VERGIL

Republic vs. Empire

Apollonius of Rhodes can be said to represent a certain moment in the “history” of the simile. He is neither the first nor the last representative of this moment; he is not even necessarily its best representative. But one could hardly find a more poignant contrast to Homer. As such, Apollonius is an important alternative precedent for Vergil’s Aeneid, for the Roman epic will take up both the question of the heroic individual as he is constituted by the various institutions of culture, and also heroic “character” as something more personal and apart from the institutions of culture. Indeed, the relationship of private and public realms is a key issue raised in the Aeneid, and criticism of the poem is divided as to the intentions of Vergil on this point: whether he was trying to promote the subjection of the private to the public, or trying to critique this “imperial subjectivity.”¹ In either case (and these two readings do not exhaust the possibilities), Vergil was involved in an explicit political practice, and the dynamics of his poetics are profoundly influenced by this fact. This practice took the form of an overt celebration of Augustus and of the empire that he had established. Moreover, this celebration has a specifically historical character to it, so that the empire is shown to be superior to its predecessors. Vergil is thus implicitly occupied with the relative value of political institutions, a matter in which Apollonius apparently had little interest, and a question which Homer did not have the tools to formulate explicitly. There was, however, an important traditional debate about which was the best form of government, a debate which compared various models of rule in order to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each. This discussion did not take the form of an epic poem, but the histories of Herodotus and Polybius and the philosophical dialogues of Plato and Cicero, to name some of the more salient examples, are texts which raised issues of “epic” scope and which perceived themselves as doing so. Before turning to Vergil, therefore, it will be necessary to consider briefly the terms of this discussion. Cicero’s Republic will serve as our example, since it will provide the closest contrast with Vergil.

The republic is described by Cicero as a form of government which is “mixed,” having elements from monarchy, democracy and aristocracy:² it is a form which arises from the dialectic of these three simple forms. Here is the passage from the Republic (I, xlv, 69):

regio autem ipsi praestabit id quod erit aequatum et temperatum ex tribus primis rerum publicarum modis. placet enim esse quidam in re publica praestans et regale, esse aliud auctoritati principum inpartitum ac tributum, esse quasdam res servatas iudicio voluntatique multitudinis. haec constitutio primum habet aequabilitatem quandam magnam, qua carere diutius vix possunt liberi, deinde firmitudinem, quod et ilia prima facile in contraria vitia convertuntur, ut exsistat ex rege dominus, ex optimatibus factio, ex populo turba et confusio; quodque ipsa genera generibus saepe conmutantur novis, hoc in hac iuncta moder-ateque permixta constitutione rei publicae non ferme sine magnis principum vitiis evenit non est enim causa conversionis, ubi in suo quisque est gradu firmiter collocatus, et non subest quo praecipitet ac decidat.

Better even than monarchy, however, is that constitution which is a balanced and tempered compromise among the three primary forms of government. For it is fitting for a government to have a royal aspect, the first citizens have some claim to power, and certain things are reserved for the judgment and will of the people. Such a constitution has in the first place a sort of balance, without which freedom is scarcely possible for long, and then a stability: for those primary forms of government are easily inverted into their perverse forms, so that from monarchy arises tyranny, from aristocracy, oligarchy and from democracy, anarchy; and furthermore, these types often are changed into others. But in the mixed and moderate constitution, this does not happen without grave faults of the leaders; for there is no cause for a change where each is firmly established in his proper place, and there is no underlying perverted form into which this type of constitution can degenerate.

Cicero recognizes that monarchy, aristocracy and democracy are three internally coherent systems, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. The republic, on the other hand, is a sort of modulation among these three simple forms. The republic sets up a ratio, a logos, among the three primary forms, a system of exchange and reciprocity. Roman history, as Scipio presents it in the second book of the Republic, exemplifies this process of dialectical exchange among the three types of rule. Each of the three classes of people (royal, aristocratic, popular) gives and takes, makes “trade-offs,” in order to achieve a balance of power.³

One could hardly find a more succinct statement of the two different structures of culture’s relationship to non-culture discussed above. The three simple forms of government are each paired with an isomorphically constructed negative image: tyranny, oligarchy and anarchy. The relationship between the members of each of these pairs is that of culture to anti-culture. The inherent weakness of these simple forms is that they will degenerate into their anti-types (Rep. I, xxviii, 44):

nam illi regi, ut eum potissimum nominem, tolerabili aut si voltis etiam amabili Cyro subest ad inmutandi animi licentiam crudelissimus ille Pharlaris, cuius in similitudinem dominatus unius proclivi cursu et facile delabitur. illi autem Massiliensium paucorum et principum administrationi civitatis finitimus est qui fuit quodam tempore apud Athenienses triginta virorum illorum consensus et factio. iam Atheniensium populi potestatem omnium rerum ipsi, ne alios requiramus, ad furorem multitudinis licentiamque conversam pesti....

For underneath the tolerable, or, perhaps even, the loveable King Cyrus lies the utterly cruel Pharlaris, impelling him to an arbitrary change of character; for the absolute rule of one man will easily and quickly degenerate into a tyranny like his. And a close neighbor to the excellent Massilian government, conducted by a few leading citizens, is such a partisan combination of thirty men as once ruled Athens. And as for the absolute power of the Athenian people--not to seek other examples of popular government--when it changed into the fury and license of the mob....

One is reminded of the Iliad where the question is posed: what can Achilles become, after rejecting his cultural role, besides an anti-Achilles?

What the republic offers instead is a mutual reciprocity among the three forms of government--a reciprocity which achieves a balance of power. A monarchy is faced with two possibilities, a good king or a bad one. But the republic has no underlying perverted form into which it can plunge and sink (non subest, quo praecipitet ac decidat). It has, like the Aristotelian εἰκών, the structure of exchange and peaceful coexistence among internally coherent systems. With this give and take structure, it can withstand internal and external shocks without resulting in a conversio, because it has a mechanism for adjusting and tuning itself: a mechanism whose process is exemplified by Roman history.

The republic is, to modify Zeno’s dictum, ὁμολογομένως κρατεύειν, “government according to a logos.” And as in the case of the Stoic ideal of life, this does not mean government according to any logos, but according to the one, all-encompassing Logos. For Cicero, nature provides certain impulses and tendencies, such as the need for virtus and the desire to defend the common safety (Rep. I, i, 1), which a government must express in its form. This immanent Logos is, for both Plato and Cicero, justice. It is manifested in government by reciprocal exchange: everyone getting his due.⁴ The republic is for Cicero the best form of government because it has the ratio of nature built into it.⁵ What is significant about Cicero’s argument is the way in which the structure of reciprocity and exchange becomes centralized in the form and content of that argument. There is an opposition established between governments which are composed of type and anti-type (monarchy/ tyranny, aristocracy/ oligarchy, democracy/ anarchy) and a government which is based on exchange. The dynamics of the former is one of conversio:⁶ conversion of a system. The dynamics of the latter is a process of exchange among systems. The former is generative in the sense that one form of government will inevitably produce its anti-type. The latter is generative in the sense that change can produce better equivalences among the systems (as Roman history shows). The dynamics intrinsic to the republic are perceived by Cicero as bringing men ever closer to the ideal state ubi in suo quisque est gradu firmiter collatus, in which there is a perfect reciprocity (justice) and hence no cause for further change. But even as a continuing process, it has a certain balance (aequabilitatem) and stability (firmitudinem: Rep. I, xlv, 69).

Cicero’s conception of the republic represents a further elaboration of the semiotics of comparison, an elaboration, to be sure, well represented before and after Cicero, but nevertheless one which allows us to speak of a “history” of the exchange process. In Apollonius the simile produces logoi. As the Argonauts travel here and there, they are made to encounter various exotica which are rendered intelligible by exchange, an epic version of the mechanism underlying “ethnologies” like those of Herodotus. The Ciceronian elaboration involves taking a series of already constituted logoi as manifesting a more general Logos, as being species of a genus. Cicero is not so interested in this or that particular stage of the republic’s development, but in delineating the immanent Ratio which modulates the whole process. When Scipio discusses the ideal nature of Rome’s site in Book Two of the Republic, Laelius interrupts him to praise his modus operandi (Rep. II, xi, 5):

illa de urbis situ revoces ad rationem, quae a Romulo casu aut necessitate facta sunt.

What Romulus did concerning the site of the city by chance or necessity, you refer back to a definite principle.

The Apollonian simile constitutes logoi by predicating exchange. The function of exchange in Cicero is to effect a revocatio ad rationem: the production not of more logoi, but of an underlying Logos. If Herodotus’ ethnologies exemplify the former, the attempt to articulate an “international” body to modulate exchange among various independent politico-economic entities can exemplify the latter. Both functions are based on the structure of exchange, but in each case the basis for comparison (code, ratio, logos) is thought of differently. We will have more to say about the Ciceronian function below, but we have now laid the groundwork for a consideration of the next “moment” in our history of the simile.

I said initially that Vergil was concerned with the relative value of cultural institutions; but it is clear that he does not pose this question in the same way that Cicero does in the Republic. Vergil does not weigh the advantages of an empire against the advantages of a republic or a democracy; he weighs a good emperor against a bad one, a morally fit leader against a morally weak one, a pious hero against a mad and violent one. Provisionally, it can be said that Vergil’s encomium of Augustus and the empire is a defense of one of the three simple forms of government discussed by Cicero. Indeed, the Aeneid does seem to revert to the view of non-culture as anticulture. Basic themes of the epic, as numerous scholars have pointed out, involve the opposition of sanity and madness, concord and discord, pietas and furor, etc.⁷ It has often been said that there is a lot of Turnus and Dido in Aeneas; but Aeneas is not “like” Turnus and Dido in the way that the Bebrukes are like sheep in the Argonautica; he is like them more in the way that the Myrmidons are like wolves in Book 16 of the Iliad. Dido and Turnus are Aeneases gone awry, representations of what Aeneas is always in danger of degenerating into. But the representation of culture in the Aeneid is not identical to that of the Iliad; and now we must turn to the text itself.

Nature and Culture in Vergil

The very first epic simile of the Aeneid compares the storm of Book 1 to a political sedition (147-54):

ac ueluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est

seditio saeuitque animis ignobile uulgus

iamque faces et saxa uolant, furor arma ministrat;

tum, pietate gravem ac meritis si forte uirum quem

conspexere, silent arrectisque auribus astant;

ille regit dictis animos et pectora mulcet;

sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor.

And as often happens when in a great crowd a sedition

arises and the ignoble mob rage in their minds

and soon torches and stones fly, for fury finds weapons;

then, if by chance they catch sight of a man remarkable

for service and righteousness, they fall silent and

give ear to him; and he rules their minds with his words

and softens their hearts; just so the clamor of the sea subsided.

This simile has no real antecedent in Homer. B 144-48 is often cited as a likely source of inspiration; but there a mob is compared to a storm, the reverse of the Vergilian situation. Here a “natural” disaster is compared to a political event. The raw and untamed fury of the storm is likened to an ungoverned people; the agency of Neptune is likened to the impact of an eminent statesman. The sedition “arises” (coorta est) it would seem, by spontaneous generation, the word coorior being an example of the middle voice in Latin describing things which arise of themselves.⁸ Sedition is here portrayed as a natural condition among people when they are not controlled (n.b., saepe), much like the winds of the storm scene narrated earlier (1, 52-61):

hic vasto rex Aeolus antro

luctantis ventos tempestatesque sonoras

imperio premit ac vinclis et carcere frenat.

illi indignantes magno cum murmure montis

circum claustra fremunt; celsa sedet Aeolus arce

sceptra tenens mollitque animos et temperat iras

ni faciat, maria ac terras caelumque profundum

quippe ferant rapidi secum uerrantque per auras;

sed pater omnipotens speluncis abdidit atris

hoc metuens.

In a vast cave King Aeolus

imposes his power on the howling winds and the

blustering storms and reins them in with chains and cages.

They all indignant, with a great murmuring, rage

around the enclosure of the mountain; Aeolus sits

in his citadel holding the scepter and softens their

minds and their anger; if he did not, they would surely

carry with them the seas and the earth and the heavens

and sweep through the air. But the omnipotent father,

fearing this, hid them in these dark caves.

Without the imperium imposed by Aeolus, the winds would pursue their natural course of destructiveness. It is this same “ruling” influence which calms the eruption of furor in the simile: ille regit dictis animos et pectora mulcet. Specifically, it is the political virtue of the great man (pietate gravem ac meritis) which calms the people. Cicero, it will be recalled, viewed nature as possessing a ratio, which a good government must instantiate: the republic is the best form of government because it has this ratio built into its structure. The implication of the first simile of the Aeneid, however, is that nature lacks a ratio of its own, and that it is culture which must provide one.

This implication is given full expression in the Georgics, a poem devoted to man’s domination of nature. Men must take up arms against an unwilling and recalcitrant earth in order to conquer her (Geo. 1, 160-61), for if nature is left to her own devices, everything will deteriorate (Geo. 1, 197-200):

vidi lecta diu et multo spectata labore

degenerare tamen, ni vis humana quotannis

maxima quaeque manu legeret: sic omnia fatis

in peius ruere ac retro sublapsa referri.

Yet even those culled and cared for with great pain

have I seen degenerate, did not human force choose

out the largest by hand year by year: thus all things

by fate impelled hasten to the worse and backward

borne slip away from us.

As Brooks Otis has noted,⁹ the entire first book of the Georgics sounds this theme of the raw and hostile nature of the environment Book Two pictures the gratifying results obtained by imposing order on nature, the beauty of the cultivated vines and trees. One striking image here is particularly noteworthy (Geo. 2, 276-87):

sin tumulis accliue solum collisque supinos,

indulge ordinibus; nec setius omnis in unguem

arboribus positis secto via limite quadret:

ut saepe ingenti bello cum longa cohortis

explicuit legio et campo stetit agmen aperto,

derectaeque acies ac late fluctuat omnis

aere renidenti tellus, necdum horrida miscent

proelia, sed dubius mediis Mars errat in armis.

omnia sint paribus numeris dimensa uiarum.

But if you plant on rising ground or sloping hills,

give the rows room; when the trees are set, let

each line be squared to perfection:

just as often in a great war, when the legion’s length

deploys its cohorts and the column stands in an open field

and the battle lines are set, the whole earth rippling

with the flashing bronze; nor has the grisly fight yet

begun, but Mars wanders doubtful between the armies,

so let all be drawn up in equal rows.

This passage not only suggests that order must be imposed on nature to improve its performance, but that the order so imposed on nature should be that of the quintessential institution of the Roman state, a battle line. Nature, it seems, progresses and improves as it takes on the characteristics of the Roman state. It is culture that legitimates nature and gives it a viable form.¹⁰

The fourth book of the Georgics, devoted to beekeeping, is the climax of this portrayal. The bees are a fitting climax because they, more than anything else, imitate the model of empire, having (Geo. 4, 4-5):

magnanimosque duces totiusque ordine gentis

mores et studia et populos et proelia.

great-souled leaders, a nation’s history

its traits, its bent, its clans and its battles.

After an initial section on the establishment of the hive (8-115), Vergil turns to the special endowments they have received from Jupiter (149-50). The description of the bees’ hive and activities which follows is filled with images of the Roman state. The bees live in a city (urbis 154; cf. sub moenibus urbis193 and aulas et cera regna 202), and have laws (legibus 154), acknowledge a fatherland (patriam 155) and household gods (penatis 155). They labor according to a fixed contract (foedere pacto 158), build their homes by laying foundations (ponunt fundamina 161). Some educate the youth (educunt fetus 163), the spem gentis (162); others guard the gates (ad portas...custodias 165). When the drones make an uprising, the bees fall into a Roman military formation (agmine facto 167) to drive them out. Finally, they are entirely devoted to their king (rege incolumni mens omnibus una est 212).

The anthropomorphism of the description of the bees can be compared to Homer’s portrayal of the wolves in Iliad 16. There we saw that the description of the wolves’ meal in the simile was determined by the descriptive system of a heroic meal. Here too, the bees are a simulacrum (although not a negative one) of the Roman state. They are not an objet trouvè which is discussed according to its own logos; the model of the Roman state has been imposed on them. Jupiter, it is in fact said, has “added” these special characteristics to them as a sign of his gratitude (149-52); they thus share in the divina mens (220). The bees are an ideal society because they are a thoroughly Romanized society. This is quite different from saying that the Roman state is natural because it is like a community of bees.¹¹

The relationship of culture and nature which emerges from the Georgics is the opposition of “organized” versus “disorganized.”¹² In such a framework, culture views itself as possessing a model which is self-sufficient and prior. Non-culture is not only that which is not organized according to the model of culture, but that which is not organized at all. In the univocal culture of Homer, non-culture is organized as a negative image of culture--and thus was inherently antinomous and dangerous. In the Vergilian perspective, non-culture is viewed as the raw material for the further expansion of culture. The possibility is recognized that order can be imposed, that non-culture can be “assimilated” and brought within the bounds of culture, that the world can be “civilized.”

The view of nature as something which is disorganized and in need of some sort of discipline implies that spontaneity and acquiescence to natural impulses have a negative value. In Book 2 of the Aeneid, for example, Aeneas responds to Troy’s desperate situation by urging his companions to arms and certain death (355-58):

sic animis iuuenum furor additus. inde, lupi ceu

raptores atra in nebula, quos improba ventris

exegit caecos rabies catulique relicti

faucibus exspectant siccis, per tela, per hostis

uadimus.

In this way fury was added to the minds of the youths,

and like wolves, plunderers in a black fog, whom the

shameless frenzy of the stomach drives blindly on, and

the cubs who are left behind await with dry throats,

through weapons, through enemies we go.

The wolves of the simile follow a natural appetite (hunger), an appetite which is expressly called improba. In so doing, they leave behind their young ones. Now family responsibilities are a key aspect of the virtue of pietas; and the wolves’ acquiescence to their “natural” hunger has a deleterious consequence. The implication of the simile is that Aeneas has regressed into the realm of nature, that he has allowed a spontaneous impulse to overcome his commitment to culture. When Venus appears to rebuke Aeneas for his folly, she reviles him in just such terms (2, 595-98):

quid furis? aut quonam nostri tibi cura recessit?

non prius aspicies ubi fessum aetate parentem

liqueris Anchisen, superet coniunxne Creusa

Ascaniusque puer?

Why are you raging so? where has your care for me gone?

should you not first look to where you left your

father Anchises, worn out with old age; see whether

your wife, Creusa, is alive, and your son, Ascanius?

Care for one’s young may or may not be instinctive, but consistent devotion to the family is a virtue of culture (pietas): an improvement on nature provided by the model of the state.¹³ The wolves of the Aeneid are different from the wolves of both the Iliad and the Argonautica. The Iliadic wolves are an isomorphically constructed negative image of culture. In the Argonautica, wolves have their own little culture organized according to their own little logos (which can thus be exchanged with the logos of the Argonauts). In the Aeneid wolves are a part of nature: they are thus without any logos at all. Theoretically, they could be assimilated, they could take on the model of the state and become domesticated. But if they simply follow their natural propensities, their actions will be random and “uncultivated” (Geo. 1, 199-203):

sic omnia fatis

in peius ruere ac retro sublapsa referri,

non aliter quam qui adverso vix flumine lembum

remigiis subigit, si bracchia forte remisit,

atque illum in praeceps prono rapit alueus amni.

Thus all things by fate impelled

hasten to the worse and backward borne slip away

from us. Just as a man who drives a boat upstream

with oars; if he perchance slackens his arms, the

channel will snatch him also headlong downstream.

The simile of this passage opposes two situations: rowing upstream, which is the role of the cultural hero (in this case the farmer) and not rowing at all, which is to abstain from cultural behavior. But the simile implies a third possibility: rowing downstream, which is to engage in anti-cultural behavior. The immediate context of this passage is walnut trees, so we could pose the three options in this way: rowing upstream is to cultivate the trees; not rowing is to do nothing for the trees, in which case they will degenerate; to row downstream would be like burning down the walnut trees. Culture in Vergil opposes itself to both of these latter alternatives, but the relationship to each is distinct. To clarify the difference, it is necessary to look at the two great adversaries of Aeneas, Dido and Turnus.

Dido: Carthago Delenda Est

Our first look at Carthage in book one of the Aeneid is of a burgeoning city being built by an industrious people. Several things in the description of the city are clear anachronisms of the Roman polity, particularly the Roman custom of the sulcus (425) and the sanctum senatum (426). But more important is the bee simile (430-36), which is based on phrases and whole lines used in Georgics 4, 162-69. Here is the simile:

qualis apes aestate noua per florea rura

exercet sub sole labor, cum gentis adultos

educunt fetus, aut cum liquentia mella

stipant et dulci distendunt nectare cellas,

aut onera accipiunt uenientum, aut agmine facto

ignauum fucos pecus a praesepibus arcent;

feruet opus redolentque thymo fraglantia mella.

Just as in summer bees work through the flowery fields

under the sun, when some lead out the full-grown young

of the race, or others pack the flowing honey and

pack the honeycombs with sweet nectar, or receive

the burden of those coming in, or forming in columns

drive out of the hive that worthless pack of drones;

the work is fervent and the fragrant honey is sweet with thyme.

Here is the passage from the Georgics, which was summarized above (4, 162-64, 167-69):

aliae spem gentis adultos

educunt fetus; aliae purissima mella

stipant et liquido distendunt nectare cellas...

aut onera accipiunt uenientum, aut agmine facto

ignauum fucos pecus a praesepibus arcent;

feruet opus, redolentque thymo fraglantia mella.

The anachronistic description of Carthage together with the simile which refers to the ideal polity of the Georgics identifies the city as an image of culture: a city which, like the bees, has taken on the model of the Roman state. As in all monarchies, the soundness of the polity arises from the virtue of the leader, in this case Dido. Her entrance is graced by a simile comparing her to the chaste Diana (498-503). Now amor, we know from the Georgics, is the nastiest of all the natural impulses which must be disciplined (Geo. 3, 209-11):

Sed non ulla magis uiris industria firmat

quam Venerem et caeci stimulos auertere amoris,

siue boum siue est cui gratior usus equorum.

But no other practice firms up the strength more

than the avoidance of Love and the goads of blind passion,

whether one is training bulls or horses.

In fact, the bees of the Georgics are especially praiseworthy because they reproduce without amor (Geo. 4, 197-202). Dido’s chastity is the key to her success as a queen, and it is in regard to this virtue that she undergoes a conversio.

At the beginning of Book Four, the hapless Dido vacillates about the “old flames” (23) Aeneas has rekindled in her. Her confidante Anna urges her not to fight against a pleasing love (38): placitone etiam pugnabis amore? Dido, of course, gives in and “looses her shame” (soluitque pudorem, 54); her love is described with a number of stereotypical images from elegiac poetry (a wound, a flame, a sickness), a most “unepic” set of interpretants. Once likened to the huntress Diana, now Dido is compared to a careless doe (incautam ceruam) who is wounded by a hunter (69-73). Suddenly, Dido finds that words fail her (76): incipit effari mediaque in voce resistit; for amor is the epitome of disorganization, and language is of the realm of culture and organization.¹⁴ Dido has stopped rowing; and the result for her city is immediately registered (4, 86-89):

non coeptae adsurgunt turres, non arma iuuentus

exercet portusue aut propugnacula bello

tuta parant; pendent opera interrupta minaeque

murorum ingentes aequataque machina caelo

The towers rise no more; the youth no longer exercise

in arms, nor do they prepare the harbors or the

battlements for war. The works are idle, broken off;

the massive menacing rampart walls, even the crane,

defier of the sky, now lies neglected.

The portrayal of amor as a sort of uncultural sloth is given full scope in the fourth book of the Aeneid, a matter aptly handled by numerous scholars. But whereas Aeneas is awakened from his folly by divine intervention before he “goes downstream” too far, Dido is portrayed as taking a further step.

As she sees Aeneas leaving, Dido hurls a fearful curse against him and his people (613-29), in which she hopes that Carthage and Rome will always be enemies (nullus amor populis nec foedera sunto, 623), that a great avenger will arise from her bones to attack Rome (625-27), and finally (628-29):

litora litoribus contraria, fluctibus undas

imprecor, arma armis: pugnent ipsique nepotesque.

I pray that our shores always war upon theirs, our

waves against theirs, our arms against theirs: let

these and their children always be at battle.

What Dido prays for is that Carthage will become an anti-Rome. Carthage thus is represented as that part of non-culture which becomes anti-culture: that irreducible residue resistant to the end to assimilation into the empire.¹⁵ Carthago delenda est, the old Cato used to say at the end of every speech; and indeed Carthage was destroyed and its soil sown with salt. The figure of Dido in the Aeneid makes this end seem inevitable and necessary, for she herself underwent a conversio from rowing upstream to rowing downstream. Her pudor made her city rise; her amor made it stop; her final madness made it collapse.¹⁶ As she throws herself on the pyre, the city resounds with wails (669-71):

non aliter quam si immissis ruat hostibus omnis

Karthago aut antiqua Tyros, flammaeque furentes

culmina perque hominum uoluantur perque deorum.

It was just as if all Carthage or ancient Tyre were

collapsing in ruin, an enemy entering the gates, and

raging fires were rolling over the homes of gods and men.

Empire must impose itself on whatever is disorganized. The preeminent example of this is the conquest of nature by cultivation. But empire must destroy its enemies, those who insist on rowing downstream. A neutral observer may have looked at the clash of Carthage and Rome as the struggle between two empires, as an encounter between two independent systems each trying to impose itself on the same “third world.” But few Romans (and no doubt few Carthaginians) would have perceived it in that way. To them it was the dark against the light, heaven against hell, culture against anti-culture.

Turnus: Bellum Civile and the Origin of the State

In Book 12 of the Aeneid, as Turnus prepares himself for the upcoming duel with Aeneas, he is compared to a bull (12, 103-6):

mugitus ueluti cum prima in proelia taurus

terrificos ciet aut irasci in cornua temptat

arboris obnixus trunco, uentosque lacessit

ictibus aut sparsa ad pugnam proludit harena.

As when a bull preparing to do battle awakes tremendous

bellows; trying to hurl his rage into his horns,

he butts up against the trunks of trees and lashes at

the winds with blows or practices for the battle by

pawing at the sand.

The simile is strongly reminiscent of Georgics 3, 228-36, where a bull driven by the goads of amor prepares himself to fight another bull. Lines 105-6 are in fact exact repetitions of Geo. 3, 223-24. That an intertext of Turnus’ simile is the digression on amor of the Georgics is not surprising: his portrayal throughout the latter books of the Aeneid is, as Otis has shown, that of a mad and violent man. As a cultural hero, Turnus is quite clearly a failure like Dido; and the difference between his ethos and that of Aeneas is immediately registered in the passage at hand (Aen. 12, 107-12):

Nec minus interea maternis saeuus in armis

Aeneas acuit Martern et se suscitat ira,

oblato gaudens componi foedere bellum.

tum socios maestique metum solatur Iuli

fata docens, regique iubet responsa Latino

certa referre uiros et pacis dicere leges.

Meanwhile Aeneas, no less keen for battle and ruthless

in the arms his mother gave to him, calls up his

indignation, happy that the war is to be settled by a

compact. He comforts his companions, stays the fears of

sad Iulus; he teaches them the ways of fate. Then

he orders his men to carry back his firm answer to

King Latinus and dictates the terms of peace.

There can be no question that the ethos of Aeneas, his portrayal as a hero of culture, is represented as a justification of his ultimate victory in the Aeneid. But the intertext from the Georgics is not so important in terms of characterizing Turnus as it is for characterizing the nature of the conflict itself. The Latin war is, after all, a bellum civile: Italy is not to be destroyed like Carthage; it is destined to become the very seat of the Roman state. The Latin conflict will not decide whether Italy will become Rome or anti-Rome: as in the battle of the bulls in the Georgics, the conflict will decide who the leader will be, whether it will be Rome under Aeneas or Rome under Turnus.

The problem can be better focused by considering the simile which describes the final confrontation of Aeneas and Turnus. As they at last come together, the heroes are compared to two bulls (12, 715-24):

ac uelut ingenti Sila summoue Taburno

cum duo conuersis inimica in proelia tauri

frontibus incurrunt, pauidi cessere magistri,

stat pecus omne metu mutum, mussantque iuuencae

quis nemori imperitet, quem tota armenta sequantur;

illi inter sese multa ui uulnera miscent

cornuaque obnixi infigunt et sanguine largo

colla armosque lauant, gemitu nemus omne remugit:

non aliter Tros Aeneas et Daunius heros

concurrunt clipeis, ingens fragor aethera complet.

And just as on huge Sila or on lofty Taburnus, when

two bulls charge together into hostile battle with

butting brows: the trainers shrink back in terror,

the whole herd stands mute with fear, the heifers wonder

who will rule the woods, whom the whole herd will follow;

the bulls with massive force trade wounds, and struggling

gore each other and wash their shoulders and legs with

much blood, and the whole woods bellows with their groans:

Just so Trojan Aeneas and Daunian Turnus crash together

with their shields, and their violence fills the air.

This simile is also strongly reminiscent of the Georgics passage on the fighting bulls (Geo. 3, 219-23). Although only a single half line of the Aeneid simile is an exact repetition of the Georgics passage (Geo. 3, 220b = Aen. 12, 720b), the two scenes have numerous connections: the mention of Sila (these are the only two Vergilian occurrences), the iuuencae standing by, the bodies of the bulls washed with blood, and the forest echoing with the bulls’ bellowing. Again, the Georgics passage does not provide an insight into the ethos of the contestants so much as an insight into the nature of the conflict itself. For the battle of the two bulls is not a battle of culture and anti-culture, or even between culture and nature. It is a struggle which is prior to the establishment of what is and is not culture; or more accurately, it is the struggle which will itself establish culture.

From the battle of the bulls emerges a victor who will have the imperium of the herd and will be solely responsible for generating offspring (cf. Geo. 3, 224: nec mos bellantis una stabulare). So too, in the battle between Turnus and Aeneas, a victor will emerge who will then become ex post facto the hero of culture; and whatever qualities he had will be “metaleptically” established as the virtues of culture. The victor, in other words, becomes the positive sign of culture; the conquered becomes its negative sign. In the Vergilian perspective, the leader is the generative origin of culture; he is the model which is imposed on everyone else. From the emperor himself comes all good and evil and everyone must conform or become anti-culture. Imperial culture, in short, is defined as that which the emperor does.

The struggle which precipitates this emergence of cultural definition is chronologically prior to culture itself. Significantly, in the two lines preceding the bull simile, the earth “groans” and “chance and virtue are indistinguishable” (713-14):

dat gemitum tellus, tum crebros ensibus ictus

congeminant, fors et uirtus miscetur unum.

The earth gives out a groan, then they redouble the

heavy blows of their swords: chance and virtue mingle into one.

Chance and virtus are mingled into one because this is the primal moment of undecidability: it is only after a victor emerges that it can be established what virtus is. Like the various stages of the succession myth in Hesiod, the struggle of Aeneas and Turnus produces a moment of unintelligibility, the “cosmic chaos” which precedes the establishment of some principle of order. Like similar instances in Hesiod and the Iliad, the earth groans (dat gemitum tellus), signifying the absence of intelligibility.¹⁷

Unlike the iuuencae of the simile who wait to see who will rule them, we know and have known from the beginning of the epic that Aeneas will win. The fact that he wins allows us to define him as the cultural hero. Once we have such a definition, it is possible to go back and write the prehistory of culture metaleptically. In retrospect, the battle of Turnus and Aeneas was not the primal conflict prior to order, for cultural order, embodied in Aeneas, existed all along. Retrospectively, the victory of Aeneas seems inevitable, because he has always been himself; that is to say, he has always been the cultural hero. The bull simile represents the moment in the Aeneid which is prior to the rest of the poem. It is only from the vantage point of the outcome of this conflict that the Aeneid can be written (as opposed to a Turneid). Aeneas won, just as Augustus won: and it is this historical fact which is the generative starting point of Vergil’s epic.

A comparison with Cicero’s Republic will once more clarify the issues here. Although Cicero clearly implies that the Roman success story is itself an argument for the superiority of the republic as a form of government, this is not the real basis of his exposition. Roman history is for Cicero an ex-emplum of a process of exchange and reciprocity, and it is this process in which he is interested. Rome’s history proves his point only insofar as it manifests the operation of the mechanism he is delineating. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Cicero sets his dialogue in the time of Scipio, a time when the republic seemed most healthy: more recent history had abandoned the mechanism of reciprocity and exchange. For Cicero, to repeat what has been said, this mechanism is prior; the ratio of the republic is something already immanent in nature before it was ever applied to government.¹⁸

In Vergil, the opposition of culture and non-culture is portrayed as organization versus disorganization. Since the origin of culture was the moment of organization, there is nothing which precedes culture but non-culture. Nevertheless, the model of culture, once established at a particular point in history, is retrospectively represented as prior, as actually being there all along. Immediately following the bull simile of Aeneid 12, 715ff., the representation of this aboriginal moment of undecidability, we read the following lines (725-27):

Iuppiter ipse duas aequato examine lances

sustinet et fata imponit diuersa duorum,

quem damnet labor et quo uergat pondere letum.

Jupiter himself holds up two scales in equal balance

and places the diverse fates of the two on the balance;

the one doomed by this conflict, his weight sinks down.

That this gesture of Homer’s Zeus¹⁹ is introduced at this point shows clearly the basic workings of the Aeneid. The victory of Aeneas is a historical fact; however, it cannot be represented as a mere contingency; it must be both a discrete historical event and at the same time it must be structurally determined as the only possible result. The notion of fate, something which is “spoken” beforehand but only recognized retrospectively, fulfills this role of simultaneously affirming and denying history. In the context of a historical project such as the Aeneid, fate is nothing but the metaleptic representation of history. Things fell out that way: therefore, from the winner’s standpoint, they were meant to fall out that way. Cicero identified the ratio of the republic with justice: Vergil’s Jupiter is identified with the ineluctable reality of history. After the scales are introduced, Turnus is routed and soon killed.²⁰ The order of the whole passage implies that Jupiter’s will was prior to the outcome of the battle, that the model of culture was prior and history only its palpable manifestation.

The Georgics relate how nature can be conquered by man, how disorganized nature can be assimilated into organized culture. The Dido episode of the Aeneid looks forward to the destruction of anti-culture. The climax of the last half of the Aeneid describes how culture is born, how it arises out of and separates itself from nature. It is a fitting sequence of subject matter, since the entire rhetoric of Vergil is a vast hysteron proteron, implying that last things are really first and first things really last. The Aeneid announces its theme to be the great struggle which produced the Roman present (tantae molis erat Romanum condere gentem), but the Aeneid is really the production of a past which reflects the present. The Aeneid recounts the contingencies which led to the present at the same time that it tries to dispel the very possibility of contingency with respect to the present.

The Aeneid has often been interpreted as a narrative of self-constitution: the development of Aeneas from the old heroic (i.e., Homeric) virtues to civilized (i.e., Augustan) virtues. At the same time, Aeneas’ career is seen as a simulacrum of the struggle of Rome herself. But the model of signification which emerges from our discussion seems to make Aeneas the kind of fully finished and self-same being typical of Homeric epic. Aeneas won; that fact makes him by definition the hero of culture. Aeneas’ character does not change in the Aeneid; it unfolds before us. What Aeneas learns he learns by revelation, the unfolding before his own eyes of what he means, what he has meant, and what he always will mean; and when he goes awry, as he does by dallying in Carthage, a divinity must intervene and get him to “come back to himself.” By viewing the Aeneid as the process by which Aeneas becomes the Roman model of a hero, we fall prey to the fiction that culture is somehow prior to itself.

Vergil, of course, tries to have it both ways. Aeneas is not simply represented as a “completely externalized” being, “absolutely equal to himself,” and “lacking any ideological initiative.”²¹ Aeneas does seem at times to be a locus of agency, in possession of something which moves the story along and not someone who who is simply moved along by it. And as in the case of another of his literary ancestors, “resourceless Jason,” the fact that Aeneas possesses some ideological initiative is nowhere so strongly marked as in those places where he seems to be temporarily without it. Our opening view of Aeneas as frozen with fear and “groaning” (ingemit) at his plight in the midst of the storm (Aen. 1, 92ff) raises the possibility that Aeneas might fail, that things might turn out differently unless he acts. There can only be a limited amount of this potential evoked in the poem, for it runs counter to the main model of signification; and in this first instance in Bock One, as in the Trojan episode in Book Two, as in the Dido episode of Book Four and as in the final battle with Turnus, the possibility of things turning out in an unexpected way is quickly countered by divine agency. The dynamics of the poem treat initiative on the part of individuals in the poem the same as “nature” in general; if there is something valuable there to begin with, what it is can only be said retrospectively, from the standpoint of culture, after it has been acknowledged and named by culture.

Turnus and Dido are indeed Aeneases gone awry, but what can this mean other than that they lost? Put another way, how is Aeneas’ independent initiative, his “character,” any different from that of Dido and Turnus? There is a difference--one is good, one is bad--but that difference is only established from a perspective which transcends the action: sometimes embodied figuratively in the poem as Jupiter, it is clearly nothing other than the judgment of Rome’s imperial present. This judgment is articulated in the poem in many ways: the speeches of Jupiter, the parade of heroes in Book 6, the shield in Book 8-and also in the similes. The similes of Vergil are not propulsive in the way that Homer’s were, nor are they productive of “new ideas” like those of Apollonius. The similes of Vergil are preeminently concerned with assigning value, with naming something ambiguous as good or bad from the perspective of its historical outcome. Thus, to return to the storm scene of Book One, the initiatives of Juno and Neptune are equally arbitrary and private until the sedition simile names one as chaotic and the other as disorderly. Elsewhere, Aeneas can have his moments of furor and insania, just as his opponents can have their moments of pietas. Such vacillations provide the story with narrative possibilities and movement; the similes, and numerous other devices, impose on that movement an interpretant outside of discourse. The imperial model of signification is one which imposes a preestablished meaning on that which is ambiguous, a process which would presumably go on until there is imperium sine fine (Aen. 1, 279), until all non-culture is assimilated and organized according to the imperial model. Then there would be a golden age in which, to rewrite a line from Eclogue 4 (22): nec magnos metuent armenta lupos, “nor would the flocks fear the great wolves.”

Apollonius, Cicero, Vergil

Before we turn to Dante, it will be useful to consider schematically what has been said about the “history” of the epic simile. In Homer we noted that the simile was, like other generative elements in the propulsive textual dynamics of Homer, a text building strategy capable of a variety of uses. With the acceleration of the cognitive skills pertaining to formal analysis, the simile becomes a semiotic mechanism for organizing and producing meaning. The characteristic operation by which this mechanism produces meaning is exchange (apodosis, redditio). Since exchange is a metaphor derived from commerce, it is tempting to explore this metaphor more fully, mindful of Cicero’s dictum, omne simile claudicat, but mindful also of Aristotle’s claim that this is the best way “to get hold of new ideas.”²²

In the first chapter of Capital, Marx discusses the basic workings of the exchange of commodities. He notes that initially objects have a “use-value”; that is, they have value to someone because they are useful to that someone. At some point, however, it becomes necessary or desirable to acquire one object from someone else in exchange for another. In such a situation, it becomes necessary to establish the “exchange-value” of each object in relation to the other, and at that moment each object becomes a commodity. Exchange-value in its simplest form will be determined by some formula such as x amount of commodity A = y amount of commodity B. Numerous factors will determine the outcome of such an “equation,” but the important thing for our comparison is that exchange-value arises in terms of a predicated exchange and that from it a code will emerge establishing equivalences between some pertinent features of each commodity.

The evolution of an object with use-value to a commodity with exchange-value parallels, mutatis mutandis, the change of the function of the epic simile from Homer to Apollonius. In the Argonautica, the simile is no longer text-constitutive in the way that it was in Homer. Rather, it is, so to speak, logos-constitutive. To return to our semiotic terminology, the simile is used for code-making. Apollonius articulates character by predicating a network of formal relationships to man’s inner life, constituting it into a microcosm. And although a comparison may be motivated by the desire to render some phenomenon intelligible by setting up equivalences between that phenomenon and some better known one, it is in the predication of the comparison that both phenomena are constituted into models. The two models become functives correlated on the basis of a text The structure of codes is established on the basis of a message, when a text postulates them as an explanatory condition for its interpretation, just as exchange-value arises on the occasion of a specific exchange.

The exchange of commodities achieves a greater degree of sophistication, according to Marx, when some one commodity (namely, gold) becomes privileged as the commodity to which everything else is compared. Instead of the evaluation of commodities in terms of ad hoc exchanges, gold becomes substituted for the exchange process, becomes the universal standard and authentication for exchange. This structural moment, the production of a transcendental value, is analogous to the Ciceronian function of the simile, when an analyst such as Aristotle takes a number of codes and establishes a meta-code, a Logos with a capital “L”. Thus for Aristotle the interest of the dialectical exchange of models is not so much in producing logoi (as it was for Apollonius), but in the ability of the process to refer one back to a more general model (Rhet. 3, 10, 1410b 2-3):

For when the poet calls old age a “withered stalk,” he produces learning and knowledge by means of what is common to both: both have degenerated.

It is the production of this commonality (genos) in which Cicero is interested: in showing that the particular exchanges which characterize the history of the republic are modulated by a transcendent ratio (revocatio ad rationem). Furthermore, the production of this ratio is perceived as the disclosure of implicit meaning, as making manifest a ratio which is immanent. Thus Aristotle states that the most successful similes and metaphors will be based on a common formal heritage (Rhet. 3, 2, 1405a 12):

Furthermore, metaphors must not be far-fetched, but must give names to things without names by deriving the metaphor from what is akin and of the same form, so that as soon as the metaphor is uttered, the kinship is clearly seen.

The words συγγενῶν and ὁμοειδῶν in this passage remind us that Aristotle defines the four types of metaphor in the Poetics in terms of the species-genus relationship (εῖδος-γένος). The knowledge that metaphor produces is thus the recognition of the true “genealogy” (kinship) among superficially different things. So also, Cicero’s analysis of Roman history leads him to a ratio which is metaleptically posited as prior and immanent in nature.

Marx notes further that in time gold as money becomes the sole adequate form of exchange value (Capital, Part I, ch. 3):

Circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown to come out crystallized gold. Not even the bones of the saints, and still less are more delicate res sacrosanctae extra commercium hominum able to withstand this alchemy. Just as every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished in money, so money, on its side, like the radical leveler that it is, does away with all distinctions.

If the production of philosophical, scientific or political principles out of a variety of specific cases is analogous to the establishment of gold as a transcendent value, Vergil’s similes take us a step further in our economic comparison. Both Cicero and Vergil “rewrite” history in order to make it conform to a principle. But the task Cicero sets before himself is to identify that ratio, to move from logoi to Logos. Vergil sets himself the opposite task: he already has the logos (the emperor); and he must show that everything is a manifestation of that logos. To continue our economic metaphor, Vergil “invests” the logos, produces little Augustan colonies backward and forward in history. The logos here is not produced by exchange, but becomes established by a paradigmatic event: the victory of Augustus. Ex post facto the logos of the emperor is portrayed as fated, as grounded in the will of Jupiter. So too, Aeneas’ victory is metaleptically represented as a result rather than as a cause. In Vergil, the Logos is the datum; in Cicero the logoi are the data. In both, however, there is a metaleptic reversal. Cicero takes the result of his revocatio and portrays it as the generative origin of Roman history. Vergil takes his Logos and portrays it as the result of divine will.

The Ciceronian and Vergilian functions of comparison may seem suspiciously similar to each other. There are good grounds for this suspicion. Both involve a transcendental principle which is in a sense outside of the productive process: which is both origin and telos. The distinctions drawn between Apollonius, Cicero and Vergil are actually oversimplified, but such simplifications have a certain heuristic value. We can, for example, see that the “transcendental” function of comparison continues a certain development incipient in Apollonius. If Apollonius recognizes the heterogeneity of the human world and exploits exchange in order to make those heterogeneities comparable, Cicero and Vergil seek to totalize human culture on a higher level of organization. It is no accident that two Romans provide us with excellent examples of this “universalizing” function, for both the late republic and the empire were remarkable success stories in “homogenization.” The provinces of Rome became “Romanized” to a degree unprecedented in the relatively autonomous sectors of the Hellenistic empires. However various the components that the Romans assimilated, the result was a truly “universal” culture; and the immense cultural capital Rome accumulated during its heyday became the generative model for European civilization for centuries to come.