Colin Lacey, Boston University
The episode between Aeneas and Helen in Book 2 of the Aeneid has been hotly debated since antiquity, and many scholars ancient and modern have rejected its authenticity (Goold 1970; Shumilin 2021). Rather than attempting to solve this problem, this paper instead investigates the resonance it displays with its adjacent scenes and the rest of the book as a whole, as well as its parallels to Book 4. Even as Aeneas expresses extreme anger at Helen, the poet’s language draws attention to his striking similarities with her, particularly his tendency to abandon his spouse and to deflect responsibility onto the gods (Grillo 2010; Perkell 2021).
Helen’s fear of retribution, described in 2.571-573, echoes deeply Aeneas’ relationships with Creusa and especially Dido. Aeneas has no access to Helen’s thoughts, but believes that she fears the “anger of her deserted spouse” (deserti coniugis iras, 2.572). This language recalls the scene immediately before the Helen episode, in which Aeneas sees figments of his family: “up came deserted Creusa” into his mind (subiit deserta Creusa, 2.562). Both here and in Creusa’s later appearance as a ghost, Aeneas’ initial reaction is terror, using the same word, obstipui (2.560, 774 ). Aeneas’ presumption of Helen’s fear, then, mirrors his own experience of fear at the sight of his “abandoned spouse.” He later feels the same fear at the thought of Dido’s reaction to his leaving Carthage (4.283 f.; 560-571). Aeneas’ rage towards Helen is cut-short by the intervention of Venus, who tells him that the fall of Troy is not Helen’s or Paris’ fault, but the gods’ (2.601 f.), implicitly eliding her own responsibility. Creusa consoles Aeneas’ worries in similar terms (2.776 ff.), suggesting it was the gods' will that he would escape Troy without her. These deflections of responsibility are apt rehearsals for the defense he will give to Dido (4.356 ff.), whose “marriage” with him, like Paris’ with Helen, was instigated by Venus.
While Aeneas is identified as a “Paris” by Iarbas (4.215), to Dido he is a “Helen,” the person who abandons a spouse. This sort of loose analogy is characteristic of the Aeneid. On the effect, Suzuki (1989, 127) writes “[t]hese shifting parallels function to destabilize our judgments of Virgil’s characters.” In Book 2, the cowering Helen reflects Aeneas’ least heroic behaviors back at him, but at the same time, the identification allows Aeneas to tap into the complex web of traditions on Helen (Blondell 2013, Edmunds 2015). Indeed, his story is rife with similar complexities, and Vergil alludes, for example, to diverse traditions about Aeneas’ loyalty to the Trojan cause (Casali 1999). Thus with remarkable economy, the author of the Helen episode– whether Vergil or another poet– has tied together the themes of abandonment and culpability, and the ambiguities of the passage are reflective of the complex mythological traditions that Aeneas and Helen both represent.