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APOLLONIUS AND THE END OF THE AENEID*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2014

Adrian Kelly
Adrian Kelly*
Affiliation:
Balliol College, Oxford
*
adrian.kelly@balliol.ox.ac.uk
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Extract

The death of Turnus is one of the Aeneid's most controversial and variously interpreted episodes – anything from the triumphant vindication of Aeneas and the Roman future, to the poet's last, resounding plaint against Augustan totalitarianism, with all the more nuanced shades of opinion in between. Virgilian scholarship has recently become tired of the opposition between ‘optimist’ and ‘pessimist’ perspectives, but one piece of potentially important evidence has not found its way into the argument. As often, it is a matter of intertexts, and it begins, unsurprisingly, with the Iliad.

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Research Article
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The Classical Quarterly , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , December 2014 , pp. 642 - 648
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Copyright © The Classical Association 2014 

The death of Turnus is one of the Aeneid's most controversial and variously interpreted episodes – anything from the triumphant vindication of Aeneas and the Roman future, to the poet's last, resounding plaint against Augustan totalitarianism, with all the more nuanced shades of opinion in between. Virgilian scholarship has recently become tired of the opposition between ‘optimist’ and ‘pessimist’ perspectives,Footnote 1 but one piece of potentially important evidence has not found its way into the argument. As often, it is a matter of intertexts, and it begins, unsurprisingly, with the Iliad.

The Homeric allusions at the Aeneid's ending have been long noticed; Servius quoted Il. 22.362–3 (ψυχὴ δ' ἐκ ῥεθέων πταμένη Ἄϊδος δὲ βεβήκει | ὃν πότμον γοόωσα λιποῦσ' ἀνδροτῆτα καὶ ἥβην) in his note on Aen. 12.952 (vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras), and modern scholars of every stripe have noted the ways in which Virgil summons the Iliad's resolution, not merely in the parallelism between Hector and Turnus as the defeated in their respective duels, but throughout the course of Book 12.Footnote 2 Ending with Turnus' demise is surprising in that intertextual context, as the reader notices all more clearly the absence of ‘Homer's palliatives’, the kind of resolution provided in Books 23 and 24 of the Iliad, after Hector's death in Book 22.Footnote 3

Though the fact of this ‘pendant’ end is obvious in the Aeneid, its import is a little less uncontested. To Oliver Lyne, for instance, these allusions add a darker tone to the poem's presentation of the Roman mission, and its failure to live up to at least the first half of Anchises' admonition parcere subiectis et debellare superbos (Aen. 6.853). Resolution of the Homeric variety, in which Achilles reveals to Priam a greater vision of humanity than hitherto apparent, is not appropriate in the context of Rome's foundation or future.Footnote 4 On the other hand, David West speaks of ‘the obvious positive and celebratory tone of this dénouement of the epic’,Footnote 5 so that the intertext simply underlines the power and impressiveness of Aeneas himself, now confirmed as the alius Latio iam partus Achilles, | natus et ipse dea (6.89–90).Footnote 6

Such a variance of opinion shows that the Aeneid's lack of an Iliadic resolution cannot, by itself, determine how we interpret this particular Virgilian silence.Footnote 7 However, the Aeneid was not the first ancient epic to deploy an absent Homeric ending in this way, for the same strategy is to be found in Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica. The significance of this poem for the structure and interpretation of the Aeneid is now undoubted,Footnote 8 and here there may be some intimation, or at least precedent, about how to read this kind of closure in Virgil. Apollonius' ending has often been compared with those of the Homeric epics, but usually in order to show its difference from those endings, not least in its abruptness:

As for the end, both Homeric epics (as also the Aeneid) conclude with an episode not explicitly foreshadowed in the proem – the burial of Hector, the battle between Odysseus and the suitors' families – whereas the ending of the Argonautica, which from one point of view seems radically abrupt, is from another surprising only in its complete predictability: how else could the voyage-narrative have ended?Footnote 9

Richard Hunter was pointing out here that the parameters of the poem respond to the literary culture of Hellenistic Alexandria, and Luigi Rossi had already argued that Apollonius' envoi to his characters (4.1773–81), specifically its very last line (ἀσπασίως ἀκτὰς Παγασηίδας εἰσαπέβητε 1781), was a typically Hellenistic allusion to Odyssey 23.295–6 (οἱ μὲν ἔπειτα | ἀσπάσιοι λέκτροιο παλαιοῦ θεσμὸν ἵκοντο).Footnote 10 These verses were the subject of a famous zetema in the Museum, with the scholia suggesting that Aristarchus and Aristophanes considered them the τέλος or πέρας of the poem.Footnote 11 Despite uncertainties over how to interpret these terms (whether as indicating literary or text-critical criteria), many modern critics have followed Rossi in considering Arg. 4.1781 to be a statement of Apollonius' scholarly or literary support for the Museum's judgement about the ‘ending’ of the Odyssey.Footnote 12

It would, doubtless, be characteristic of Apollonius to comment in such a learned way on Homer and his Alexandrian reception.Footnote 13 Indeed, even if we take a sceptical view of this case, we might still – and perhaps more persuasively – see an allusion here to an earlier portion of Odysseus' reunion with his wife, specifically in the simile marking Penelope's final acknowledgement of her husband (Od. 23.233–40):Footnote 14

ὡς δ' ὅτ' ἂν ἀσπάσιος γῆ νηχομένοισι ϕανήῃ,
ὧν τε Ποσειδάων εὐεργέα νῆ' ἐνὶ πόντῳ
ῥαίσῃ, ἐπειγομένην ἀνέμῳ καὶ κύματι πηγῷ·        235
παῦροι δ' ἐξέϕυγον πολιῆς ἁλὸς ἤπειρόνδε
νηχόμενοι, πολλὴ δὲ περὶ χροῒ τέτροϕεν ἅλμη,
ἀσπάσιοι δ' ἐπέβαν γαίης, κακότητα ϕυγόντες·
ὣς ἄρα τῇ ἀσπαστὸς ἔην πόσις εἰσοροώσῃ,
δειρῆς δ' οὔ πω πάμπαν ἀϕίετο πήχεε λευκώ.

The parallels seem much clearer, with a voyage happily (for now) concluded, and several more direct echoes in phraseology (ἐπέβαν ~ εἰσαπέβητε, ἀσπάσιος / ἀσπάσιοι ~ ἀσπασίως). Of course, one need not exclude either alternative, since Apollonius could have been evoking both passages at once, and for the purposes of the current argument it does not greatly matter. What is of more moment is that Apollonius is doing this at all, invoking at the end of his own poem a penultimate episode (or two) from his Homeric model. In doing so, he draws attention to the fact that the Argonautica lacks the successfully socialized ending of the Odyssey – the reunion of husband and wife, her despatch back into the female quarters, Odysseus' journey to the fields and meeting with his father, the re-stamping of his authority on the suitors' families and the wider society of Ithaca. All this resolutionary material is missing from the Argonautica, and it is not particularly hard to see why. Jason will never succeed in establishing authority over his wife, he will never settle down as the ruler of any community, and his miserable death (so memorably vaunted in Euripides' Medea) overshadows the poem's depiction of its particularly ἀμήχανος (‘no-devising’) hero. This contrasts powerfully with the Odyssey's πολυμήχανος (‘many-devising’) protagonist, whose authority is protected in his absence by a faithful wife, and re-established on his return by force of arms and divine aid. In short, the Argonautica summons Homer's ending to crystallize our impressions of Jason: he fails where Odysseus succeeds.Footnote 15

The Argonautica was one of Virgil's most important models, and so we should not be too surprised that he closed the Aeneid in the same way that Apollonius had finished his poem, namely by stressing the lack of the kind of resolution to be found in the model Homeric epic.Footnote 16 Virgil uses the Iliad to answer Apollonius' invocation of the Odyssey, and he also does it in a much more thorough manner, for the whole of Book 12 engages constantly with the fate of Hector,Footnote 17 but this is hardly an argument against the parallel. Of course, there were many other poems, now lost, which formed a part of Virgil's tradition, but it is not possible to speculate much or very profitably about the ends of these epics and their influence upon the Aeneid.Footnote 18 Ennius' Annales and Naevius' Bellum Punicum were important examples (though both of these authors, unlike Virgil, drew the narrative into their own times),Footnote 19 while the exiguous remains of the tantalizingly titled Argonautae by Virgil's near-contemporary Varro of Atax do not cover the ending of that poem.Footnote 20 Moreover, Greek epic poetry flourished between Homer and Apollonius (and after), but once more we cannot speak of its parameters in the required detail. There is therefore a possibility that other texts deployed the same kind of pendant closure, though the extent of the Aeneid's interaction with the Argonautica suggests that it is not unreasonable to see a direct relationship between them on this matter as well.

So what significance is to be drawn from the fact that Virgil and Apollonius used the same closural strategy? We noted earlier that the Homerism of the Aeneid's ending could be interpreted variously. When the Apollonian precedent is added, however, Virgil is not drawing attention simply to the Homeric absence (as we have long seen) but also to the deployment of this strategy by his Alexandrian predecessor.Footnote 21 At the very end of the Aeneid, then, Virgil connects Aeneas with Apollonius' Jason, and not for the first time in the poem, as Damien Nelis has established.Footnote 22 This parallel implies the way in which we should interpret the Aeneid's pendant Homeric ending: just as the Jason of the Argonautica is diminished by the concluding, allusive comparison to the Odysseus of the Odyssey, just as he fails where Odysseus succeeds, so the Aeneas of the Aeneid is to be diminished by the Achilles of the Iliad.

One could hardly call such a conclusion novel, yet the Apollonian parallel directs us decisively towards it, shaping the way in which we read the Iliadic intertext. The substance of the resulting diminution is that Aeneas is less successful, specifically, in living up to his paternal example: while the Trojan fails here to fulfil Anchises' instruction parcere subiectis by killing the suppliant Turnus, Achilles receives and protects his suppliant Priam, just as his father had received Phoenix (Il. 9.438–41, 447–84) and Patroclus (Il. 23.83–90),Footnote 23 and succeeds even against his own anger in sending the Trojan back to Troy. This is no oblique or merely implied parallel, for Turnus' appeal to the example of his own and Aeneas' father (Aen. 12.932–6: utere sorte tua. miseri si qua parentis | tangere cura potest, oro – fuit et tibi talis | Anchises genitor – Dauni miserere senectae | et me seu corpus spoliatum lumine mavis | redde meis) is a ringing allusion to Priam's appeal in precisely this context (Il. 24.486–7: μνῆσαι πατρὸς σοῖο θεοῖς ἐπιείκελ' Ἀχιλλεῦ, | τηλίκου ὥς περ ἐγών, ὀλοῷ ἐπὶ γήραος οὐδῷ·). Virgil is not just alerting his audiences to a general lack of resolution, but focussing on a definite and crucial aspect of that deficiency,Footnote 24 in much the same way that Apollonius uses the Odyssean parallel to draw his audiences' attention specifically to the marital disharmony that will destroy Jason.

This filtered equation may also lead us to evoke directly the ending of the Odyssey as a frame for Aeneas' behaviour.Footnote 25 Both Odysseus and Aeneas die with their people prospering, after killing their main opponent(s) in a (re-)marriage competition, so that one could combine the Apollonian filter with this more direct Homeric interaction, where palliatives are again notable by their absence: while Odysseus is able to settle affairs on Ithaca after the slaughter of the suitors, to connect once more to a wife possessed of active homophrosyne with her husband, and Athena can personally staunch further trouble at the end of Book 24, Virgil's Aeneas is given no chance within the poem to socialize Turnus' killing, to unite with a wife who is something more than ‘an almost perfectly cold blank’,Footnote 26 or to enjoy the leadership of a people at peace.Footnote 27 Where the Apollonian filter directs the reader to interpret the link between Aeneas and Achilles to the former's discomfiture, a direct Odyssean engagement would contrast him with Odysseus to the same end.

Of course, what one chooses to make of these equations will probably depend on wider beliefs about Virgil's attitude to recent Italian history, the Augustan settlement, and his main character, though the current case would seem prima facie more congenial to the ‘pessimistic’ strands of Virgilian criticism.Footnote 28 That Aeneas is a diminished or failed Homeric hero is one of this school's central theses, while his symbolic importance to the Roman mission, and failure to live up to it, inevitably foreshadows the social and civil strife in the first century b.c.e., enshrining the poem's ambiguity about its audience's Augustan present. The victory which Aeneas enjoys over Turnus – like that experienced by Jason on his return home – leads to a future marked forever by the action at the narrative's closure; that success can only be ‘tragic’.Footnote 29

On the other hand, one could continue to maintain ‘optimistically’ that Aeneas is a new style of epic hero, and that the comparison with Achilles, even through the Apollonian contrast between Jason and Odysseus, conveys not diminution, merely difference.Footnote 30 Aeneas, after all, is probably to be imagined as returning Turnus' body,Footnote 31 and he does found an eventually successful dynasty. Moreover, the Argonautica's portended marriage leads to the death of children within the household and the extinction of Jason's line, while the Aeneid's leads to the propagation of Aeneas' Roman future. Much will also depend upon one's take on Jason, especially within the renaissance of Apollonian studies over the last thirty years. Where once he was conceived as a failed Homeric hero, more recent interpretations connect his abilities and character with subtle critiques of that model, and see him as a serious attempt to deal with new social, political, and artistic realities.Footnote 32

The argument of this article, therefore, is not intended to be a silver bullet for the monster lurking at the end of the Aeneid. However we take it, Virgil's structural allusion to Apollonius' conclusion is there, and appears to pivot upon the failure of the protagonist to perform the important action successfully and honourably accomplished by his Homeric counterpart. Simply put, as Jason is no Odysseus, Aeneas is no Achilles. Future discussions of the Aeneid's contentious ending will need to consider the direction which the poet himself offers in this case, a direction made possible by Virgil's complex engagement with the Homeric and Apollonian epic past. The wearied consensus in Virgilian scholarship of which we spoke at the start of this article, the feeling that it is time to move beyond the issue of the poet's attitude towards the Augustan regime, may therefore be a little premature.

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Bill Allan, Joseph Farrell, Nora Goldschmidt, Jim O'Hara, Philip Hardie, Matthew Robinson, CQ's anonymous referee, and the Department of Classics at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, as well as the Casa Guilherme de Almeida in the same city, where the material in this article was first presented.

References

1 See Thomas, R.F., Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. xi–xx, for an introductory narrative, and counter-argument; also Conte, G.B., The Poetry of Pathos: Studies in Virgilian Epic (Oxford, 2007), 150–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 152–4. For summaries of the issues and scholarship on this final scene, see Horsfall, N.M., A Companion to the Study of Virgil (Leiden, 1995), 192–216Google Scholar (with appendix by Clausen at 313–14); Tarrant, R.J., Virgil: Aeneid Book XII (Cambridge, 2012), 16–30Google Scholar.

2 See e.g. Hardie, P., ‘Closure in Latin epic’, in Roberts, D.H., Dunn, F.M., and Fowler, D.P. (edd.), Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 139–62, at 143–4Google Scholar, for a summary. The standard work is Knauer, G.N., Die Aeneis und Homer (Göttingen, 1964)Google Scholar, esp. 316–27 (for this portion of the Aeneid) and 425–31. I take it as axiomatic that Aen. 12.952 is the final line of the poem. Cf. J. O'Hara, ‘The unfinished Aeneid?’, in Farrell, J. and Putnam, M.C. (edd.), A Companion to Virgil's Aeneid and its Tradition (Oxford, 2010), 96–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 103–6; Tarrant (n. 1), 3 n. 6; contra West, S.R., ‘Terminal problems’, in Collard, C., Finglass, P.J., and Richardson, N.J. (edd.), Hesperos: Studies in Ancient Greek Poetry Presented to M.L. West on the occasion of his 75th birthday (Oxford, 2007), 3–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 13.

3 The term is that of Putnam, M.C., The Humanness of Heroes: Studies in the Conclusion of Virgil's Aeneid (Amsterdam, 2011)Google Scholar, 115. Of course, Virgil has his funeral games for Anchises in Book 5, on which see Cairns, F., Virgil's Augustan Epic (Cambridge, 1989), 215–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the surprise ending with violence, see Farron, S., ‘The abruptness of the end of the Aeneid’, AClass 25 (1982), 136–40Google Scholar, inadequately answered by Springer, C.P.E., ‘The last line of the Aeneid’, CJ 82 (1987), 310–13Google Scholar.

4 Lyne, R.O.A.M., Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid (Oxford, 1987), 135–7, 217–38Google Scholar. See also Lyne, R.O.A.M., ‘Vergil and the politics of war’, CQ 33 (1983), 188–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 201–2 = Harrison, S.J. (ed.), Oxford Readings in Virgil's Aeneid (Oxford, 1990), 316–81Google Scholar, at 336: ‘Unlike the Iliad, the Aeneid does not proceed after its “Book 22” into eventual hard-won harmony. Book 12 ends in an echoing silence.’ Of the enormous amount of scholarship in this vein, see most recently Putnam (n. 3), 102–17.

5 West, D., ‘The end and the meaning’, in Stahl, H.-P. (ed.), Vergil's Aeneid: Augustan Epic and Political Context (Swansea, 1998), 303–18Google Scholar, at 303.

6 Cf. Stahl, H.-P., ‘The death of Turnus: Augustan Virgil and the political rival’, in Raaflaub, K. and Toher, M. (edd.), Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and His Empire (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 174–211Google Scholar, at 198: ‘a Super-Achilles able to defeat the “New Achilles”’; see also 193 and n. 24 for his question-begging preference ‘to limit the use of Vergil's models in the interpretation of the Aeneid to the function which they are assigned by the Vergilian context’. How one defines this ‘function’ depends entirely on one's interpretation of the ‘context’, as shown very clearly by the treatment of Homeric passages in Stahl, H.-P., ‘Aeneas: an “unheroic” hero?’, Arethusa 14 (1981) 157–77Google Scholar, at 159–65; see also Thomas (n. 1), 288–93.

7 On the Odyssey as an intertext for the end of the Aeneid, see below, p. 647 with n. 25.

8 See Nelis, D., Vergil's Aeneid and the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius (Leeds, 2001)Google Scholar, passim, but esp. 1–21, 382–402 (summarized in Nelis, D., ‘Apollonius and Virgil’, in Papanghelis, T. and Rengakos, A. [edd.], A Companion to Apollonius Rhodius [Leiden, 2008 2], 341–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Nelis suggests in his Virgil–Apollonius table (453–83, at 483) that Aen. 12.952 is an ‘inverted’ and ‘possible’ parallel for Arg. 4.1781, but in the Apollonius–Virgil table (481–508, at 508) the parallel is denied. This refers to his argument that the Aeneid cannot be separated into two ‘Argonautic’ halves (i.e. Aen. 1.1–7.36 ~ Arg. 1 & 2 / Aen. 7.37–12.952 ~ Arg. 3 & 4), and at 387–8 he relates Apollonius' envoi to Virgil's apostrophe of Nisus and Euryalus (Aen. 9.446–9). Elsewhere (365–81) Nelis draws parallels between the defeat of (the figuratively fire-breathing) Turnus in Virgil and Aietes' actual fire-breathing bulls in Apollonius at the end of Argonautica Book 2; though one might construct that in Aeneas' favour, it seems to me that the poet's point is rather that victory thus (i.e. dubiously) gained is a qualified success, since in Apollonius the means will becomes Jason's end.

9 R.L. Hunter, ‘Poetics of narrative in the Argonautica’, in Papanghelis and Rengakos (n. 8), 115–46, at 136; see also Hunter, R.L., The Argonautica of Apollonius: Literary Studies (Cambridge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 120: ‘The end of the poem is no real end.’

10 Rossi, L.E., ‘La fine alessandrina dell’Odissea e lo घΗΛΟΣ ΟΜΗΡΙΚΟΣ di Apollonio Rodio’, RFIC 96 (1968), 151–63Google Scholar.

11 See Heubeck, A. in Russo, J.A., Fernández-Galiano, M., and Heubeck, A., A Commentary on Homer's Odyssey Volume III: Books XVII–XXIV (Oxford, 1992), 353–5Google Scholar, for discussion; Kelly, A.D., ‘How to end an orally-derived epic poem’, TAPhA 137 (2007), 371–402Google Scholar, for a defence of the ‘continuation’.

12 See e.g. Livrea, E., Apollonii Rhodii Argonauticon: Liber Quartus (Florence, 1973), 476–8Google Scholar, on 4.1781; Green, P., The Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodios (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, 1997)Google Scholar, 360; Clare, R.J., The Voyage of the Argo: Language, Imagery and Narrative in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius (Cambridge, 2002), 283–5Google Scholar; contra Campbell, M., ‘Apollonian and Homeric book-division’, Mnemosyne 36 (1983), 152–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 See A. Rengakos, ‘Apollonius Rhodius as a Homeric scholar’, in Papanghelis and Rengakos (n. 8), 193–216.

14 See Campbell (n. 12), 153; Hunter (n. 9 [1993]), 119–20 with n. 77.

15 For recent studies of Jason, see e.g. Hunter (n. 9 [1993]), 15–25; Clauss, J.J., ‘Conquest of the Mephistophelean Nausicaa: Medea's role in Apollonius' redefinition of the epic hero’, in Clauss, J.J. and Johnston, S.I. (edd.), Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 149–77Google Scholar; Pietsch, C., Die Argonautica des Apollonius von Rhodos: Untersuchungen zum Problem der einheitlichen Konzeption des Inhalts (Stuttgart, 1999), 99–158Google Scholar, esp. 100–4 with further bibliography. For other interpretations of the end of the Argonautica, see e.g. de Forest, M., Apollonius' Argonautica: A Callimachean Epic (Leiden, 1994), 132–3Google Scholar, for whom (plausibly) this is a victory of ‘Callimachean poetics’, while Hunter (n. 9 [1993]), 119–20, expands the allusion to include Od. 23.248–50, which ‘casts a dark shadow over the end of the poem’, Mori, A., The Politics of Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica (Cambridge, 2008), 233–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, contrasts the ‘happy’ end of the Argonautica with the despair of the Aeneid, and Hutchinson, G.O., Talking Books: Readings in Hellenistic and Roman Books of Poetry (Oxford, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 89, perceives ‘the happy ending of the Argonautica, the natural conclusion of its tight formality, as in some respects a self-consciously artificial imposition’.

16 This is not to exclude other models or influences, esp. from Latin epic: Nickbakht, M., ‘Aemulatio in cold blood: a reading of the end of the Aeneid’, Helios 37 (2010), 49–80Google Scholar, connects Aen. 12.952 with Ennius' envoi (Cic. Tusc. 1.34 = Varia 17–18 Vahlen2 = fr. 46 Courtney) and, though he is careful not to elide its complexity, reads the end of the poem as Virgil's (~ Aeneas') defeat of Ennius (~ Turnus). See also I. Gildenhard, ‘Virgil vs. Ennius, or: the undoing of the Annalist’, in Fitzgerald, W. and Gowers, E. (edd.), Ennius perennis: the Annals and beyond (Cambridge, 2007), 73–102Google Scholar; S. Casali, ‘Killing the father: Ennius, Naevius and Virgil's Julian imperialism’, in Fitzgerald and Gowers (this note), 103–28, esp. at 110–28 for a similar equation (Ennius ~ Anchises). For Wigodsky, M., Vergil and Early Latin Poetry (Wiesbaden, 1972)Google Scholar, 138, the ending of Lucretius' De rerum natura was ‘the only one which could have supplied Vergil with a model for the abruptness of his ending; and the Aeneid ends with Turnus’ death, allowing the sunnier events to follow to be supplied from earlier references, much as Lucretius passes briefly over the lives of gods and sages to dwell on scenes of ordinary human folly and misery', yet even this description makes the parallel with the Argonautica seem stronger.

17 This is immediately clear from even the swiftest glance at Knauer (n. 2), 425–31; see also Tarrant (n. 1), index, s.v. ‘Iliad, as model for V’.

18 See esp. Fowler, D.P., ‘First thoughts on closure: problems and prospects’, MD 22 (1989), 75–122Google Scholar = Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin (Oxford, 2000), 239–83Google Scholar; Fowler, D.P., ‘Second thoughts on closure’, in Roberts, D.H., Dunn, F.M., and Fowler, D.P. (edd.), Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature (Princeton, NJ, 1997) 3–22Google Scholar = Roman Constructions, 284–308; Feeney, D.C., The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1991), 107–28Google Scholar, 267–9; Hardie (n. 2). For the influence of Virgil's ending on subsequent Latin poetry, see Hardie, P., The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition (Cambridge, 1993), 11–18Google Scholar; Tarrant (n. 1), 30–3.

19 See e.g. Hardie (n. 2), 140–1, 143; Skutsch, O., The Annals of Q. Ennius (Oxford, 1985), 5–6Google Scholar; Goldberg, S., Epic in Republican Rome (Oxford and New York, 1995), 111–34Google Scholar; Casali (n. 16), Gildenhard (n. 16); Nickbakht (n. 16); Goldschmidt, N., Shaggy Crowns: Ennius' Annales and Virgil's Aeneid (Oxford, forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 See Courtney, E., The Fragmentary Latin Poets (Oxford, 1993), 238–43Google Scholar; also Hofman, P., ‘Die literarische Persönlichkeit des P. Terentius Varro Atacinus’, WS 46 (1928), 159–76Google Scholar, on his ‘learned’ use of Apollonian commentaries; Wigodsky (n. 16), 103–4; Nelis (n. 8 [2001]), 397–8.

21 For other examples of this well-known ‘Homer through Apollonius’ technique, see e.g. Clausen, W., Virgil's Aeneid and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry (Berkeley, CA, 1987), 95–6Google Scholar, on the description of Pallas leaving Pallanteum (Aen. 8.587–91) as modelled not only on the start of Diomedes' aristeia (Il. 5.4–6) but also Apollonius' erotic recasting of that Homeric image in Medea's reaction upon seeing Jason (Arg. 3.956–61). See also the excellent general discussion in Farrell, J., ‘The Virgilian intertext’, in Martindale, C. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge, 1997), 222–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the fundamental work of Nelis (n. 8 [2001]), passim, but esp. 382–402.

22 Nelis (n. 8 [2001]), 380: ‘it is Aeneas who is the Jason figure throughout Vergil's epic’. Matthew Robinson has suggested to me that Ovid also seems to have recognized and developed this intertext in Fasti 3, where Lavinia, enraged by Aeneas' reaction to the appearance of Anna on Latium's shores, takes on a ‘Medea-like ferocity and jealousy’ – see esp. Fasti 3.637–8 (non habet exactum quid agat: furialiter odit | et parat insidias et cupit ulta mori) – though Barchiesi, A., The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 164–6Google Scholar, offers a more ‘Roman’ interpretation of her behaviour. For Ovid as a critical reader of Virgil, see Thomas (n. 1), 78–83, esp. 82–3 on Lavinia (without mentioning the Fasti); S. Casali, ‘Other voices in Ovid's Aeneid’, in Knox, P.E. (ed.), Oxford Readings in Ovid (Oxford, 2006), 144–65Google Scholar.

23 Peleus also takes Epeigeus (Il. 16.570–6) into his household in similar circumstances, and was himself an exile in several early Greek epic traditions. See Alcmaeonis F 1 B; [Hes.] F 211, 212b MW; also Alden, M., ‘The despised migrant’, in Montanari, F., Rengakos, A., and Tsagalis, C. (edd.), Homeric Contexts: Neoanalysis and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry (Berlin, 2012), 115–32Google Scholar, for this theme in general, and 121–2 for Peleus' prominence.

24 See Tarrant (n. 1), on Aen. 12.933–4, 332. For the programmatic importance of paternal influence in constructing the relationship between Ennius and Virgil, see esp. Casali (n. 16). Philip Hardie has reminded me of the disturbing parallel with Pyrrhus' behaviour in Book 2, where he first kills Priam's son Polites ante oculos … et ora parentum (Aen. 2.531) and then the old man himself, after Priam had made an unfavourable comparison with the mercy shown by his father (540–3): failure to live up to the Achillean example of the Iliad is not limited in the Aeneid to Aeneas.

25 As part of a larger argument about the Odyssey's intertextual function for the whole of the Aeneid, Cairns (n. 3), 177–214, at 210–14, and Dekel, E., Virgil's Homeric Lens (London, 2011)Google Scholar, esp. 109–14, contend that the Odyssey is even more important than the Iliad for Virgil's ending: they see Aeneas as a successful Odysseus, killing his enemies and achieving his nostos. However, the Odyssean parallels for Book 12 in general and the material of this article in particular are vastly fewer and much less striking than those from the Iliad (cf. Knauer [n. 2], 425–31; Tarrant [n. 1], 18 n. 70, also index s.v. ‘Odyssey, as model for V’), and one also wonders why Virgil once more leaves that apparent success pendant (as described in the above paragraph).

26 Oliensis, E., ‘Sons and lovers: sexuality and gender in Virgil's poetry’, in Martindale, C. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge, 1997), 294–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 207; contra Lyne (n. 4 [1987]), 114–22, and Lyne, R.O.A.M., Words and the Poet: Characteristic Techniques of Style in the Aeneid (Oxford, 1989), 79–82Google Scholar, who tries to make a little too much of her famous blush (Aen 12.64–9); also Cairns (n. 3), 151–76. On Lavinia's afterlife in Ovid, see n. 22 above, and for other ancient recreations see Tarrant (n. 1), 105–6, on Aen. 12.64–9.

27 On the traditions of his death and apotheosis (Aen. 1.259–60, 12.794–5) soon after the end of the Aeneid, see Tarrant (n. 1), 292–3, on Aen. 12.794.

28 On this term and its scholarly context, see above, nn. 1 and 3.

29 I am indebted to CQ's reader for the notion.

30 I am indebted to Philip Hardie for discussion on this point.

31 See, however, Edgeworth, R.J., ‘The silence of Vergil and the end of the Aeneid’, Vergilius 51 (2006) 3–11Google Scholar, at 4–7.

32 See above, n. 15.