Table Of ContentFama and Fiction in Vergil’s Aeneid
For my sister, Lydia
Fama and Fiction in
Vergil’s Aeneid
Antonia Syson
The Ohio State University Press • Columbus
Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Syson, Antonia Jane Reobone, 1973–
Fama and fiction in Vergil’s Aeneid / Antonia Syson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1234-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8142-1234-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9336-2 (cd-rom)
ISBN-10: 0-8142-9336-0 (cd-rom)
1. Virgil. Aeneis—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Epic poetry, Latin—History and criticism.
3. Rhetoric, Ancient. I. Title.
PA6932.S97 2013
873'.01—dc23
2013014967
Cover design by Mia Risberg
Text design by Juliet Williams
Type set in Adobe Garamond Pro
Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Cover image: Master of the Aeneid (fl. ca. 1530–1540). Juno, Seated on a Golden Throne,
Asks Alecto to Confuse the Trojans. France, Limoges, ca. 1530–35. Painted enamel plaque on
copper, partly gilt, H. 9 in. (22.9 em) ; W. 8 in. (20.3 em.). Fletcher Fund, 1945 (45.60.6). The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Image copyright © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na-
tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
ANSI Z39.48–1992.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Chapter 1 • Introduction 1
1.1 The seams of fiction in epic and novel 7
1.2 What Turnus sees 18
1.3 Classifying fama 28
1.4 Chapter previews 40
Chapter 2 • Monstrous Fama 44
2.1 Fama’s tongues 46
2.2 Jupiter’s bargain 54
2.3 Sinon’s fama 59
Chapter 3 • Matter out of Place I: Across the Styx 63
3.1 Dirt and disorder 69
3.2 Daedalean excesses 74
3.3 Misenus and the substance of fama 78
3.4 Putting Palinurus in his place 84
Chapter 4 • This and That 91
4.1 Memories of the Harpy 96
4.2 When “that” becomes “this” 102
4.3 Recognizing divine authority 108
vi • Contents
Chapter 5 • Matter out of Place II: Nisus and Euryalus 117
5.1 Fama evaluated 119
5.2 Dirty fighting 126
Chapter 6 • The Order of Metamorphosis 135
6.1 Vidi ipse 137
6.2 Cybele and Jupiter’s order 146
Chapter 7 • Slithery Changes 165
7.1 Venus’ fictions 166
7.2 What Amata sees 178
7.3 Reading for the novel 185
Chapter 8 • How to Do Things with Birds 191
8.1 Rumors 194
8.2 Accipio agnoscoque deos 201
8.3 Juturna’s fictional truth 208
Afterword • Swan Song 214
Works Cited 219
Index Locorum 230
General Index 232
Acknowledgments
This project has made me learn just how grateful it is possible
to be for the unfathomable depths of generosity I have found in
friends, family, and colleagues.
First and last, Nelly Oliensis: I don’t know what would have
become of the project without her sharp questions, her untan-
gling and rephrasing of ideas that were expressed with quite
unnecessary obscurity, her reading suggestions for relevant
theoretical and philosophical perspectives when I was drafting
chapters of my dissertation, and—most of all—her warm and
steadfast encouragement (though I’m sure I haven’t convinced
her of everything I argue here). And for providing through his
emails just the light editorial touch, guidance, and firm support I
needed as I completed the book, I owe an immeasurable amount
to my editor, Eugene O’Connor.
Others read single chapters or the whole manuscript at vari-
ous stages from its tiny kernel as a dissertation to its most recent
drafts. In different ways all contributed to the development of
the book’s overall shape (with the usual caveat that what’s good
I owe to them, while they’re not to be blamed for what isn’t):
Melissa Mueller, Lydia Syson, James Ker, Chris van den Berg,
vii
viii • Acknowledgments
Howard Mancing, Keith Dickson, Aaron Seider, Angelica Duran, Jim
Tatum, Margaret Williamson, Allen Romano, David Wray, Shadi Bartsch,
Danielle Allen, Peter White, Ted Lisowski, Matt Pincus, Leslie Kurke, and
the members of my lovely dissertation committee all those years ago (along
with Nelly Oliensis): Kathy McCarthy, Marianne Constable, and William
Fitzgerald. The Ohio State University Press’s anonymous readers helped a
lot, and so did another still unknown reader when the project was at a much
earlier stage. I am grateful, too, to Steve Oberhelman and an insightful
anonymous reader for Helios, who helped me to sharpen an essay which is
now chapter 3. But of all these, I would single out with even warmer grati-
tude for their lavishly detailed comments Melissa Mueller, James Ker, Chris
van den Berg, Jim Tatum, Allen Romano, Danielle Allen, Matt Pincus, and
Kathy McCarthy.
Much of my stimulation has come from conferences and talks, particu-
larly from fellow participants in the “For a Theory of the Novel of the 21st
Century” workshop at the Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford, the
APA in San Antonio, the International Conference on Narrative in Birming-
ham, and the Indiana Classical Conference, as well as audiences at talks I
gave at York University, Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan,
the University of Chicago, the Department of Classics at Stanford, Scripps
College, and SUNY Buffalo.
Many of my thoughts and questions about fama and fiction are indebted
to students here at Purdue, at Dartmouth College, the University of Chi-
cago, Northwestern University, and UC Berkeley. I am thankful to these
institutions, too (and to the Mellon Foundation’s doctoral and postdoctoral
fellowships) for generous research support and for employment in various
capacities. And I can’t imagine what it would mean to think or teach in this
line of work at all without Oliver Taplin, who was my undergraduate tutor
at Magdalen.
Finally, none of this would have meant anything without all the other
kinds of help given by amazing friends, colleagues, and family, especially
Lucy Gaster, Nick Deakin, Luke Syson, Anna Lawrence Pietroni, Julia
Davids, Jill Peterson, Celina Gray, Christiane Hullmann, Jo Depledge,
Amanda Oberg, John Fox, Jo Crawley-Quinn, Jo Park, Uthie Srinivasan,
Elena Coda, Jen William, Anu Subramanian, Nicki and Matt Haines,
Patty Hart, Patrice Rankine, Nick Rauh, Marcia Stephenson, Polly Gaster,
and the younger generation: Sophy, Poppy, Molly, Benedict, Felix, Judy,
Sol, Popi, Andrew, Margot, Leonia, Arthur, Phoebe, Adam, Rufus, and
Solomon.
1
Introduction
Both Aeneas and his enemy Turnus are told “Look!” at pivotal
moments in the Aeneid. A goddess issues each imperative; each
drastically alters its recipient’s mental state and sets the Aeneid’s
story on a new trajectory. “Look,” his mother Venus instructs
Aeneas (Aen. 2.604), when she lifts the cloud that normally
blunts mortal vision, so that he can see for himself the unrelent-
ing hostility of the gods (diuum inclementia, 2.602), who are
tearing apart his city.1 “Look at these!” says the Fury Allecto to
Turnus (Aen. 7.454), when she throws off her mortal disguise
and demands that he look at her Fury’s gear in all its contami-
nating, snaky force.2
“Look!” is an injunction familiar to novel readers. We are
repeatedly asked to look at the world around us, and to blend
that world—as we remember or imagine it—into the narrative’s
1. Hershkowitz 1998, 80–85 analyzes Aeneas’ vision of the gods in relation to
Turnus’ madness—and Turnus’ moments of clarity. She argues that Aeneas in 2.624ff.
and Turnus in 12.665ff. “view the same fundamental chaos and darkness” (85).
2. For detailed discussion of these commands, see chapters 6.1 and 1.2. In 2.604
Aeneas tells the Carthaginians of Venus’ orders: aspice is the first of a series of impera-
tives. In 7.454 Allecto directs Turnus, respice ad haec, telling him to “have regard for”
the force of her hellish attributes; bella manu letumque gero (“wars and death I bear in
my hand,” 7.455).
1
2 • Chapter 1
particular creations. George Eliot’s Middlemarch invites us to visualize this
blending in the famous “parable” that reflects Rosamund Vincy’s egoistic
view:
Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by
a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all direc-
tions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination,
and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of
concentric circles round that little sun.3
Eliot’s “lo!” marks out the almost magical power of the narrator to bring
such visions to the reader’s inner-eye, as well as the power of the candle’s
viewer to etch with her gaze the concentric circles that turn the flame into
a “little sun.”
Over and over again mortal characters in the Aeneid are faced with unset-
tling words and strange visions, and are called to look to these for some
kind of divine order. Readers too are invited to see a world structured (and
thrown into disarray) by the gods’ whims and plans, and a world where
humans owe the gods not only their obedience but their interpretive skills.
Not all divine communications in the Aeneid take the form of grammatical
imperatives, of course. But those appeals to “look” at a world infused with
the power of the gods—and to yield to that terrifying power—spell out
explicitly a rhetorical gesture that permeates the entire narrative, giving a
special cast to the fictive knowledge offered by the poem.
Does this rhetorical stance belong uniquely to epic, or is it shared by
genres that do not summon the full panoply of divine violence to authorize
the fictive knowledge they offer? A flippant version of my answer would be
simply, “Yes.” Or, to put it less frivolously: the very fact that it is so tempt-
ing to frame the question disjunctively points to two distinct advantages of
analyzing the Aeneid’s rhetoric of fiction. We may sensitize ourselves to some
of the most salient characteristics of the poem’s fictive knowledge, and to
the ways this knowledge overlaps with that of other genres.
“Fictive knowledge” refers to what imaginative texts and artifacts know,
or invite their readers to imagine knowing. It is a pointedly inclusive term,
which takes in forms of knowledge not always associated with fiction, like
“historical” and “cultural” knowledge. The term’s inclusiveness borders on
paradox: can one “know” something that is made up? It leaves open the
fertile question of what it means to assign the status of “knowledge” to the
communications of epic fama.4
3. Eliot 1994, 264.
4. Figuratively describing an epic as “knowing” something is also a way of acknowledging how
Description:Chapter 3 • Matter out of Place I: Across the Styx. 63. 3.1 Dirt and disorder. 69 .
drastically alters its recipient's mental state and sets the Aeneid's story on a new
