Introduction
It is only in Book 7 of the Aeneid that Aeneas and his fellow Trojan refugees finally reach Hesperia. Their previous travels and travails contain many of the classic elements of the Greek ktisis (foundation) narrative, full of mistaken city foundations and misinterpreted prophetic riddles that nonetheless eventually lead to a far-off homeland, ripe and waiting to be settled and urbanized.Footnote 1 The Trojans’ final arrival in their homeland becomes apparent through the resolution of a riddling prophecy given to them by Apollo through Celaeno, the harpy:Footnote 2
ibitis Italiam portusque intrare licebit;
sed non ante datam cingetis moenibus urbem,
quam vos dira fames nostraeque iniuria caedis
ambesas subigat malis absumere mensas.
To Italy you will go. Permitted to enter port
but never granted a city girded round by ramparts,
not before some terrible hunger and your attack on us – outrageous slaughter –
drive you to gnaw your platters with your teeth!Footnote 3 (Verg. Aen. 3.254−7)
This resolution pays homage to the foundations of cities such as Taras, Rhegium, and the cities of the Ozolian Locrians, where ambiguous riddles represent ‘founding a colony overseas in terms of solving a puzzle’, and where ‘the solution, or colony, reorders an unfamiliar and confused landscape’.Footnote 4 Sprawled out on the Tiber’s grassy shore, crunching on the flat rounds of bread they had used as tables, their rejoicing is short lived. A mere 400 lines later they are at war, stirred to conflict by Alecto in the service of Juno. The casus belli (cause of war) that bathes Latium in blood for the remainder of Vergil’s epic was not, however, the martial emotions of bellicose men, but a mistake, made by a small boy hunting in the woods, who kills a pet stag beloved of a local Latin girl.
While the Aeneid is clearly ‘an epic of urban settlement and colonization,’ this ‘solid, undramatic, unromantic aspect of the poem’ had received little attention until Horsfall’s 1989 article on the subject and has continued to be understudied.Footnote 5 The focus of the poem’s first half follows ‘a strong precedent in Greek epic of travel and proto-colonization’, and takes inspiration from Hellenistic literature interested in aitiology and ktisis.Footnote 6 However, the continual resonance of the colonial theme in the second half of the narrative, from the resolution of Celaeno’s riddle in Latium to the death of Turnus, tends to be overlooked in discussions of the construction of empire, nation, and Romanness.Footnote 7 Yet, the poem’s ‘Iliadic’ half, if lacking in the overt foundation narratives of the first six books, continues to tell a colonial story. Indeed, the poem is coloured by recent memories of the Social War (88–91 bce), a conflict that laid bare the fissures between Rome and its long-conquered and colonized Italian brethren.Footnote 8
Books 7–12, while sharing Homeric thematic and narrative characteristics, do not tell a simple tale of invasion and civic destruction, but rather address the complexities of encounter between a tapestry of local peoples and the expectations, goals, and actions of the colonizer, in this case, newly-arrived Trojans, looking to reclaim ancestral rights to the land. Indeed, Macrobius attributed the unusual casus belli, to Vergil’s need to invent a cause of the war without a clear Homeric model.Footnote 9 What Vergil does invent, the death of Sylvia’s stag, is a story that highlights the potential for conflict when different approaches to belonging, authority, and custom come into contact in a newly-shared landscape. The deer, an animal in law, in legend, and in ritual, that inhabits a liminal space between domestication and wilderness, plays a crucial role in Vergil’s vision of extended colonial encounter on Italian soil.
The scene has been the product of somewhat brief and unbalanced analysis, overwhelmingly placed in conversation with bucolic poetry and the metaphorical language of nature and wilderness as they are applied to an imagined, rustic Italy of a more ancient time.Footnote 10 The suffering of the deer has parallels to the suffering of Dido and to the death of Turnus at the end of the poem; a recurring ‘injured deer’ motif evokes sympathy and characterizes cruelty.Footnote 11 The scene has also been read in terms of dichotomies: the newly-arrived, highly-urbanized Trojans coming into contact with the pastoral golden age of archaic Latium highlights ‘the binary opposition between domesticity and wildness, and, by extension, the opposition between the civilization of man and the condition of savage nature’.Footnote 12 What has not been noted is the crucial role the incident plays in Vergil’s extended ktisis narrative. In Book 7, it begins its creative deviation from a Greek literary tradition of colonization that tends to resolve into metaphor before touching in any real way on the complexities of colonial encounters.Footnote 13
A historical reading of the passage reveals that the incident is carefully designed to touch on the realities and intricacies of a meeting of two communities – colonized and colonizer – and the construction of new dynamics of power and authority. Here I read Aeneid 7.475−510 in conjunction with other trials and conflicts over the killing of deer in another colonial setting: the east coast of America from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Deer challenge physical boundaries and ideas of ownership and property, moving between categories of wild and tame, free and owned. It is this unfixed quality that makes deer a potent symbol of colonial encounter, forcing confrontations between conflicting systems of knowledge, law, and power. Stories that place deer at the centre raise questions about the colonial experience and the encounters and negotiations between colonizing forces, local inhabitants, and their newly-shared natural environment.
Aeneas the colonist revisited
The Aeneid is rife with the stock elements of Greek colonization stories. Aeneas acts as an oikist (founder), founding multiple cities throughout his travels and laying out their walls and laws. Throughout, the role of riddles, misinterpreted and resolved, along with the primacy of Apollo, follow a colonial literary tradition well-established from at least the fifth century bce.Footnote 14 The narratives that remain from the Greek world, however, often gloss over the part of the colonizing experience most interesting to Vergil and his Roman readers, who were concerned with crafting an origin story that, as with the myth of the Sabine women or Romulus’ asylum, explained the mixed origins of the Roman population and its effect on their cultural make-up.Footnote 15
The vast majority of Greek stories end with the resolution of the oracle and a seemingly instantaneous foundation of a city with its accompanying laws, division of property, and cult to the founder. They hint only metaphorically at conflict between newcomers and local populations.Footnote 16 The first half of the Aeneid, up until the fulfilment of Celaeno’s prophecy on the banks of the Tiber, follows these established patterns. However, despite its interest in recounting the origins of city and empire, the work never arrives at the actual foundation of a city in Latium, instead devoting a full six books to the encounter between Trojans, Latins, Etruscans, and Arcadians, whose conflicts and partnerships would form the basis of a unified Italian culture under Roman rule and provide the backdrop for the formation of numerous Roman institutions.Footnote 17 The resolution comes not in the form of the foundation of the city, but in that of a treaty, decided by the gods. In the agreement, Jupiter and Juno neatly construct the bones of a Trojan society dressed, quite literally, in Latin clothing and articulating Trojan religio (religious significance) in the Latin language.Footnote 18
Accompanying this is the presumed future marriage of Aeneas to Lavinia, the daughter of Latinus, the eponymous king of the territory and people. Marriage is a common metaphor for the encounter between colonists and native peoples and lands. The two institutions, city foundation and marriage, are both ‘institutions of integration and acculturation, concerned with uniting opposites and transforming that which is wild and foreign into a fruitful and productive experience’.Footnote 19 Lavinia has a semi-divine connection to the land through her father, son of Faunus and a Laurentine nymph, and through Faunus to Saturn;Footnote 20 she thus recalls figures such as the eponymous nymph Cyrene, pursued by Apollo, whose capture, submission, and marriage birthed the Greek colony in Libya.Footnote 21 Yet, as with the foundation of the city in Latium, this presumed marriage never occurs in Vergil’s text. Instead, the reader is presented with a tense and violent colonial encounter, where the existing interests and relationships between the peoples of Italy sit uneasily with the newly-arrived Trojan colonists predestined not only to found Rome, but to unite Italy under Roman rule.Footnote 22 Interest in Homeric precedent has perhaps overshadowed how Vergil quite consciously transplants the framework of the Homeric war narrative into a colonial setting. The shooting of the stag as the tipping point into violence is a carefully-crafted part of this colonial narrative.
The colonization narrative begins with an encounter with other stags. In Book 1, Aeneas climbs his way onto a cliff, hoping to get the lay of the land and perhaps see the remnants of his once great Trojan fleet. He gazes out to sea:
Navem in conspectu nullam, tris litore cervos
prospicit errantis; hos tota armenta sequuntur
a tergo, et longum per vallis pascitur agmen.
Constitit hic, arcumque manu celerisque sagittas
corripuit, fidus quae tela gerebat Achates;
ductoresque ipsos primum, capita alta ferentis
cornibus arboreis, sternit, tum volgus, et omnem
miscet agens telis nemora inter frondea turbam;
nec prius absistit, quam septem ingentia victor
corpora fundat humi, et numerum cum navibus aequet.
Hinc portum petit, et socios partitur in omnes.
Not a ship in sight. But he does spot three stags
roaming the shore, an entire herd behind them
grazing down the glens in a long ranked line.
He halts, grasps his bow and his flying arrows,
the weapons his trusty aide Achates keeps at hand.
First the leaders, antlers branching over their high heads,
he brings them down, then turns on the herd,
his shafts stampeding the rest like rabble into the leafy groves.
Shaft on shaft, no stopping him till he stretches
seven hefty carcasses on the ground – a triumph, one for each of his ships –
and makes for the cove, divides the kill with his whole crew (Verg. Aen. 1.184−94)
Aeneas, in an act that foreshadows his son’s mistake on the riverbanks in the true Hesperia, takes down not one, but seven stags. The story stands in contrast to the single stag felled by Odysseus on Aeaea, but occupies a shared epic vocabulary in which the measure of ‘heroic leadership lies in the ability to find food’ in order to feed crew and strengthen community in both body and spirit upon arrival in unknown and ‘uncivilized’ places.Footnote 23 In both stories, the figure of the stag also conforms to a ‘widely-attested folklore motif’ in which the animal acts as a guide, leading the hero to some ‘otherworld’ or, in the case of the Aeneid, a new frontier of the colonial journey.Footnote 24
While Odysseus’ encounter leads him from the reality of providing for his travel-weary men to the irreality of Circe’s island, Aeneas’ encounter emphasizes the necessary relationship between successful urban foundation and wilderness untouched by man. The three stags and their herd are described in vocabulary reminiscent of sheep and cattle – armenta (herd), pascitur (pasture) – painting an image of agricultural domestication in their abundance and calm occupation of the fertile valley. The image recalls the island across from the Cyclops that the Odyssey describes in colonial terms and where there are huge numbers of wild goats, who roam with no fear of men.Footnote 25
Aeneas’s quick work in bringing down seven such magnificent creatures is not only a testament to their quasi-tame state, but also to Aeneas’s own divinely-sanctioned role as colonial founder and leader of his people.Footnote 26 The number, one for each ship, plays an important role as Aeneas divides the meat and distributes it, an act that evokes the distribution of land and laws that accompanied the foundation of colonies and cities.Footnote 27 Here Vergil foreshadows coming descriptions of truncated foundation efforts in Thrace and in Crete, and later in Sicily and on the banks of the Tiber.Footnote 28 Of course, Libya is already colonized, already an example of the colonial ideal in which a well-planned urban centre rises fully formed in the midst of resource-bearing wilderness. It is not until Aeneas leaves Dido and her Tyrian settlers that he will finally be able to truly live out the entirety of his colonial destiny on the banks of the Tiber. It is here that Vergil’s epic takes a creative turn. In transitioning from a narrative of Mediterranean wandering to one of nation-building, Vergil is forced to grapple with his colonial setting in ways for which Greek colonization narratives largely left him unprepared.
Sylvia’s stag
Initial diplomatic meetings between Trojans and Latins go well. Already, the melding of two peoples seem set to be joined peacefully through marriage. Juno, however, sets other plans in motion, calling on Alecto whose manipulation of the situation sparks tensions between colonial and local communities over boundaries, authority, and custom. The Fury arrives to where young Ascanius is out hunting and infects the sensitive noses of his hounds with the familiar scent of a stag. They give pursuit:
Cervus erat forma praestanti et cornibus ingens,
Tyrrhidae pueri quem matris ab ubere raptum
nutribant Tyrrhusque pater, cui regia parent
armenta et late custodia credita campi.
Adsuetum imperiis soror omni Silvia cura
mollibus intexens ornabat cornua sertis
pectebatque ferum puroque in fonte lavabat.
Ille, manum patiens mensaeque adsuetus erili,
errabat silvis rursusque ad limina nota
ipse domum sera quamvis se nocte ferebat.
Hunc procul errantem rabidae venantis Iuli
commovere canes, fluvio cum forte secundo
deflueret ripaque aestus viridante levaret.
Ipse etiam, eximiae laudis succensus amore,
Ascanius curvo direxit spicula cornu;
nec dextrae erranti deus afuit, actaque multo
perque uterum sonitu perque ilia venit harundo.
Saucius at quadrupes nota intra tecta refugit
successitque gemens stabulis questuque cruentus
atque imploranti similis tectum omne replebat.
There was a stag, a rare beauty, antlers branching,
torn from his mother’s dugs. And the sons of Tyrrhus
nursed it with father Tyrrhus, who kept the royal herds,
charged with tending the broad, spreading pastures.
Their sister, Silvia, trained the stag to take
the commands she gave with love,
wreathed its horns with tender, fresh-cut garlands,
curried the wild creature, bathed it in running springs.
Tame to the touch, it liked to frequent its master’s table.
Roving the forests, home to the well-known door it came,
all on its own, even at dead of night.
This fine beast, straying from home, chanced to be floating down a stream,
cooling off on a grassy bank when the frenzied hounds
of the hunter Iulus started it – Iulus himself, fired
with a love of glory, aimed a shaft from his tensed bow
and Alecto steadied his trembling hand and the arrow shot
with a whirring rush and pierced through womb and loins.
Back to its well-known home the wounded creature fled,
struggled into its stall and groaning, bleeding,
filling the long halls with cries of pain,
it seemed to plead for help. (Verg. Aen. 7.486–510)
The stag, of course, is no ordinary wild beast, but rather a beloved member of an important Latin household attached to the court of Latinus. Here Ascanius, early in his own journey towards oikist, which will culminate in the foundation of Alba Longa, shows a marked difference from the character and abilities his father displayed when he killed the seven stags in Book 1. Ascanius’s clumsy attempts to gain glory in hunting result in a bloody and dramatic scene in which the deer drags his injured body home, crying and imploring the family for help, and becomes a symbol of the violence and disruption brought by the new arrivals to Italian shores. Ascanius, in this scene as throughout, is used by Vergil ‘to hint at the manifold difficulties associated with looking forward beyond the present’.Footnote 29 While Aeneas performs the role of imperial progenitor without hesitation and with full success, his son sits uneasily and insufficiently in the role of oikist, and, indeed, his childish attempts to ‘come of age’ by imitating his father result in a disruption of the peace that would bathe Latium in blood.Footnote 30
The story has no direct precedent in ancient literature.Footnote 31 However, the mutable quality of deer, the behaviour of which confounds categories, is a common enough topos. As a symbol of Artemis, deer tend to star in moments where the idea of ownership overlaps with the vision of the untamed, free wilderness. At the festival of Artemis Laphria in Patrae, where wild animals such as wolves and bears were sacrificed to the goddess, the priestess rode in a carriage pulled by deer, the animals acting as a symbol of the perversion of the rules of domestication and sacrifice that lay at the heart of the festival.Footnote 32 Here, the ability of deer to be domesticated like horses and cattle, while maintaining their symbolic association with the untamed wild, calls attention to the unique powers of the goddess. In her presence, categories of wild and domestic, of free and owned become blurred.
More directly related to Vergil’s use of the death of the stag as casus belli is the story of the mistaken killing of a deer by Agamemnon, which leads to the sacrifice at Aulis. Presumably in ignorance, Agamemnon allowed his hunting to take him into the sacred groves of Artemis where he kills a deer. Like Ascanius, he did so for glory. His boasts over his kill drew the attention of the goddess who blocked the fleet at Aulis until amends were made in the form of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia.Footnote 33 Here, the relative status of the deer, sacred property of the goddess or wild animal available for the hunt, changes depending not on the relationship of the deer to human societies (whether or not it returned to a habitual residence, see below) but on its dynamic relationship with the territory. Within the sacred grove the deer was untouchable. If it foolishly wandered outside the grove, it would presumably become a normal deer, property of whomever managed to hunt it down.
Ascanius’ encounter is a product of a similar changeability in the status of the deer. When the deer was at home in its stall, it was visibly tame. As it wandered the banks of the Tiber, it was, to the casual observer, wild, ripe for the hunt. It is this that constitutes Ascanius’ defence when he is put on trial in Tiberius Claudius Donatus’ fifth-century Interpretationes Virgilianae:Footnote 34
Haec sunt quae aliquantum vocaverant cervum, quem venantis Iuli commoverant canes errantem. Illic constituit omnem defensionem Ascani. Si enim super eo apud prudentis ageret, diceret: agrestem putavi, nescii mansuetum utpote extra domos degentem nec ipsius causa venatum processi, sed ferarum capiendarum studio, quae in silvis et in ripis fluminum reperiri consueverunt.
These are the things which to some degree had called the deer, which the dogs of Iulus the hunter spurred into motion as it wandered. This constitutes his whole defence. If, for instance, he brought this before a judicious man, he might say: ‘I thought the deer was wild. I did not know that he had been tamed while passing his time outside the house, nor did I proceed with the hunt for the deer itself, but for the sake of capturing wild beasts, which are accustomed to take shelter in the woods and the banks of rivers.’Footnote 35 (Donatus, Interpretationes Virgilianae 2.75.24−76.6)
According to Donatus, Ascanius, were he to go in front of a court, would claim that he did not know that the deer was tame, and that he merely preceded with the hunt as was his custom and that shooting the deer was appropriate under the circumstances in which he was searching for wild animals down by the banks of the river.
Roman readers would have sympathized with his confusion. Deer and other wild animals were sometimes kept in careful constructions of curated wilderness (vivaria).Footnote 36 Outside these private zones, however, deer required more complex legislation. The ambiguity of deer was articulated in Roman law, which carefully distinguished animals that wandered but returned to a fixed point (property) from those that wandered and did not, or no longer, returned to the same point (free game). In the case of ownership of a stag, the law states that a tame stag may belong to an owner if it has the continual intention of returning (revertendi animum). Once this ceases, it can become the property of someone else.Footnote 37
Deer also occupied a more symbolic role in the Roman cultural sphere. Late-antique Christian authors critique the New-Year custom of impersonating stags (cervulum facientes), probably by wearing antlered masks, and thus ‘changing themselves into the condition of wild beasts’ (in ferarum se velint habitus com mutare).Footnote 38 A first-century-ce statue bust of Acteon from Diana’s sanctuary at Nemi, now at the Museum of the Roman Ships, speaks not only to the continued salience of the Artemis myth in the Roman context, but also to the potent symbolism of antlers mounted on a human head. The fragment shows the same unsettling and evocative moment of transition and inversion celebrated in the New Year’s festivities: from human to animal, from hunter to hunted, from civilized to wild. Vergil’s story not only taps into this symbol of fluctuating boundaries, but also the legal conception of the deer as an animal that raises questions about ownership, the boundaries of communal knowledge, and individual authority.
More generally, animals often play a role in the literature of colonization. In the Aeneid, the personified Tiber tells the Trojans that a sow will mark the future site of Alba Longa, as the weary goats marked the future site of Aegae, the cow at Thebes, and snakes at Alexandria.Footnote 39 For their part, deer appear in the riddle of the foundation of Byzantium, ‘where fish and deer feed at the same pasture’ (Steph. Byz. ἔνθ᾽ ἰχθὺς ἔλαφός τϵ νομὸν βόσκονται τὸν αὐτόν), and at Thyateira where colonists were instructed to ‘found a colony where a deer, having been shot, is seen running’ (Steph. Byz. οὗ ἂν ὁραθϵίη ἔλαφος τϵτοξϵυμένη καὶ τροχάζουσα κτίσαι).Footnote 40 Given Vergil’s debt to the fragmentary works of Callimachus and Apollonius, we cannot preclude that the longer story of the transgressive hunting of a locally-owned deer was not elaborated in some other extended, now lost, ktisis poem.Footnote 41 The deer is both a symbol of the absence of urban life and an invitation for urban life to begin. Plutarch characterizes the degraded cities of Sicily as filled with deer and wild boar, imagining residents hunting beside the walls of their houses.Footnote 42 Here the deer is a sign of encroaching wilderness, a symbol of the fragility of the colonial venture. Yet, it is also a resource, one that allowed and facilitated colonization of the famously wildlife-replete Sicily.Footnote 43
The setting – the banks of the river that both connects and divides the colonists from the Latins – is important. In colonial literature, ambiguous oracles often resolve themselves in the shape of natural features.Footnote 44 For the Trojans, it is the divinized Tiber that provides a final and clear roadmap to the end of their ambiguous adventures. He not only lays out the precise time and site of the founding of Alba Longa by Ascanius, but also points the Trojans up the river to the future site of Rome.Footnote 45 The Tiber connects the newly-arrived Trojans symbolically to the future site of Rome as much as to their own past across the sea. The river is a conduit, but also a natural division of territory, delineating boundaries but not encompassed by them.Footnote 46 The deer on the banks of the river thus inhabits a natural no-man’s land, a place of transition between Trojan destiny and Latin traditions. Rivers and the thick vegetation that protects their banks are an ideal habitat for deer, which thrive in zones of transition between thick woods and open plains.Footnote 47 It is no coincidence that Ascanius and his dogs were seeking prey in ripis fluminum (on the bank of rivers).
Ascanius the colonist
Vergil’s deer both evokes colonial stories of animal guides and riddles and symbolizes the transgression of ambiguous boundaries. In the context of the poem, this blurred line between domestication and wilderness, between private property and common resource, is transferred into a colonial setting and used to highlight the potential areas of conflict over belonging, authority, and ownership that would plague any potential fusion between Trojans and Latins in their newly-shared territory.
The consequence of Ascanius’s transgression was not a feud with a neighbour over a violation of private property as imagined in Roman law, but rather a violent war to establish new boundaries and relationships in a new land. Ascanius, a newly-arrived colonist, had no way of knowing that the stag was a tame and important member of a local household. Indeed, a stag wandering the shores of the wild river, seemingly unafraid of humans, was an expected symbol of the type of uninhabited, resource-rich homelands that the colonists had long envisaged, and indeed had already encountered in Book 1 on the shores of Libya, which is recalled to the reader through the shared vocabulary and imagery of the two instances.Footnote 48
Clearly, Ascanius had no thought of ownership of the land, much less of the deer, when he made the decision to shoot. Tyrrhus, the royal herdsman, holds the unique position of determining the boundaries of authority and ownership of animals among the Latins, a power enforced by the image of him taking the stag as an infant from its mother and raising it in his own house. When Ascanius kills the stag, he, like Agamemnon in the sacred groves of Artemis, violates a boundary and authority known to insiders (the native Latins) but not outsiders (the newly-arrived Trojans). Ascanius, who seeks high honours for his kill, is accustomed to a culture in which wild animals are not only available to, but the rightful pursuit of, a nobleman who hunts them as a ‘civilized and civilizing activity’.Footnote 49 That the native culture of Hesperia may have different cultural boundaries surrounding the ownership of wild animals does not occur to him and would perhaps have not been accepted by him, even if it had.
The story ought thus to be understood as part of a creative augmentation of colonial topoi, transferred into the context of archaic Italy. While some stories from the Greek tradition mention native inhabitants – such as the Sicels in Sicily whose ruler Hyblon granted the Megarians the right to found Megara Hyblaia, or the series of wars between the colonists of Taras and the native Iapygians – what is far more often presented is an arrival in an eremos chora (uninhabited country), the colonial site described much like Homer’s lush island of innumerable goats.Footnote 50 In these stories, animals act as guides to the future sites of cities, a tradition that Vergil includes in Book 8 with the sow signalling the site of Alba Longa.Footnote 51 The inclusion of the deer, an aspect of the new land that Ascanius fundamentally misinterprets, acknowledges the complicating factors not only of initial arrival but of all the stages of settlement. What the Romans knew well, after a centuries-long struggle to control and regulate the entirety of the Italian peninsula as well as the broader Mediterranean world, was that colonial ventures often arrived in places where entrenched local laws and customs did not always fit easily into Roman expectations and systems. In order to arrive at a peaceful fusion between Latins and Trojans, Vergil was forced to fill in the gap in this story of conflict, and he uses the liminal figure of the deer to begin, touching on themes endemic to the colonial experience in both literature and reality. Similar accounts from the colonization of the Americas show how the ambiguous position of deer gave them a natural role at the centre of encounter between colonizer, colonized, and shared landscape.
The deer and Nathan Webster
Many centuries after the composition of the Aeneid, and on a distant continent, Nathan Webster was called to appear in the court of Salem, Massachusetts on the charge of killing a deer.Footnote 52 In the case, brought on 4 April 1682, he was charged not only with the death of the deer, but with accompanying accusations of ‘lies and breach of the peace’. Witnesses were called to testify. It appears that Webster had killed a deer that had been seen loitering around some of the village houses. The deer, witnesses attested, had no ear mark, as would be used to mark pigs and cattle as private property, but did sport a red collar. Two witnesses claim to have asked Webster ‘why he would shoot a deer with a red list around its neck’. The witnesses claimed the deer belonged to one David Wheeler, though others later claimed it was the property of William Savery. Reading between the lines, it seems that Nathan was a difficult neighbour. He had killed the deer, as his neighbour John Emerry testified, knowing that it was tame, and yet he had claimed that the lack of ear mark absolved him of the consequences of this knowledge.
English law, like Roman law, had provisions for recognizing property rights over tamed wild animals. Those ferae naturae (of wild nature) ‘such as are deer in a park, hares or rabbits in an enclosed warren, doves in a dovehouse, pheasants or partridges in a mew, hawks that are fed and commanded by their owner, and fish in a private pond or in trunks’ were recognized as property when confined, and, as in the Roman case, continued to be recognized as property if they once again wandered free but maintained the intention of returning (animum revertendi).Footnote 53 Webster’s neighbour, who had marked his property with a red collar, had clearly assumed that the respect for these same laws and customs extended to the nascent colonies set up in the fertile wilderness of the New World.Footnote 54 Indeed, English law specified that ‘if a deer, or any wild animal reclaimed, has a collar or other mark put upon him, and goes and returns at his pleasure … the owner’s property in him still continues, and it is not lawful for anyone else to take him’.Footnote 55
The dispute, in this case, between two colonists over the death of a pet deer, highlights the sometimes messy process of negotiation inherent in colonial settings as Old-World traditions and expectations were translated into environments marked by new and evolving ways of thinking about the community, land, and ownership. The first few centuries of American life along the colonized coast were characterized by uneasy, continually-negotiated relationships between neighbours, both fellow colonists and native inhabitants. Here again, we see the deer, with its capacity to vacillate confusingly between domestic and wild as it wanders and returns again. Indeed, in other parts of the American colonies, where deer constituted one of the most important and abundant economic resources, the animal found itself at the centre of debates over personal liberty, private property, and the cultural formation of American life.
In 1666, George Alsop, an English emigré who lived for some time as an indentured servant in Maryland, published his treatise on the Character of the Province of Maryland, a travelogue and description of the land, inhabitants, and culture.Footnote 56 Although he claimed himself unable to give a full account of the plethora of animals that inhabited the deep woods of Maryland, he did linger on deer: ‘because they are oftner seen, and more participated of by the Inhabitants of the Land, whose acquaintance by a customary familiarity becomes much more common than the rest of Beasts that inhabit the Woods by using themselves in Herds about the Christian Plantations’.Footnote 57
The climate and landscape of the southeastern parts of North America did indeed set up the perfect conditions for white-tailed deer. The ‘incredible abundance’ of deer had been noted in the very first voyage to Virginia in 1584.Footnote 58 The native inhabitants of the American southeast, including the Shawnee, Cherokee, and Delaware tribes, among others, had long relied on deer – their meat and skins – to support their local economies. Understanding that deer thrived in transition environments – between forests and open plains – they set fires to clear new openings in the forest and expand their own hunting territories.Footnote 59 Their seasonal hunting and mobile lifestyles ensured that their hunting ‘allowed for the animals’ recovery to the levels that the first European colonizers found remarkable’.Footnote 60
For newly-arrived waves of colonists, wonder at the abundance of deer was magnified by the fact that the cervine population of England had been steadily declining since the end of the Middle Ages and access to hunting was restricted by centuries’ worth of overlapping laws. In most parts of England, access to game was the exclusive property of the crown and peerage.Footnote 61 Laws enclosed game in private hunting lands and sometimes prevented those of lower classes from shooting even those deer that had wandered into their own fields.Footnote 62
Yet this tangle of laws did not translate to the wooded, coastal regions of Maryland, in which deer ‘traverse their ranging and unmeasured walks…[and which] is bounded and impanell’d in with no other pales than the rough and billowed Ocean’.Footnote 63 Not only did old laws that restricted hunting and hunting grounds to elite sectors of society lose validity in the American context, but deer were simply too numerous to require regulation: ‘They (deer) are also mighty numerous in the Woods, and are little or not at all affrighted at the face of a man…yet they will stand (all most) till they be scratcht.’Footnote 64 These deer were in such numbers and were of such a disposition, that they behaved almost as if they were domesticated animals. Indeed, their lack of fear meant that one could get almost so close as to pet them (‘till they be scratcht’).
While English law emphasized strictly demarcated and controlled dominion and ownership over the natural world, the realities of the wide expanses of the New World and the distance from the crown meant that these ideas had to be renegotiated around new, American ways of thinking about liberty and property. Yet culturally, ideas about man’s relationship to nature, influenced by English history, religion, and culture, meant that when English colonists first arrived in the New World, they ‘resorted to familiar ideas about animals as a way of imposing order on a strange New World…an essential part of their strategy was the assertion of dominion over animals’ at odds with many native attitudes that recognized commonalities between human and non-human species.Footnote 65 As in the Roman case, where exotic animals and plants filled arenas and elite horti (gardens) and Italian animals and crops spread across the Mediterranean, display of triumph over wild animals and their eventual replacement with domesticated animals acted as a symbol for the conquest of the land itself across New-World colonial contexts.
Colonists, entrenched in English cultural codes that restricted hunting to leisure activity and prioritized the use of domesticated animals for sustenance, were interested in taming certain types of New-World animals, such as turkey and buffalo, on a grand scale.Footnote 66 At the same time, the large numbers of domesticated animals – cows, pigs, horses etc. – brought over to the Americas, were quickly running wild, altering their new environments with a speed and efficiency unequalled by any other imported or invented technology.Footnote 67 In seventeenth-century Massachusetts, where Webster shot the deer with the red collar, most owners let their livestock roam free to scavenge, often marking them as property by little more than a tag around their necks: ‘Fences were not for keeping livestock penned in, but for keeping livestock out.’Footnote 68
Faced with an abundance of game, hunting took on much greater importance in colonial society. Free and unregulated access to deer soon became one of the hallmarks of a new, American style of liberty and by the eighteenth century the trade with England in deerskins was one of the primary drivers of the New-World economy.Footnote 69 Liberated from the restrictions on hunting prescribed in English law, American colonists in the southeast pursued deer with no regard for the limits of property or colonial boundaries recognized by the English crown. The realities of New-World life meant that the deeply-entrenched categories of wild and domestic, owned and free, were challenged on a cultural level, and, as a result, soon became subject to a patchwork of territorially-dependent laws responding to the collision of English notions of property, the perceived colonial right to consume the native resources, and the customs of the people that already inhabited the area.
By 1730, less than a century after Alsop’s wonder at the plethora of deer in the greater Chesapeake, the Maryland assembly was called on to address a crisis in the deer population:
The Species of Deer hath of late Years been very much lessened, occasioned principally by the Inhabitants shooting, or otherwise destroying them, during the Time of the Female Deer being with Young; and which evil Practice, if not put a Stop to, may in few Years entirely destroy the Species of Deer, to the great Damage of the good People of this Province.Footnote 70
The subsequent law restricted deer-hunting to the autumn and winter months, from the end of July to the first of January. An exception was made for native peoples: ‘That it is the true Intent and Meaning of this Act, that the Liberty given to the Indians aforesaid, shall extend only to the Killing of Deer for their private use, and not for Sale.’Footnote 71 The law thus acknowledges the two different social and economic approaches to deer that coexisted in the Province of Maryland.
To avoid regulations that had come to dominate the colonies of the eastern seaboard, hunters increasingly pushed their way west. On the far side of the Appalachian Mountains, in the wildlife-rich lands of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley, American hunters came into conflict with both the standards of English colonization, which valued agricultural land divided into privately-owned plots, and the native inhabitants of the area – the Shawnee, Cherokee, Delaware, Creek, and Chickasaw tribes among others – who frequented the hunting grounds.Footnote 72 As the private, small-plot model spread across the mountains, colonial hunters were banned from private property and pushed towards the remaining, deer-filled, unregulated wild of the Ohio Valley.Footnote 73 With conflicts between natives and colonial hunters on the rise, a series of treaties in the later eighteenth century established western boundaries between the United States and various native hunting grounds. Yet these early treaties based native possession of the territory not on boundaries of the landscape, but on the roving behaviours of their prey, largely the white-tailed deer.Footnote 74 In 1831, when the Cherokee Nation sued Georgia for attempting to distribute native lands to colonists, central to the defence was that the Cherokee controlled land not defined by mapped-out borders and private property, but by the availability of animals for the hunt:
But every advance, from the hunter state to a more fixed state of society, must have a tendency to impair that pre-emptive right, and ultimately to destroy it altogether, both by increasing the Indian population, and by attaching them firmly to the soil. The hunter state bore within itself the promise of vacating the territory, because when game ceased, the hunter would go elsewhere to seek it.Footnote 75
The Cherokee, it was argued, could not claim the land itself, but only the territory of the deer they hunted. Deer, by nature, were unattached to place and were able to roam freely. In the west, deer, defined as part of native hunting grounds, were thus interpreted as a form of private property. At the same time, the natural propensity of deer to not act like property, and indeed to roam freely, stymied any real attempts to define and protect native property rights: ‘The white-tailed deer provided a legal basis for both Indian dispossession and Indian opposition to removal.’Footnote 76 In a frontier zone mutually constructed through native and colonial practice, the deer repeatedly proved a point of contact and collision.Footnote 77
Private claims to wild animals, as much in land disputes between colonists and natives in the southeast as in neighbourly spats in small villages in the north, highlight how the conditions of the New World, the suspension of Old-World law and class distinctions, the sense of unending abundance, nascent colonial notions of economic liberty, and native customs converged, sometimes violently, around the figure of the white-tailed deer. It was in pursuit of deer, the mobility of which ‘confounded authorities’ legal efforts to dispossess the indigenous inhabitants and to exert exclusive ownership and rational use of their colonial possessions’, that colonists were pushed to develop the new ideas about ownership and property rights and that would eventually provide the basis for the massive displacement of native tribes in the areas west of the Appalachians.Footnote 78 The pursuit of free-roaming deer ran counter to English ideas of property and ownership which were tied to the demarcation and alteration of the natural landscape. Yet the abundance of deer, their lack of fear, their ability to be tamed and claimed placed them in an uneasy position at the centre of colonial encounter. Like Sylvia’s stag, the deer of the New World occupied a liminal space in the legal and cultural imagination, ‘neither domesticated or entirely wild, but dangerously in between’.Footnote 79
The sheer availability of the almost-tame deer – ‘little or not at all affrighted at the face of a man’ – encouraged colonists to understand deer as ripe for the taking, part of a landscape owned under no form of law that they recognized, and ready to be plundered for economic gain. Ascanius, caught up in the hunt and his bid for glory, saw nothing strange in the stag that confidently happened to cross his path. He was, after all, in Hesperia, a land foretold and granted to the Trojans by the gods to rebuild their civilization. The possibility of disputed ownership, of the land or of the stag, never crossed his mind. When Webster shot the deer with the red collar, he was challenging entrenched ideas about how wild animals could be made and kept as private property in a colonial setting that placed new value on economic liberty. The idea of ownership that Webster brought to the Salem court was that practised by Ascanius in Latium – for the colonist in a new land, imagining himself its owner by divine right, everything that the land granted was fair game.
Conclusions
The Aeneid is an epic of national origins and, as such, concludes its colonial narrative with a neat treaty between the Roman and Latins, divinely conceived and sanctioned, that accounts for the unique Roman mix of local language and eastern custom and that provides historic support for imperium sine fine (empire without end).Footnote 80 It is also concerned with cultural imperium in Italy itself. It is easy to forget that, less than half a century before Vergil’s composition, Rome had once again gone to war with the Latins and their allies, and that the conflict was the culmination of centuries of tension during which time Latin communities were taxed, displaced, and occasionally destroyed.Footnote 81 While the myth speaks to the fusion of cultures in central Italy, it is but a thin veneer for the story of the primacy of one.
This compromise, bloodily brokered in the time from the death of the stag to the treaty in Book 12, shows an evolution from Jupiter’s initial prophecy to Venus which presents the Trojans as a separate people, a colonizing force come to reign in Latium.Footnote 82 This transition within the poem, from a story of cultural hegemony to the messier realities of cultural fusion, has as its hinge point a conflict which breaks out over the death of a tamed wild animal, an incident that embodies the tensions inherent when two communities, with two different visions of power, ownership, and authority, come together in a shared landscape. When the Latins, desperate for peace, do envisage offering a section of land to the Trojans to found a city, it is a tract of agricultural land, already worked by Auruncans and Rutulians, with a clear border, where the Trojans might found a city, plough the fields, and pasture their animals.Footnote 83 What Ascanius proved with his unrestrained hunting, was that the Trojans would never be satisfied with clearly-defined tracts of agricultural land. Theirs predestined were the wilds of Hesperia – the resources of both its empty and its occupied places.
The treaty brokered between the Latins and the Trojans by the gods is an invention of a Rome that had finally and completely subdued Italy to its will. As in the myth of American Thanksgiving, this invention mapped friendship, cooperation, and mutual learning onto uncertainty and violence.Footnote 84 Yet, despite the propagandistic nature of the text, Vergil’s account is one that tells the story of colonization and war from multiple perspectives. By engaging with and moving beyond the ossified, narrative structures of Greek colonization literature, the poet explores the complexities of colonial encounter. It is no coincidence that the death of Sylvia’s stag occurs at the moment when colonizing voyage confronts the realities and conflicts of life in a new land. Placed in conversation with similar encounters in modern contexts, the symbology of Vergil’s deer takes on new meanings and encourages us to rethink the connections between the odd casus belli and the war and settlement to follow.
