound effects of Book 3—with all the clamores and clangores (128, 226, 313, 524, 566, 672), gemitus (39, 555, 577, 664), and sonitus (238, 584, 648, 669)—not so much for the sake of vividness as for its exact opposite, blindness. The accumulation of aural detail evokes the figurative (and often literal) blindness of his characters, while reinforcing a sublime darkness at especially obscure moments of the poem.
With reference to other sound-heavy passages from elsewhere in the Aeneid, I conclude by showing how the alignment of sound and blindness in Book 3 opens up new ways to consider the effects of aural details throughout the poem—especially, I argue, whenever the poet invokes sounds in the absence of visual detail. This connection of Vergil’s auditory imagination to thematic blindness points the way to more concrete interpretations of sound effects in the Aeneid, while also contributing to the larger “sensory turn” in recent studies of the poem (Smith 2005, Reed 2007, Hope 2018, McAuley 2021) and Roman antiquity more generally (Bettini 2008, Butler 2015, Betts 2017).