6—
Completeness of the Speeches
However, this avoidance of digressions is only one aspect of speech in Virgil; its
basic character has everything in common with Virgil's epic style as a whole.
Virgil's speeches are free of anything accidental, arbitrary or untidy. His speakers
do not start from a chance position, to reach their goal by various detours, or to be
steered towards it by their interlocutors; he does not select a point arbitrarily, when
others could have served equally well; rather he exhausts all possible material; he
does not leave the point he is dealing with until it is dealt with completely, so that he
does not have to return to it repeatedly; he does not leap suddenly from one thought
to another, leaving a gap for the listener to fill in for himself, but places similar
things next to each other, or develops one thought from another. The psychological
presupposition for this is that each character at every moment is capable of survey-
ing and arranging all the material which has anything to do with his speech: we do
not need to spell out how seldom this can ever happen in real life, least of all in
moments of great emotion: that Virgil does not depart from his rule even here has
already been pointed out above (p. 234); he strives to make his depiction penetrating
and convincing by portraying its causes as completely as possible. He makes his
characters use the same means to persuade each other as he himself does to win over
the reader: if a character is to be won over by pleading or persuasion, it is not
enough to take one argument and make it effective by widening or deepening it; as
418 many arguments as possible are lined up. This is true not only of the longer ad-
dresses, such as that of Venus to Jupiter (1.229ff.) or of Dido to Aeneas (4.305ff.),
but also of quite short speeches. When Magus pleads to Aeneas for his life
(10.524ff.), this is modelled on Homer's Adrestus ( Iliad 6.46); the latter pins his
hopes entirely on his opponent's greed, promising a rich ransom. Magus does not
forget to do the same, but before he does so he appeals to Aeneas' feelings as a son
and as a father, in order to arouse his pity for his own father and son,[66] and finally he
argues that one dead soldier more or less makes no difference to the Trojans'
victory: all this without using many more words than his Homeric model. When
Somnus, in the shape of Phorbas, wishes to send Palinurus to sleep (5.843-6), he
compresses into a few lines a reference to the calmness of the waves, the steady
winds, the steersman's recent exertions and fatigue, and his offer to take over; and
Palinurus' rejection of the offer also takes only a few lines (848-51), dwelling on the
unreliability of that monster, the sea, the deceptiveness of the winds and of the
bright sky; he mentions his own experience in these matters, and points out the
responsibility of his position, since it is Aeneas who has entrusted himself to him.
The numerous shouts of encouragement given by Homer's heroes to their men as
they fight or hesitate usually consist only of a brief appeal to honour or to the
present favourable chance of victory, or the danger of the situation, or the results of
victory and defeat; or else just a few of these motifs are combined; when Pallas
(10.369) encourages his men, he starts by appealing to their sense of comradeship by
addressing them as socii [friends], then his oath per vos et fortia facta etc. [by
yourselves and your brave deeds] reminds them of their own honourable record,
their loyalty to Evander and his previous successes; he mentions his own ambitious
419 hopes, and finally their obligations towards their common homeland and its great-
ness, vos et Pallanta ducem patria alta reposcit (374) [your proud land requires you
and me, Pallas your leader]; there follows an explanation of the present situation: we
are fighting against mortals on an equal footing, not against divine disfavour, we are
equal in number to the enemy; in any case we have to fight and win since flight is
impossible as we are completely surrounded. We see that the Arcadians are sho-
wered with a deluge of arguments, each one indicated so briefly yet fully that a
summary of its contents would not be any shorter than the speech itself. Similarly
Anna's persuasion of Dido (4.31-49): all possible arguments against Dido's remain-
ing single, and in favour of the new marriage, are compressed here – in the Homeric
style these arguments would fill several pages –, and one has the impression that
Virgil never gave a thought to the question of whether it was possible for Anna to
think all this out so quickly, and for Dido to consider all the implications immedi-
ately; rather, the poet uses Anna's speech as a pretext to motivate the psychology of
Dido's action as thoroughly as possible. Finally, to look at just one more example, it
is instructive to compare Latinus' advice to Turnus (12.19ff.) and Priam's advice to
Hector, to desist from combat against a stronger opponent. Priam dwells on two
points: on the fate of his two sons, Lycaon and Polydorus – here he digresses greatly
from the actual purpose of his speech – and the tragic fate which he himself would
face after Hector's death: that is painted at length in cruelly painful detail. Latinus'
words combine the description of what would be left to Turnus after renouncing
Laurentum and Lavinia, with a reminder of the will of the gods, and the tragic
consequences which his neglect of them has already had; the king then shows why
he himself must wish to end the war; finally he refers – obliquely and briefly,
cleverly calculating Turnus' character – to the danger of the undertaking ( respice res
bello varias [43] [think of war's shifting chances]) and adduces as a clinching
argument the respect due to Turnus' aged father. If all that together has no effect
then nothing can.
420