Wanderings of Aeneas

The last we see of Troy is the weeping of those who witness Hecuba turned into a feral dog, and the tears of Aurora for Memnon, which return each day as dew. 

The very next scene has Aeneas, who apparently was present at the transformation of Hecuba, setting out on his own odyssey:

Yet the fates did not allow Troy’s destiny, also, to be overthrown with her walls. Aeneas, Venus’s heroic son, carried away on his shoulders her sacred icons, and bore his father, another sacred and venerable burden. He dutifully chose that prize from all his riches, and his son Ascanius, and carried over the sea in his exiled fleet, he left Antandros’s harbour, and the sinful thresholds of Thrace, and the soil drenched in Polydorus’s blood, and riding the favourable winds and tides, he came with his company of friends, to the city of Apollo on Delos. Book 13 623-39.

Ovid doesn't treat the journey directly, but we glimpse Aeneas (and Ulysses) from time to time, between the stories of Scylla, Acis and Galatea, Circe, Glaucus Polyphemus et al that take up the foreground.

Here's a map of Aeneas' journey which might be useful:

A few background sources for Roman Myth

As is his wont, Ovid spends half book 13 on Troy and the aftermath of its fall before moving on to seemingly unrelated tales. His account of the fall of Troy contains some of the darkest pages of the Metamorphoses, and we'll want to ask ourselves why the poet chose to encapsulate the final calamity of the sacred city in the maternal figures of Hecuba and Aurora.

We'll also want to ask about the relation of the two halves of book 13. What possible relevance could the love of Polyphemus for Galatea and the transformation of Glaucus, which make up the second half of the book, have to the prized armor of Achilles and the devastation of Troy?

Curiously sandwiched between the tragic Troy tale and the somewhat grotesque tales of the smitten Cyclops and the man-turned-half-fish we find the beginnings of the wanderings of Aeneas. His story will take up a good deal of Book 14 as well.

One excellent resource to look to as we move into the Roman myths of these final books is Peter Meineck's talks on Roman Mythology. The lecture entitled "Trojan Ancestors: The Myth of Aeneas," as well as two later lectures on Virgil's Aeneid will be seen to have many resonances with things we've been talking about lately, including our recent discussion of the Iliad in relation to Ovid's re-visioning of it in Book 13.

Meineck also has a 92-page pdf Roman Myths course booklet that's free for downloading. It includes brief summaries of his main points as well as additional supporting materials. It's here. A good family tree for Aeneas is here. This useful map of Aeneas's wanderings (click to enlarge) is from Parada, here.

Wanderings of Aeneas

Myrrha and co. in Inferno 30

If you look for Myrrha in Dante's Commedia, you might be surprised where she can be found. In the 10th bolgia, or sac, of the eighth circle, (in Canto 30) she enters as one of a pair of violent spirits racing around the pit, tearing other shades to pieces with their teeth. She and Gianni Schicchi are compared to beasts:

... two shades I saw, both pale and naked,

who, biting, ran berserk in just the way 

a hog does when it's let loose from its sty.

The canto is rich in imagery and suggestive power, perhaps in part because it's the canto of falsifiers, liars. For Dante, who defined poetry as una bella menzogna -- a beautiful lie -- the proximity of the poetic enterprise to the vicious worlds of impersonators, counterfeiters, and famous liars (including Sinon, the Greek who talked the Trojans into opening their city to the wooden horse, and Potiphar's wife, false accuser of Joseph in Genesis) -- seems to provoke a stunning burst of vivid narrative fragments.

Most of these are from Ovid. I'll just note them here -- a reading of the entire canto is a task for another day. The books of Metamorphoses where each appears are in parens:

1. The canto begins with Juno's rage against Semele (Book 3);
2. Which leads to the madness of Athamas, who hurls his own son Learchus to his death (Books 3-4).
3. And to Hecuba, turned into a barking lunatic at the sight of her children, Polyxena and Polydorus, dead in ruined Troy (7 & 13).
4. Then "accursed Myrrah": "she who loved her father past the limits of just love" (Book 10).
5. The vile exchange of japes between Maestro Adamo the Florentine counterfeiter and Sinon the lying Greek (Sinon is not in Ovid, but from the Aeneid) leads to a final Ovidian reference when Adamo says to Sinon:

                       "You have both dryness and a head that aches;
                        few words would be sufficient invitation
                       to have you lick the mirror of Narcissus." (Book 3)

Clearly Dante not only read Ovid with care, but with acute attention to the interplay of illusion and the likenesses of truth that we have come to appreciate as "Ovidian."

With a simile that could have come from the poet of Metamorphoses himself, Dante conveys the burden of being caught in the entrancingly duplicitous world of appearances:

Even as one who dreams that he is harmed 

and, dreaming, wishes he were dreaming, thus

desiring that which is, as if it were not, 

so I became within my speechlessness.

Dore: Myrrha, Virgil, Dante