Hors d'oeuvre: the reception of reception

Scenes of hospitality (xenia, hospitium) are typical in epic and epicising narrative since Homer.Footnote ² This article is concerned primarily with the instance in the eighth book of Virgil's Aeneid, in which Aeneas shelters in Evander's quasi-pastoral enclave during the prevailing war against the Latins.Footnote ³ The ultimate model for this account of hospitium, as for so many epic scenes of hospitality, is the Homeric episode in which Odysseus, poised to overthrow the ignoble and profligate suitors, is received by Eumaeus, his humble swineherd but noble host (Od. 14–16).Footnote ⁴ Its homely and antiheroic ethos had previously recommended the same Homeric interlude to Callimachus, as witnessed through its reception in his Aetia and Hecale. The centrepiece of the Aetia embeds, within an epinician for Berenice's victory at the Nemean Games, the aetiological tale of Heracles’ reception by Molorcus during his expedition against the Nemean lion (frr. 54–60j Harder).Footnote ⁵ Similarly, Callimachus’ Hecale epyllion traces the Attic deme of Hecale and the cult of Zeus Hecalaeus from the name of the old woman who hosted Theseus during his campaign against the bull of Marathon.Footnote ⁶ The similarities between Callimachus’ Victoria Berenices and Hecale may go yet further than their fragments and testimonia disclose,Footnote ⁷ but they are already sufficient to bring either one, or both, into view as intermediaries in Virgil's subsequent reception of the Homeric source text in the Aeneid.Footnote ⁸ Like Odysseus in Homer and like Heracles and Theseus in Callimachus, then, and following in the footsteps also of the Virgilian Hercules who, in the chronology of the Aeneid, had recently been hosted by Evander at the time of his victory over Cacus and foundation of the Ara Maxima, Aeneas becomes the latest hero to enjoy the humble xenia of a Greek elder before defeating a foe and securing the conditions for the survival of his people.

The Ptolemaic context in which the Aetia and Hecale were composed is a matter of no small significance in the present analysis. That same context looms large in Aeneid 8, which includes a prophetic ecphrasis of Augustus’ victory over Cleopatra at Actium (Aen. 8.675–713) and prefigures basic aspects of that victory in the epyllion of Hercules’ defeat of Cacus.Footnote ⁹ Literary reception in Aeneid 8 is thus part of the project which establishes Virgil as an Augustan – not just Roman – Homer:  after Actium, Virgil's Homeric intertextuality reads as a charged counter-appropriation of the Homer employed in Hellenistic texts with a political agenda of their own.Footnote ¹⁰ Callimachus’ epinician for Berenice's victory at the Nemean Games asserts the queen's Argive ancestry and encloses a narrative which intimates her descent from Heracles.Footnote ¹¹ The Homeric model at the core of this nexus lends these aspects of Ptolemaic identity a template of suitably Hellenic and heroic pedigree. Similarly, in the Hecale, Homeric intertextuality combines with Atthidography to promote a narrative of heroic xenia that can be read against the backdrop of the geopolitical alliance established in Callimachus’ lifetime between Athens and Alexandria against the Macedonian occupation of Attica.Footnote ¹² It may well be significant that the Atthidographer Philochorus, an important source for Callimachus in writing the Hecale, is recorded in the Suda (s.v. Philochorus = FGrHist 328 T1) as having been put to death by Antigonus (sc. II Gonatas) for supporting Ptolemy (sc. II Philadelphus), presumably after the Chremonidean War (263/262 BC) in which Athens fell to Macedonian rule.Footnote ¹³ Amid these heated international relations, the parallel narratives of the Victoria Berenices and Hecale might even be taken to suggest the coordination of Ptolemaic and Athenian cultural values in opposition to the forces that would undermine their reciprocal xenia. This intertextual alliance will have been all the more powerfully felt given that the Victoria Berenices at the start of Aetia 3 was directly preceded by the celebration of Athens that, as far as we can tell, bookended Aetia 2.Footnote ¹⁴ In such ways as these the politics of Callimachus’ present can be sensed in the mythological past of his xenia narratives. The reception of these political texts by Virgil on the site of Rome in Aeneid 8, then, will be pertinent to the post-Ptolemaic and Augustan ‘now’ that is so immanent in this book of the epic.Footnote ¹⁵

The similarity to Aeneid 8 of these Callimachean tales of hospitality has not gone unrecognised, but there is more to say about the depth of their penetration into the Virgilian narrative.Footnote ¹⁶   Likewise, the typological and ideological implications of these legendary narratives vis-à-vis Augustus’ historical victory at Actium and subsequent ‘re-founding’ of Rome are well appreciated.Footnote ¹⁷ However, little has been made of Virgil's poignant structuring of these typologies on the narratives of Ptolemaic eulogy whose production line the Battle of Actium had effectively terminated.Footnote ¹⁸ An improved vantage point from which to consider these questions is now afforded by A. Harder's monumental edition of the fragments of Callimachus’ Aetia, alongside other recent studies.Footnote ¹⁹   Building on previous scholarship, the present article suggests that new light can be shed on the episode of Aeneas’ reception by Evander in Aeneid 8 by reading it in the light of what is now understood about Callimachus’ narrative of Molorcus’ reception of Heracles, its place within the Aetia, its relationship to the parallel narrative of Hecale's reception of Theseus in the Hecale, and the ideological implications of these aetiological myths for both Hellenistic and Augustan Roman readers.

In the paragraphs above, discussion of hosts receiving guests (narratives of guest-reception) has overlapped with discussion of poets receiving their predecessors (narratives of literary reception). This may not be an accident of the English language. The use of the terms ‘host’ and ‘guest’ by some literary theorists to denote alluding/target and received/source texts, respectively,Footnote ²⁰ invites consideration of the possibility that the reception narratives of Callimachus and/or Virgil trope their authors’ literary reception of their precursors.Footnote ²¹ K. Gutzwiller, reviewing the etymological tradition that saw Hecale's name derived from the Greek καλεῖν (‘to call’, i.e. ‘invite’) and καλιή (‘hut’), ventures that ‘Hecale's unassuming hospitality is thus encoded in her name and in the poem's title to reinforce the metapoetic message … [T]he thin style embodied in the Hecale welcomes all – characters of all social levels and language from diverse sources.’Footnote ²² Propertius, at any rate, seems to have entertained this way of reading, since his own reception of Aeneid 8 in elegy 4.9 concludes by inviting the epic Hercules into his elegiac poetry-book (4.9.72 uelis libro dexter inesse meo).Footnote ²³ However, while Hecale and Propertius appear to extend a warm welcome to the visitors in their texts, the polysemy of the terms xenos and hospes (‘host’, ‘guest’, ‘stranger’, inter alia),Footnote ²⁴ and the function of hospitality scenes as a barometer of civilised values, require that hospitality as a metaphor cannot automatically be taken to imply a benign narrative of reception, literary or otherwise.Footnote ²⁵ In the essay that gives this article its epigraph, J. Hillis Miller unpacks the semantics of terms of hospitality to reveal the more ambivalent and deconstructive potential of literary and scholarly reception. If Callimachus’ neo-Homeric narratives of xenia cater to a Ptolemaic agenda in anything like the ways suggested above, then their relocation to the Roman context by Virgil is to be seen as an aspect not only of Rome's Hellenisation in the literary sphere, but also of its aggressive disruption and uprooting of Hellenistic cultural narratives.Footnote ²⁶

First course: Aeneid 8 and the Victoria Berenices

When E. V. George published his Aeneid VIII and the Aetia of Callimachus in 1974, no ‘Lille Papyrus’ had yet revealed Molorcus’ entertainment of Heracles as a narrative insert within Callimachus’ celebration of Berenice II's Nemean victory at the opening of Aetia 3.Footnote ²⁷ Nor had the fragment preserving an old peasant's invention of the mousetrap (fr. 54c Harder) been identified as a narrative insert within the Molorcus–Heracles episode.Footnote ²⁸ Since the structural complexity of Virgil's Callimachean model, as a ‘Chinese box’ of narratives, has come to light only latterly, it was perhaps inevitable that the success of George's research would be correspondingly modest.Footnote ²⁹ Nevertheless, working from Pfeiffer's landmark edition of Callimachus (1949–53), George correctly understood Aeneas’ dream-interview with Tiber and waking interlocution with Evander (Aen. 8.36–369) as a reconfiguration of the Aetia in narrative epic. Within this framework, the successive arrivals, receptions and legacies of Saturn, Evander, Hercules and Aeneas were found to correspond to a series of hospitality narratives in the Aetia, including that of Molorcus and Heracles. George further compared the battle with the mice, an unplaced fragment though it then was, to Hercules’ battle with Cacus,Footnote ³⁰ and posited a relationship also with the hospitality narrative of the Hecale.Footnote ³¹ Intervening discoveries have confirmed that there is much to commend in George's thesis, and it is now clear that Evander's entertainment of Aeneas, with its inset Hercules–Cacus epyllion, corresponds – in ways more precise than George could have realised – to Molorcus’ entertainment of Heracles and its inset battle with the mice. It will be useful first to review and supplement the parallels between these narratives before going on to consider wider areas of traction between the Virgilian and Callimachean texts.Footnote ³²

It is the theme of rustic hospitality that most obviously sets Aeneas and Evander into relation with Heracles and Molorcus. Both Aeneid 8 and the fragments and testimonia of Aetia 3 feature hospitality (frr. 54c.14, 54i.19, 60c.1 Harder hospes; cf. Aen. 8.123, 188, 364, 463), a humble abode (fr. 54c.3 στέγος; cf. Aen. 8.366–7 angusti subter fastigia tecti | ingentem Aenean duxit, ‘beneath the roof of his narrow hut he led the huge Aeneas’, 455 ex humili tecto), and poverty (frr. 54c.25, 54d.6, 54g.4; cf. Aen. 8.359–60, 364–5).Footnote ³³ Papyrus finds may not hitherto have glimpsed the details of the repast afforded to Heracles, though Probus’ note on the ‘groves of Molorcus’ (lucosque Molorchi) at G. 3.19, which crucially ascribes the story to the Aetia, indicates that the host was liberal beyond his means (60c.3–4 Harder qui cum immolaturus esset unicum arietem, quem habebat, ut Herculem liberalius acciperet, ‘when he was on the point of sacrificing the one ram he possessed, so that he might welcome Heracles the more generously’). Molorcus’ explanation of how the lion has diminished his means as a host, and his prayer for its death (fr. 54b.21–2 αἰνολέων ἀπόλ̣⌊οιτο. ε[ … | καὶ θεὸς η καινε[ … ‘may the terrible lion perish … and the goddess … kill …’), finds a parallel in Evander's account of Mezentius’ terrorising of the region (Aen. 8.481–8, 569–71) and his prayer for the tyrant's demise (483–4 quid memorem infandas caedes, quid facta tyranni | effera? di capiti ipsius generique reseruent, ‘Why should I recall the despot's unspeakable murders, why his savage deeds? May the gods reserve them for his head and his family’). These parallels are inevitably fragmentary in nature, but they are sufficient to show that the framing narrative of Aeneid 8 (Aeneas’ sojourn with Evander) corresponds to the primary inset narrative of the Victoria Berenices (Heracles’ sojourn with Molorcus). One implication of this relationship might be to see Aeneas’ reception by Evander as the prelude to a Herculean victory of his own. That script, of course, is already heavily implied in Aeneid 8, but its Callimachean intertextuality additionally rewrites the Herculean lineage of the Ptolemies as an Augustan typology.Footnote ³⁴

The coordination of the Callimachean and Virgilian frameworks extends also to the inset narrative of Aeneid 8. Evander's account of Hercules’ victory over Cacus, which parallels the framing narrative of Aeneas’ defeat of his opponents and prefigures Augustus’ victory at Actium, matches structurally the inset narrative of the Victoria Berenices, in which Molorcus’ defeat of the mice (fr. 54c) parallels the framing narrative of Heracles’ defeat of the Nemean lion, which in turn prefigures Berenice's victory at the Nemean Games.Footnote ³⁵ Virgil's Salian hymn telegraphs this connection by celebrating, among Hercules’ other labours, his defeat of ‘the huge lion beneath Nemea's rock’ (Aen. 8.295 uastum Nemeae sub rupe leonem). The same Herculean labour is signalled also when Evander welcomes Aeneas to a couch strewn with ‘the hide of a shaggy lion’ (177 uillosi pelle leonis) and later sends him off on a horse ‘which a lion's tawny hide covers entirely, flashing with golden claws’ (552–3 quem fulua leonis | pellis obit totum praefulgens unguibus aureis).Footnote ³⁶ It is not unlikely, then, that the account of Hercules’ defeat of Cacus should elaborate on references to Heracles’ defeat of the Nemean lion in Aetia 3. If Callimachus housed the Nemean lion in a cave, as the testimonia have it (Nigid. Fig. fr. 93 spelunca; Ps.-Apollod. 2.5.1 σπήλαιον; cf. the mountain-setting of fr. 56 Harder), Virgil may have exploited this parallel with the Cacus legend as he inherited it (Aen. 8.193, 224, 234, 304 spelunca; cf. Livy 1.7.5–7; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.39.2–4). The rocky overhang that is all that remains of this cave when Aeneas visits (Aen. 8.190–3 suspensam hanc aspice rupem … hic spelunca fuit) anticipates the lair of the Nemean lion as described by the Salian priests (295 uastum Nemeae sub rupe leonem).Footnote ³⁷   Immurement in this cave is another feature common to Aeneid 8 and surviving accounts of Heracles’ victorious strategy (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.39.4 and Ps.-Apollod. 2.5.1). Such a parallel with the Nemean beast (fr. 54b.21 αἰνολέων, fr. 54e.1 τέρα̣[ς) would help to explain why Virgil dehumanises the Cacus who in Livy is a local shepherd (1.7.5 pastor accola eius loci) and in Dionysius merely a robber (Ant. Rom. 1.39.2 λῃστής τις ἐπιχώριος): suggestively, the description of Cacus’ corpse (Aen. 8.266–7 uultum uillosaque saetis | pectora semiferi, ‘the half-beast's face and thorax, shaggy with bristles’) recalls the Herculean lion skin on which Aeneas and Evander sit (177 uillosi pelle leonis: see above) by means of an adjective Virgil uses nowhere else.Footnote ³⁸

The defeat of this monster by strangulation is a further detail in Virgil's narrative that is duplicated in the Heracles–Molorcus testimonia but not in the Hercules–Cacus tradition: Aen. 8.260 corripit in nodum complexus, et angit inhaerens (‘he seizes him, wrapping him into a lock-hold, and strangles him in his grip’) recalls Ps.-Apollod. 2.5.1 περιθεὶς τὴν χεῖρα τῷ τραχήλῳ κατέσχεν ἄγχων (‘setting his arm around its throat he gripped it and strangled’), with the transliterated form of ἄγχω occurring only here in Virgil and in the physical rather than the psychological sense it generally has in Latin.Footnote ³⁹ Strangulation is also the tactic deployed by a distinctly un-Callimachean Heracles to finish off the Nemean lion in the pseudo-Theocritean Heracles Leontophonos ([Theoc.] Id. 25.266–7 ἦγχον δ’ ἐγκρατέως στιβαρὰς σὺν χεῖρας ἐρείσας | ἐξόπιθεν, ‘I strangled him tightly, pressing with my strong hands from behind’).Footnote ⁴⁰ Since this poem is thought to borrow much of its lexis from the Victoria Berenices, but pointedly to depart from Callimachus in its overblown account of Heracles’ labour,Footnote ⁴¹ we cannot be certain that it is witness to details derived by Virgil from the Victoria Berenices. In this case, however, it is no less relevant that we find Virgil looking instead to a text that parodies Callimachus precisely in order to fill out a hyper-epic passage of Aeneid 8 for which there could be no parallel in the Victoria Berenices. It is, in fact, most likely that Callimachus’ account (or Heracles’ report) of the heroics against the Nemean lion was far more concise than the surrogate narrative of Molorcus’ antiheroics against the mice: the Abbruchsformel preserved in fr. 54h switches to more scholarly interest in the types of garland awarded at the Nemean and Isthmian Games (fr. 54i).Footnote ⁴² In Virgil's narrative, by contrast, the violence downsized by Callimachus is once more reinflated to epic proportions.

Virgil's strategy of epic inflation is evident also in the comparison to be made between the manufacture of Aeneas’ cosmic shield in Aeneid 8 and the diminutive hoplopoeia of Molorcus’ mousetrap in Callimachus. Both episodes are nocturnal interludes within their respective hospitality sequences (Aen. 8.370–453; fr. 54c.16–18, 32–3). Again to be remarked, however, is the difference in scale: just as the Hercules–Cacus epyllion reinflates Molorcus’ battle with the mice to Herculean proportions, so Venus’ commissioning of arma from Vulcan and his supervision of the Cyclopean forge looks from the Victoria Berenices to Iliad 18, where Thetis enlists Hephaestus’ collaboration in providing armour for Achilles. As has been recognised, a further Callimachean text already mediates Virgil's Homeric model: in Callimachus’ Hymn to Artemis (hy. 3) the young goddess enlists the help of Zeus and the Cyclopes to make her bow and arrows.Footnote ⁴³ In each of these texts the manufacture of a less important article is interrupted for the new commission (twenty serving-trollies for Achilles’ shield; a horse-trough for Artemis’ hunting-gear; a thunderbolt for Aeneas’ arma),Footnote ⁴⁴ but it is the equivalent moment of ‘unfinished business’ in Molorcus’ battle with the mice that gives the closest parallel for Vulcan's interruption of the Cyclopes in Aeneid 8:

In this motif, too, Virgil's hoplopoeia advances the reconfiguration of the Victoria Berenices in the epic mode. While in Callimachus Berenice's victory is coordinate with the humble scene of Molorcus’ domestic ingenuity, in the Aeneid Augustus’ victory demands a shield of Homeric proportions.

The clash of Hercules and Cacus, then, set within Aeneas’ visit to Pallanteum, translates the inset tales of the Victoria Berenices to the site of Rome with a considerable degree of epic inflation in the process. The vacillation of Virgil's narrative between Callimachus and Homer is relevant to three related details in the Victoria Berenices that might now be connected to Aeneid 8 by a reader alert to the basic parallelism. These are: Heracles’ return and second meal with Molorcus; the role of Molorcus’ son; Molorcus’ sacrifice depending on Heracles’ success. On the way back to Argos after slaying the Nemean lion, Heracles enjoys a second overnight stop with Molorcus during which he is able to allay his hunger (fr. 54i.17–18):

Following in the footsteps of Hercules, Aeneas also gets to enjoy a banquet in commemoration of the hero's defeat of Cacus (Aen. 8.180–3, 283–4), but he does so before setting out the next morning for war (455–65). In comparison with Heracles’ reward towards the end of the Callimachean narrative, Aeneas’ satisfaction of his hunger (184 exempta fames et amor compressus edendi) will appear somewhat premature, his mettle not yet having been tested by any comparable Herculean labour.

This reorganisation of the sequence of the Callimachean narrative draws attention, secondly, to Aeneas’ as yet unfulfilled responsibilities to Evander, especially in respect of the latter's son (cf. Aen. 8.514–15 spes et solacia nostri, | Pallanta adiungam, ‘Pallas, my hope and comfort, I will ally with you’).Footnote ⁴⁵ The eventual death of Pallas at the hands of Turnus is the Virgilian counterpart to the tragic demise of Patroclus in the Iliad, but Aeneas’ failure to return Evander's son alive might also be read in relation to the tradition, preserved in Lactantius Placidus’ commentary on Stat. Theb. 4.159–60, that a son of Molorcus was killed by the Nemean lion.Footnote ⁴⁶ If Molorcus’ paternity was suggested in Callimachus’ original, or imported into it, then the death of Pallas reconfigures Callimachean chronology to merge the elegiac model of the Aetia with the epic model of the Iliad.Footnote ⁴⁷ Contemplating the life or death fates that await his son (Aen. 8.574–83), Evander thus reflects a Homeric motif (cf. Il. 7.77–86) through Heracles’ assessment of his prospects against the Nemean lion, as Callimachus seems to have had it (60c.4–5 Harder, again from Probus):

Compare Ps.-Apollod. 2.5.1, glimpsed in fr. 54e:

These sources suggest that Callimachus’ Heracles had instructed Molorcus to presume him dead and sacrifice accordingly if he failed to return.Footnote ⁴⁸ If the hero happily intercepted Molorcus just before he had made sacrifice for his soul (cf. 60c.9–10 Harder superuenit itaque et Molorcho paranti sacrificium Manibus, ubi et aries immolatus erat), Aeneas less happily imagines Evander, as yet unaware of the tragedy that has befallen his son, vainly making vows and piling the altars with hopeful offerings (Aen. 11.49–50 et nunc ille quidem spe multum captus inani | fors et uota facit cumulatque altaria donis). In this way, the Aeneid tragically inverts the outcome of the Callimachean story. Heracles sends to Molorcus the thank-offering of a mule (fr. 54i.19–20):

Aeneas, however, returns to Evander a broken promise and body (Aen. 11.45–6, 53–5):

Thus, the framework plot of Aeneas’ reception by Evander and subsequent failure to protect his host's son is a rerun, with tragic differences, of Heracles’ reception by Molorcus in the inset narrative of the Victoria Berenices. Virgil's fusion of archaic and Hellenistic models thus extends well beyond the immediate hospitality framework of Aeneid 8 before the poignant Callimachean subplot finally gives way to the tragic Homeric masterplot.

This section has so far explored the parallels, at multiple levels of narrative, between the Victoria Berenices and the Aeneid. These narrative interpenetrations also extend from the mythical past to the historical present embraced by both texts. The significance to Virgilian encomium of the ‘Lille Papyrus’, which showed the connection between the mythical past and Callimachus’ Ptolemaic present, was established by R. F. Thomas, who demonstrated that the opening of Georgics 3 (as well as of other Augustan and post-Augustan centrepiece proems) is informed by the corresponding juncture at the start of the third book of Callimachus’ Aetia.Footnote ⁵⁰ Since the Victoria Berenices links up with both Georgics 3 and, as shown above, Aeneid 8, it could be significant that the honorific temple and triumph of Augustus adumbrated at the centre of the Georgics recurs in Aeneid 8, again in medio (G. 3.16; Aen. 8.675), as the centerpiece depiction on Aeneas’ shield of the Battle of Actium and Augustus’ triple triumph.Footnote ⁵¹ This suggests that the Molorcus–Heracles myth intersects not only with the hospitality narrative of Aeneid 8 and its ramifications later in the epic, but also with the book's bilocation between mythical past and Augustan present. In Aeneid 8, this bilocation is effected most obviously by the ecphrasis of the future on Aeneas’ shield (626–728), the commissioning and fabrication of which is, as we have seen, embedded in the intertextual nexus with Aetia 3 as an epic counterpart to Molorcus’ mousetrap. D. Nelis has shown that Apollonius’ ecphrasis of Jason's cloak (Argon. 1.721–67) is the primary Hellenistic model mediating the shield of Achilles to that of Aeneas as an icon of cosmic significance.Footnote ⁵² If there is room in this analysis also for the Victoria Berenices, it might be as a template for the concentric arrangement of mythical and historical time. Quite how Callimachus managed the transition from contemporary frame to aetiological myth is unclear from the surviving fragments of Aetia 3,Footnote ⁵³ but the connections between the Victoria Berenices and the ecphrastic centerpiece of Georgics 3 have tempted some to speculate that the narrative transition in Callimachus was also effected via an ecphrasis, perhaps even describing the figural peplos of a victory statue for Berenice:Footnote ⁵⁴ fr. 54.13–16 all but certainly refers to weaving (though the context is less clear), and interlinear scholia preserve a possible reference to a statue in what may have been the transitional section (60f.8).Footnote ⁵⁵ Whatever mechanism of insertion was exploited by Callimachus to connect Berenice's victory to the mythological insert, it is likely that it was a stimulus behind the structure of Georgics 3 as well as of other ecphrastic showpieces, perhaps especially Catullus 64, where the marriage of Peleus and Thetis frames the description of the bridal couch on which the narrative of Theseus and Ariadne is embroidered.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Callimachean mechanism of transition to the myth need not have been managed via the ecphrasis of a peplos for Virgil to have taken his cue from it as well as from Apollonius’ description of Jason's cloak, but it is notable that the metal shield is referred to as a textum – that is, as something woven – precisely at the moment of its impossible ecphrasis (Aen. 8.625 clipei non enarrabile textum).Footnote ⁵⁷

Just as the inset narratives in Callimachus reflect their frames, so in Aeneid 8 a nexus of links between the embedding and embedded narratives connects the monster slain by Hercules (259 incendia uana uomentem, ‘spewing futile fire’; cf. 199, 252–3) with the monstrous arms now admired by Aeneas (620 galeam flammasque uomentem, ‘the helmet spewing flames’) and the depiction of Augustus thereon (680–1 cui tempora flammas | laeta uomunt, ‘his brow spews auspicious flames’).Footnote ⁵⁸ Just as the ecphrasis at the centre of the Georgics looked to the Victoria Berenices at the centre of Callimachus’ Aetia to celebrate the victory of Octavian, so Aeneid 8 looks again to the Victoria Berenices to locate the victory of Augustus in the middle of the shield ecphrasis. In Virgil's narrative epic, the political allegory encapsulated in the Victoria Berenices spills beyond the borders of Evander's epyllion and into the fabric of the text, not only in the death of Evander's son, but also in the ecphrasis of Aeneas’ shield.

At the end of Aeneid 8, having inspected the images on the shield, Aeneas symbolically ‘hoists onto his shoulder the fame and fortunes of his descendants’ (731 attollens umero famamque et fata nepotum). P. Hardie has suggested that Aeneas’ act of taking the cosmic icon of the shield onto his shoulders departs from the Iliadic model so that the hero comes to resemble Hercules temporarily deputising for Atlas in taking on the weight of the world.Footnote ⁵⁹ This Herculean aspect in Aeneas’ gesture may recommend, for one last time in this book, his comparison with Callimachus’ Heracles. Harder's edition of the Aetia collocates to the end of the Victoria Berenices a much debated pair of fragments, one of which mentions ‘the skin which became a covering for a man, his defence against snow and missiles’ (fr. 60a τὸ δὲ σκύλος ἀνδρὶ καλύπτρη | γιγνόμενον, νιφετοῦ καὶ βελέων ἔρυμα); in the other, someone ‘lifting the animal's skin onto his shoulder’ (fr. 60b θηρὸς ἀερτάζων δέρμα κατωμάδιον) is glimpsed.Footnote ⁶⁰ Hardie's interpretation would certainly be significant here if Heracles is indeed the subject of the verb in fr. 60b as Harder surmises. The testimonia associate the act of shouldering the lion skin with Heracles in the context of the Molorcus episode (Ps.-Apollod. 2.5.1 θέμενος ἐπὶ τῶν ὤμων ἐκόμιζεν), and their specific recognition that it serves as, precisely, Heracles’ shield (Nigid. Fig. fr. 93 itaque postea claua pro gladio, pelle pro scuto in reliquo tempore uti instituit) would explain the relevance of this intertext for the Herculean Aeneas as he acquires his cosmic arma at the end of Aeneid 8.

The corresponding section of the Callimachean narrative will have yet further significance for Aeneas if fr. 60a is correctly located adjacent: in this description of the skin's/shield's defensive properties, Callimachus’ own source text is Aphrodite's protection of Aeneas himself in the Iliad (5.315–16):

Indeed, the aptness of such a ‘window allusion’ by Virgil might now be taken to support the attribution of frr. 60a and 60b jointly to the end of the Victoria Berenices. In this way, Virgil connects the end of Aeneid 8, where the Herculean Aeneas acquires the shield commissioned for him by Venus, with Callimachus’ Homeric intertexts at the end of the Victoria Berenices, where Heracles’ lion skin is associated with the protection given to Aeneas by his mother in the Iliad.Footnote ⁶¹ It might here be said that Virgil's Herculean Aeneas recognises his Iliadic self in Callimachus’ Heracles. If Virgil's reading of Callimachus is indeed as close as these connections suggest, it may be that attollens umero in line 731 recognises Callimachus’ κατωμάδιον as a Homeric hapax at line 431 of Iliad 23, a stichometric coincidence of 1 per cent probability,Footnote ⁶² and a more involved version of the phenomenon witnessed in the famous ‘coincidence’ of the Euphrates six lines from the end of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo (hy. 2.108 Ἀσσυρίου ποταμοῖο μέγας ῥόος), Georgics 1 and 4, and again here in Aeneid 8.Footnote ⁶³

Second course: Aeneid 8 and the Hecale

With structural and thematic elements similar to those of the Victoria Berenices, the Hecale will necessarily exhibit comparable parallels with the Aeneid, with which in addition it shares the hexameter. The Hecale enjoyed considerable popularity at Rome,Footnote ⁶⁴ and its influence on Aeneid 8, though difficult to pinpoint on the basis of what survives, is not difficult to sense.Footnote ⁶⁵ As in the Victoria Berenices, so in the Hecale the framing story (Theseus’ defeat of the Marathonian bull) gives precedence to an inset narrative of rustic xenia (Hecale's reception of Theseus: frr. 27–39 Hollis). How explicitly the Hecale was then related to the framework of Callimachus’ present is unclear, but the text's enclosure of Atthidographic lore locates in autochthonous myth a powerful aetiology for Athenian xenia as the civilised antipode to monstrous villainy.Footnote ⁶⁶   To the extent that this narrative may have resonated with, for example, Athens’ diplomatic relations with Alexandria against Macedon, the Hecale no less than the Victoria Berenices and Aeneid 8 will, in its own way, have configured the present as the future of the past.Footnote ⁶⁷ A closer look at the surviving points of contact between the Hecale and Aeneid 8 will therefore point the way to Virgil's reconfiguration of Callimachean myth in the Augustan context.

The scraps of Callimachus’ description of Hecale’s humble entertainment of Theseus (frr. 27–39) preserve a sequence that is at least in general terms comparable to Evander's reception of Aeneas.Footnote ⁶⁸ Firmer links can be made with the snippets of their after-dinner conversation. Apparently analeptic in content, this comprised Theseus’ précis of his background (fr. 40) and Hecale's extended account of the vicissitudes of her life (frr. 40–62). Near the beginning of her speech, she harks back to her more prosperous youth (fr. 41) and remembers a man from Aphidnae to whom she perhaps now compares Theseus (fr. 42.2–6):

The identity of the man from Aphidnae is not clear, but Pfeiffer's suggestion that he is Theseus’ father Aegeus is plausible, as Hollis notes, given the tendency in epic for elders to liken visiting princes to their fathers in days gone by.Footnote ⁶⁹ Thus, in Odyssey 3 and 4, Nestor and Helen compare Telemachus to Odysseus with identical expressions of amazement (3.123 σέβας μ’ ἔχει εἰσορόωντα, 4.142 σέβας μ’ ἔχει εἰσορόωσαν, ‘awe seizes me as I behold you’) that recommend the association of fr. 50 τόδ’ ἔχω σέβας (perhaps with Pfeiffer's supplement εἰσορόωσα) with this section of the Hecale. In Virgil's conflation of these Odyssean passages in Aeneid 8,Footnote ⁷⁰ Evander ‘recognises’ Aeneas from his resemblance in voice and appearance to Anchises (154–68):

Although Hollis’ commentary on the corresponding recognition scene at Hecale fr. 42 favours the identification of the Aphidnaean not with Theseus’ father but with Hecale's late husband, it twice compares Evander's ‘recognition’ of Aeneas’ likeness to his father, first as an instance of this scenario in epic, and again for an elder's emphatic use of verbs of recollection (fr. 42.4 μέμνημαι; cf. Aen. 8.156–7 recordor! | nam memini). Further similarities can be noted: Evander's awe (Aen. 8.161 mirabar … mirabar) might be compared to Hecale's σέβας if fr. 50 belongs, as Hollis argues, to this context; the ephebic cheeks of his younger self (Aen. 8.160 tum mihi prima genas uestibat flore iuuentas) correspond to those which Hecale recollects of Theseus’ lookalike, again accepting the placement of fr. 45 Hollis (ἁρμοῖ που κἀκείνωι ἐπέτρεχεν ἁβρὸς ἴουλος | ἄνθει ἑλιχρύσωι ἐναλίγκιος, ‘over him, too, the soft down was recently beginning to spread, like the helychrysum flower’).Footnote ⁷¹ Traditional though these expressions may be, a further similarity suggests a relationship between the two passages that is more than conventional: the ἄλλιξ recalled by Hecale is a recherché word glossed the Suda and the Byzantine etymologica as Thessalian for the chlamys,Footnote ⁷² the very garment recalled by Evander in his analogous situation in Aeneid 8: his chlamydem que auro … intertextam (167 ‘cloak interwoven with gold’) thus calques the form of Hecale's ἄλ⌊λ⌋ικα χρυσείηισιν̣ ἐεργομ⌊ένην ἐνετῆισιν and conveys the idea of ἔργον ἀ⌊ρα⌋χ̣νά̣ω̣⌊ν insofar as texere is used of, precisely, ‘the work of spiders’.Footnote ⁷³ The Virgilian phrase is also, of course, suggestively reflexive of the intertextuality being claimed for it here, as is the transmission of the prized object from one generation to the next.Footnote ⁷⁴

In her autobiography, Hecale seems to have related how she reared two boys (her sons?)Footnote ⁷⁵ who were killed, one perhaps by the villain Cercyon, for whose demise she prays (frr. 48–9). Hecale's parenthood may be a further respect in which she is comparable to Molorcus, with the difference that her prayer for revenge turns out already to have been fulfilled by Theseus, whose narration of his encounter with Sciron and Cercyon probably formed an inset ‘prequel’ within the hospitality narrative (frr. 59–62). Cercyon and Sciron in the Hecale are thus paralleled in the Aeneid both by Mezentius and Turnus, the villains Evander wants dead (Aen. 8.484, 11.177–81), as well as by Cacus, whose defeat by Hercules is a prequel to Aeneas’ later victories. To this broad parallel the surviving fragments of the Hecale provide some contours. As Cercyon ‘fled Arcadia and settled among us, a bad neighbour’ (fr. 49.9–10 ὅς ῥ’ ἔφυγεν μέν | Ἀρκ⌊αδίην, ἡμῖν δὲ κακὸς⌋ παρενάσσα⌊το γείτων), so Mezentius fled to Latium (a latter-day Arcadia: Aen. 8.492–3), ‘trampling on his neighbour's head’ (569–70 finitimo … huic capiti insultans). Sciron, too, is an ‘inhospitable tyrant’ (fr. 59 τύραννος ἄξενος) who matches Mezentius’ infandas caedes … facta tyranni | effera (Aen. 8.483–4, ‘unspeakable murders … the savage deeds of a tyrant’) with his own brand of murder most foul (frr. 59–60), a respect in which both are comparable also to Cacus (Aen. 8.195–7 semperque recenti | caede tepebat humus, foribusque adfixa superbis | ora uirum tristi pendebant pallida tabo, ‘the ground was forever warm with fresh gore and, nailed to the haughty doors, men's faces hung, pale in their dismal decay’; cf. 8.485–8 for Mezentius’ equivalent). The similarity of these baddies to Cacus may not be incidental: according to one tradition, Cercyon is a son of Hephaestus (Hygin. Fab. 38 Cercyonem Vulcani filium armis occidit, ‘[Theseus] slew Cercyon, the son of Vulcan’), a paternity which Virgil also accords to Cacus (Aen. 8.198 huic monstro Volcanus erat pater), possibly without precedent.Footnote ⁷⁶ The gory scene outside Cacus’ cave in Virgil (Aen. 8.195–7 above) might thus be compared to his brother's wrestling ground in Callimachus (fr. 62 ἧχι κονίστραι | ἄξεινοι λύθρωι τε καὶ εἴαρι πεπλήθασι,‘where the inhospitable arena is full of gore and blood’).

The death of Hecale's son at the hands of Cercyon lends dramatic tension to the framing story, which began with Aegeus’ anxiety that, having no sooner recovered Theseus, he might lose him to the Marathonian bull (Dieg. x.18.20–8; frr. 6, 17). Aegeus’ situation here is analogous to that of his ‘future’ self in Catullus 64, with the difference that the latter reluctantly agrees to send his long-lost son into a more monstrous tauromachy on Crete (64.215–37).Footnote ⁷⁷ Among the interconnections between the Hecale, Catullus 64 and Aeneid 8, Evander represents another father who fatefully sends his son into battle with a ‘monster’ (Aen. 8.470–519, 558–83). The similarity of his farewell speech to that of Catullus’ Aegeus may look through the latter to its Callimachean model.Footnote ⁷⁸ In support of this hypothesis, it can be noted that the futile aspiration with which Evander closes his propemptic speech (Aen. 8.582–3 grauior neu nuntius auris | uulneret, ‘may no messenger with graver news wound my ears’) has been compared to the expression of foreboding that Callimachus’ Aegeus may have pronounced at this juncture of the Hecale (fr. 122 ἀπούατος ἄγγελος ἔλθοι, ‘an unwelcome messenger may come’).Footnote ⁷⁹ Callimachus here glosses a disputed Homeric phrase (Il. 18.272, 22.454) with what Hollis pronounces ‘the most curious product of Homeric controversy to be found in the Hecale’:Footnote ⁸⁰ ancient Homerists seem to have disagreed as to whether to read a prepositional phrase ἀπ’ οὔατος (‘away from the ears’) or, as Callimachus seems to recommend, the adjective ἀπούατος (‘bad’). Virgil's close calque of the Callimachean version of the expression (nom. adj. + nom. ‘messenger’ + optative verb) thus seems to be a dutiful nod to both ἀπούατος (grauior) and ἀπ’ οὔατος (auris). If this zetema makes the intertext more conspicuous to the scholarly reader, it also exposes the distance between emotive and cerebral reading in Callimachus’ appropriation of Homer, and Virgil's appropriation of Callimachus.

As with Heracles’ defeat of the Nemean lion in the Victoria Berenices, Theseus’ bullfight in the Hecale was probably mentioned en passant in deference to the homelier elements in the story. From what little survives in the papyri, we know that Theseus wrestled the bull's horns to the earth (fr. 67) and smashed one of them with his club (fr. 69.1) before dragging back the beast alive (fr. 68). A spondeiazon casually quoted by Cicero (fr. 165 πολλὰ μάτην κεράεσσιν ἐς ἠέρα θυμήναντα, ‘venting all in vain into the air with its horns’) may also belong to this section of the Hecale, as suggested by Catullus’ near-identical (though inversely spondaic) description of Theseus’ defeat of the Minotaur ‘as it hurled its horns to no avail in the empty winds’ (64.111 nequiquam uanis iactantem cornua uentis).Footnote ⁸¹ Similar to these lines, and therefore a likely ‘window allusion’ via Catullus to the Callimachean source, is Hercules’ capture of Cacus ‘as he spewed his unavailing fires in the darkness’ (Aen. 8.259–60 hic Cacum in tenebris incendia uana uomentem | corripit). The Athenians’ awe at Theseus’ exploit (fr. 69.2–3 ὡς ἴδον, ὡ[ς] ἅμα πάντες ὑπέτ̣ρ̣ε̣σ̣α̣ν̣, ο̣ὐ̣δ̣έ̣ τ̣ι̣ς̣ ἔ̣τ̣λ̣η̣ | ἄνδρα μέγαν καὶ θῆρα πελώριον ἄν̣τ̣α̣ ἰδέσθαι, ‘as soon as they saw it they all trembled and not one dared to look directly at the great hero and the monstrous beast’)Footnote ⁸² also finds general correspondence in Virgil, with the difference that Cacus is dragged out dead (Aen. 8.264–5 pedibusque informe cadauer | protrahitur, ‘the hideous corpse is dragged forth by the feet’) and the onlookers are unable to avert their gaze (265–7: see above).

These interpenetrations of inset and framing narratives in text and intertext do much to nuance the more obvious typological parallels in Aeneid 8. Within the framework that relates Aeneas’ reception by Evander to Theseus’ reception by Hecale, the inset of Hercules’ victory over Cacus replays Theseus’ defeat of the Marathonian bull. Aeneas’ later victory over Turnus then replays the inset of Theseus’ defeat of Cercyon, Aeneas thus avenging Evander as Theseus (albeit unknowingly) avenges Hecale. In this way, Aeneas’ coincidence with the feast held annually in commemoration of Hercules’ victory (Aen. 8.172–4) itself coincides with Callimachus’ aition of the modest τράπεζα held annually in Hecale's honour (frr. 82–3, cf. Aen. 8.174, 283 mensae). In Virgil, however, the commemoration focuses on a victory achieved through violence, whereas in Callimachus a humbler emphasis is placed on the social value of xenia. Here the Aeneid enacts a process of cultural translation whereby the Hellenistic Atthidography of the Hecale is overwritten in the production of new aitiologies for Augustan Rome.

Digestif

Considered purely from the perspective of epic narrative, the parallels between Aeneid 8 and the Victoria Berenices and Hecale map the hospitium of Aeneas–Evander onto the xenia of Heracles–Molorcus and Theseus–Hecale. These narrative parallels will be all the more radically embedded in the Aeneid if, as suggested above, Evander's loss of Pallas and his subsequent vengeance through Aeneas is a subplot that expands on the intimations of parental bereavement and vicarious retribution that scholars have detected in the fragments of the Victoria Berenices and Hecale. As this subplot approaches its gory dénouement, the similes that compare Turnus to both lion (Aen. 9.792–6, 10.454–6, 12.4–9) and bull (12.103–6, 715–22) bring the Callimachean intertexts of book 8 to their inevitable conclusion.Footnote ⁸³

These parallels cannot be considered independently of the parallelism between the Victoria Berenices and Hecale. That parallelism renders it impossible to decide in absolute terms which of the Callimachean texts enjoys greater traction with the Aeneid (indeed, the typology that associates Aeneas with Hercules within epic time and with Augustus beyond it suffices to illustrate the potential of narrative structures to migrate from one context to another). Rather, the interrelation of the Victoria Berenices and Hecale reminds the reader to consider how both narratives, received as a carefully constructed pair, work simultaneously in the Aeneid.

On the level of genre, Callimachus’ deft transposition of the Homeric hospitality story between the elegiac and epic genres can be regarded as an important context for Virgil's self-imposed ‘problem’ (a hyperextension of Callimachean aesthetic debate) of how to write a Homeric poem in the Callimachean style.Footnote ⁸⁴ The hospitality narrative at Pallanteum takes its cue from Callimachean precedent to solve this problem as part of the process whereby the Aeneid establishes Virgil as the Roman Homer. Generic rapprochement should not, however, obscure an important respect in which Virgilian narrative remains distant from Callimachean modernism: like the Odyssey, the Aeneid ultimately subordinates to its epic teleology the antiheroic or ‘realistic’ atmosphere that dominates the discrete narratives of the Aetia and Hecale. The bucolic interlude in Pallanteum is hedged about by Aeneas’ impending war against the Latin ‘suitors’ of Lavinia, and Evander's xenia is overshadowed by the intertextuality that is claiming his son as the Patroclus of a Roman Iliad. The theme of parental bereavement thus shifts from poignant Callimachean subplot to tragic Homeric masterplot. At the end of Aeneid 8, Aeneas hoists onto his shoulders the shield on which is depicted the ‘renown and destiny of his descendants’ (731 famamque et fata nepotum) primarily in imitation of Homer's Achilles (via Apollonius’ Jason), and only secondarily of Callimachus’ Heracles – at the very moment, moreover, when the latter dons a lion skin that will afford him the protection enjoyed by Aeneas in the Iliad. In such ways as these, the intertextuality between the hospitality narratives of Aeneid 8, the Victoria Berenices and Hecale is more extensive and meaningful than has previously been appreciated.

Virgil's Callimachean intertextuality will provide more than a literary feast if, as suggested above, the parallelism between the Victoria Berenices and Hecale also implies the coordinate cultural projects of Athens and Alexandria. It is on the level of politics and ideology, then, that Virgil's reception of reception plays out in the new cultural centre of Augustan Rome. The interplay of past and present in the Callimachean intertexts proves to be comparable to the temporal and diegetic strategies employed in Aeneid 8: in all three cases inset narratives reflect their framing texts, and these frames in turn reflect the context of each poet's present. However, in the historical gap that separates Callimachus and Virgil, a revealing inversion of temporal perspective must be noted: whereas the Victoria Berenices embeds mythological paradigms within its present-day encomium of Berenice (Heracles’ defeat of the Nemean lion and Molorcus’ of the mice each reflect and modulate the recent victory of the queen's horses at the Nemean Games), Aeneid 8 embeds its encomium of the Augustan present within the mythological framework of Aeneas’ arrival in Pallanteum. This complex incorporation of the Aetia in the Aeneid, as in the Georgics, enlists Ptolemaic literature in the service of its Roman successor. If the Hecale, likewise, refashions Athenian mythology as the heroic past of the present age of the Diadochi, Aeneid 8 historicises that present for the politics of the Augustan now. Read in this way, Virgil's temporal inversions of the Victoria Berenices and Hecale assume an unsettling ideological force: the encomium of Augustan supremacy in Aeneid 8 overturns Callimachus’ dual celebrations of the Ptolemaic dynasty in the demise at Actium of the last of the Ptolemaic queens. Transplanted to Latium, Virgil's Arcadians cannot but remind us that Rome has superseded Alexandria and Athens as the political and cultural centre of the ancient Mediterranean.Footnote ⁸⁵ In this context, Virgil's subtle intertextuality is an instance of ‘soft power’, but it also implies a more aggressive model of reception that meditates on the extent to which the brute force of Roman imperialism eclipses an older order of xenia.