1. More Background: Household gods, ancestor cult, pius Aeneas

• Lares and Penates: "holy things and household gods": house and state
• Masks of the ancestors: ancestor cult
• pietas, pius Aeneas
• Duty to gods, family, state (the three are, to a Roman, more or less inseparable)
• Note how orderly: the cosmos
• Aeneas is a very different kind of hero, one for whom we, perhaps -- a nation of reckless individualists (or so we like to think) -- have less natural affinity than for the Homeric heroes ("contrast between the intensely personal preoccupations of the Homeric heroes and the public responsibility through which Aeneas' sense of honor finds its expression" - W A Camps, 9)
• Suffering personally, willing to subordinate his own interests and desires to his duty to state and family
• the State as Family for Romans
• [minor digression: the Palladium: the cult image of the goddess Minerva = Pallas = Greek Athena, a cult statue said to have descended from heaven, and on which the safety of Troy depended. Ulysses and Diomedes steal the statue in an escapade towards the end of the war, thereby insuring the doom of Troy. Supposedly, according to Sinon, they defiled the statue-- touching it with bloody hands, thus had to build the Trojan Horse in recompense ... or so the (Greek) story goes.]

2. Book two. Flashback to Troy: why you can never go home again

Context: spoken by Father Aeneas at a banquet to the ever more sympathetic Queen Dido in Carthage: how is this like, how different from the Odyssey?

a. Trojan war from a Trojan point of view: Ulysses, Sinon

We certainly see a very different side of the Greeks, esp. Ulysses

• Cory Lundberg: "It was nice to hear the story told from a Trojan point of view"
• Joell Molina: "will they constantly be bashing the Greeks making them look like the bad guys?"

The Sinon episode: Laocoon, snakes, Greek guile, drunken Trojans, attack

Note the snake imagery, which ties in with the major theme of Deception:

• Laocoon, pp. 36f. and the snakes from the sea
• from Tenedos (where Greek fleet hides)
• crests blood-red, eyes ablaze with blood and fire
• Sinon, cf. sinuous: the "coils" of the snake
• Trojan Horse, "fat with weapons" (the Latin suggests pregnant), "glides" and "winds" up into the city (again, from the Latin: not clearly represented in your translation on p. 37)
• a ruinous sleep, like a snake, has "wound" its way into the hearts of the Trojans
• When the Trojans in desperation adopt Greek guiles, and they too are compared to a snake
• Pyrrhus is like a snake (see below)
• Note how Roman is (p. 36) the introduction to the Sinon episode: "Such was the art of perjured Sinon, so insidious, we trusted what he told. So we were taken in by snares, forced tears-- yes, we, whom neither Diomedes nor Achilles could defeat, nor ten long years, a thousand-galleyed fleet." (It's clear that Aeneas and the Trojans are brave, but dooomed.)

Hector appears to Aeneas as a ghost:

• Geoff Geibel: "In lines 371-385, Aeneas describes the haggard appearance of Hector after being killed by Achilles. Why does he use such an elaborate description, and what is the purpose?" (pp. 38-9)

b. Centrality of the family, fall of Troy: the inner sanctum, death of Priam

Note the movement of the image of Troy's fall: from outer to inner, from masses to individuals, from involvement by Aeneas to helpless watching from afar (like a shepherd on a hilltop watching a flame rage through crops): repeatedly (as Matt Cottone alertly notices), it's stated that "weapons are useless for the Trojans" -- why?

Movement also gives a vivid image of the inner sanctum, almost a womb image (cf. Trojan horse!), certainly one of violation of the "virgin" territory of the inner family:

pp. 44-45: Pyrrhus - snake (! note phallic associations! violation!) - "inner house is naked now": but not at all comic like e.g. the Nausicaa episode in the Odyssey

The central event: Death of Priam

• Kathy Chevalier: "Why does Pyrrhus kill Polites in front of his father, Priam? It seems such an indecent thing to do. Pyrhuss surpasses this horrible act by dragging his father, Praim, through his son's blood and then stabbing him with a sword into his side. Priam is also decapitated. [Are these actions of insensitivity and defilement by Pyrrhus meant to reflect the dragging of Hector's body by his father, Achilles?]"
• Why is this the central event?
• pietas: link to Anchises
• lack of pietas for Greeks (contrast with Trojan-Romans)
• terrible destruction of Troy and all it stands for: need to move on to a new civilization
• brutal savagery of war: not to be celebrated
• the womb symbol, for Troy, is no longer an image of birth and fertility and progenation, but of destruction and savagery
• Pompey the Great, and the image of the head on the shore: links back to the civil wars, to the futile, brutal savagery of war that Vergil and his generation have known too well: links forward to the peacefulness that such savagery can -- finally, at at great price! -- bring, as Vergil and his generation are experiencing in the Augustan Age: pp. 46-47: Aeneid links mythological, heroic-age events to those of the present (and the future)

Escape from Troy (summarize: hidden escape route: flame over Iulus' head)

• Jim Kraly: "Can the scenes with Aeneas' family at the end of book 2 be directly related to the Hector's scene with Andromache and his son in the Iliad?"

3. Book three. Search for a new home

a. Odyssey as backdrop

Goals and purposes of the voyage, attitude of the hero could not be more different, even though very similar

• Both search for home: difference?
• Both are "long-suffering" "much-enduring": difference?
• Fantastic, but not the "light fantastic": cf. story of Polydorus, for instance (to which cf. the auditor, Dido, and her experience with Pygmalion and Sychaeus); lack of hints that these are "tall tales": not necessarily true but traditional, to be considered a unqualified part of the fiction in this heroic journey
• Ryan Bonn: "The journey of Aeneas and the curse from Celaeno is strikingly similar to Odysseus' journey and curse form Polyphemus. Any resemblance or significance?"
• The love-interest: Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa versus Dido: also contrast internally Andromache (that is, the one we see in the Aeneid) with Dido
• This "scripting" of the reader to compare and contrast, and thereby to see what is essentially alike and what is essentially different in this epic is quintessentially Vergilian

b. Helenus, Andromache, and "little Troy" in Epirus (Buthrotum)

• A "toy Troy", with a miniscule copy of the might citadel of Ilium, a dried-up stream named after the river Xanthus, and unimpressive gates patterned on Troy's Scaean Gates. "This pathetic simile has no life or future at all. Its prevailing mood is tears; its attention is fixed on the dead past; and its symbol is the cenotaph of Hector by which Aeneas finds Andromache weeping as he approaches the walls. There is no child of Andromache-- the Greeks killed him at Troy -- ... and Vergil pointedly ignores the young people of the town. It has no future, only a tragic dead past to stir its feelings." [W S Anderson, Art of the Aeneid, 41]
• With this as the central event, preceded by two failed attempts to start a "new Troy" we begin to understand that founding a new Troy is no light task: and one that must focus on future greatness not past glory: tendency of the Aeneid to use the heroic age to focus on the relationship between past, present, and future

From these initial 3 books, we come to understand that the Trojans are bound for Italy by divine command, with the (gradually revealed) promise of a great future for their descendants, and that they bring certain holy symbols of the continuing vitality of the ancient Trojan civilization

Next time: the Tragedy of Dido, and the problem of Aeneas' character; Fate and Gods in the Aeneid