8—
Arrangement of Speeches
After all that we have said, one would expect the arrangement of the speeches in
Virgil to show a similar amount of deliberation and calculation. One who has found
how very much the effect of a speech depends on the arrangement of its parts will
automatically follow the rules of the art here too. An example is Numanus' scornful
speech (9.598ff.), where one thought follows another very logically: he wants to
entice the Trojans out of their entrenched position, so he starts by accusing them of
cowardice: 'Are you not ashamed?'. That leads to the scornful utterance: 'To think
that these are the people who are crazy enough to want to bully us out of a marriage
by force! We, who have much more significance than the Greeks, and they have
already beaten them.' He proceeds to expand on who 'we' are and describes Italic
life according to the different generations: infants, youths, men, old men. 'And what
can you offer? You adorn your bodies and live an idle, vain existence.' Logical
conclusion: 'Go home to your Phrygian orgies and leave the field to us real men':
finishing with the worst insult: o vere Phrygiae neque enim Phryges [you who are
really women of Phrygia, not Phrygian men] and sinite arma viris [leave arms to
425 men].[75] The emotional speeches have the same characteristics. Aeneas' lament over
Pallas' corpse refers, in order, to the dead man (11.42-4), Evander (45-57), the
future of the realm and its ruler, Iulus (57-8); in speaking of Evander he refers first
to the past, then comments on the present, then predicts the future; finally he
anticipates the consolatio [consolation]. Aeneas does not put himself to the fore, and
says nothing about the direct effects on himself of the loss of Pallas: the indirect
effect is that he realizes that the dead youth's pleasures which are now made vain
were the same as his own (42f.), that he felt responsible to the father for the son
(45ff., 55) and – something which goes without saying – that he is deeply concerned
about the future of his family. Dido's first speech to Aeneas on his departure falls
into two parts: accusation ( indignatio ) (4.305-13) and pleading (miseratio ) (314-30);
the transition from one to the other is very natural: 'You are in such a hurry to run
away, that you don't even give a thought to the winter storms, and it is not even as if
you are anxious to reach home – you are going to a strange land', this leads of itself
to the thought of what he is giving up: mene fugis? ['Is it from me you are trying to
escape?']. The pleas are based on the past (315-18), the present (320-3) and the
future (324-6); the finale is formed by the lament, arising directly from her thoughts
of the future, that she will not even have an image of her beloved in the shape of a
little son: if anything might move the hard-hearted man and force him to remain
then it would be this last argument.[76] How Aeneas for his part briefly meets the
426 accusations one after the other, and then explains in detail, point by point, that his
departure is not voluntary, I do not need to tell you.
In these three examples, which will suffice to represent many others, the poet has
arranged his material with a sure touch. At the same time, he has avoided making
this arrangement too obvious: he elides the divisions between sections rather than
drawing attention to them. It is unnatural for a violently upset person to give vent to
his feelings in a well-ordered way; with great art Virgil makes it seem as natural as
possible, clothes the skeleton of the speech and smooths out the transitions so that
we seem to see not a framework of bones but a living body. He therefore starts not
with a cool propositio [exposition] but with a leap in medias res [into the midst of
the matter], starting from the thing nearest to hand; no announcement of, or em-
phasis on, each new section,[77] no explicit formulae at the conclusion; trains of
thought which are psychological rather than logical, perfectly in tune with the
purpose of the speech, which Virgil intends should work overwhelmingly upon the
feelings, not upon the mind. That is true even of the speeches which come closest to
the oratio [formal speech] as found in the art of rhetoric, the speeches made in the
assembly by Venus and Juno in Book 10, by Drances and Turnus in Book 11: they
argue, and on both occasions the reply refers as closely to the previous speech as
only a reply in the senate or a court of law does, even quoting verbatim from the
opponent; at the same time they remain full of pathos, every part calculated to affect
their emotions, and it is only in Turnus' speech that one finds anything like a
rhetorical emphasis on its arrangement:[78] this is intended to make a clear-cut divi-
sion between the well-considered oratio deliberativa [deliberative speech] and the
heated invectiva [accusation] of the first part of the speech.
427 The poet is so accustomed to arranging his speeches in this way that he does not
even change completely when, as with the lament of the mother of Euryalus (9.481-
97), he wishes to use the form and the content to give the impression of a person
completely beside herself; there is only one occasion where he ventures to use
broken utterances to express crazed agitation, and that is in Dido's outburst of anger
when she sees the fleet sailing away (4.590ff.): but even here the effect depends
more upon the form of the speech – loud exclamations and questions – and its
content, which is close to sheer insanity – than upon any disturbance of the normal
sequence of thought.