Virgil and Religion

This paper presents a reading of episodes in Aeneid 4 and 5 involving Juno and Venus. Its thesis is that cooperation between Juno and Venus makes sense in an episode set in Carthage, whereas conflict between them makes sense when the scene shifts to Sicily. The reason is that these goddesses were worshipped differently in Carthage, Sicily, and Rome.

Virgil, Aen. 4.173-197 contains a famous description of the goddess Fama, who is imagined as an amalgam of body parts. She is a singular creature created out of pluralities: a plethora of wings, eyes, tongues, mouths, and ears. She grows to span the distance from earth to heaven, moves with unfathomable speed, and is ever-vigilant.

In the Aeneid, Vergil gives special attention to two particularly marginalized characters: that is, Dido and Amata, characters who are marginalized by their foreignness, their gender, and furthermore by their threat to the mission of Aeneas and, thus, the mission of Rome. There has been much treatment of Dido, as well as some regarding Amata, albeit less (e.g., Zarker 1969, Burke 1976).

Ceremonies that constitute the felt strong closure in Iliad 24 (supplication, lamentation, funeral, funeral feast), broadly “structures of care” (M. Lynn-George), affirm the meaningfulness of human lives, the care of (some) gods for human beings, and of (some) human beings for each other. In Aeneid 12 structures—not to mention “care”—fail on both the human and divine level.

This paper argues that the central virtue of pietas in the Aeneid frequently responds to Lucretius’ redefinition of this “very Roman concept” (Austin 1971, at Aen. 1.10) in the De Rerum Natura. Scholars have long recognized Epicurean elements in the Aeneid (Mellinghoff-Bourgerie 1990; Dyson 1996; Gordon 1998; Adler 2003; chs.