I—
The Sources
The relationship of Virgil to the traditional myths of Troy and Rome was not like
that of a modern poet to the material which has inspired him to the creative act. It
was more like that of an ancient historian to the traditional history which he was
re-telling. The material did not simply serve as a basis for his own invention: the
transmission of the tradition was an end in itself, and the poet felt that it was his
obligation to state the truth, to pass on what had been passed on to him (in so far as
he did not wish to reject something on account of the nature of the material or for
artistic reasons). This obligation was an age-old legacy of ancient poetry, but in the
course of the centuries the legacy had necessarily been considerably modified to suit
the taste of each new generation. In ancient Greek times, the poet, whether writing
an epic or a drama, was no more than an interpreter of the myth; he interpreted it
according to the meaning that it had for him ; the myth had its own life and the poet
helped it to live on, as generations had done before him. Later, when men had a
different mental relationship to the myths, the poems still retained the same external
relationship to them. Although the life of men was no longer influenced and per-
meated by the myths, they had learnt them in their childhood in their traditional
form, and it was in that form, and no other, that they wanted to hear them from the
epic poet. If any poet found the familiar myths tedious or thought that they no longer
had any relevance for his own time, that was fair enough: he was welcome to search
for novelties in remote corners, or to collect local folk traditions which had not yet
become common Hellenic property; but he had to keep innovation within the frame-
work of the tradition. Anyone learned and bold enough to serve up some particularly
surprising novelty would do well to affirm solemnly in his opening words that
240 nothing in his account had been conjured out of thin air. This was how Virgil's
contemporaries, and Virgil himself, conceived the task of the epic poet; and, since
the story he was about to narrate was the history of the origins of the Roman race
and of the Julian gens , he would be even less likely to put his own invention in place
of the traditional version.[1]
Which authors, then, were available to Virgil as representative sources of the
traditional accounts? In the first place, of course, the national historians and
antiquarians; it was surely in their works, Virgil believed, that the truth was to be
found, and he spared no effort in drawing on these sources. But secondly, and
especially for the Greek parts of the narrative, he could go to the poets; it stands to
reason that they, precisely because they were expected to be faithful to the tradition,
could themselves constitute the tradition for later writers. Furthermore, in many
cases they were the only source which the conscientious writer could use for the
earliest period. It is therefore scarcely surprising that, for his account of the fall of
Troy, Virgil makes as much use of Euphorion as he does of Hellanicus or Varro; and
he extends this practice to include Roman poets, if, as is very likely, he took the
story of Dido not from the historians but from Naevius.
In these circumstances it naturally never occurs to Virgil to attempt to disguise
his dependence on the works of his predecessors, any more than his Hellenistic and
Roman forebears had done.[2] Apollonius is admittedly exceptional in occasionally
referring naïvely to certain persons, 'earlier singers'[3] who have said this, that or the
other; generally, poets use the impersonal 
[they say] or refer to the evidence of
[what people say], which comes to much the same thing. Thus Catullus, no
doubt keeping closely to his Greek original, presented the whole of his epyllion
241 (poem 64) not as a narrative but as the re-telling of a narrative;[4] thus, too, Horace
often introduces examples from myth and history as 'what people say';[5] in the same
way Virgil himself had introduced the Aristaeus epyllion at the end of the Georgics
with ut fama [according to what people say] (Geo . 4.318; cf. 286). In the Aeneid ,
too, he often refers to what he has heard, what has been said or reported, fama .
Indeed, he leaves no doubt that when he calls upon the Muse to inform him about
some particularly difficult and obscure point, this Muse is none other than fama
itself;[6] this relieves Virgil of the burden of responsibility for the truth of what he
writes, and at the same time allays any suspicion that he may have invented it. Virgil
naturally realizes, and so does the reader, that fama is far from being absolutely
reliable, tam ficti pravique tenax quam nuntia veri [as retentive of news that is false
and wicked as she is ready to tell what is true] ( Aen . 4.188),[7] Such references to
242 'what people say' generally occur in the context of miraculous mythical tales[8] and
they are generally confined to stories that have no close connection with Virgil's
own account and are remote from it in time and place:[9] it is as though he is only
243 willing to take responsibility for the truth of his own main narrative, and prefers to
shift the responsibility for everything else onto others. But this limitation of liability
is a matter of poetic tact; it remains true that the poet himself acknowledges the
existence of a tradition which formed the basis of his work; indeed, in one place,
where he has to recount that an immortal performed an action unworthy of an
immortal because his vanity had been wounded, he does not conceal his doubts
about the traditional version, any more than a cautious historian would, and as his
Greek predecessors had also done in similar circumstances.[10]
In order to discover where Virgil drew the line between tradition and invention,
let us briefly survey those sections of the Aeneid where our analysis in Part I
involved a consideration of their sources.
In our analysis of the Sack of Troy, we saw that the individual details, except for
a few which we shall mention in a moment, were modelled closely on the tradition,
but that their selection and combination were obviously Virgil's own work. We have
to imagine how he set about his task. Before setting pen to paper, he will have let his
mind dwell on all the relevant material, and will have re-fashioned it so as to create
a totally new episode that was in harmony with his own very individual intentions.
In the scenes involving the wooden horse, hardly one detail was Virgil's new
invention, but Sinon's act and the death of Laocoon seem to have been presented in
a new light, and the artistic structure of the scenes also seems to be new. We found
exactly the same in the case of, for example, the scene of Priam's death, where we
were able to trace practically every detail back to the earlier tradition. In the nar-
rative of Aeneas' own adventures, we were able to observe a combination of
different traditions: on the one hand Hellanicus, for the defence of the citadel and so
forth; on the other hand the popular tradition; and finally the help given to Aeneas
by Venus; the figure of Panthus seemed to have been combined with the role of
244 some other person, unknown to us; the death of Coroebus was linked with the rape
of Cassandra, and the death of Polites with that of Priam, thus creating a completely
new overall picture. The rescue of Creusa by the Great Mother, as well as numerous
individual characters – such as Thymoetes, and the heroes in the horse – and
circumstantial details – the burning of the city, moonlight, the torch-signal etc. – all
turned out to have been taken over from previous versions. If we are looking for
original Virgilian invention, the limitations of our knowledge make it impossible to
be certain, but we would probably not go far wrong if we included the appearance of
Hector in Aeneas' dream; the death of Androgeos and Coroebus' plan of disguising
himself in his armour; the scene between Aeneas and Venus, and Venus' appearance
to him; the scenes in Aeneas' house (which imply an earlier date for the auspicium
maximum than that handed down by tradition); and Creusa's appearance and her
prophecy. We can see that in every case the function of these new details was to fill
gaps in the tradition which became apparent as soon as the story was presented from
a Trojan point of view and concerned itself with the personal adventures of Aeneas
about whom there was little in what we may call the official Greek version. Virgil
follows very much the same procedure as Hellenistic poets who wished to present a
well-worn myth in a new light: they placed a minor figure in the foreground, and
thus made it possible for them to say new things within the framework of the ancient
myth.[11] We may observe, incidentally, that Virgil filled most of these gaps with
mythical material; furthermore, at no point, as far as we can tell, did he contradict
the consensus of traditional opinion, although he did omit a great deal of traditional
material.
We also came across another clear example of this abbreviation of the material in
the account of Aeneas' Wanderings. Virgil seems to have permitted himself a major
departure from the tradition when he located the death of Anchises in Sicily; we
have seen what practical and artistic considerations led him to do so. He may have
thought that he was justified in introducing a new version when the traditions
provided so many different accounts of the event. Elsewhere in the Wanderings too
he is filling in the gaps in the tradition: in Book 3, apart from the Andromache
scene, he inserts supernatural or fabulous material: Polydorus, Apollo at Delphi, the
Penates in Crete, the Harpies, the omen at the landing in Italy, the story of Poly-
phemus and Achaemenides. In Books 4 and 5 he merely embellished the tradition.
245 For the events in Latium, Virgil's treatment of the characters and their adventures
remains faithful to the sources. But here too we find, first of all, the combination of
different sources – the alliance with Tarchon and the battle against Mezentius, the
friendly attitude of Latinus and the battle against the Latins. Secondly, Virgil allows
himself complete freedom in the manipulation of the chronology – Mezentius' death
occurs before that of Turnus (and therefore in a duel with Aeneas, not, in accordance
with the tradition, with Ascanius); the events are concentrated into a few days; the
death of Turnus occurs before that of Aeneas; Lavinium is founded only after the
conclusion of hostilities. Again, the material is expanded by the inclusion of other
ancient Italian traditions – Evander and Pallas, Turnus' allies, including Camilla,
and again, Diomedes. Finally, Virgil re-shapes the tradition in epic style – he
describes battles that include many episodes, but above all, again, mythical material:
prodigies, Allecto, various types of scenes and stories in which the gods appear,
including some that are manifest inventions, for example the metamorphosis of the
ships by the Great Mother and the transformation of the ancient Latin goddess
Juturna into Turnus' sister and Jupiter's beloved: this (like perhaps the dream-oracle
of Faunus, see above p. 181 n. 6) is a remarkable attempt to contribute to the
Hellenization of the native gods of Italy which was to be a constant preoccupation of
Ovid. Apart from the chronology and its consequences, Virgil never directly contra-
dicts the tradition.
Some of the minor figures were freely invented by Virgil: these probably include
Androgeos in Book 2, Achaemenides (above p. 93 n. 43), Nisus and Euryalus,
Drances, and many warriors in the battle-scenes, for which the tradition supplied far
too few names; but even here Virgil prefers to keep to the tradition wherever
possible, and often it may only be our ignorance of the tradition that leads us to
assume that Virgil has invented a name:[12] Venulus, the ambassador sent to
Diomedes, is taken from the legends of Lavinium (Servius on 8.9), and Latinus'
chief shepherd is named Tyrrhus after the shepherd in whose hut Silvius was tradi-
tionally said to have been born (Servius on 6.760; 7.484), etc.
Thus we have established that the general guidelines that Virgil followed in
246 handling his sources are as follows: to accept as much of the traditional version as
possible, in so far as it was compatible with artistic considerations; in order to
achieve this, different sources might be combined; free invention was permissible to
fill any gaps or inadequacies in the tradition; in the selecting of this new material,
preference is given to mythical subject-matter, which had only a general link with
the tradition, but no connection with particular scenes;[13] he is permitted freedom in
the arrangement and combination of different traditions, but he is not permitted to
contradict the consensus of the tradition unless it is absolutely necessary.
If we disregard the mythical element, which it is the right, or we might even say
the duty, of the epic poet to add to his narrative, then Virgil has, on the whole,
transmitted the tradition more conscientiously than the majority of Roman annalists,
to say nothing of the novelistic historians of Hellenistic times; we have only to think
of what these historians regarded as permissible by way of 
[elaboration].
Thus, as far as we can see, it appears that the ancient critics of the Aeneid did
comment on those few places where Virgil deviates from the traditional narrative,
but that they did not hold it against him. They were satisfied that it was only an
oversight if he deviated from the established facts of Italo–Roman history;[14] other-
247 wise he is granted a certain degree of freedom in shaping his own story, and indeed
Servius, comically standing a well-known aesthetic principle on its head, says that
the epic poet has no right to report the unadorned truth, even, for example, about
Venus' star, which, according to the traditional account, guided Aeneas to Latium.[15]
However, one thing is obligatory: that the poet should know the traditional version
and should not contradict it out of sheer ignorance.[16] Therefore, when he deviates
from it, he should make at least a covert reference to the true version in order to
reassure learned readers. The ancient commentators succeeded in tracing a consider-
able number of such allusions in Virgil,[17] though they certainly followed several
false trails; but their observations ought not, in my opinion, to be rejected out of
hand. As we have already seen (p. 80), Virgil omits the tradition that Diomedes
returned the Palladium to Troy, although he hints (5.704) that he is aware that the
Nautian gens believed that it explained their relationship with the cult of Minerva.
He omits the tradition that Latinus presented the Trojans with a specific piece of
land, but he makes Latinus express the intention of doing so (11.316). Unlike Cato
and others, he does not say that the battle between the Latins and Trojans was the
consequence of marauding raids by the Trojans; but Juno's violently anti-Trojan
speech accuses them of arva aliena iugo premere atque avertere praedas (10.78)
[laying a heavy yoke on farmlands not their own and driving off their plunder]; and
there are doubtless many similar examples,[18] although it may be difficult to draw the
248 line between learned allusions and the free adaptation of traditional motifs in every
case.[19]
Finally, we may observe that Virgil handled the traditional material just as
Homer was then believed to have done.[20] He, too, had taken the true story of the
Trojan War and the return of Odysseus, and made a poetic version of it (
[he organized]); in other words he had embellished the events as recounted in the
tradition, and had made them come alive ( [rhetorical arrangement]); at the
same time he had interwoven all manner of supernatural and miraculous events
( [myth]) with the ordinary affairs of mankind, in order to give his listeners
greater pleasure, interest and moral instruction than they would have derived from a
straightforward historical narrative. Homer, too, has written nothing which is com-
pletely untrue (except perhaps here and there out of ignorance); it is rather the case
that, beneath the cover of myth, the perceptive reader can discern the traditional
account which enshrined the real truth.