I

‘The last stanza of Horace's poem’, writes Denis Feeney of Hor. Carm. 3.3, ‘declares virtually outright that he has just been “quoting” epic matter: “desine peruicax | referre sermones deorum et | magna modis tenuare paruis” (70–2)’.Footnote ² A poem that recounts the doings of gods automatically demands comparison with epic, but if the speeches of gods are presented, all the more so. Horace's poem in fact evokes an episode within a specific epic poem, the Council of the Gods that occurred during the first book of Ennius’ Annales. But such divine councils are a ‘stock epic scene’,Footnote ³ and rather more than that: they are moments when epic is at its most quintessentially epic. In simple terms, an epic poet ‘may underline the significance and increase the dramatic effect’ of a critical point in the narrative ‘by showing us that it exercised the gods’,Footnote ⁴ and that analysis applies to any divine presence in a poem: if a key impulse of epic is to amplify the significance of human activity, those occasions when higher forces overtly assert their control of human destiny satisfy a number of fundamental preoccupations of the genre. But in the Council of the Gods we have the most developed and impressive realization of this divine concern for mortal existence, as well as a topos that in Rome at least achieved special status within the broader field of divine machinery in epic.Footnote ⁵ That status is perhaps reflected in a tendency discernible in the Roman section of the tradition for such councils to fall early in the epic narrative, as if initiating the epic plot.Footnote ⁶ If so, however, Virgil's Council at Aen. 10.1–117 defies expectation by failing to be convened until the plot of the epic is very far advanced indeed, and even then, as this article will consider, achieving strikingly less than one might expect of a plenary gathering of supernatural powers at an advanced stage in an epic narrative.

The divine council has a history as long as the epic genre, punctuated by landmarks such as Claudian's influential combination in the In Rufinum of the epic Concilium Deorum and the Virgilian motif of Hellish forces driving activity in the human realm: a concilium deforme (Claud. In Rufinum 1.28).Footnote ⁷ Claudian's infernal Council inspired ‘the many councils of devils summoned by Satan in medieval and Renaissance epics that operate with a Christian divine machinery’ (one that tolerated a proliferation of demons but not of gods), finding its most celebrated expression in the ‘great consult’ convened by Satan in Book 2 of Milton's Paradise Lost.Footnote ⁸ Tracing the topos in the other direction, meanwhile, and always bearing in mind the greater definition it achieved in Rome,Footnote ⁹ we find that the Homeric motif whereby ‘the gods of the upper world habitually meet in assembly, presided over by their chief, and take decisions there … is equally at home in Sumero-Akkadian, Hurro-Hittite, and Canaanite literature’.Footnote ¹⁰ It is a much shorter section of this rich and extended tradition that the present article aims to tackle, the three centuries between Ennius and Statius. But its argument is that an intervention as formative as Claudian's later proved to be was that made by C. Lucilius the satirist, itself a response to Ennius’ authoritative deployment of the motif in the Annales.Footnote ¹¹ My claim is that the alternative versions of the divine council offered in Ennius’ epic Annales and in Lucilius’ satires define a narrowly Roman tradition boasting its own peculiar dynamic, essentially offering a polarity of outcomes for an individual, deification or condemnation, with divergent implications also for the welfare of the city of Rome. The immortal councils addressed here all continue to be held in heaven, among the Olympian not the infernal deities, but their implications for mortals often anticipate the grim and punitive consequences of the post-Claudian conference of devils.

The final destination of this article is an attempt to redeem Virgil's deployment of the concilium topos in Aeneid Book 10, of which one scholar remarked, representatively and not unreasonably, that ‘it was not worth the trouble to bring together the whole court of heaven for so little’.Footnote ¹² My case in Virgil's favour will involve showing how deftly he combines in his own Council the ‘epic’ and the ‘satirical’ models, with their diametrically opposed characters, that he had inherited. But I shall start by describing Ennius’ Council and Lucilius’ response to it, thereby explaining the origin of the polarity that Virgil was able to exploit, and after that I shall illustrate, as succinctly as I can, the influential afterlife of this encounter between Ennian and Lucilian models of the concilium deorum in subsequent Roman literature.

But before that, a key observation about this tradition is worth more explicit elaboration. My reading of the concilium tradition after Ennius and Lucilius, as I have anticipated, identifies a polarity of outcomes established by the epic and the satirical councils, epic (in very general terms) fulfilling its mission to extol, satire its instinct to condemn. As such, however, my approach requires a preliminary refinement, subtle but important, of Barchiesi's perceptive remarks on past efforts to draw a sharp line between the serious and the parodical in the Roman tradition of the Council of the Gods:Footnote ¹³

Barchiesi is unquestionably right to resist schematic division of the field into epic or satirical concilia, and indeed an implication of the remainder of this article is how very fluid, dynamically so, this tradition was. But another presupposition of the argument that follows is that something key to the power of the concilium deorum as a literary topos in Rome was the lasting awareness in the later tradition of two distinct directions that the concilium might follow, epic or satirical. These two threads do indeed become thoroughly intertwined but always, it seems, in full consciousness of the established proprieties: epics that allude to the satirical model do so alert to the scandal of that gesture, and satire remains aware that its version is a subversion of a normative, epic, realization of the proceedings of the divine council.

II

Lucilius’ staging of a Council of the Gods in what was regarded in antiquity as Book 1 of his satires, and was originally the first book of a second collection,Footnote ¹⁶ was a gesture of fundamental significance for the genre he was so influential in shaping, a self-conscious relaunching of satire in what would prove to be its canonical hexametrical form. The question of metre was central to this development, and reinforces the inaugural status of Lucilius Book 1. As Gratwick remarks, a significant part of Lucilius’ poetic style involved the misuse of epic form: ‘Lucilius clearly enjoyed clothing his provocatively demotic language in the heroic hexameter.’Footnote ¹⁷ Gratwick's insight might indeed be expressed more forcibly.Footnote ¹⁸ The appropriation of the dactylic hexameter by satire, and satire's misapplication thereafter of the signature vehicle of heroic poetry, crystallized satire's oppositional stance to epic.Footnote ¹⁹

Lucilius Book 1, and the Concilium Deorum within it (so named explicitly by Lactantius, Div. Inst. 4.12, though whether it filled Book 1 or shared the book with other satires is disputed), confirmed the exclusive adoption of hexameters in Book 30. But the provocative character of Lucilius’ Concilium Deorum was not limited to metrical appropriation. It was also to all appearances a parody of the Council of the Gods in the first book of Ennius’ Annales,Footnote ²⁰ incidentally the text that had first introduced the dactylic hexameter to Roman epic. The clearest indication of its relation to Ennius may be Lucilius’ fr. 5 Warmington, consilium summis hominum de rebus habebant,Footnote ²¹ a hexameter, evidently introductory, that Servius (at Aen. 9.227) attributes to Lucilius, but which scholars have suggested that Lucilius (and Virgil in his line consilium summis regni de rebus habebant) copied from Ennius:Footnote ²² it is stylistically very epic. In short, however, Lucilius inaugurated exclusively hexametrical satire by staging an explicit challenge to Ennian epic, a challenge that took the shape of a satirical version of that most epic motif, the divine council.

The Councils of Ennius and Lucilius are both of course in a catastrophically fragmentary state, and their reconstruction is much debated. But the sketches that follow capture their broad architecture in a reasonably uncontroversial way. The Council in Annales Book 1, following Skutsch's explicitly ‘tentative’ organization of the material,Footnote ²³ fell early in Ennius’ account of the foundation of Rome. After the preliminary material (evocation of the Muses, dream of Homer), Aeneas leaves Troy and comes to Italy; Ilia his daughter is impregnated by Mars, and it is at this juncture that the gods convene to discuss the future of Ilia's twins. Ilia suffers tribulations but prevails, the twins similarly; Romulus and Remus grow up, take the auspices, and come to blows: Remus is killed, Rome is founded.Footnote ²⁴ Scrolling forward a little, but still in Book 1, Romulus after an eventful reign is deified, but that outcome, the apotheosis of Romulus (and seemingly also the concomitant death of Remus), has already been anticipated in the council. Two moments in Ovid are particularly important here, Met. 14.805–17 and Fast. 2.481–90, in both of which a hexameter line delivered by Jupiter in Ennius (also quoted by Varro, Ling. 7.6)Footnote ²⁵ is recalled by Mars, unus erit quem tu tolles in caerula caeli. Skutsch postulates that this line describing the fate of Romulus entails another on Remus’ starkly opposing destiny: ‘The emphatic unus suggests that the decision to save the twins for the present ended in some such way as quorum tamen occidet alter; cf. Ov. Fast. 2. 485.’Footnote ²⁶

Further illuminating analysis of Ennius’ Council has been done, notably Denis Feeney's discussion of the nuanced way in which Juno's position vis-à-vis the foundation of Rome must have been presented,Footnote ²⁷ a significantly qualified agreement which did not preclude her support for Carthage against Rome in the Punic Wars, and thus for most of the rest of the Annales.Footnote ²⁸ Hor. Carm. 3.3 and the exchange between Jupiter and Juno in Aeneid Book 12 (791–842), as read by Feeney, indicate how influential that aspect of Ennius’ Council proved to be. But the essential upshot of Ennius’ Council—and I feel justified in so presenting it because it is in such essentializing terms that the later tradition seems to have conceived of it—was twofold, a divinely sanctioned decision that Romulus should be deified, and the decision thereby entailed, that a city should be founded by Romulus—Rome. That is how the business of Ennius’ Council is generally encapsulated in modern scholarship: ‘the founding of Rome and the promised deification of Romulus’,Footnote ²⁹ ‘die Gründung Roms und die künftige Göttlichkeit des Romulus’.Footnote ³⁰ If Skutsch and others are right to suspect that Ennius was the first to have Romulus deified, of course, then that element of the Council's decision will have been especially marked.Footnote ³¹

Lucilius’ Council is perhaps datable to around 125 b.c., thus half a century or so after Ennius.Footnote ³² A preliminary observation is that we are dealing with a divine council that is very mindful of its predecessor in Ennius.Footnote ³³ A god, without doubt Romulus,Footnote ³⁴ says and perhaps opens his speech with references to an earlier meeting (Lucilius, frr. 19–22 Warmington):

If we discern a certain tentativeness in Romulus’ manner, that is only appropriate from a divine senator of very recent standing. From another god we also have (Lucilius, fr. 23 Warmington)

Ovid's Metamorphoses, in a passage already cited, similarly figures the literary tradition as a series of meetings of this council,Footnote ³⁵ Mars referring to the Concilium in Ennius’ Annales in tu mihi concilio quondam praesente deorum | … dixisti (14.812–15). In the divine Council of Thebaid Book 1, to which we shall return, the Statian Jupiter in turn alludes to actions taken in Ovid's Metamorphoses.Footnote ³⁶ One of the things that gives the Roman tradition of the concilium deorum its individual identity, and a degree of independence from its Greek precedents, is the further character that Lucilius gave to this body, concerned as it was with Rome's interests and also composed as it was, like the literary tradition, of a sequence of separate but interrelated moments: Lucilius’ divine Council was explicitly a divine version of the Roman Senate,Footnote ³⁷ as Servius’ terms indicate (Serv. ad Aen. 10.104):

We are presumably to imagine the topic for consideration put to this celestial Senate by the presiding magistrate, Jupiter, who then asked other gods to give their opinions, sententiae. We seem to be able to distinguish speeches by Neptune, Apollo and Romulus, at least.Footnote ³⁹ A decision was then reached.

It is just possible that Ennius’ Council had already carried a hint of the senatorial about it: fr. 52 Skutsch, if indeed bipatentibus in Ennius referred to doors, and to the doors of a space in which the gods were assembled, may allude to the practice of keeping the doors of the Curia open when the Senate was sitting.Footnote ⁴⁰ But there is no evidence in what survives from Ennius’ Council of anything resembling the intensive imitation of senatorial procedure, and the thorough humanization of the divine senators that accompanies it,Footnote ⁴¹ which we see in the fragments of Lucilius.Footnote ⁴² Ennius’ gathering is of course retrospectively constructed as senatorial in the satire (a prior gathering of the body meeting in his poem), but a specific determinant of the more overtly senatorial format of Lucilius’ divine Concilium will have been the reprehensible individual who was the focus of this council's attention, L. Cornelius Lentulus Lupus.

Lupus had been consul in 156 b.c., censor from 147 (Val. Max. 6.9.10; Festus 360L), and latterly princeps senatus from 131 or 130 until his death in 126/5 (Acro at Hor. Serm. 2.1.67: the satire evidently followed his death);Footnote ⁴³ however, as a proconsul between consulship and censorship, as Valerius Maximus records, he had been convicted for extortion under an obscure lex Caecilia de repetundis, and that could be presented not, as Valerius does, as a paradigm of professional resilience but as an indictment of corruption at the heart of the state. The latter was Lucilius’ approach: secuit Lucilius urbem, writes Persius (1.114–15), te Lupe, te Muci, et genuinum fregit in illis;Footnote ⁴⁴ Horace has Lupus ‘overwhelmed by slanderous verses’ (famosisue Lupo cooperto uersibus, Serm. 2.1.68), as if his treatment in Lucilius’ satire were tantamount to being stoned.Footnote ⁴⁵ Lupus’ latter role as princeps senatus of course makes a divine senatorial hearing called to discuss him especially apt. What the precise nature of Lupus’ shortcomings was, in Lucilius’ account, is not entirely clear, but a prosecution de repetundis, as we know from the case of C. Verres, could extend a long way beyond strictly financial impropriety. Lupus features as a target of abuse elsewhere in Lucilius, frr. 1138–41 Warmington (preserved in Cic. Nat. D. 1.63) and 805–11 Warmington (from Book 28, via Probus at Virg. Ecl. 6.31): in context Cicero is by implication associating Lupus with perjury, while the passage from Lucilius Book 28 suggests judicial corruption and brutality, combined with an interest in philosophy,Footnote ⁴⁶ and here it is worth reminding ourselves of Marx's conjecture of cuiusdam iudicis improbi in the text of Servius at Aen. 10.104.Footnote ⁴⁷ From within the Concilium Deorum, meanwhile, frr. 36–8 Warmington suggest attention to Lupus’ physical repulsiveness, fr. 46 Warmington his interest in exotic foodstuffs.Footnote ⁴⁸ Freudenburg persuasively highlights the office of censor that Lupus had in common with the target of the Apocolocyntosis, the Emperor Claudius (for the parallels between Lucilius’ satire and the Apococolyntosis, see pages 645–646 below): Lupus would represent an official charged with restoring the health, broadly defined, of Rome, but who in his person embodied its corruption.Footnote ⁴⁹

A reconstruction of the business of Lucilius’ Concilium that would command the assent of most scholars has Jupiter raising the question of the future of a degenerate Rome threatened with destruction (frr. 6–9 Warmington), and various gods speaking to the question. The destruction of Rome appears to be an explicit option, perhaps proposed by Neptune.Footnote ⁵⁰ Romulus seems to have made a special point of Rome's loss of Romanness, its devotion to Eastern luxuries and the Hellenizing of its language (frr. 12–17 Warmington).Footnote ⁵¹ Romulus himself seems to have been represented by Lucilius as an embodiment of old-world unpretentious Romanitas uncorrupted by these external influences. Skutsch reconstructs a line probably attributable to Lucilius, and probably to his Council of the Gods, Romulus in caelo feruentia rapa uorare, which would be a parody of Ennius, Ann. 110–11 Skutsch (from the end of Book 1 or the start of Book 2, after Romulus’ deification has been fulfilled), Romulus in caelo cum dis genitalibus aeuom | degit.Footnote ⁵² The Lucilian Romulus, with his taste for steaming turnips even in heaven, as Connors puts it,Footnote ⁵³ ‘embodies the qualities of sturdy incorruptibility’:Footnote ⁵⁴ Freudenburg suggests that Romulus’ taste for turnips and his rigorous Roman principles evoke Cato the Censor specifically.Footnote ⁵⁵ Chahoud wonders if the emphasis on cultural miscegenation in Lucilius’ Concilium reflects a particular shortcoming of Lupus, a man who Lucilius in Book 28 seems to imply had unacceptably Hellenizing inclinations.Footnote ⁵⁶ In any case, the devastating critique this represents of a man who had been censor, charged with maintaining the integrity of the Roman state, is evident enough.Footnote ⁵⁷

To summarize, while in Lucilius’ Council the great beneficiary of Ennius’ Council, Romulus, retains an exemplary status, Lupus, the structural counterpart of Ennius’ Romulus in Lucilius’ Concilium—the individual about whom the whole discussion revolves—is entirely reprehensible; indeed, an embodiment of everything Rome should not be. As such, though, he is also, like Ennius’ Romulus, an individual who encapsulates the city, in Lupus’ case the vicious and decadent Rome of the 120s; if Freudenburg is right to see Lupus’ censorship as central to his condemnation, his censorium funus the trigger for the divine debate,Footnote ⁵⁸ no magistracy represented the essence of the city more clearly than that. The conclusion of Lucilius’ Council, the measure settled on by the gods as a response to Roman corruption, was that Lupus should be punished by death (fr. 46 Warmington), and it is an appropriate death, a hanging judge handed down a concomitantly harsh sentence; also the death of a glutton at dinner.Footnote ⁵⁹

There is much to debate in that or in any other reconstruction, and ultimately no alternative to weighing the analyses of the fragments in the extensive scholarship,Footnote ⁶⁰ but what is clear enough is that in Lucilius’ Council of the Gods we are dealing with a systematic reversal of the terms of Ennius’ Council. Whereas Ennius countenances the foundation of Rome and the elevation to divinity of an embodiment of the great new city, Romulus, in Lucilius Rome is so corrupt as to be under threat of extinction, and instead of a deified founder we have, it seems, a physically repulsive and morally depraved criminal whose just deserts are not apotheosis but condemnation and punishment in the shape of a straightforward human death, the polar opposite of deification. Manuwald states the contrast as between ‘the honouring of a benefactor of the Roman people’ and ‘the elimination of an unworthy citizen’.Footnote ⁶¹ Presumably scapegoating is in play in Lucilius, the embodiment of the community's ills expelled in an act of purification.Footnote ⁶² Horace's formulation of Lucilius’ attack on Lupus at Serm. 2.1.68 as a kind of poetic stoning might suggest as much, since stoning is classically the act of a collective, the people as a whole taking revenge on a single perceived malefactor.Footnote ⁶³

I simplify here, but only, I think, in a way in which literary history is itself inclined to simplify the sum of earlier contributions.Footnote ⁶⁴ What I believe the later tradition will have seen in Ennius’ Concilium Deorum and Lucilius’ response to it was epic and satire enacting in a paradigmatic way their quintessential generic impulses, to praise and to blame (Dio Chrysostom defines a similar polarity between Homer and Archilochus at Or. 33.11), to elevate and to degrade, to raise to divinity and to reduce to the subhuman status of an executed criminal. A familiar moment at Juv. 10.58–67 might illustrate the dynamic. As Sejanus falls from near-supreme power to criminalized corpse, ‘dragged by the hook’ (66), an honorific statue (the most aggrandizing form of statue possible, a chariot team) is converted into the tawdriest of domestic utensils, chamber pots. Here also satire performs its archetypal function, countering and subverting praise and its cultural expressions, epic poetry above all.

III

My argument is that this dynamic polarity of divine councils established by Ennius and Lucilius, the laudatory and the punitive, shapes in large part the history of the topos for the next two centuries. The clearest illustration of the influence it exerted, and a concrete example of the dynamic in play in later literature, is to be found in Seneca's Apocolocyntosis. A close relationship has long been suspected between the Apocolocyntosis and Lucilius, and Apocol. 9.5 is not coincidentally where the half-line feruentia rapa uorare is preserved.Footnote ⁶⁵ Most obviously, as in Lucilius, we have a concilium deorum in this text, characterized as a Senate, and the upshot of its consultation is the punishment by death of a high-status malefactor. But I would suggest that the debt of the Apocolocyntosis to Lucilius runs deeper still, and that the dynamic that I have identified as existing between the Ennian and the Lucilian divine Councils is restaged by Seneca's Menippean satire in the context of Julio-Claudian imperial succession.

Ennius had talked of apotheosis, Lucilius of a death sentence. The Apocolocyntosis is, familiarly, a satirical response to the apotheosis conferred on Claudius by the Senate after his death in a.d. 54 (Tac. Ann. 12.69, 13.2). On the (secure) assumption that we can identify the work we have with the one mentioned by Dio Cassius (60.35.2–4), we have preserved by the Greek historian a neat analysis of the manner in which the satire inverts the terms of the official treatment of the dead emperor:

Gallio's witticism that ‘Claudius had been dragged to heaven on a hook’, sharing imagery as it does with Juvenal's account of the fall of Sejanus (cf. also Juv. 6.622–3, descendere … in caelum), is best understood as a gloss on his own brother's satire,Footnote ⁶⁶ which recounted the transformation of a deified figure into a condemned criminal. That is certainly a fair summary of the text we have, which, led by the words of Augustus (partly fulfilling the role of Lucilius’ Romulus as newly appointed senator),Footnote ⁶⁷ indicts Claudius ‘as an arbitrary judicial murderer’Footnote ⁶⁸ who deserves punishment himself. At Apocol. 14.1–3, for example, Aeacus condemns Claudius with a version of an eye for an eye, αἴκε πάθοι τά τ’ ἔρεξε δίκη κ’ ἰθεῖα γένοιτο,Footnote ⁶⁹ a ruling that Claudius finds unfair but not, given his own enormities in the judicial arena, unfamiliar.

Eden, as noted,Footnote ⁷⁰ is peculiarly resistant to the notion of the Apocolocyntosis’ debt to Lucilius, but it is fair to say that he is isolated in that view. It is perfectly appropriate to adduce parallels in Lucian, as Eden does, themselves presumably indebted to Menippean satire, the Icaromenippus and the Council of the Gods, but what neither of these texts displays is a key motif that the Apocolocyntosis shares with Lucilius, namely the single criminal individual who is in some sense representative of the sorry condition of the state as a whole.Footnote ⁷¹ But I would further suggest that the most important debt that Seneca's satire owes to Lucilius’ engagement with Ennius is its essential project of reversing a narrative of apotheosis. Lucilius took Ennius’ deification of Romulus and turned it into a condemnation of Lupus; Seneca overturns the apotheosis of Claudius and consigns him to a criminal's death. The major difference is that, while Lucilius’ correction of an apotheosis was done within a literary exchange, albeit one with important implications for the contemporary condition of Rome, the Apocolocyntosis contradicts by means of a literary text the measures undertaken by the Roman Senate in a.d. 54.

If the Apocolocyntosis is the text that preserves the force of my proposed polarity most explicitly, there is further evidence for its persistence in the divine Councils of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Statius’ Thebaid, and in aspects also, perhaps, of the composition and reception of Cicero's epic poetry. Degl'Innocenti Pierini has argued convincingly for an extended allusion to Lucilius’ Concilium in Ovid's Council in Metamorphoses Book 1, starting from the observation of a shared metaphor from the medical arena used to describe the crisis to which Jupiter is in each case responding.Footnote ⁷² In both Lucilius and Ovid a council is called in conditions of crisis,Footnote ⁷³ in both there is a strong contemporary charge to the scene in heaven,Footnote ⁷⁴ and both poets introduce a representative personage who ‘constitutes a symbol of the degeneration of morals and of the spreading nefas’,Footnote ⁷⁵ and is dealt with vengefully: it is thus the punishment of criminality, involving an individual representative of the broader community, which is on the agenda in each instance. Tellingly, both villains, Lupus and Lycaon, also have lupine associations, allowing the criminality of the object of divine vengeance to shade into bestiality.Footnote ⁷⁶ All I would add to Degl'Innocenti Pierini's perceptive analysis is some consideration of the implications of Ovid's evocation of the Lucilian Council at this point of Metamorphoses Book 1, where both Lucilius and Ennius had set their divine Councils and thereby in some sense characterized their work. The assumption here, as anticipated, is that an epic cannot collude with satire without consequences, and the message communicated by this allusion about Ovid's poem seems both bold and apt in metaliterary terms. It is highly appropriate that an epic which hazards its generic status as determinedly as the Metamorphoses does adopts for its inaugural authoritative divine intervention a version strongly hinting at the Lucilian paradigm; in other words, that a poem of instability and dissolution, a poem programmatically at odds with conventional epic, follows not the constructive Ennian model but the satirical model that talks of crisis, corruption, imminent disaster and condemnation.Footnote ⁷⁷

The implications are not so different in the Concilium Deorum in the first book of the Thebaid (197–311).Footnote ⁷⁸ This is another assembly with punitive consequences (nunc geminas punire domos … descendo, Theb. 1.224–5), subtly suggestive of a Senate,Footnote ⁷⁹ and one self-consciously indebted to Ovid as well as to Virgil and Homer, but offering a creative variation on the tradition in that it replaces the individual focus of both Ennian and Lucilian Councils with two victims: Argos and Thebes, and ultimately Polynices and Eteocles. The dualism of the Thebaid is one of the poem's most persistent features,Footnote ⁸⁰ enacted as much at the level of the divine protagonists as the mortal: Schubert illustrates it by the parallel gathering of Dis in the Underworld at 8.21–126 (the upshot of which is not punishment but clemency), ‘a pendant to the divine council in Book 1’.Footnote ⁸¹ Statius thus achieves a brilliantly original twist on a long tradition, but still seems to betray a continuing awareness of the power, it might be said, of not imitating Ennius: like the Metamorphoses, Statius’ epic communicates its bold originality by opting for the satirical, not the epic, model of divine motivation. What the punitive Council of Thebaid 1 launches is of course another ‘Lucilian’ narrative of crisis and doom.

Potentially parallel to Ovid's and Statius’ embrace of the dystopian version of the council is Cic. QFr. 3.1.24, not poetry so much as commentary on his own poetry. The De Temporibus Suis to which Cicero here alludes was composed, although never necessarily completed, in the aftermath of his exile, and celebrated his recovery from that misfortune:Footnote ⁸²

(My analysis is indebted to Harrison.)Footnote ⁸³ From QFr. 2.8.1 we understand that there was a speech of Jupiter at the end of the second book (out of a total of three) of this poem, seemingly in a concilium deorum ‘called to sanction the return of Cicero to Rome’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Harrison compares this council with the divine assembly of Od. 1.22–95, similarly concerned with a homecoming. What Cicero says here at QFr. 3.1.24, meanwhile, is probably not a serious statement of his intentions for the poem but a whimsical notion of what might go into it. Goldberg suggests that, when Cicero fantasizes about adding an episode in which he can exact revenge on A. Gabinius and L. Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the consuls who had acquiesced in his exile, it is the model of Lucilius that asserts itself: Cicero imagines a speech given by Apollo, a god who featured in Lucilius’ Council (frr. 24–32 Warmington) but not apparently in Ennius’, which condemns the two reprobate imperatores.Footnote ⁸⁵ The implied contrast with this unfriendly reception are the various celebratory welcomes which a returning general might usually expect, up to the glorifying reditus represented by the triumph. The reversal Cicero entertains is thus characteristically satirical.

In relation to his earlier poem, De Consulatu Suo,Footnote ⁸⁶ Cicero did not entertain any satirical fantasies that we are aware of, and the Council of the Gods that he seems to have placed in the first book was one to which Cicero was summoned and which ‘gave Cicero sanction to save Rome’.Footnote ⁸⁷ But it is interesting to read this Council through the distorting lens of the pseudo-Sallustian Inuectiua, which takes Cicero's self-glorifying claims of being a new Romulus (Inu. in Cic. 4.7) and twists them into an indictment of his crimes against the city. When Cicero is turned from the city's custos into a carnifex, exploiting the difficulties of the city to enhance his own glory, and bringing division rather than protection (2.3), a satirical reflex to correct an act of panegyrical elevation is identifiable not unlike that of Lucilius.Footnote ⁸⁸

IV

The most subtle exploration of this bifurcated tradition that I am proposing, nevertheless, can be claimed by Virgil. The divine Council of Aeneid Book 10 is a remarkable intervention in that tradition in many respects, not least by virtue of how overdue it is within the poem: there is only one gathering of gods in the Aeneid that can qualify as a full concilium (identified as such in the conventional way, Aen. 10.2),Footnote ⁸⁹ but the reader has to wait until nine books have passed for a scene more typically found closer to the start of a text. By this point in the plot, it is fair to say, the suspense has been sufficiently built up that we expect this set piece to deliver a decisive outcome. The concilium deorum is, as already discussed, the most authoritative expression of the providential view that is available to an epic poet (definitive decisions are what it is all about), and that we finally experience it as the poem's hero returns with renewed determination and resources to the field of battle hardly diminishes that readerly anticipation. Nor does the manner in which the scene is presented to us: Jupiter in his first speech (6–15) is terse, imperious and resolute.

In the event, however, what is most arresting about Virgil's Concilium Deorum is how utterly inconclusive it turns out to be. After the speeches of Venus and Juno, Jupiter announces no decisive action (Aen. 10.100–17), but rather resigns the role of dictating events to Fate, although what kind of comprehensible causal mechanism rex Iuppiter omnibus idem. | fata uiam inuenient describes it is hard to say. There are ways of softening the oddity of this passage, for example in the characterization of Jupiter, his ‘rhetorical trickery’ in Harrison's account, his ‘very human, not to say bureaucratic, manoeuvre’ of hinting that Fate is not really his responsibility, his ‘undoubtedly bogus plea of impartiality’.Footnote ⁹⁰ (Lyne is more scathing still: ‘a combination of teasing opacity, disingenuousness, and, I think, mendacity’.)Footnote ⁹¹ But even if one seeks an understanding of Virgil's Concilium primarily in the psychology of its participants (rather than, as I am inclined to do, in the impact that the poet is seeking to have upon his reader), this is still a concilium that opens with a bang, and in its style of presentation meets the readership's confident expectations as it does so, and ends with a whimper. But the whimper, it is important to emphasize, is still dressed up as a bang: Klingner is right, for example, to identify a degree of ‘majesty’ in Virgil's realization of Jupiter greater than anything to be found in Homer,Footnote ⁹² and that majesty persists into his second speech even as he renounces any responsibility for future events. An awed silence attends his vacuous words; the oath that confirms he will do nothing has a dire solemnity and a seismic impact (cf. Hom. Il. 1.530).

It would very much seem that Virgil is deliberately setting out to confuse, disappoint and disturb his readers, readers who by this stage in the Aeneid are demanding some firm direction to the plot. One reader, Sebastiano Timpanaro, has described the passage as ‘forse il piu “imbarazzato” e inconcludente concilium deorum di tutta l'epica antica’;Footnote ⁹³ Barchiesi talks of the contrast with Ovid's dynamic Jove in Metamorphoses Book 1: ‘The divine councils of Homer and Virgil pale by comparison: in Virgil in particular, the only council of the gods on the fates of the Trojans and of Italy ends with a complete and utter stalemate’, adding the crucial observation that it has absolutely no impact on the larger plot.Footnote ⁹⁴

We can perhaps make this point another way. Harrison's edition of Aeneid Book 10 has much to say about Virgil's Homeric models at this point. In structural terms, the divine assembly at Il. 20.4–30, undertaken as the hero returns to battle (there is an obvious parallel between Aeneid Book 10 and Iliad Book 20, too) and yielding no very specific policy (Zeus expresses his impartiality, and the gods are encouraged to support whichever side they will, δίχα θυμὸν ἔχοντες, 20.32), is a key point of reference. But in detail and expression Il. 8.1–40 and 4.1–72 are equally important,Footnote ⁹⁵ and when Harrison asserts that Jupiter's ‘decision is couched in the words of Zeus’ from Iliad Book 4 (Aen. 10.104 accipite ergo animis atque haec mea figite dicta ~ Il. 4.39 ἄλλο δέ τοι ἐρέω, σὺ δ’ ἐνὶ φρεσὶ βάλλεο σῇσιν; also borrowed from Iliad Book 4 is ‘Jupiter's indignation at Juno's attempts to thwart his plans’),Footnote ⁹⁶ one of the things that we are obliged to do is contrast the world-changing outcomes of the Iliadic dialogue that follows Zeus's statement with the striking lack of any decisive outcome from Virgil's. Most suggestively of all, it is in the divine assembly of Iliad Book 4 that Hera offers for destruction, in exchange for Zeus's beloved Troy, three cities dearest to her heart, ‘Argos and Sparta and Mycenae of the wide ways’ (51–4). This moment is of high relevance for another divine encounter in the Aeneid: when Jupiter foretells to Venus, ueniet lustris labentibus aetas | cum domus Assaraci Pthiam clarasque Mycenas | seruitio premet ac uictis dominabitur Argis (Aen. 1.283–5), it is, as Feeney writes, in ‘poetic fulfilment of the pledge [Juno] had made to Zeus’ in Iliad Book 4.Footnote ⁹⁷ In other words, Virgil at this critical moment in the council of Aeneid Book 10 evokes Rome's history of progressive world domination, encompassing the full sweep of time from the fall of Troy to the conquest of Greece. No issue is of greater interest to the Aeneid—yet this council will do nothing whatsoever to advance the Roman mission.

But the concern of this article is with a dynamic peculiar to the Roman literary tradition of the concilium deorum. What makes the divine Council of Aeneid Book 10 relevant to this discussion is a pattern of allusion within it to both Ennius’ and Lucilius’ Councils. The implications of this allusion, however, parallel and complement the conclusions we have drawn from Virgil's Homeric models.

The Ennian character of Virgil's Council consists in clear stylistic and verbal similarities to the Annales, in the case of one word (bipatentibus, Aen. 10.5) traceable with all likelihood to Book 1 (fr. 52 Skutsch)Footnote ⁹⁸ but discernible throughout, albeit similarities ‘of expression rather than content’.Footnote ⁹⁹ As for its debt to Lucilius, we have the electrifying assertion of Servius at Aen. 10.104 that totus hic locus de primo Lucilii translatus est libro. There is a bit more than Servius’ word to go on for Lucilius’ presence. Virgil's Concilium, like Lucilius’, follows the procedures of the Senate, albeit in a more restrained and dignified way than the satirist. Harrison's careful delineating of senatorial hints within an overwhelmingly epic environment identifies suggestions of relatio (report of the matter in hand by the presiding magistrate) followed by interrogatio sententiae (asking senators for opinions) and discessio (voting division).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Servius auctus at 117 also relates the last line and a half to the escorting (presumably by other senators, out of the Senate) of the (presiding) magistrate.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Relevant in addition is Heinze's acute observation, cited by Moeller, of the unusual extent to which Jupiter is characterized at 116–17, the only time in the poem that he is realized as a physical personage, actively engaged with his social environment,Footnote ¹⁰² a subtle demotion of the father of the gods that itself hints at the mode of satire.

That Servius was essentially correct in his claim, and that Virgil's passage is indeed indebted to Lucilius, is now well enough accepted.Footnote ¹⁰³ But Marx,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ followed by Norden,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ while accepting the essential validity of Servius’ information, argued that Virgil could not have imitated Lucilius (‘an epic poet neither could nor should take anything from a writer of satires’), and that what Servius was seeing was a common debt to Ennius on the part of both Lucilius and Virgil, undoubtedly an elegant solution. Wigodsky accepts that Virgil borrowed from Lucilius, but still I think fails to confront fully the scandal of an epic alluding to a satire: according to Wigodsky, Virgil essentially cherry-picked from Lucilius such material as could be turned to ‘serious’ use.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

My point here is to insist once again that for an epic to model itself on a satire, especially an epic at its most epic in a gathering of divine forces, does necessarily carry a charge. To put that another way, Marx's statement of the proprieties of epic borrowing from satire (which owes something to Servius, sed hoc quia indignum erat heroo carmine mutauit …) is in fact as a principle hard to fault. But Virgil was alive to the potential of such impropriety. Here in his Council of the Gods he seems to have deliberately engineered the collision of antithetical models, alluding to Ennius’ and Lucilius’ Councils simultaneously. Virgil's Council is a singularly indecisive event in plot terms, but in these formal terms also it is hamstrung, both Ennian and Lucilian. These competing points of reference entail, it is worth emphasizing, something rather more than a collision between epic and satire. What a Council modelled on Ennius promises is the foundation of Rome and the deification of its founder, while a Lucilian Council casts doubt over the entire Roman enterprise, and criminalizes its representative. But what of a council that entertains both outcomes? There will be an apotheosis, we might conclude, but there will also be a scapegoating; or perhaps, if our attention is on Aeneas’ destiny, there will either be a deification or a condemnation, but this council is not ruling which.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Apotheosis and criminalization are concepts with a very clear resonance in the later books of the Aeneid, as are the foundation and destruction of cities. In the event, the hints provided by this double allusion might be understood to be realized in its denouement, the contrasting fates of two individuals, Aeneas and Turnus, one of whom will succeed, ensure the foundation of Rome and be deified,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ while the other will die and be defined as a criminal as he does so (Aen. 12.949).

But we are some way from the resolution of this poem at the start of Book 10, and if we respond to this indecisive council in the way that I think the poet is encouraging us to, it is with anxiety that the outcomes we have been trained to expect from this action may not in fact be realized. If we take Jupiter at his word here, and at the same time read Virgil's allusive messages dispassionately, we honestly cannot be confident what the upshot will be, an Ennian foundation or a Lucilian crisis. What makes this a stunningly bold strategy on Virgil's part is all there in the tepid responses of Boissier and Timpanaro:Footnote ¹⁰⁹ the poet has deliberately stoked expectations of a decisive piece of divine machinery, but in the event has it offer only further questions; he has staged the most impressive set piece that the epic genre could muster, and let it come to nothing. To some degree this simply answers the needs of an epic poem still three books away from its conclusion, a strategy to render compellingly indeterminate what might have been deadeningly predictable in the last books of a national epic. But that indeterminacy of outcome also dramatically destabilizes the morality of the conflict between Aeneas and Turnus. There is no guidance from the gods, just two contrasting fates, unassigned to individuals.

Now, a divine council that fails so abjectly to specify the fates of two individuals is a departure from Ennius in particular. The unlucky twin Remus could also be defined as a criminal in the language of his brother in Ennius (frr. 94–5 Skutsch), nec pol homo quisquam faciet impune animates | hoc nec tu: nam mi calido dabis sanguine poenas, and this suggests that the establishment of a polarity between deification and criminalization must be credited first to Ennius (who was the first to deify Romulus, it appears).Footnote ¹¹⁰ But between Ennius and Virgil Lucilius had clarified that dichotomy by elaborating the figure of the criminal and tying his criminality to the condition of an imperilled Rome, relaunching the dissident literary mode of satire on the back of it. The perennial power of the council of the gods as a poetic motif in Rome thus owes not a little to these two key interventions at formative stages of classical Roman literature, and in literary works especially important in Roman self-fashioning: Zetzel reminds us that, if Ennius was the early writer most often named by Cicero, Lucilius came second.Footnote ¹¹¹ Between them they framed the terms of this topos for two centuries, and incidentally lent Virgil the means to make his own counterintuitively potent contribution to the tradition.