This essay attempts to develop some ideas about national identity as envisioned in the "Aeneid", with two foci: the lack of clarity concerning Aeneas' own nationality, and the inaccuracies in the descriptions of the foreigners portrayed on Aeneas' Vulcanian shield. I aim to undermine the notion that Vergil's own generation and Augustus' regime should be assumed to be the "climax," "culmination," or "fulfillment" of the historical process as the "Aeneid" imagines it, and to present reasons for thinking that Vergil's audience (...) was being invited, instead, to imagine a very long-range future-to expand for themselves the scope of the poem and meet its challenge. I discuss the possibility that Vergil himself was not born either Roman or technically Italian and mention also the probable high proportion of his original audience born without the Roman franchise and admitted to it in the 80s or in 49. I argue that the extended historical range-finder through which the poem requires its readers to view themselves and their inheritors is designed to impose upon them the task of seeking a version of mos that can be made universal, and the task also of regarding present opponents as destined future fellow-Romans. (shrink)

Tree-chopping in the Aeneid has long been seen as a disturbingly violent symbol of the Trojans' colonization of Italy. The paper proposes a new reading of the poem which sees Aeneas as progressive extirpator not just of foreign rivals but also of his own Trojan relatives. Although the Romans had no family “trees” as such, their genealogical stemmata (“garlands”) had “branches” (rami) and “stock” (stirps), and their vocabulary of family relationships takes many of its metaphors from planting, adoption, and uprooting, (...) while plant life is often described in human metaphors. Imperial historians use the growth and collapse of trees to mark the rise and fall of dynasties; natural historians like Columella and Pliny use metaphors of adoption, abortion, and adultery to characterize the perversions of agriculture and horticulture. It is thus no coincidence that Aeneas' encounters with Hector, Priam, Deiphobus, and others often take place against a background of real or metaphorical trees (tree similes, headless or mutilated human trunks, ancient trees and woods). These encourage us to see an element of dynastic encroachment in scenes that look pious and peaceable but confirm Aeneas' ascendancy and claim to Trojan succession. The Polydorus episode in particular can be read not just as a grotesque interlude but as a nightmare about endlessly reproducing heirs; one loose strand from Priam's house is allowed to remain, while Virgil deals imperfectly with the problem of Aeneas' own successors. The paper ends by re-examining Virgil's account of grafting in Georgics 2 and arguing that it is viewed positively, perhaps in order to cast Augustus' adoption of heirs as a miracle solution. (shrink)