3—
Juno and Venus
No ancient reader will have asked the impertinent question, why Aeneas was sub-
96 jected to these years of wandering: for Apollo, who certainly had Aeneas' interests
very much at heart, might surely have spared him a lot of trouble by giving him an
unambiguous oracle before his departure; but who would dare to call the god to
account for what he sees fit to reveal to mortals or to conceal from them, when every
message, even when it is wrapped in the desperately ambiguous obscurity of oracular
language, deserves most humble thanks as an act of the purest grace, condescension
and compassion.
However, anyone who has read the opening of the Aeneid before reading Book 3
will perhaps expect to find a particular motivation for Aeneas' lengthy wanderings.
For the proem suggests that they are to be blamed on Juno's thirst for vengeance: it
was she who drove the pious hero into so many travails and dangers, she who
pursued the Trojans over all the seas and kept them away from Latium, as the poet
says;[17] indeed the queen of the gods herself speaks of the plan she embarked on to
turn the Trojan king away from Italy, a plan which she does not wish to abandon,[18]
and of the war which she has been waging for so many years with that one race.[19] In
fact from this moment onwards she is active enough: the tempest which drives
Aeneas to Carthage is her work, she causes the union with Dido; later it is her
intervention that leads to the burning of the ships, which results in the foundation of
Segesta; she stirs up war in Latium by means of Allecto and never ceases to support
the enemies of the Trojans. But until that moment we have just mentioned, in other
words, during the years between the departure from Troy and the departure from
Sicily, throughout the events treated in Book 3, we hear nothing of Juno's interven-
tion; and yet this period covers by far the greatest part of the errores [wanderings]
and labores [toils]. The contradiction seems blatant, and yet I do not believe that it is
a case of an inconsistency arising from different plans, or that Virgil would have
smoothed over this contradiction. When he wrote the proem to Book 1, he had most
97 probably not yet created the scheme for Book 3 as it now stands, and it is conceiv-
able that at that stage he was intending to allot an active role to Juno in the period
that preceded the beginning of the action of Book 1. In my view it is more probable
that he was thinking only of the events that followed and, with these in mind,
proceeded to model his proem on that of the Odyssey . Then, when he composed
Book 3, there was no opportunity for an open and obvious intervention by Juno; but
if the poet had any doubts about whether this was compatible with the words of the
proem he would have been able to feel reassured by the precedent of his model,
Homer. For in the proem to the Odyssey , even less ambiguously than in the Aeneid ,
the exhausting wanderings of the hero are blamed on an angry deity (Poseidon in
this case); and yet here, too, as far as we know, Poseidon plays no part in Odysseus'
destiny until after the beginning of the action, during the sea-storm in Book 5; in
Odysseus' own narrative we hear nothing in his various unhappy adventures of
anything that might have been caused by Polyphemus' prayer to his father; and in
the case of Odysseus' longest sojourn, the seven years spent with Calypso, it is even
clearer than in the Aeneid that it cannot have been the result of the work of Posei-
don. Any reader who noticed this would have to assume that Odysseus had never
been told that his sufferings were due to the enmity of the god, and Virgil could
count on the same assumption. It is clear from the single passage in Book 3 which
points to Juno's enmity that he was well aware of the parallel: Helenus urgently
advises Aeneas (435ff.) that the most important thing is to win Juno's favour by
prayers, vows and sacrificial offerings: only if he succeeds in this will he reach Italy
98 safely from Sicily.[20] Aeneas acts according to this advice at the time of the first
landing in Italy (3.546), and this single mention of his obedience to it must also
count instar omnium [on behalf of all] for the future. Nevertheless he did not
succeed in calming the wrath of Juno, as is shown by the fact that the crossing from
Sicily to Italy does not go smoothly: thus Helenus' words of warning refer to the
sea-storm narrated in Book 1. However this is itself clearly modelled on the words
of Teiresias, Odyssey 11.100ff.: he too warns of Poseidon's future anger, and pro-
ceeds (121ff.) to point out the way to appease him: he says no more of the earlier
results of this anger than Helenus says of Juno's previous hostile activities.
Just as the hostile goddess remains in the background, so too does the goddess
who favours him. According to Aeneas' own narrative, Venus seems never to have
appeared to him, either to guide him, or to advise or to assist him, throughout the
greater part of the period of his wanderings. Yet Virgil must have had different
intentions about this matter when he was writing Book 1, since he makes Aeneas say
to Venus that he had begun his journey matre dea monstrante viam (382) [shown the
way by my divine mother], and makes him complain at her departure quid natum
totiens , crudelis tu quoque , falsis ludis imaginibus (407-8) ['Ah, you too are cruel!
Why again and again deceive your own son with your mocking disguises?']. But
there is no reason to suppose that at that stage this intention had taken any particular
form, and when he was writing Book 3 Virgil left Venus completely out of the
picture; here too there is an analogy with the Odyssey . Odysseus in his own account
of his adventures knows nothing of Athena's protection and support, and is still
99 complaining about this neglect after he has landed in Scheria ( Od . 6.325, cf.
13.318), without realizing that it was Athena who had made this very landing
possible for him, providing him with active help at this point for the first time as far
as we know: the poet himself felt it necessary to explain her previous absence on the
grounds that she had been unwilling to oppose her father's brother (13.341, cf.
6.329). When Virgil was creating the relationship between Venus and Aeneas he
clearly had the relationship between Odysseus and Athena in his mind, though he
may not always have been aware of it, and I venture to suggest that in the phrase
totiens falsis ludis imaginibus [again and again you deceive with mocking disguises]
he was not thinking of particular appearances of Venus, but of the changing forms in
which Athena manifested herself to Odysseus, who for his part, though admittedly
without Virgilian pathos, half-reproachfully complains to his divine protectress
the definitive reshaping of Book 333, Aeneas' complaint would admittedly seem
meaningless to the reader, and we must assume that Virgil would have excised it
once he realized that it was now irrelevant.