2—
Vision of the Gods
The vision which Venus unveils to Aeneas has a much more powerful effect on him
than her mere words. He sees with his own eyes what is hidden from mortals, and no
mortal had yet ever seen. Sometimes one deity grants a favoured mortal the privi-
lege of seeing him or her with his own eyes. But in this vision the veil which screens
from mortal sight the whole world of the gods and their sway on earth is pulled
aside. The motif is borrowed from the Iliad (5.127) but it is developed very much
more powerfully. In the Iliad , Athena gives Diomedes supernatural powers of sight,
so that he can distinguish gods from men on the battlefield and avoid fighting with
them; however, that means that he recognizes only those gods with whom he comes
into contact himself. Virgil's inspiration, too sublime even for the poet's words to do
it justice, almost too vast for the imagination to grasp, arouses misgivings for that
very reason. We might easily believe it if the poet himself described it; but, as it is, it
is narrated by Aeneas as an eyewitness. We therefore feel entitled to clear, tangible,
concrete images. Neptune, for example, capable of uprooting the whole city from its
foundations, is represented in a way that almost goes beyond our powers of visuali-
52 zation. Jupiter, who imbues the Greeks with courage and strength and incites the
gods themselves to fight against Troy, is a figure that completely baffles any attempt
that might be made to imagine him in physical terms, and even if in this case Virgil
tactfully allows Venus not to draw Aeneas' attention to him explicitly, as she does
with the other gods, yet Jupiter must be among the numina magna deum [giant
powers of gods] that Aeneas sees.[81] Juno stands as
Scaean Gate and summons the Greeks from the ships – what, still? one asks in
amazement; for it was long ago that Androgeos had rebuked the men he took to be
his companions for coming so late from the ships; we had been under the impression
that there were no more left to come by the time that Priam's citadel fell. If it were a
matter of a panorama of the whole sack of Troy, we could understand what Juno
was doing. She does not put her hand to the task herself, for that would hardly be
seemly for the regina deum ; but, as far as she is concerned, the city she hates cannot
be overwhelmed by the enemy soon enough; so she stands at the gate and calls
furiously across the plain, and her cry spurs on the Greeks to make haste with the
destruction of the city.
The starting-point of Virgil's conception can be traced with the help of Tryphio-
dorus. He too depicts the participation of the gods (559ff.), but as part of his general
description of the night of terror. Enyo rages through the streets all night, accompa-
nied by the gigantic Eris who inflames the Argives to battle, and finally Ares arrives
to grant them victory. From the citadel terrifying shouts are heard from Athena as
she shakes her aegis. Hera's tread makes the aether rumble; the earth trembles,
shaken by Poseidon's trident; Hades leaps up in horror from his throne. All this is
simply a copy of the picture that introduces the Battle of the Gods in Homer,[82] with
only a few changes in detail to fit the new situation: Ares too is on the Greek side
now, Athena no longer stays on the shore but stands on the citadell as she does in
Virgil, and as Ares does in Homer.[83] The other divergences from Homer, which
53 Tryphiodorus and Virgil have in common, are unimportant. They both mention
Hera, both give Athena her aegis and Poseidon his trident. As we can see, there is no
reason at all to suppose that Tryphiodorus knew Virgil's description and made use
of it. In every essential he keeps closer to Homer than to the Roman poet, except that
Zeus does not appear in his account, whereas in Homer he sends peals of thunder
from on high, and Virgil shows him doing something altogether different. Every-
thing that Virgil adds in order to make the scene more vivid and to present in visible
symbols the enmity of the gods towards Troy is absent from Tryphiodorus. But
surely no one will doubt that the scene in the Iliad is the direct or indirect model for
Virgil's scene; indirect, in my view, since Tryphiodorus also made use of it, and
both of them made the same minor changes. Any famous version of the Sack of
Troy, we may assume, will have included a scene showing the hostile gods taking
part in the final struggle of the great war, on the lines of Homer's Battle of the Gods;
but now there is no god fighting on the side of the defeated. Virgil realized that this
would make a magnificent finale for his Sack of Troy, and reshaped it for his own
special purposes. First it had to be changed into narrative in the first person; conse-
quently the scene had to become visible to Aeneas.
Virgil found a means of achieving this in Venus' intervention, and was thus able
to make the thrilling scene into an integrating component of the entire action: it is
indispensable in that it convinces Aeneas through the evidence of his own eyes. But
the scene has not completely lost its original purpose, that of concentrating the
mighty struggle into one magnificent symbol. In the case of Jupiter, Virgil does
without the concrete representation of his actions required by the new context, and
he is not afraid to introduce an anachronism into his portrayal of Juno. Other
singularities can easily be explained by the particular nature of his poem. Mars, the
ancestor of the Romans, cannot appear as one of the inimica Troiae numina [powers
not friendly to Troy]. Athena does not shout – no goddess shouts in Virgil – and
consequently there is something rather insipid about the simple phrase summas
arces insedit [sits on the citadel's height]. Jupiter supplies the crowning touch: it is
only when the Almighty himself supports the enemies of Troy that all hope is lost.