The Things Aeneas Carried: The Inner Life of Virgil’s Objects

Kachuck, Aaron [UCL]

My goal in this paper will be to examine to what extent the structure of Virgil’s Aeneid might be said to exemplify this “best” kind of plot, and the possible role of vengeful objects within it. More precisely, I present here a new interpretation of the structure of Virgil’s Aeneid, from book 1 to 12, as the story of things and, ultimately, their inner lives. My endpoint will be an analysis of how the baldric of the dead youth Pallas provokes Aeneas’ rage and the poem’s conclusion. What is the status, what is the role, of this baldric? Is it only, in Virgil’s words, a “memorial of terrible pain” (saevi monimenta doloris)? Or does it play some more active part in the poem’s denouement, or, rather, surprise peroration? The longer version of this paper approaches this question in three parts, beginning with an investigation into the development of the idea of the genius rei in Servius Danielis’ adaptation of Varro, Verrius Flaccus, and Aufustius to a reading of Virgil’s Georgics. The end result of this investigation of Servius Danielis’ articulation of the genius rei is thus that, while Virgil clearly had the cult of the genius as part of his poetic thesaurus, it is not at all clear that the formal term itself is most apposite to the study of his poetry. Instead, as I suggest, we need to obey the dictum of Charles Brink, that « The prudent and highly institutional approach to matters of cult and appellation on the part of Augustus and his advisers is scarcely on a par with the poetic expressions of volitions, emotions and hopes » (Brink 1982: 51). Thus, to understand this question of the life of objects in Virgil’s poetry, parts two and three of this paper, which you will hear today, turn from explicit to implicit theology, to the adaptation, that is, of the rhythms of cult to poetic form. First, I show how two overlapping and interconnected series of object-exchanges help structure the Aeneid as a whole, from Aeneas’ gifts to Dido in book 1 to Aeneas’ burial of Pallas in book 11, then from Pallas’ death at the end of book 10 to Turnus’ death in the last lines of the poem. In today’s second part (part three of the full paper), I look at how these object-exchanges describe a trajectory from inert objects to objects full of feeling and agency, or, we might say, genius, with the special case of Pallas’ baldric prepared both by the apparitions of the Penates in book 3 and of the Idaean nymphs in book 9, as well as by the progression of apparently ingenious objects in book 12.