Fama

The one Ovidian personification taken directly from the Aeneid is Fame, Fama. In the Metamorphoses she appears appropriately at the beginning of book 12 at the point where Ovid sets out to rework the subject matter of the Homeric epics themselves (12.39-63) ^[38] She is the personification of Homeric epos (but also the spirit presiding over Ovid's own retelling of the Homeric epics). In the Aeneid Fame is the most developed example of a personification allegory. She is introduced as a negative force, an evil (malum ) a female demon

spawned by an angry Mother Earth to oppose the dispensation of the masculine ruler of Olympus; yet curiously she also insists on being read as a figure for the male poet's own propagation of words.^[39] As chthonic source of disruption she has strong affinities with Allecto; there is also a marked parallelism between the representation of Fama and that of the Jovian double of Allecto, the Dira whom Jupiter dispatches at the end of book 12 in order to effect a closure within the human narrative.^[40] These connections form part of a wider pattern of association within the Aeneid, and in later Latin epic, between fama, female rumor-mongering, and lament, madness, and infernal demons.^[41] And like Allecto, Fama is a distorter and a shape-shifter, whose twistings and perversions have the effect of transforming the human narrative. For a personification she is notably inhuman; the genealogy that makes of her a sister of the giants Coeus and Enceladus might incline us to visualize her as an anthropomorphic monster, but she is then represented as a far less humanoid monstrum, with a multiplicity of wings, eyes, tongues, mouths, and ears, and in her nocturnal flight and rooftop perching she turns into a kind of bird.

Fama is a linguistic construction of the linguistic slipperiness that has infected the story of Dido at this point. Jon Whitman, in his excellent discussion of Fama, observes that she appears at a "moment of moral and linguistic breakdown,"^[42] immediately after Dido's attempt to impose her own reading on events: "She calls it a wedding, with this name she disguises her fault" (Aeneid 4.172).^[43] But Fama may also be read in a larger context as a figure for the fictional powers of the epic poet himself: Fama herself is self-reflexively caught up in the chain of fama, "as they relate," "ut perhibent" (4.179).^[44] Furthermore the whole Dido and Aeneas story, a meeting that could never have taken place, is notably a fiction of epic fama.

The intervention of Fama in Aeneid 4 is the beginning of a narrative structure, which interrupts the primary action of the Dido and Aeneas story and which continues at 198-221 with the African prince Iarbas's transmission, through prayer, of the human rumors about Dido and Aeneas up to the divine level of Jupiter, an upward motion reversed when Jupiter sends down his conveyor of words, Mercury, as winged messenger-god, the Jovian double of the chthonic Fama, to order Aeneas to leave Carthage. Mercury breaks his downward journey to alight on the weird mount Atlas (246-258). Elsewhere I have analyzed this sequence with reference to the trope of hyperbole (in generic terms, the "greatness" of epic).^[45] I now wish to shift my ground and consider it in the light of the trope of allegory. And allegory, it will appear, is inseparable from metamorphosis.

Right at the beginning hyperbole and metamorphosis are united in the allegorical image of Fama's expansive power: "Small at first through timidity, but she soon raises herself into the sky" (4.176). This is a kind of metamorphosis recognized by Ovid (Metamorphoses 15.434, Pythagoras on the city

of Rome): "Through growth she changes her shape." Pythagoras's authority for this statement is none other than Fama herself: "Even today rumor [fama] has it that a Trojan city, Rome, is rising" (431-433).^[46] But quantitative change, hyperbolic exaggeration, is not the only effect of Virgil's Fama. She is also responsible for the qualitative change involved in distortion and misrepresentation: "as persistent in fictions and distortions as she is the messenger of truth" (4.188). This echo of the Hesiodic Muses' claim "We know how to speak many falsehoods like true things, and we know how to utter true things, when we wish" (Theogony 27-28) is usually referred to the power of the epic poet to create fictions.^[47] But the "fictional/true" opposition also structures the practice of allegory: Jesper Svenbro analyzes the interpretative practice of Theagenes, the first recorded allegorizer of Homer, in terms of a transposition of the Hesiodic distinction between truths and lies from the social conditions of poetic discourse to the interior of the discourse, where it becomes the binary opposition between surface sense, the "lies", and the deep allegorical sense, the truth.^[48] Fama's account of the winter of luxury in Carthage tells the story in another way, but her form of "all-egory," "other-saying," perverts the expected distribution of truth and falsehood.^[49] Her version of the story moralizes, with a tendency to reduce the complex human situation to the abstractions of luxus and cupido (Aeneid 4.193-194); it is like a prevalent moralizing interpretation of the Phaeacian court in the Odyssey, on which Dido's court is modeled, as a figure for decadent luxury and hedonism, an "Epicurean" voluptuarism.^[50] One might think also of that reductive moralization of the real-life history of Cleopatra and Antony, a clear example of "allegorizing" to ideological ends. Iarbas's account to Jupiter of what is going on (206ff.) repeats this "allegorical" version of "reality" but then adds another layer of allegory when he calls Aeneas a Paris (215) .^[51] The Epicurean color of the moralizing interpretation of the Phaeacians seems to tinge Iarbas's own rebuke to Jupiter at 208-210: "Do we shudder for nothing when you hurl your bolts? Are they blind, those flames in the clouds that fill our minds with terror, and is it empty rumblings that they stir up [inania murmura miscent]?" This materialist view of the thunderbolt would transform Jupiter and the other gods into nothing more than the "empty report," inanisfama (or Fama ) the words with which Iarbas concludes his complaint (218).^[52] At this point the literal reality of the epic narrative is in danger of drifting before the winds that lead to allegorization. The primary narrator lays his hand on the tiller to guide us back to a very present and very epic (and Ennian) Jupiter "the all-powerful heard," "audiit omnipotens" (4.220).^[53]

The initial expansion and subsequent upward progress of Fama thus generate a series of competing interpretations of the epic action and of the cosmic order of epic. Jupiter's authoritarian intervention, through his straight-speaking messenger Mercury, aims at reimposing an Olympian order on the narrative and its meanings. This is the context for the description of the

strange figure of Atlas, the man-mountain on whom Mercury alights on his downward flight. The mountain is the product of a metamorphosis, but change in the past is now memorialized in an image of eternity: mountains are proverbially the most enduring of monuments. This terminal metamorphosis contrasts with the indefinitely proliferating, Protean, metamorphoses of the giantess Fama. Atlas within the Aeneid is also a figure for the origins of epic, for at the end of the first book we learned that he had been the teacher of the exemplary bard Iopas (1.740-741). We might say then that the source of epic tradition has been set in stone. Moreover, this terminal metamorphosis is of the kind that does not alter the subject's previous shape: Atlas still has a head, shoulders, chin, and beard.^[54] The petrified Atlas remains in some sense the same. However, as we advance through Aeneid 4 we will find that he may also be read allegorically, but in the manner of that kind of philosophizing allegory that attempts authoritatively to fix meaning: the picture of the ever-during Atlas foreshadows the famous simile later in book 4 that compares Aeneas unmoved in the face of Dido's pleas to an oak weather-beaten but fast-rooted on a mountaintop (4.441-446), an image of Aeneas in his ideal role as the impassive Stoic hero, unchangeable in his inner self while outside only tears are "rolled over," "mens immota manet, lacrimae uoluuntur inanes" (449).^[55] This heroic role corresponds to the philosophizing abstraction of Odysseus into a figure of the wise man.^[56] But, as we have seen, the events of the poem will finally demonstrate the impossibility of pinning down the epic man as the philosophical personification of a perfected humanity.