II—
Allecto
1—
Allecto Personifying Discord
Virgil introduces the period of renewed sufferings that await Aeneas in his struggle
for Latium with scenes which deliberately parallel the corresponding scenes at the
beginning of the first part of the Aeneid . In each case, Juno is amazed and furious to
see the good fortune that her enemy enjoys, and pours out her emotions in a
soliloquy; in each case, she uses a minor divinity to destroy her enemy; in each case,
her command is immediately obeyed and disaster strikes. But because it is necessary
to increase the tension, and because this second and final attempt at revenge has to
have a more powerful effect, her plan has to be introduced in a way that is more
striking in every respect. This is ingeniously achieved in Juno's monologue: hatred
of the Trojans, disappointment at previous failures, her conviction that she has been
wronged and humiliated – all this is expressed in stronger terms than ever before.[9] It
is precisely because she foresees that her plans will inevitably come to nothing that
there are no bounds to her overwhelming desire to exact the greatest possible
vengeance while she still has the chance to do so. With the splendid antithetical
phrase flectere si nequeo superos , Acheronta movebo ['if I cannot change the will of
Heaven, I shall release Hell'], she enlists a more powerful ally than before. Instead
of the ruler of the winds, the peaceful Aeolus, who had been a guest at the table of
the Olympian gods, she summons a monster from the Underworld, hated not only by
the Olympians but even by the gods of the world below: Allecto, the Fury who
drives men mad. Instead of unleashing the powers of nature she unleashes furious
passion, the insanity of mortal men, which causes so much more harm than the
183 powers of nature ever can. It is war that is going to flare up, and Virgil and his
contemporaries knew very well what that meant. Hell knows no more fearful
plague; anyone who wants to shatter the sanctity of peace must be out of his mind.
Only those who share the total abhorrence of war felt by Virgil's contemporaries
can fully understand why the poet made it the work of Allecto. Thus the queen raves
lymphata (377) [in a reckless frenzy]; her companions have furiis accensae pectora
(392) [hearts ablaze with hysterical passion]; Turnus' lust for battle is scelerata
insania belli (461) [the atccursed lunacy of war]; and Tyrrhus reaches for his axe
spirans immane (510) [panting with savage rage]. So the mad tumult breaks out
almost simultaneously in three different places: Virgil has created a unity out of a
haphazard juxtaposition or unconnected series of events by means of the figure of
Allecto, so that they are converted into a carefully arranged sequence brought about
by the machinations of a single will.
However, Allecto is not really the personification of madness, but of discord, cui
tristia bella iraeque insidiaeque et crimina noxia cordi (325) [Allecto, who dearly
loves war's horrors, outbursting wrath, treachery and recriminations with all their
harms] and tu potes unanimos armare in proelia fratres , atque odiis versare domos
(335f.) ['You know well how to set brothers, united in love, at armed conflict one
against the other. You can wreck homes by hate']; her real work is the dissolution
and destruction of peaceful agreements: disice compositam pacem [shatter the pact
of peace which they have made] and when she has done her work she announces
perfecta tibi bello discordia tristi : sic in amicitiam coeant et foedera iungant (545–
6) ['Behold, you have your quarrel, and it has been securely ratified by horrors of
war. Now see if you can join them in friendship again and make them agree to
peace!']. Thus she is to a large degree the counterpart of Eris, who similarly appears
in Hesiod ( Theog . 225f.) as one of the daughters of Night (cf. virgo sata Nocte [331]
[maid, daughter of Night]), and whose destructive swarm of children may have been
in Virgil's mind when he wrote line 325 (quoted above). So she does not really
appear as a vengeful or punishing daimon : she is an Erinys to the extent that if she
succeeds in her work then madness will result (447, 570), and she is one of the deae
dirae (324) [dread goddesses], the sorores Tartareae (327) [Tartarean sisters], of
whom she is the most loathsome. Like the Erinyes, she carries whips and torches
(336), and has snakes for hair (cf. Discordia demens vipereum crinem vittis innexa
cruentis [6.280] [Strife the insane, with bloody ribbons binding her snaky hair].
Virgil may have drawn his inspiration for this creature from tragedy, in which, from
Aeschylus onwards, Erinyes and other such daimons had frequently appeared: thus
an author as early as Macrobius, in the remarkable passage in which he mocks all
these scenes, writes sparguntur angues velut in scaena parturientes furorem (5.17.3)
[there are snakes everywhere, as on the stage, giving birth to madness]. In surviving
tragedies, it is the figure of Lyssa in Euripides' Herakles who comes closest to
Allecto;[10] an even closer parallel may well have appeared in the attempts of post-
184 Euripidean tragedians to outdo Euripides. They will have supplied Virgil with the
basic colours for his picture: but the concept itself came from another source.
Postquam Discordia taetra Belli ferratos postis portasque refregit [when hideous
Discord burst apart the iron-bound doors and gates of War] wrote Ennius in his
Annales; Virgil deliberately echoes this in Belli ferratos rumpit Saturnia postis
(622) [the Saturnian queen burst apart the iron-bound gates of War]. It may well be
that Ennius also described how Discordia prepared the way for war, and that Virgil
is trying to outdo that description; but Discordia was too abstract for his taste, and he
preferred to use the well-established and graphically developed figure of the Erinys.
2—
Amata
Allecto's first victim is Queen Amata, who is driven insane by poison injected by
one of the snakes from Allecto's head. The snake, which is elsewhere no more than
a horrible attribute of the Erinyes, here becomes, as a poisonous reptile, a symbol of
consuming madness; it injects its poison in many different guises, just as Allecto
herself tot sese vertit in ora (328) [assumes so many countenances]. The immediate
result of Amata's madness is that she tries to induce her husband to act against the
will of the gods by means of a sophistic interpretation of the oracle. When this
attempt fails, and madness like a consuming disease forces its way even deeper into
her very spirit, the queen's collapse into insanity becomes clear to all: in crazed
delirium she rages through the cities of the land. And in her ecstatic state she roams
even further afield: she becomes a maenad and flings herself into the woods, taking
her daughter with her. It is not easy to say in what sense Virgil wishes his portrayal
of this 
[Bacchic frenzy] to be taken. In silvas simulato numine Bac -
chi . . . evolat et natam frondosis montibus abdit quo thalamum eripiat
Teucris . . . 'euhoe Bacche ' fremens , solum te virgine dignum vociferans [she went out
into the forests in her flight, pretending that the power of Bacchus was upon
her . . . and she hid her daughter among leaf-clad mountains . . . to rob the Trojans of
their wedding. 'Ho, Bacchus!' she shouted, and 'None but you' she shrieked,
'deserves the maiden!']. Two things are clear, firstly that Amata is truly in the grip
of madness, not acting in a cold, calculating way and feigning madness after careful
consideration. Previously she had already been truly lymphata [frenzied], then maio -
rem orsa furorem [seized by an even wilder madness], and finally Virgil writes
185 talem . . . reginam Allecto stimulis agit undique Bacchi (404) [so fared it with the
queen, as Allecto goaded her now this way, now that and drove her by the Bacchic
power]. On the other hand, it is equally certain that in spite of this last phrase, and in
spite of the fact that the women are later said to be attonitae Baccho (580) [under the
shock of Bacchus], it is not a question of true Bacchic ecstasy: for how could
Allecto bring that about? After all, the Bacchi stimuli [goads of Bacchus] are not
hers to command. But Virgil does say explicitly s i m u l a t o numine Bacchi (385)
[pretending that the power of Bacchus was upon her], and just as the description that
follows is in many respects unmistakeably dependent on Euripides' Bacchae ,[11] so
too this phrase is very reminiscent of Pentheus' suspicion that the women are
gadding about 
(218) [pretending to celebrate the rites of
Dionysus] in the mountains: except that what was a false supposition in the Bacchae
is actually the case here. And in fact the words that Virgil uses, especially the
addition of her intentions in silvas evolat . . . quo thalamum eripiat Teucris taedasque
moretur (387f.) [she went out into the forests in her flight . . . to prevent the marriage
ceremony and to rob the Trojans of their wedding], support the view that Amata is
pretending to be acting in obedience to the command of Bacchus, rather than that
Allecto drove her to the delusion that she was possessed by Bacchus. Later, Virgil
writes stimulis agit undique Bacchi (405) [drove her now this way, now that, by the
goads of Bacchus]; this must be a case of 
[arousing a kind of Bacchic
frenzy] here ascribed to the Fury from the Underworld, just as in Euripides' Trojan
Women (408) Apollo is said to Cassandra [fill her with Bacchic
frenzy].[12]
Virgil's creation is quite idiosyncratic and can only be explained as an amalga-
mation of several concepts. At first, Allecto plays a rô1e similar to that of Lyssa in
Euripides' Bacchae (977), when she is called on by the chorus to incite the maenads
against Pentheus. There, too, madness sent by the powers of the Underworld is
involved in the action.[13] In Virgil, the god plays no part, although the rites are
186 performed in exactly the same way as, for example, in Euripides' Bacchae and in
the cult of Dionysus generally. In Virgil, Roman sensibilities are very evident: the
god Liber himself cannot desire any kind of dissolute maenadism, in which respect-
able upper-class matrons forget all morality and decency; that would be an abuse of
the name of the god, which would be a serious offence – hence maius adorta
n e f a s (386) [venturing a still graver sin] – which could only have been prompted
by insanity sent from Hadles. In a very similar way, the Bacchanalia, where genuine
ecstasy certainly did play a rôle, were once regarded in Rome as a criminal decep-
tion and banned by the magistrates.[14] But if the intention of Amata with her thiasi
[troops of Maenads] is to make it impossible for her daughter to marry, on the
grounds that she is dedicated to the god – taedas morari (388) [to prevent the
marriage ceremony] – this is reminiscent of another heroine who falsely claims to be
dedicated to the cult of Bacchus, and for much the same reasons: Laodameia, who in
Euripides' famous drama tried to evade marriage by a similar pretence: her thiasi
dolosi [groups of fraudulent maenads][15] may well have been in Virgil's mind.
Amata, however, does not persist in her deception; when the other matrons, in the
grip of the same madness, join her and she swings the pine-torch in their midst, in
her confused mental state she believes that she is carrying the marriage-torch in the
bridal procession, and she sings the marriage-song for her daughter and Turnus.[16]
187 But in the middle of her song (this is surely how repente [suddenly] in line 399 is to
be understood) she breaks off and calls on the women of Latium to join her in
resisting Latinus who is guilty of showing contempt for a mother's rights. The result
achieved by Amata, or rather by Allecto through Amata is twofold: first, Lavinia,
frondosis montibus abdita (387) [hidden amid leaf-clad mountains] and allegedly
dedicated to the gods, is temporarily taken out of Latinus' hands, and secondly, all
the women of the land have been mobilized in opposition to the marriage that he has
proposed, and this in its turn affects the male population: quorum attonitae Baccho
nemora avia matres insultant thiasis . . . undique collecti coeunt Martemque fatigant
(580) [from all sides there gathered the relatives of those women who, under the
shock of Bacchus, had gone prancing in frenzied bands about the trackless
forests . . . and they too clamoured incessantly for an appeal to Mars]. Possibly Virgil
was borrowing a Greek motif here and toning it down, with the result that it does not
achieve its full effect: it is conceivable that in some Greek work, an ecstatic move-
ment took hold of the women and they yielded to it 
[with
total abandon][17] and thereby provoked their menfolk to embark on a war. This would
be a development of the idea which Aristotle put forward to explain the remarkable
behaviour of Odysseus in Iliad 2.183: he ignores good manners so that the popula-
tion will be astounded and will turn to him, 'as they say that Solon behaved when he
wanted to gather the people together to persuade them to fight for Salamis'. The
incident to which Dümmler ( Kl . Schr . II [Leipzig, 1896] 405f.) rightly refers in this
context, the
have come even closer to the motif as we may suppose it was presented by Virgil's
source. Virgil himself seems to imply that the men are anxious to fight in order to
put an end to the women's disorderly and giddy behaviour. He has thus found an
ideal way of making the mad lust for war spread all over Latium; the women, who
are more susceptible to this infectious mania, are the agents whereby the men, who
are slower to be moved en masse , are all individually inflamed to resist Latinus'
plans. We can only regret that this ingenious piece of motivation is not treated very
clearly and fails to achieve its full effect.
3—
Turnus
Allecto has begun her fiendish work with the action which has the least immediate
impact, which needs the longest time to develop, and which at first only briefly
188 thwarts Latinus' plan by delaying its execution.[18] She now turns to Turnus, the real
motivating force behind the war. While he is asleep she comes to him in the guise of
the priestess of Juno, and goads him with words calculated to touch his sense of
honour and his manly pride; she herself mentions Juno, and claims that she is acting
on her orders. Turnus refuses; then the Fury is filled with anger, appears in her true
form and plants her torch in his chest: he wakes up, bathed in sweat, and from that
moment on the fire of hell burns in him. In this episode, too, Virgil has blurred the
clarity of the one motif by combining it with too many others. The appearance of the
dream-figure is based in the first instance on the dream of Penelope in the Odyssey
(4.795ff.), in which she is consoled by an
Athena and takes the form of her sister Iphthime. Penelope replies to her in her
dream, just as Turnus does (and that is what distinguishes this dream-narrative from
the others in Homer) and tells her about her worries: then the says that it has
been sent by Pallas Athena, the personal protectress of Telemachus, and that puts
Penelope's mind at rest.
[Pallas . . . who has sent me now to tell you these things]: Virgil has incorporated this
straightaway in Allecto's first speech to Turnus, with ipsa palam fari omnipotens
Saturnia iussit [the Saturnian Queen, the Almighty, had herself commanded me to
say this openly to you], and, in fact, Calybe, as Juno's priestess, could indeed have
received instructions from her in a dream:[19] though it does appear rather awkward
when we find that Turnus rejects this revelation and proceeds to appeal directly to
Juno himself, confident that she will not forget him. These lines have not been
completed, as is shown by the half-line 439; Virgil probably intended that Turnus
should go on to say that he did not believe in Juno's alleged warning, on the grounds
that she would not permit events to proceed as far as allowing his bride to be
withheld from him. This is followed by the mocking rebuke that inflames Allecto
189 with blazing anger. Formally, the final lines of Turnus' speech (443-4) are modelled
on Hector's farewell speech in the sixth book of the Iliad (490-2);[20] however, the
motif of rejecting a divine warning, and suffering a divine anger in consequence, is
derived from another source. In his Hymn to Demeter (42), Callimachus describes
how Demeter takes on the form of her priestess Nikippa,[21] and gives a friendly
warning to Erysichthon, who wants to fell her sacred tree; he dismisses her scorn-
fully, and then she reveals herself in her divine form and stature – 
[her feet touched the ground, her head
touched the heavens] – and utters fearful threats. Either Callimachus himself or
some very closely related source supplied Virgil with the motif. It probably goes
back to the dialogue between Helen and Aphrodite in Book 3 of the Iliad (386ff.),
although there are no close echoes of the Homeric passage in Virgil. However, the
result of the goddess' angry speech is the same in each case: Turnus, like Helen,
immediately does what he had at first refused to do. It is this reversal and the
increase in dramatic tension that it creates which caused Virgil to combine the motif
of Penelope's dream with the motif of Helen or Erysichthon, yet it cannot be denied
that the latter motif has no true psychological justification in this context. Whereas it
certainly contributes a good deal to the characterization of Helen, and of Erysich-
thon, that the former at first tries to avoid Paris, and that the latter very coarsely
repudiates the priestess' reprimand, this is not true in the case of Turnus: at most,
Virgil perhaps hoped to show that to start with he had been a peaceable character,
who had had no inclination whatever to enforce his claims with a mailed fist; but
that possibility seems to be excluded by the fact that he rejected the message simply
because he did not believe the truthful account given by Calybe.
190
4—
Ascanius:
War Breaks Out
Turnus commands his Rutulians to take up arms, in order to give Latinus a strong
warning against the newly-made alliance. However, a peaceful settlement was still
perhaps possible; Allecto knows that a breach can be healed if blood has not yet
been spilt, so she puts the finishing touches to her work by means of a third
intervention: Trojans and Latins are to come to blows. At the same time, there were
two reasons why the Trojans had to be made responsible for starting the dispute.
First, everything is arranged so as to pile as much tinder as possible around the
throne of Latinus, since that is where the flames of war are eventually to flare up and
blaze forth. However, Latinus' subjects can only demand that their king should
declare war if they feel that they themselves have been injured; if they were to begin
the war themselves, they would have no occasion or reason to be angry with the
foreign settlers and they would be in no position to come before the king demanding
revenge. Secondly, Virgil could not be indifferent to the fact that this gave him the
opportunity to respect the tradition, in so far as it existed, according to which the
casus belli was some form of encroachment by the new settlers, such as looting or
other incursions into Latin territory. Virgil is operating very skilfully when he makes
the offence committed by the Trojans as slight as he can, yet serious enough to
motivate the anger of the Latin country-folk. The country-folk: that is explicitly
emphasized several times (504, 521, 574), and apparently they are very different
from the city population that is stirred up by Amata (384); they are the uncivilized,
191 undisciplined[22] bands, who are always prepared to rush to help each other at the call
of the shepherd's horn, to drive off robbers and wild animals; it is these men, who
act on the impulse of the moment, passionately, and without mature reflection, who
are to strike the first blow.[23] But the injustice which incites them to retaliate in this
case is not any theft or wrongful raid, but an offence by an innocent offender,
Ascanius. Allecto brings it about that Ascanius, while out hunting, fatally wounds a
tame stag, which is the household pet of Tyrrhus' large and highly respected family,
although of course Ascanius has no idea that it is a privileged beast. It is significant
that Allecto does not dare to lay a finger on the boy himself, the darling of the gods;
she puts his hounds on the scent of the stag after she has 'flung madness upon them',
(rabiem obiecit [479-80]), as Artemis had once done to the hounds of Actaeon.
Ascanius, who is passionately devoted to hunting (which was regarded as a thor-
oughly Roman pursuit in Virgil's day), catches sight of the magnificent stag, and
possessed by an understandable longing for glory ( eximiae laudis succensus amore
[496]) takes aim. Tyrrhus' daughter Silvia is the first to see the wounded creature;
she immediately breaks into a loud lament and calls on the country-folk for help;
thus events are set in motion by a woman, who is much more liable to give way to
mindless grief than a man. Allecto then sees to it that the affair spreads far and wide
(505, 511). All this is undoubtedly Virgil's own invention. We ought not to look for
the motif of the ill-starred hunt in any historical version of the legend, since it is far
too Hellenistic in spirit. But the tame stag and its accidental death were perhaps
borrowed by the poet from the story of Cyparissus, which he knew from a Hellenis-
192 tic poem, as we learn from the combined evidence of Ovid[24] and Pompeian paintings
(especially Helbig 219 cf. Ovid Met . 10.113). I might almost go as far as to say that
we cannot fully comprehend Silvia's sorrow and anger and the other consequences
of the fatal arrow unless we know the sad outcome of the Cyparissus story: the
Hellenistic poet will have used every one of the many artistic devices at his disposal
to touch the reader's heart with the story of the boy's mortal grief. Virgil had to
respect the laws of epic and restrict himself to allusions, but he was still censured for
it: one ancient critic found the whole motif leve nimisque puerile [lightweight and
too childish] (Macrob. loc . cit .).
How first Silvia's menfolk come running in answer to her call, how Tyrrhus,
armed with his axe from his tree-felling, summons his troops, and how someone – it
must have been the Fury herself – raises the alarm by a blast on her horn – and
immediately men come pouring in from every direction – all this is vividly
described by Virgil; and, since Ascanius is apparently in danger, it is also clear why
the Trojan warriors immediately march out armed for battle – if it had been some
Trojan of no particular significance who was in danger, it would have been necess-
ary to supply some additional motivation to produce this effect. After that,
bloodshed is inevitable, and it comes as no suprise that the inadequately armed
country-folk are overcome by the Trojans, who are experienced fighters. Blood now
cries out for vengeance.
Thus Allecto brings her work to a climax, and Virgil has plotted its progress with
calculated artistry: Juno had pronounced sere crimina belli , arma velit poscatque
simul rapiatque iuventus (339f.) [sow in recriminations the seeds of war: in one
breath let their manhood want, demand and grasp their arms], and she can now
ascertain to her own satisfaction that stant belli causae (553) [motives for a war are
established]. Now that disaster is on its way, there is no need for further help from
the powers of darkness. Once discordia has sprung up between men, its own inner
nature forces it to erupt into war. The three separate streams of war-fever unite in
Latinus' palace, and the weak old man tries in vain to stem their flood; Allecto has
seen to it that he will be alone in his resistance, and the waves pass over him and
onward. The actual outbreak of war however still needs to be embodied in some
public action; Virgil therefore creates an episode out of something which may have
been no more than a figure of speech in Ennius (see above p. 149f): the opening of
the Belli portae [Gates of War]. By means of the descriptions of the temple, and a
solemn reference to the custom that is still observed (601ff.), the event is given the
importance that it requires; and since it is not Discordia (as in Ennius) but Juno
herself who flings open the gates, we are given the impression that, despite Allecto's
help, the war has been brought about by the goddess herself.[25]
193