SCS-87: Virgil

In Georgics 4, Clymene sings a song within a song, an epyllion within the epyllion. I argue that the description of Clymene and the Nymphs, an underappreciated moment within the Orpheus-Aristaeus epyllion, is a mise en abyme, a smaller reflection of the larger epyllion.

Achilles and Orestes are well-studied models of mythical vengeance for the Aeneid. Allusions to Achilles and Hector’s duel and Achilles’ Shield are well known (West 1974). Curtis (2017) has shown that the final duel of Book 12 culminates a series of militarized choral scenes drawing on the association of battle with human and cosmic chorality displayed on both Homeric and Virgilian shields (also Hardie 1986). Scholars have also noted evocations of Orestes’ myth throughout the Aeneid (Rebeggiani 2015, Hardie 1991). In this paper I will merge these two models.

Despite the continued efforts to elucidate Homer’s precise influence on Virgil (e.g. Knauer 1964, Barchiesi 1984, Farrell 2021), scholars have overlooked just how literally Virgil translates Homer’s language for divine rescue. In Homer’s Iliad, the verbs σώιζω, “I save,” and ἐξαρπάζω, “I snatch out,” do more than describe a god whisking a hero off to safety: they reflect the traditional fate of that hero.

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).