IDEOGRAPHIC IMAGERY in AENEID IV
		  and VIRGIL's PHILOSOPHIZING

		 	   Allan Wooley
		     Phillips Exeter Academy
  		 This selection starts at page 124 of the original


However, I believe that Virgil intended us also to hear another strong echo, that would quite significantly enrich our understanding of his point here. One of the cues to this echo for me was a phrase in his description of Mercury's first theophany: paribus nitens Cyllenius aliis(69). In fact, it reminded me of another who like Virgil used mythic images as analogues for philosophic ideas. Plato's philosophic discussions of love may well have been a source that Virgil reviewed when he was working on book IV. When in the Phaedrus(70) Plato is explaining the nature of soul, he compares it to a winged pair of horses and their charioteer. Since both the horses (thymos & epithymia) of divine charioteers are noble, the chariots of the gods travel easily and are (isorropos) or well-balanced, while those of humans have one bad horse and so fly in a limping and sporadic way. When the gods and their trains get to the top of heaven they perch on the outer rim of heaven and gaze beyond. And this is just what Mercury does. But this is no hermeneutic smoking gun, not because that is what he did in Homer, but (to switch analogies) because one strand of hemp does not make a rope, and more importantly because Virgil has left no sign that I can see to mark this as an intentional allusion. And yet he describes Mercury in such a way(71) that several commentators have thought that Virgil was comparing Mercury to a rider and the clouds to his horses(72). If so, then Virgil is just continuing the symbolic correlation that he made in Book I between winds and horses(75). Naturally, I combine this with the description of Mercury as Psychopompos(76) that may go somewhat beyond his Homeric model to conclude that Virgil is making his allusion to Plato's charioteer of the soul more obvious. Furthermore, it helps to motivate the prominence of Atlas, as the height pinnacling into heaven(77); it explains Dido's actions, because those souls which follow in Hera's train chose royal natures for their beloveds, but those that follow Ares are ready to sacrifice themselves and their beloved, if they feel wronged by the loved one(78); and finally the Phaedrus overlay greatly bolsters Aeneas' position philosophically: he is not only responding to the orders of a mythological god, but he has received that intuitive flash of insight from the realm of reality that reveals the Ideas, or enough of that world to cause that conversion and about-face that is described especially in the Republic.

In fact, I think that the main and strongest Platonic allusion is not to the Phaedrus, but to the Republic; indeed, it must be practically a foregone conclusion that a philosophically committed poet, who was intending(79) to write an epic on founding a glorious and perhaps ideal state and who was associated with a circle that read Cicero(80), would read Cicero's De Re Publica carefully and its model even more carefully(81). In Plato's Republic we have the Allegory of the Cave(82), in which the our life in the sensible world of sights and sounds is likened to existence in a cave where the light is artificial and there is no real Knowledge but only Opinion or ????, for which one of the Latin translations is 'fama'(83). Once we have this key in hand, much becomes clearer(84). Fama, like Plato's ???? and like Dido's moods, goes through many permutations. Already at line 91 we know that Dido's fama (here almost synonymous with pudor in the sense of right opinion) will not withstand her passion; then Dido and aeneas enter the cave of opinion, and when Dido comes out, she is not moved by any concern for her reputation (line 170) or by specie, another word very close in sense to ????, opinion or appearance. At this point the phantasmagoric Rumor arises, spawning its ghostly children, the false opinions of men and the empty threats of the gods,- in Iarbas' opinion at line 218. Indeed, it is Dido's false opinion and her faulty assessment that makes her call her liaison with Aeneas marriage.

There are many other correspondences between Aeneid IV and Plato's Republic(85), but the major connections are that we have a Cave here in Book IV too, and both end with a pyre that has significance far beyond a mere funeral. Both caves are Caves of illusion, and when the soul is in the cave of illusion, opinion, here poetically portrayed as FAMA, replaces Truth and true knowledge of the Ideas(86). We have that Opinion from Plato's Republic in the Aeneid Book IV, and in fact, it seems to be competing with pure mind's intuitive grasp of the Ideas in a epistemological contest. Dido gets her knowledge from Fama, while Aeneas is informed by Mercury, and as a Platonic result Aeneas prospers, and disaster awaits Dido. "This reconstruction may help to explain the speed of the reversal [of conduct] once he [Aeneas] hears Mercury's words."(87) Moreover, this is all according to the Phaedrus' Law of Necessity(88), that the soul that follows his god rises, but the soul that falters and does not see the Truth beyond this world falls and becomes heavy with inanimate materialism. Here Plato is producing his own artistic overlay echoing Empedocles' oracle of Necessity, the ancient decree of the gods, that causes the Hate- following soul to return to the body and fall into a lower rebirth(89); furthermore, Empedocles' oracle of destiny and decree of the gods serves in many ways as a model for Virgil's notion of Fatum. And with this we come full circle back to Virgil's signature version of the traditional Empedoclean cosmic frame.

But the ideographic allegory of a contest between Punic Opinion and Roman Truth is not Virgil's most striking image nor his most telling allusion in Aeneid IV. Rather, it is Virgil's wondrous three-stage syncretism of the marriage bed and the mountain and the pyre.(90) In the first instance this is an allusion to Sophocles' Trachiniae, firstly when Heracles curses his marriage bed, then when Deianira, retreating to the marriage bed, calls the marriage bed to witness as she commits suicide with the sword, just as Dido will do, and finally when Heracles has his son Hyllus promise to build a pyre for him atop Mt. Oeta and place his litter on top(91). There is perhaps a distant allusion here to parallel locations of the Iliad and the Odyssey; in Book 23 of the first we have Patroclus' pyre and in Book 23 of the second we have Penelope and Odysseus' marriage bed described in great detail(92). But the immediate and most important allusion is, of course, to the three beds and the pyre of Er in Book X of Plato's Republic. The three beds are for Plato the three levels of existence: the Idea of bed, the actual physical bed, and the painter or poet's copy of the physical bed, which is thus three removes from reality. Such a copyist might indeed, like a magician, deceive a sincere person by creating phantoms, as indeed Dido deceives Anna(93). The cumulative ideographic projection of mountains in Aeneid IV as permanent connectors of heaven and earth now reaches an paradoxically perverted conclusion, because Dido now is trying to create an artificial, opinion-based mountain, crowned in further irony with her marriage bed which becomes her bier. The Platonic allusion allows us to understand that Dido has created a phantom marriage which she now tries grotesquely to fashion into an (??(? ???o? connecting heaven and earth. But the allusion to the myth of Er informs us that it will have cosmic effect, but not the union of Love, but the strife of the Punic Wars. Thus, starting with the Cave and ending with the artificial mountain-pyre, Aeneid IV informs itself with Plato's Republic, all within its continuing Empedoclean frame. 

       
  
     69 Aeneid 4.252; cf. n. 90 infra on "manifesto in lumine" (358) for 
        another strong allusive pointer to Plato. 

     70 Phdr. 246A. Most scholars say that Virgil was an eclectic in the 
        Aeneid: John Ferguson PVS p.27, E. Norden, op. cit., p. 34 ff. 
     
     71 Aeneid 4.245:
                  Illa fretus agit ventos, et turbida tranat
                  nubila; iamque volans apicem et latera ardua cernit 
     
     72 Williams, op. cit., ad loc., and possibly Austin op. cit., ad 
        loc., citing Henry. Virgil has already made the symbolic 
        connection between the winds and horses in Books I & II, cf., 
        e.g., 1.51, 2.238 & 304. 
     
     75  Cf. Conington, op. cit., on 1.54 for the correlation of the 
        imagery of winds and horses in that passage. 
     
     76 as shown at Od. 5.43 f., cf. n.69.  Cf. H.J. Rose, A Handbook of 
        Greek Mythology, New York, 1959, p. 146, W.K.C. Guthrie, The 
        Greeks and Their Gods, Boston, 1950, pp. 89 & 230.  Of course, 
        Virgil has directly imitated the Od. 24.2-4 in lines 242-4, and 
        Odyssey 24.1-14 is a locus classicus for Hermes Psychopompus, 
        although that name is not used.  Cf. endnote #2 on this passage:  
        Aristarchus' rejection of the Nekyuia in Od. 24, because Hermes 
        is not Cyllenian or Psychopompus (elsewhere) in Homer, and 
        W.B.Stanford's (The Odyssey of Homer, London, 1962) vol. II, p. 
        409f., ad loc. commentary on Aristarchus' arguments.  Finally, 
        there is included in this description of Hermes the Spirit-Guide 
        a simile comparing the souls to squealing bats in the recess of a 
        wondrous cave, a passage cited by Plato at Republic 387A, but not 
        related directly to his Cave, on which cf. also Mary Johnson, 
        "The Cave of the Bats", CW 26 (1933) 184. 
     
     77 It is the characteristic of Atlas, both at 247 and 482 to connect 
        heaven and earth,- to form, as it were, a bridge between them. It 
        is not the only figure to be so described:  Fama at 177 
                  ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubila condit
        and both Mercury and the Massylian priestess-witch have power in 
        heaven and earth;  Mercury comes down from Heaven to Earth, and 
        has the power to raise the dead, while the Massylian witch can 
        also control ghosts and turn back the stars, and so on.  The 
        important thing is the Virgilian ideographic context:  they both 
        are very closely related in position and function and lineage 
        with Atlas, who is not only a mountain but the father of the 
        sages and the grandfather of Mercury.  Of course, as we shall 
        see, Fama and the Massylian witch connect heaven and earth in a 
        destructive way. 
     
     78 Phdr. 253B
     
     79 According to Tenney Frank op. cit. p.67 ff. Virgil already 
        intended to write an Aeneid before he published the Eclogues;  
        indeed he started in 46 BC before Caesar was assassinated. 
     
     80 Cf. Catullus poem 49:
                  Dissertissime Romuli nepotum,
                  Quot sunt quotque fuere, Marce Tulli, ..
                  Quanto tu optimus omnium patronus.
        And cf. T. Frank, op. cit., p. 80 f. on their reading Cicero, 
        although Cicero held a poetic credo different from the neoterici, 
        cf. Otis, op. cit., p. 31. 
     
     81 It is quite fitting for Virgil to take Plato's Republic as a main 
        model for two further reasons.  First, as Otis, op. cit., 223 f. 
        points out, Aeneid I-VI is about the education of the Roman hero-
        statesman, just as the Republic is the education of the 
        philosopher-king.  Further, it can be assumed that the circle of 
        Maecenas was quite interested in the question of the relationship 
        of poetry and the state.  It is obvious that Virgil believes that 
        Iopas and he himself have met all of Plato's conditions for 
        inclusion in the state.  Cf. also Orpheus in Elysium:  Threicius 
        .. sacerdos at 6.645. 
     
     82 cf. note #69 where it is clear that the Cave is a symbol for the 
        Cosmos. 
     
     83 As we can see from Q. Cicero, Petitio Consulatus 5.17 where 
        Quintus uses bona fama as the translation for ?(?o???, or at M. 
        Cicero, De Rep. 2.2 where he says that we can can accept the 
        traditional opinion of men that Mars was the father of Romulus, 
        though we have no further evidence: concedamus enim famae 
        hominum, praesertim non solum inveteratae, sed etiam sapienter a 
        maioribus proditae. 
     
     84 Cf. n. 54 and further note that at 4.188 & 190 Fama is described 
        as follows: ficti .. tenax quam nuntia veri; facta atque infecta 
        canebat.  At Rep. 506C Plato argues that those who hold some true 
        opinion without rational justification are like blind men who 
        happen to pick the right path. Here and at Meno 97D, Symp. 202A, 
        and Phileb. 40C Plato points out the difference between right 
        opinion and knowledge.  At the Rep. 479D-480A Plato equates the 
        lovers of spectacle and the lovers of sights and sounds and the 
        lovers of opinion (the doxophilists).  Opinion is the half-way 
        house between Being and Non-being. 
     
     85 Cf. appendix #4, and also the fact that Virgil has helped us 
        clearly to differentiate the mobility of Mercury and Fama in 
        several ways:  first there is the difference in sex (cf. n. 59);  
        second there is the difference in lineage:  Mercury is Olympian 
        and the offspring of the good Titan Atlas, while Fama is the 
        monstrous progeny of Earth like the Giants;  third and most 
        tellingly there is the Platonic contrast:  Mercury represents 
        soul which belongs to the world of Ideas but can move in both 
        worlds, hence its relatedness to the Phaedran Atlas, while Fama 
        like opinion is tied to the material world, cf. n. 55. 
     
     86 Virgil has already initiated this motif in Book II (604), which 
        now from the hindsight seems farily obvious: 
                  Aspice- namque omnem, quae nunc obducta tuenti
                  mortalis hebetat visus tibi umida circum
                  caligat, nubem eripiam.
        Venus, here operating as Platonic philosophic Eros, which is the 
        second strain of symbolic allusion with which Virgil informs his 
        Venus, rips the shroud of mortality from Aeneas' eyes so he can 
        see reality, here in mythic terms as befits a mythological epic. 
        The 'reconstruction' in the line quoted from G. Williams, op. 
        cit., p. 46, refers to his elaboration of Virgil's point in his 
        indirect revelation of Aeneas' psychology and suppressed guilt 
        from his mention of his dreams and the oracles given to him as 
        reported by him in his speech to Dido 4.345 f.. I do not disagree 
        or reject Williams' reconstruction of Aeneas' suppressed guilt, 
        but I do not find it as convincing as Williams for the reasons 
        given at the beginning in footnote #2. In fact, I believe that 
        Williams could have strengthened his interpretation by showing 
        how Virgil united this theme of dreams with that of male vs. 
        female, and with that of hunting, as discussed in note #59.  
        Rather, I believe that Virgil has begun to prepare us for a 
        transcendent philosophical awakening already at the end of Aeneid 
        II, at 604 f. 
                  Aspice - namque omnem, quae nunc obducta tuenti
                  mortalis hebetat visus tibi et umida circum
                  caligat, nubem eripiam
        Even without looking back from Aeneid IV this must sound very 
        Platonic; the strong sense that mortal corporeality blunts and 
        obscures our vision of the truth and the real world of the Ideas, 
        here as portrayed mythologically as the cosmic forces working in 
        the world.  At this point Aeneas would have been ready to obey, 
        had not Anchises still persisted in his desire to stay.  I 
        believe that Virgil equates Mercury to the person who might 
        unshackle the prisoners in Plato's cave and force them to turn 
        around at Republic 515C or 518C, in both of which passages Plato 
        uses the analogy of a physical about-face, a complete reversal to 
        describe the re-orientation of the mind from the world of shadows 
        to the daylight of reality.  It is just in this quise that 
        Mercury is described at 4.358: 
                  ... ipse deum manifesto in lumine vidi
        Plato spent much of Republic vi exploring the metaphor of light 
        and Sun as an analogue for truth and the world of Ideas, before 
        he descended into the Cave.  In the physical world perceptions 
        are contradictory, confusing, and slow to convince, while the 
        clarity of an Idea is apodictic, definitive, and immediate.  If 
        my explanation of the ekphraseis as allusive philosophic symbols 
        is correct, then their point is to further support the notion of 
        a Platonic vision, a moment of intuitive insight, and so the 
        second question posed at the start has its answer.  And finally, 
        also the third question;  Book IV is much more than just a love 
        tragedy.  It explores in some deliberate detail the philosophic 
        underpinings of the Roman vision. 
     
     87 Phdr. 248C:
                  ?????? ?? (????????? (??( (??? (v ???( ??( ??vo???(? 
        ??vo??v? ?????( ?? ?(v (???(v. .. 
     
     88 Cf Empedocles frg B 116 DK, 109 W, cf. Wright, op. cit., p. 276 
        on the relation between Love and Necessity. Cf. C. Kahn, 
        "Religion and Natural Philosophy in Empedocles' Doctrine of the 
        Soul", Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy, edd. JP Anton & GL 
        Kustas, Albany, 1972, p. 19 and n. 67 on various Empedoclean 
        reminiscences in Plato's Phaedrus. 
     
     89 The mentions of the pyre and the marriage bed which is brought 
        out and set on top of the pyre are interlocked and each is 
        mentioned five times:  494 pyram, 504 pyra, 640 rogum. 646 rogos, 
        676 rogus vs. 496 lectum iugalem, 508 toro, 650 toro, 659 toro, & 
        691 toro. 
     
     90 Sophocles, Trach. 791, 920 f., and 1191 f.
     
     91 Il. 23.166 ff. & Od. 23.18 1ff. 
     
     92 Rep. 597B ff. 
     
     93 Rep. 598D: ?(???? ??? (v????o?, ???, (? (o???v, (v???(v ????? 
        ??v? ??( ?????( (????????. 

Appendix 4. Correspondences of Aeneid to Republic:

    VERGIL AENEID 4                					 PLATO REPUBLIC

   27 Pudor.. tua iura resolvo      		<    331c justice = render each his due
                                         			443a just=keep oaths & agreements
      1.516 nube cava amicti       			<         359d+612b ring of Gyges
      1.544 quo iustior nec pietate          			 just even with the ring
   47 Quam urbem .. tali coniugio   		<    460a best city has communism + 
                                                	marriage between guardians
                                         			431  new wellordered city
   65 Heu vatum ignarae mentes      		<    364b soothsayers claim power to 
       to                                          			make gods change!
   86 Non coeptae adsurgunt turres  		<    368d analogy of soul & state (435b)
                                          		disordered soul = collapsed city
   91 nec famam obstare furori      		<    439e thymos vs. too much appetite
      cf. 170                              				thymos, champ of right opinion 
   119 / 130 the Sun                		<    508 / 516 Sun + idea of the Good
       Titan, radiis,iubare exorto
   124 / 165 speluncam              		<    514a the allegory of the Cave 
   138/148 auro aurum aurea . auro  		<    415 myth of metals:  Golden race
       Dido & Aeneas philos rulers
   173 FAMA .. mobilitate viget     		<   476 Opinion (DOXA) vs. Truth
       188 tam ficti quam veri             		cf. 2 parts of Parmenides' poem
   194 cupidine captos              		<   437 appetite,462 community of pleasure
                                          		557 democracy sinkhole of hedonism
   215/261 ille Paris, stellatus   			<    372 luxurious city of pigs
        iaspide .. uxorius               				427 must be purged
   222 Mercury controls souls/sleep 		<    509d the Divided Line: soul spans 											both
                                           		worlds, the seen and the unseen
   247 Atlantis duri                		<    473c philosopherking
   265 Mercury addresses Aeneas     		<    500c lover of wisdom by divine becomes 
       2cd direct meet w/ gods            		divine, contemplating eternity 486a
                                         		      496c Socrates' divine sign saved phil
      2.591/604 omnem quae hebetat  		<    506 we must remove the blindness of 
       mortalis visus, nubem eripiam       			the best who would lead us. 
      UNSEEN WORLD OF GODS          		<      IMMATERIAL WORLD OF IDEAS
   281 ardet abire = restoration    		<    518d speediest & best conversion 
   281 ardet abire = restoration    		<    444b justice in the soul is proper
        of justice in A's soul            			hierarchy of the parts of soul
                                           			cf. 432b justice in the state
   291 taciti .. dissimulent        		<    359d ring of Gyges (not A's 1st
                                                 				reaction)
   322 Dido's pudor et fama         		<    443a cf. above
   333 Aeneas' defense speech       		<    496c cf above:  Socrates' Apology
      Apollo is the cause                  		Apol 20e f. Apollo is the cause 
      dreams and signs              		<      Apol 33c prophecies and dreams
                                                		31c/40c  the daimonion
   347 hic amor hic patria est      		<    403a right vs. sex, 485a philosophy
   358 deum manifesto in lumine     		<    508f. cf. above @ 119
   370 undemonstrative Aeneas       		<    397d philoskings are dull
   440 unresponsive Aeneas               		      604e
   481 maximus Atlas                		<    473c cf. above
   483 Massylean witch              		<    364b cf. above @ 65
      cf. with Mercury
   494/504 Dido's pyre = mountain   		<    614b myth of ER
      584 dawn A sails + D suicide         		      621b ER awoke on pyre at dawn
   607 Sol et conscia Iuno          		<    508 cf. above @ 119
      in Dido's curse
   640-676 3 rogus + 2 torus        		<    596b the three beds
      death-sleeping-wedding             			idea-craftsman's-artist's
   665 FAMA                         		<    476 cf. above @ 173