Just thought I'd publish one of my research articles...

[fpb]

...just to show the kind of thing I do in real life.

THE RABBLE OF LATIUM AND THE NOBILITY OF TROY

Virgil, homosexuality and “Latin” values

By Fabio P.Barbieri
THE RABBLE OF LATIUM AND THE NOBILITY OF TROY

Virgil, homosexuality and “Latin” values

By Fabio P.Barbieri

I cannot disguise the irritation I feel when a scholar, however clever, denies evidence on no good grounds, and motivates his/her position with an assault on the primary sources. The event, of course, is too frequent to challenge it every time; but in the case of Richard Jenkyns (Virgil's Experience: Nature and History; Times, Names, and Places, OUP), the work is both too monumental, too important, and too otherwise deserving of praise, to just let it go. On what grounds does Dr. Jenkyns deny - and deny magisterially, in extenso, in his confident professorial voice - the report of Donatus and others, that Virgil loved boys and was reputed to be a virgin as far as women were concerned? On no other ground, so far as I can see, than that the Lives are unreliable .

As I write, I have access to only one of the Lives, namely Donatus’; and I have no interest in trying to prove its reliability from internal evidence, even granting that it is possible. Nor can we challenge the Lives from any earlier, let alone contemporary evidence; if Jenkys intends, at his own caprice, to simply deny their value, it is hard to answer him from them. Our best source for Virgil, incomparably, is Virgil; and it is from Virgil’s own work that I intend to work. Nevertheless, a review of basic facts does not seem out of place.

Donatus states clearly that Virgil loved boys; not just in the sense of passing fancies or mere lust, but as serious long-term relationships. The two great loves he mentions have two things in common: they were both his own slaves, and they were both educated - one, Cebetes, was a poet in his own right. It is worth noting that Donatus mentions this among a number of things about the poet that he respects : he was most sparing in food and drink (cibi vinique minimi); although he accepted gifts from friends to the ultimately rather modest amount of a hundred thousand sestertii and a few good residences in Rome and the Bay of Naples, he refused the goods of an exile, even though offered by Augustus; and he was “so upright of life, of speech, of soul” (vita et ore et animo tam probum) that the people in Naples called him (with an unusual Greek word) parthenias, the maiden boy. These are all good things; even the gifts from “friends” in high places would seem good to a Roman of Donatus’ age (when social stratification was increasing rather than decreasing in the Empire), evidence of the esteem of high lords. If Donatus wished us to disapprove of his close relationship with his poet-slave Cebetes and with his other slave-lover, Alexander - himself a gift from Asinius Pollio - he would not mention them here. But while Virgil could accept from his “friends” both houses and patrimony, even slaves whom he would grow to love, he refused the gift of a concubine (Plotia Hieria); refused it, indeed, as vehemently, as conclusively, as he ever did the dishonourable offer of the exile’s goods (verum pertinacissime recusasse). Donatus’ source for this is first-rate, Asconius Pedianus, the commentator of Cicero, a learned contemporary with excellent contacts. No leanings toward ordinary romance or marriage, let alone protracted heterosexual affairs, are recorded or even hinted at.

This article intends to show that the Lives are not only, on this point, perfectly reliable, but that a proper understanding of the peculiar homosexual slant of Virgil’s sensibilities, in conjunction with a study of his sources, sheds a flood of light on his poetics, his methods of composition, and his interpretation of Roman legend.

Let us start from the two most obvious points, the two major pederastic passages in the Aeneid: Evander’s memory of his youthful dalliance with Anchises (8.157-168), and the great episode of Euryalus and Nysus (9.176-449). Other allusions to homosexual loves, such as 10.324-327, are merely part of Virgil's Homeric catalogues of dead heroes with Greek names, and he would be a brave man who tried either to give them a pre-Virgilian origin, or to ascribe them any great significance; these, on the other hand, are important episodes, that leave an impression and are part of the central flow of the story.

The encounter of Evander and Anchises is interesting in a number of ways, the most important from our point of view being that it is used to reinforce the somewhat remote chain of relationships which Aeneas himself had just outlined to Evander (8.134-142): it is not only, old Evander says to Aeneas, because we share a distant kinship going back to Hermes and Atlas, that I welcome you, but above all because, when I was a boy, your father had sex with me at my request - and you look as beautiful as he did then. Aeneas’ argument from kinship is not only weak, but clearly intended to be weak: Virgil actually underlines, through the words of Aeneas himself, that Evander is much more closely connected with the Atreids, deadly enemies of Troy, than with the Dardanians. In other words, Virgil wants it clearly understood, with no ambiguity whatever, that the motive power of Evander’s friendly and honourable reception of someone who could almost be seen as a racial enemy - the great enemy of Evander’s cousins, the Atreids - is due entirely to his passionate romantic memory of Aeneas’ beautiful father: the man, we remember, who in his youth had pulled the very goddess of love out of the sky .

In Virgil’s view, therefore, the relationship of eromenos and erastes establishes something very like a guest-friend or blood-brother relationship, one that binds both partners and their close kin for years to come. This seems to me rather more than the ordinary Greek pederast would claim. I have no space or time for a discussion on the nature of Greek pederasty, but it seems to me to restrict itself to the brief age of boyish beauty, and then to dismiss the boy with a blessing; the boy himself, one supposes, being the better for the educational experience and ready, in turn, to transmit whatever value went along with homosexual sex to his own future lovers. I recall no such view of lasting, binding value in pederastic relationships either in the dialogues of Plato or in pederastic poetry or anywhere else (including Sappho).

However, it does seems to prelude, in some subterranean way, to Juvenal’s brutally sarcastic tale of the elderly homosexual marrying his own boyfriend (Satires 2.117-148); in the sense that it is there, rather than in any Greek writing, that a lasting and legally binding nature is postulated for homosexual relationships. The Greek version of homosexual love vanished with the first beard of the beloved; it is in Rome that we find the idea of a lasting homosexual relationship, one that can actually lay claim to a lifelong, “married” status.

Now Juvenal reports this event as a fact, specifying the socially low descent of the beloved (a trumpet-player); but, at the same time, he treats it as the ultimate enormity, as a vision of judgement rather than a present event. His treatment is so ambiguous as to leave us in doubt as to whether it ever happened. But he does say clearly that, in his view, Roman society was heading in that direction. What, then, exactly does he mean? Well, Juvenal’s favourite device is exaggeration. If he says that “we”, the Romans of his time, are heading in a direction where homosexual marriage will be as normal as the ordinary kind, what we have to conclude is that he saw trends in his society that would lead to a recognition and an embedding of long-term homosexual relationships within the law. It was an exaggeration to say that, in a foreseeable future, homosexual marriage would have been legalized (and, in fact, it wasn’t); what he meant was to present a caricature of what the acceptance of settled homosexual relationships would do to society.

The Roman idea of homosexuality differed from the Greek in another way: not only did it tend to permanence, but it involved social unequals. One might almost say that the archetypal Greek homosexual couple was a free man and a free boy, while the archetypal Roman one was a master and a slave. Juvenal underlines that the boyfriend married by his rich homosexual was socially inferior ; which raises echoes in the life-story of Virgil himself, with his two great loves - both slaves. This sort of thing has little place in the Greek idea of pederasty, whose educational context implies free and most often noble birth for the beloved: a Greek would have regarded affairs with slaves as naturally demeaning, and the notion of marrying one as deeply degrading. This does not extend only to homosexual relationships: compare Sappho’s fury at the Greek slave-girl whom her brother set free and took as a lover in Egypt , with the relaxed and self-satisfied attitude of Horace to his servile lovers of both sexes. Servile birth and rank were, in Greece, an all but insuperable obstacle to permanent sexual relationships; in Rome, they were almost a stimulus.

A modern spirit certainly finds this relationship, postulating a master-slave or at least noble-base polarity between partners, eminently dubious. I therefore find it particularly significant that Virgil makes the boy (Evander) take action and be the suitor, and the adult (Anchises), whose position is that of the greater power, dignity and authority, be the pursued; and it is the boy who, sixty years after, relates the affair with a glow of pride and reflected joy. It is as though Virgil is trying to convince himself that the younger or junior member of the couple, who as a rule is the pursued rather than the pursuer, would, put in the position of being free to choose (young Evander, after all, is not only a free man, but a prince), choose a homosexual relationship with the elder - rather than, say, finding a girlfriend, and one of his own estate. Also, Virgil does not even hint at the reality of slave or dependent relationships. Virgil himself had climbed from a low social milieu, the fact that he himself, with his “rustic face” and accent, should end up owning and having great love affairs with highly educated slaves, the playthings of the top layers of society, one of whom was an actual gift from a consular friend, should ask grim and troubling questions of his conscience; and Virgil’s conscience was, if anything, abnormally sensitive.

The ancient relationship of Anchises and Evander is pretty much the only sexual relationship in the epic, straight or homosexual, that has unmixedly positive results. The love of man and woman, as far as Virgil is concerned, is at best a burden, at worst a disaster; but the love of man and boy can also be destructive, as we are to see in the episode of Euryalus and Nysus, neither of whom would have died if they had not been in love with each other. In this case, and in this case alone, sexual love leads to a permanent good: not only glowing memories for Evander, but a permanent link of friendship between Trojan and Arcadian princes, which allows Aeneas not only to enter Latium and gain a permanent friend, but also to take part in the sacred rites and be taught all he needs to know about the past and the sacred nature of the country he is to rule. This relationship, and this relationship alone, is the token of friendship between nations, rather than, as in the loves of Dido, Helen, Turnus, and Euryalus, a brutal possession leading to disaster.

That the episode is an invention of Virgil’s seems to me self-evident, but, since self-evidence cannot be assumed, I want to make a few points. First, I have argued elsewhere that the legend of Aeneas in Latium is an entirely native one, whose protagonist was simply identified with the Greek hero; as the episode of Anchises and Evander is clearly present to connect the Greek past of the heroes with their Latin future, it cannot be regarded as anything but a connective put in place to bind the Latin material with the Greek. It cannot, in other words, belong to the early Latin layer of epic material; it is a late harmonizing invention. Indeed, the whole context is both Hellenizing and learned, Alexandrine or post-Alexandrine. This does not make it certain that Virgil invented it himself, but makes it likelier. Second, the passage shows an association between the practice of sacred ritual and homosexuality which we will encounter again, and which I will argue is typical of Virgil. This is putting the cart before the horse to some extent: but it is because the young Evander gave himself up in love to Aeneas’ father Anchises, and received precious gifts from him in exchange, that the old Evander invites Anchises’ son to take part in the great annual sacrifice to Hercules, at which time - an excellent omen - Aeneas reached Evander’s settlement: it is, that is, because Evander had a homosexual relationship with Aeneas’ father, that Aeneas is admitted to the sacred rites on the very first occasion in which he meets anyone at all in Latium . Thirdly, I know of no Roman legend - as opposed to the Greek stories about Ganymed or the young Laios - featuring pederasty or homosexuality.

The last point, of course, also tells against the episode of Euryalus and Nisus . But there is an even stronger argument: their Greek names. They are genuine, ordinary Greek names, without any adaptation. Now the rule is that major characters purported to be Greek in the Aeneid have either Latinized names such as Hercules for Herakles and Aeneas for Aineias, or, in one case, a very generic word like Evander (="Good Man"), that anybody could have constructed. Genuine, unmodified Greek names such as Euryalus and Nysus belong exclusively to minor victim characters in lists of warriors slain by the major heroes. The rest are Latin.

There are other reasons to treat the episode as an interpolation. In my previous work about the epic, I have argued that the expedition of Aeneas to Latium - with no women or old men - had the characteristics of a uer sacrum; but the council of war before the boys' unlucky expedition is quite out of keeping with a uer sacrum, a company of young men of one age class. For absolutely the only time in the whole epic, the Trojan voices we hear are those of old men, councillors with white beards, senatorial figures. It is probably true that Virgil himself did not understand the Trojan company as a uer sacrum; but he mentions nothing like it elsewhere. It is Latinus and Turnus who are surrounded by friends of various ages and councillors ready to give advice. It is part of their role as kings, leaders of nations, surrounded by relatives and courts; Aeneas has no court, no relatives, and no proper nation with him - only a military company of young warriors under his orders. He makes his decisions alone. Here, however, the camp of young men is suddenly transformed into a besieged citadel with old mothers, children, old warriors in council; for a moment, we are in Homer's Troy, not in Latium.

Who interpolated this legend, and why? I think that there can be little doubt that Virgil not only inserted the episode, but made it himself out of whole cloth. He was not incapable of such things: we know that, since antiquity, the whole enormous Dido episode - one quarter of the whole epic - was regarded as his invention. Why, then? In the case of Dido, his reasons to interpolate the founder of Carthage, though multi-layered, are not difficult to discern; but in spite of the greatness of the tale of Euryalus and Nysus, no such clear set of meanings can be perceived. Indeed, it seems to do nothing to advance the overall story. When the bloody night is over both armies are just as when it began.

This is the answer I proposed in Gods of the West I: Indiges:

…To understand the purpose of the episode, beyond its picture of fair and courageous young lovers, we must look at it within the larger legend. And the only effect that Euryalus and Nysus' death has on the plot is this: Ascanius gains a foster mother. This is the promise he makes to Euryalus about his mother :
"Thus shall she be my mother; just the name
Creusa shall she lack..."
- in case her son fails to return from his daring mission.

This promise is the obvious point. All the other rewards offered to the two young lovers are predicated upon their success; if they make it through Latin lines, they will get such and such prizes. This, and this alone, is predicated upon their failure; if they fail and die, then Iulus must adopt Euryalus' mother as his own. But if the episode is interpolated, from beginning to end, by Virgil, this means that this was the conclusion he wanted to lead it to: Iulus, extraordinarily, adopts, on his own initiative, a second mother who is never to be the wife of his father Aeneas.

Now it is interesting that Livy also had problems with Ascanius' mother. Her identity was seems to have troubled him and his sources profoundly . He speaks of Iulus' birth in tones of solemn doubt; he is not sure that Creusa actually was his mother; he wildly suggests there might have been two Ascanii; and, piling absurdity upon absurdity, he proposes that Ascanius' foster mother was none other than - Lavinia! The woman, if you please, whom both Virgil and Dionysios show hiding her pregnancy and her son Silvius from Ascanius, because, Dionysios explains, her son, rather than Ascanius' sons, is the true heir, and she has cause to fear Ascanius' jealousy!

This leads to one useful conclusion: the problem of Ascanius' mother and foster mother was one of those points that troubled Hellenistic Latin antiquarians. We find Virgil inserting a massive and magnificent interpolation to explain, in the end, that he had a foster mother, and Livy botching up an extra Ascanius and making wild guesses as to who his foster mother was. It is interesting to find that Livy, difficult though he found this point, nevertheless is clear in his mind that Ascanius had a foster mother. Why should he? Why should the Latin witnesses be so unanimous that Creusa never reached Latium, indeed that she might not have been Iulus' mother at all?

There is a most obvious reason: the ancestry of Iulus was quite a live issue in their time, when the head of the Roman State based his claim to power on his being the heir of Iulus' descendant Iulius Caesar . Both the Mantuan poet and the Paduan historian were very much of Octavian's party, his personal acquaintances and protegés; his legal ancestry (he was only Caesar's adopted son, but he was his legal heir, and therefore the legal head of the Iulian clan) was evidently a matter of some concern to them.

But if such troubled outgrowths sprouted in this place of the legend, there is every reason to believe that the original was enigmatic, troubling, and unacceptable to Augustan writers - and therefore every reason to believe it to be a genuine archaic survival. What troubled Virgil is, once we realize the trend of the episode, fairly clear: why should his story show Creusa - a well-established if secondary character in Greek epic - as lost, vanished, one way or another out of the story, only to add an unnecessary foster mother to the boy's family tree? One can practically see his mind working: the foster mother is not only unnecessary, she is positively out of place in an all-male environment. Hence, there must be some peculiar reason why Ascanius recognized her as his foster mother; and the reason must lie within the sort of behaviour you would expect of this all-male environment - in fact, of an army in the trenches. And what is more obvious in an army in the trenches, than that young men die? - That's it! She must have been the mother of some other young man who died (gloriously, it goes without saying) and whom Ascanius had taken, as a sort of compensation, into his own family circle.

I believe this is almost the inevitable conclusion from the facts. That Iulus acquires a foster-mother because of Euryalus' death is written in the epic; and the fact that Euryalus was never meant to do anything but die, and that his death achieves nothing (his mission fails) except that, seems on the face of it quite obvious. That such a grandiose episode should end in nothing more than the adoption of a foster-mother, that all the blood and slaughter and high emotion and suicidal valour should achieve no more than this, is so curious as to beg for an explanation. Not only that: having gone to all that trouble to arrange the fostering, Virgil never speaks of it again. It even begins to seem odd to have added such a marvelous tragic saga at this point, hiding the actual point of his narrative almost completely; was he, by any chance, trying to take our eyes away from the question of Iulus' stepmother with the dazzling poetry of the fall of the lovers? Was it that he did not want his readers to think about it too much?

If I am correct, this huge interpolation, inserted as it was to make sense of a difficulty in the original legends, shows to what lengths Virgil was prepared to go in order to avoid rewriting the story; and gives the lie to all those interpretations, including Dumézil's, that understand the poet to have largely made his story up. He did not; he worked hard to understand and smooth out "apparent" contradictions between Greek and Latin traditions. That is surely why he worked so long at the epic and still left it unfinished. He could have had Creusa live into Latium; he could have ascribed her whatever role this stepmother character had; at the price of a very small amount of rewriting and an almost unnoticeable twist in his material. Instead he inserted a whole new chapter - rather than delete a single minor detail.

This, then, is my view of why Virgil wrote this episode. But one thing must be borne in mind. Unlike the matter of Dido - where, once the decision to involve the founder of Carthage had been made in the first place, the sequence of events was almost predictable - in the case of the stepmother Virgil had full liberty to use whatever material he cared to use; and, having to explain one stepmother or nurse to explain, he brings in two boys - one of whom does nothing more than die for his boyfriend. The meaning of this hardly needs underlining: left, as it were, to his own devices, able to imagine any series of events that would lead to Iulus acquiring an adopted mother, he invented a pair of fair, gallant and unfortunate homosexual lovers. And we notice that there are two bold and fair boys, but only one mother; Virgil, I think, had to explain her, and created the beautiful episode of Euryalus and Nysus purely because he liked to think of fair and gallant homosexual boys in couples. And the fact that we are speaking of one couple, living and dying together, rather than of a series of love affairs, reminds us of the permanence that the Romans, rather than the Greeks, tended to imagine in homosexual relationships.

To sum up what we have seen so far: the two major pederastic episodes in the Aeneid are both the work of Virgil himself. They must therefore reflect his attitude. The first shows, first, that he was disposed to regard homosexual relationships as binding upon their members in the same way as guest-friendships and sworn blood-brotherhoods; which, while not exactly parallel to the Roman tendency to regularize homosexual relationships almost to the point of marriage, belongs far more to that area of ideas than to Greek pederasty, where permanency was not expected. He was also disposed to feel that homosexual relationships were capable of having a positive and constructive meaning, involving, among other things, long-term mutual agreement and the admission of partners into religious ritual. The second shows that, given the chance, the kind of heroic stories he would invent - rather than take over whole from earlier accounts - would be tales of noble and beautiful homosexual boys. He did not often have the chance, for, I have argued elsewhere, the story he was working with was mostly pre-existent; but he preferred to make up new episodes out of whole cloth to explain unusual features in the story he had inherited, rather than modify it. And it is these new, partly or wholly made-up episodes, rather than the pre-existent story he had inherited, that are most revelatory of his own imagination; and the imagination that strikes us in the episodes of Dido, of Euryalus and Nysus, and of the encounter of Anchises and Evander, is not one that shows any sympathy for heterosexual relationships - or any antipathy towards homosexual ones.

There is much more to say about parts of the epic that do not directly mention homosexuality. One frequent feature of male homosexuals is a painful and unresolved with an overwhelmingly powerful and highly sexual mother - something I have encountered more than once among my friends. Now, we would not expect a Roman, however untypically gentle and retiring, to recognize any such problem in his background; even less for his friends to accept it and put it on record. The predominance of a mother-monster would be an impossibly shameful thing to admit in the macho world of Roman values. But that such things were not admitted does not mean that they did not happen; the history of Imperial dynasties, where decorous concealment of unpleasant realities was next to impossible, is riddled with powerful mothers and genuine mother-monsters. Cut away half of what was said about Agrippina, mother of Nero, and there is still plenty of reason to regard her as one.

The test case would obviously be the treatment of maternity in Virgil’s poetry. If scholars can legitimately draw considerable conclusions from the brief appearance and ultra-violent death of a character called Magus (Aeneid 10. 521-536) - the name, according to the Lives, of Virgil’s father’s employer and later business partner - then it hardly seems wrong to look at the foremost mother character in the poem, who occupies far more space than Mago and involves the poet’s and reader’s attention to a far greater extent. And, quite frankly, Amata is the very prototype of the mother-monster. Amata's wants to force a candidate of her choice, the handsome young Turnus, as son-in-law on her husband Latinus, king of Latium. Apart that this is, in terms of Roman attitudes, a clear no-no - women should not be involved in politics, and they certainly should not use the bedroom to wield influence - her attitude is irrational. Virgil makes her hate Aeneas with a passion before she has any chance to assess him. She only once actually lays eyes on him, and that glimpse is the death of her. At the back of this is maternal jealousy, pushed to a point not far from incest; she has nothing but hate and fear for anything outside the family circle. Dionysios of Halikarnassos calls this woman not "Amata", "beloved", but "Amita", "paternal aunt". This reading has been challenged , but it is right beyond doubt: Dionysios himself tells us, without any explicit confirmation from Virgil, that "Tyrrhenos" - Turnus - was her nephew ! He was a kinsman, virtually another son. She simply wanted to seal the family within its own closed circle; not just because, as mother of the bride and aunt of the groom, she had a recognized and powerful position within it, but above all because of an unreasoning detestation of the "unfamiliar" world beyond. It may be undesirable to psychoanalyze a dead author; but I cannot help feeling that the hysterical, intrusive, ignorant, power-thirsty mother-monster the poet paints so well in Amata does much to explain why Virgil left his Mantuan home early, never went back, and settled in that haven of disaffected Northerners, Naples. To say the least, a man who has such an experience of the behaviour and views of mothers is more likely than another to become homosexual.

I would go further: I would say that Virgil’s horror at the realities of sexual generation has directly to do with his distaste for mothers and the maternal. Virgil joined a passionate regard for male love with a profound disgust for the merely animal functions of generation, a fear of romantic love, and a strong misogyny. I recall no praise of female beauty in his work, except for the brief apparition of Lavinia in Aen 12.64-69:

accepit uocem lacrimis Lauinia matris
flagrantis perfusa genas, cui plurimus ignem
subiecit rubor et calefacta per ora cucurrit.
Indum sanguineo ueluti uiolauerit ostro
si quis ebur, aut mixta rubent ubi lilia multa
alba rosa, talis uirgo dabat ore colores.

- and we should notice that there is nothing about this passage, however exquisite, that could not just as properly be applied to a beautiful boy. No passage could be quoted from Virgil to disprove the thesis that love of male and female was, to him, either a smutty joke (as in the "reward" that Silenus promises a nymph in one of the Bucolics), or, when in more serious mood, a dreadful madness. To this view he built two colossal monuments: book 3 of the Georgics and books 1-4 of the Aeneid. And while the Dido episode can be - and has been - misunderstood in a romantic light, no such misunderstanding is possible with Georgics III. The book is overhung by a sense of horror, manages to mention a number of the worst fiends of Hell in passing, and concludes with a ghastly doomsday-like account of a plague in Noricum; and the genuine terror with which it speaks of "Venus" is even undiplomatic, given that she was the hallowed ancestress of the Julian clan.

Nor is the epic any less grim. In the passage we just quoted, the association of Lavinia’s beauty with the fire that is consuming Turnus - a fire, we remember, that is the same devil-flame lit in him by Allecto five books before - reminds us that the Aeneid consistently associates the love of man and woman with devouring flame. Dido loves - and burns; and it is not by chance, however dubious editors may find the passage, that the very incarnation of Beauty, Helen herself, appears to Aeneas as the last and worst vision in the horrible night of Troy’s fall. Virgil works the scenes and pictures of the disaster like a symphonist; in a sequence of lies, perjured gift, murderous snakes sent by the gods, treachery, sudden invasion, enemies in the streets, rape, theft, murder, the obscene killing of the old king on his own altar and before his own family - and fire, fire, fire. There is a sequence of images of progressive savage ruin, at the height of which appears - the daughter of Tyndareus. In the midst of all the horror she sits, apparently unmoved - at least, no expression of any kind is described - beside the altars; those same altars on which Priam has just had his throat cut. This sequence of images has nothing to do with reason, not even with narrative direction: rather it tends to create an association of ideas between fire, female beauty, divine wrath, and utter ruin, all seen from the entirely subjective standpoint of the narrator, Aeneas (and there is a further depth of horror, and a further strengthening of theme and association, in the fact that he is telling it to Dido). At the end of the sequence there is a feat of visual alchemy which shifts the eye from the vision of human to that of divine female beauty: Helen, with all the anger and horror she stands for in Aeneas’ eyes, is replaced, one might almost say overlain, by the vision of Aphrodite, Aeneas’ own mother, who imperiously takes over the direction of the narrative, away from the purposeless slaughter of Helen that Aeneas intends, and to the constructive alternative of rescuing the remnants of Troy and taking them abroad. And yet this final vision of the divine purpose and power behind mortal distress is hardly free of ambiguity: the same power that warns Aeneas off murdering Helen, the maternal power that gave him birth, is the power who, as he narrates it, is working still further horror and disaster in the soul of Dido, preluding ultimately to the Punic Wars - horrors as hideous as the very fall of Troy. The power which, generation after generation, works the horrors of love, lust, and war, the power by which cities fall and countries are devastated by the likes of Hannibal, is the very power that generated Aeneas himself, and, through him, Rome: it is Venus Genitrix, Aphrodite the Mother, the maternal as lustful, violent, and destructive. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the suicidal Dido is also cast as a mother - if a failed one; in another of those symphonic sequences of ideas we have already observed in the case of Helen (in which the theme of Dido is interwoven with others), Dido is associated first to to the son of Aeneas that she will never have, a son who would remind her of her father (IV 327-330, esp. si quis mihi parvulus aula luderet /Aeneas, qui te tamen ore referret) to a vision of herself as a spirit of - what a surprise - fire, dreadful fire (384:sequar atris ignibus absens), through a series of visions of horrible family feuds, culminating in another vision of a mother as an avenging spirit of fire (472-73: Armatam facibus matrem et serpentibus atris/Cum fugit; Ultricesque sedent in limine Dirae), and finally, as she is already physically burning, of the ultor, the terrible avenger, who is the only truth that will arise from her bones - to whom she is, in a very real sense, the remote mother: Hannibal. This is Dido’s heterosexual love and Dido’s motherhood; and it surely is no coincidence that the god who pushes him away from her at last, with a clichéd and insulting reference to the unreliability of women, is presented as a most beautiful young man (556-570). In those terms did the greatest poet before Dante think of love, sex and reproduction; the failure to realize this is the reason why moderns tend to treat Lucan - the poet of life as horror - as a strange aberration, whereas he is in my view in a direct line from Virgil, simply extending to the whole of existence his horror at the realities of generation.

As opposed to this world of ideas - or rather feelings - there is in Virgil an association between homosexuality and religious ritual. We have already observed it in the matter of Evander and the admission of Aeneas to the rites of Hercules Victor, but it has an equally clear manifestation in the mouth of an enemy, Remulus Numanus, Turnus' brother-in-law.

The name of Remulus Numanus could not possibly be more national, constructed as it is of the name of the second king of Rome and of the fallen brother and partner of the first. It makes an implicit statement about the nature of Turnus’ army and Italic culture that I do not think has often been noticed. For the figure of Numa stands, in Roman pseudo-history, for everything that is religious: not only for the practice and theory of ritual, but for the purely religious and ritual response to any practical problem, for that aspect of the Roman state which can be described as a professional apparatus to pacify the gods and interpret oracles. All his legends have to do with the procuring and (when necessary) the neutralization of oracles. Religious ritual is at the very centre of his being. Yet at this earlier period in the legend of Roman origins - a legend which, by Virgil’s time, had reached not only a high degree of articulation, but also a very firm chronological form - Virgil produces a warrior called Numanus - pertaining to, belonging to, even the son of, Numa - who is an outspoken despiser and opponent of religious ritual:

'non pudet obsidione iterum ualloque teneri,
bis capti Phryges, et morti praetendere muros?
en qui nostra sibi bello conubia poscunt! 600
quis deus Italiam, quae uos dementia adegit?
non hic Atridae nec fandi fictor Vlixes:
durum a stirpe genus natos ad flumina primum
deferimus saeuoque gelu duramus et undis;
uenatu inuigilant pueri siluasque fatigant, 605
flectere ludus equos et spicula tendere cornu.
at patiens operum paruoque adsueta iuuentus
aut rastris terram domat aut quatit oppida bello.
omne aeuum ferro teritur, uersaque iuuencum
terga fatigamus hasta, nec tarda senectus 610
debilitat uiris animi mutatque uigorem:
canitiem galea premimus, semperque recentis
comportare iuuat praedas et uiuere rapto.
uobis picta croco et fulgenti murice uestis,
desidiae cordi, iuuat indulgere choreis, 615
et tunicae manicas et habent redimicula mitrae.
o uere Phrygiae, neque enim Phryges, ite per alta
Dindyma, ubi adsuetis biforem dat tibia cantum.
tympana uos buxusque uocat Berecyntia Matris
Idaeae; sinite arma uiris et cedite ferro.' 620

The ideological opposition that Numanus is setting up - from, of course, a hostile and caricatural position - is between the life of a highland cattle-raider and that of someone dedicated to sacred services; and it is in the former, not in the latter, that he places himself and his own people. In other words, this hero “belonging to Numa” stands for the exact opposite of what the later, famous Numa did .

The opposition involves archaic features that makes it highly unlikely that Virgil should have invented it. The opposition between cattle theft and religious practice is characteristic of archaic Latium, where (as in other Indo-European cultures) there was an essential connection between cattle and ritual. In both Rome and Tibur, the central cults of the town were dedicated to a god identified in Hellenistic times with Hercules (his original name being Recaranus or Trigaranus ), whose chief care was the protection of cattle, and which were situated in or above the cattle market (forum boarium). Disappointing though visitors such as Dionysios of Halikarnassos might find it , it was an article of faith with the Romans that the altar of this Hercules or Recaranus was more ancient than the city itself, and also that it was the “greatest”, that is the noblest and most hallowed, of the city’s many places of sacrifice: the ara maxima. The chief concern of the cult of Recaranus/Hercules Victor is the property of cattle, which is properly established when a tithe is paid to the gods. The stories are clear: the archetypal sacrifice that establishes the cult of the Ara Maxima is not the killing of Cacus - which is only a prelude - but the tithe paid by “Hercules” and/or Evander once the cattle had been recovered. This altar was the guarantor of legal relationships between men: oaths were sworn over it when - Dionysios says very clearly - both parties intended the oath or agreement to be unalterable: its famous foundation legend (do I really have to insult my readers by a summary of the story of Hercules and Cacus?) underlined the divine protection for the right of property: the hero of heroes destroys the arch-robber and restores, primevally, the right of property, embodied in cattle.

The centrality of the cattle trade in this view of society strains our imagination, and the context of this set of ideas would be made clearer if we replaced it with some symbol of value more familiar to us - say, gold. But to the early Indo-Europeans, whether settled or nomadic, cattle were wealth on the hoof, as testified by hundreds if not thousands of Vedic hymns and even Celtic praise poems. It represented high, yet easily transferred value. And as for religious activities, cattle are the prime ordinary sacrificial material. In Rome, horses are only sacrificed on one specific and intensely unusual yearly occasion (the equus October) and human beings only in exceptional circumstances (the ritual burial alive of two Greeks and two Gauls in times of extreme national peril); cattle are the largest and most expensive item regularly offered to the gods. The primeval theft of cattle, therefore, had much the same emotional significance as the primeval theft of gold in Wagner’s Ring; except that in Rome, the theft was just as primevally avenged.

The sacred legend that underlies the narratives of the foundation of Rome moves backwards to embrace this primeval vindication of the right of property. Both Livy and Virgil not only go out of their way to incorporate the story of Cacus, but also present it in the same way: as a digression, a step backwards in time in their picture of Roman origins. This means that both found it very important to indicate that, before the coming of Aeneas the founder, the site of Rome had already been hallowed, not as a purely sacred area - that was to be Lavinium - but as a place where men might freely meet, by the tremendous appearance of a strong god and his establishment of the first public cult. (The only other cult mentioned in the epic is the domestic one of Latinus at the beginning of bk 7 - which fails.)

On this world of contracts and cattle sacrifice Virgil has superimposed his preoccupation with homosexual practice; not only by allowing Aeneas entrance to it thanks to his father’s homosexual affair, but also by making its ideological opponent in the story, Remulus Numanus, associate religious worship with effeminacy and both with the Trojans, and oppose both to cattle robbery and Italian nationality and extreme machismo - machismo, too, of a notably Roman stripe: durum a stirpe genus natos ad flumina primum/ deferimus saeuoque gelu duramus et undis;/ uenatu inuigilant pueri siluasque fatigant,/ flectere ludus equos et spicula tendere cornu./ at patiens operum paruoque adsueta iuuentus/ aut rastris terram domat aut quatit oppida bello. We are, says Remulus, real men - sinite arma uiris et cedite ferro - while you are effeminate Asiatics, “indeed, women of Asia”: uobis picta croco et fulgenti murice uestis,/ desidiae cordi, iuuat indulgere choreis,/ et tunicae manicas et habent redimicula mitrae./ o uere Phrygiae, neque enim Phryges, ite per alta/ Dindyma, ubi adsuetis biforem dat tibia cantum./ tympana uos buxusque uocat Berecyntia Matris. And it is hardly irrelevant to what can be gathered of the life and manners of Virgil parthenias, that among the “unmanly”, “Asiatic” activities condemned by Numanus there is, if not poetry, at least music and dance - iuuat indulgere choreis.

A good deal of nonsense has been spoken about Virgil’s supposed Italian patriotism. Virgil was no Italic: he came from the city of “five nations and four peoples under them”, Mantova, at the border between two non-Italic peoples, Veneti and Celts, whose annexation to the province of Italy was an innovation that took place in his own lifetime. Virgil came to Rome not, like Ovid or Tibullus, as a fellow-Italic to whom the City was the centre of a vast, culturally homogeneous hinterland, but as a provincial, to whom it was the head city of the world - not as a Yorkshireman to Queen Victoria’s London, but as an Indian or African subject. The mentality, language and attitude, not of the supranational aristocracy (which he had learned at school), but of the majority of uneducated Latins, were alien to him. Whatever his mastery of literary Latin, the dialect and the peasantry with which he had grown up were not Italic but northern; and whatever there was of vulgarity, machismo and ignorance in the attitude of the Italic-on-the-street, would have not only disgusted him as a naturally fastidious spirit, but alienated him as a foreigner. Nothing could be clearer than that, with few exceptions, he sympathizes not with the inhabitants of the land, but with the strangers, received so badly and against the will of the gods, and fighting, arms in hand, to make the will of God prevail (for Aeneas is fighting literally in the name of Jupiter). And if you stop to look at what actually happens in the epic, Italy is hardly honoured. Following the mendacious and possessed Turnus, revolted against their legitimate King and against the very will of God, they meet a much smaller army - and are shattered on the field in three days. Properly told, this would sound exactly like an English joke about the Italian army in World War Two.

There is another aspect to Virgil’s response to popular machismo. Who are, in fact, these effeminate Orientals whom Numanus treats with such contempt? Why, they are not less, but more manly, powerful, warlike, than the macho Italics themselves. This is how King Latinus, father and head of the whole Italic world, describes them: bellum importunum, ciues, cum gente deorum/ inuictisque uiris gerimus, quos nulla fatigant/ proelia nec uicti possunt absistere ferro; and this is how the greatest surviving Greek hero says of their leader: experto credite quantus/ in clipeum adsurgat, quo turbine torqueat hastam. Even if we did not witness ourselves his mighty deeds on the field of battle, we would know him for a great fighter from the best possible source - the view of his enemies. “Women, not men?” Quite the opposite.

Now, it seems to me that this implied retort connects directly with one of Virgil’s few reported utterances: when taxed with imitating Homer too closely, he is said to have retorted: cur non illi quoque eadem furta temptarent? Uerum intellecturos facilius esse Herculi clauam quam Homero uersum subripere - Why don’t they try the same kind of theft themselves? They’d bloody well find out that it is easier to steal the club from Hercules than the verses from Homer. In other words, he, the parthenias, the man of pathological shyness who took refuge in the houses of complete strangers rather than meet his fans, the man who was revolted at the very idea of a female concubine, was the real macho hero, the one mind strong enough to “steal the club from Hercules”, to perform a deed beyond any of his critics. We do not need to doubt that this greatest of all ancient poets, the ultimate master of language and simile, chose the macho language and simile deliberately and with a purpose; and we may therefore conclude, both that the anecdote from the Vita is truthful, and that the implicit response to Numanus’ insults - with all that they carry of personal memory, personal outrage, and resentment - is intended and calculated.

We cannot be crude about the Roman view of pederasty and homosexuality; we cannot imagine that, just because these things were known, joked about, sometimes admitted, and certainly practiced, therefore they had the same kind of positive approval, of sanction, that married straight sex had. Formulate that statement in so many words and you must realize that it is nonsense. Rather, they were in the nature of amusing little failings. If a Roman bore the penetrative, “manly” role, then he could indulge in the kind of laddish, yet shame-faced bragging that sexual adventure bears to this day. (Indeed, unregulated sex has a way of bringing forth bragging that is not only foolish but in effect illegitimate: listen to “tourists” fresh from Brazil or Thailand, bragging of their exploits with women who are, after all, prostitutes - whose job is to give them sex!) Let us be clear about this: the Roman who, like Catullus, brags about his sexual activities - and, indeed, threatens to subject his adversaries to them - is not showing, or seeking, generalized approval: he is indulging in a display of rather immature, defiant naughtiness. This same young man, Catullus, apostrophised both leading Roman politicians, Cicero and Caesar, in deliberately disrespectful terms; in one and the other case, we are talking about adolescent braggadocio. This is not a manifestation of acceptable behaviour: it’s let’s-shock-daddy stuff; and, in terms of our understanding of the real Roman view of homosexuality, is even more revealing that Juvenal’s polemics, because it shows that there was no generalized approval of pederasty or homosexuality, such as Plutarch’s essay On Love shows existed in Greece in Roman times.

But while taking the penetrative role came within the area of acceptable naughtiness and shame-faced bragging, the opposite was simply contemptible. If a Roman was perceived to be the “woman” in the relationship, then he was placed in the despised and ostracized area of the cinaedi, the effeminate. What the average Roman thought of such can be found in the writings of an author who delighted (at least early in his career) to be the voice of the Roman-in-the-street, the unsophisticated decent citizen with no leaven (or stain) of Greek culture: Juvenal. And Juvenal despises cinaedi, though with a tolerant rather than hostile contempt. Of course Juvenal comes more than a century after Virgil; but a recent study of Roman sexuality insists that “what never changed is the ideology” of Roman sexuality . Indeed, if any pressure for change there was, it must have come from the upper-class Hellenistic tendencies which had become second nature to the Roman aristocracy (Juvenal himself clearly makes homosexual affairs an exclusively upper-class concern, with the average cinaedus being a sponger on a rich degenerate), since nine times out of ten times it is the upper classes that dictate social change. In other words, the period of Juvenal would, if anything, be more and not less tolerant of cinaedism and effeminacy than that of Virgil.

What I am saying, then, is that we must imagine the feelings of the young Virgil - not yet the great poet of the Empire - lonely, young, pathologically shy, very homosexual, socially inferior, and a provincial alien to boot, coming in from Gallia Cisalpina, outside Italy; we must imagine the impact on him of the kind of attitude that Juvenal was to show, without Juvenal’s poetic excellence - his reaction to the insensitivity, coarseness, and stupidity he was bound to see in the commoners' attitude. First he must have experienced it himself; later, as he became a major figure among the intellectual elites, he must have realized that these same intellectual elites themselves - with their admixture of tolerated and practiced homosexuality - fell under the same popular condemnation. This, surely, is why Virgil associates religious ritual (which was closely associated with poetry and philosophy) and homosexuality: because in his own life, the admission to the circle of the learned and powerful, to the intellectual, religious and political elite, had at once brought him into contact with sympathetic people who did not treat him with the contempt, tolerant or otherwise, of a Juvenal, and at the same time allowed him to realize his potential as sage and poet. Being “admitted to sacred things” and to circles impregnated with homosexual practice, had been, to Virgil, one and the same thing, and he reflected this in his affabulation, associating homosexuality and admission to the sacra by instinct.

My theory, then, is that Virgil used the relative values of homosexuality and what might be called gay-bashing as terms of judgement by which he condemned Latin society before the coming of Aeneas. Is it not obvious that he has thrown into the character of Remulus everything that repelled him about the vulgar and brutal machismo of his time, everything he rejected about Italic values? In effect, by praising the life of cattle raiders, Remulus Numanus is subscribing to the world of anti-values of Cacus; and doing so, at that, when Cacus has already lost the battle and the power of the gods to defend property and punish the wicked has been well and truly established - and established around that which he despises, a religious establishment (the ara maxima) manned by “Greeks”. No wonder that he dies: he is bound to die. He could be said to represent an expiation for Latin vulgarity: he represents everything about the Latin character that has to be killed before the Fate-willed union of Latins and noble Troyans can be achieved.

This may well have been his role - whether or not he was called Remulus Numanus - in earlier versions; but, with his invectives against Phrygian effeminacy, Virgil has summed up the things that he, Virgil, hated about Italics. The role of this character, in other words, is to sum up in himself, and see destroyed by a public death, all the negative features of the Latin soul, which would otherwise make it impossible for Latins and Trojans to unite. In the pseudo-history of the Aeneid, each ethnic group stands for a moral quality that will go into the making the imperial nation of the world: in particular, the story is about the fusion between Trojans, carriers of sacred values, and Latins, bearers of royal power. The peace treaty of bk.12 divides the roles with extreme clarity:
Non ego nec Teucris Italos parere iubebo
Nec mihi regna peto: paribus legibus ambae
Inuictae gentes aeterna in foedera mittant.
Sacra deosque dabo; socer arma Latinus habeto,
Imperium sollemne socer. Mihi moenia Teucri
Constituent, urbique dabit Lavinia nomen.
"Not I do either wish for the Trojans to govern your nation,
Nor yet to be King; both nations, invincible, equal
In law, shall be allied for all time.
Religion and Gods shall I give; let Latinus,
Father-in-law, solemnly rule and keep weapons. My Trojans
Shall build walls, and Lavinia shall name the new city."

Two scholars who rarely ever agreed on anything, Georges Dumézil and Herbert Jenkins Rose, have recognized in the same terms the importance and significance of this passage . Aeneas is priestly, and ruling Latium as Latinus' successor is by no means the most important aspect of what he is or does. He has come to Latium not to seize the kingship, which will remain vested in Latinus, but to give the kingdom of his father-in-law holy things and Gods, sacra and Deos. Part of this is to found Lavinium, the holy city, where these sacred things will be lodged and these cults will be practiced. And it is significant that the peace treaty excludes a possibility that had been raised, earlier in the epic, by the Latin coward Drances. Drances had proposed that a new city for the Trojans should be built by Latin labour (11.130-131) ; Aeneas stipulates explicitly that the city will be built by Trojan hands alone. Even though the Trojans must have Latin wives, it is important to the issue of the story that Lavinium, their permanent settlement in Latium, should be free of Latin labour. Conversely, apart from the two brief generations of Aeneas and Ascanius, it is the blood of Latinus, and that alone, which rules over Latium. Just as the blood of the Latins has entered the priesthood of Lavinium only through the female side, so, conversely, the blood of Troy has only gone to strengthen the direct royal descent of Latinus. The two strands will from henceforth flow together, royalty and priesthood, separate but equal. Whatever else he may have lost or misunderstood of the ancient story he was telling, this passage proves that Virgil understood the complementarity of priestly Trojans and royal Latins perfectly well; and therefore Remulus’ death expiates all the negative aspects of the purely material values invested in Italic identity. It follows that Virgil’s association of vulgar queerbashing talk with Remulus’ praise of the cattle-robber’s life and values, and with his contempt for religious ritual, is a conscious step; he is indeed, clearly and consciously, associating homosexuality with the service of sacred things.

For the national poet of Rome, Virgil cut rather a poor figure of a Roman. He funked out of a career as a lawyer because of the need for speaking in public, and, according to Donatus, he would dive into private houses in Rome rather than meet awestruck fans. Now this shyness involves the reversal of some traditional Roman categories. Leading Roman male citizens were expected to live in public; and this had a subcutaneous relationship with the rather macho attitudes of the average Roman to sexuality, which divided the world not so much into straight and homosexual, as into penetrators and penetrated. Think of Cicero thumping his tub in front of crowds of senators or free citizens, playing the role of the brave opponent of mighty enemies to the hilt: indubitably, quite a macho role - in two occasions, against Catiline and again against Mark Anthony, this attitude led to civil war. But I would suggest that Virgil’s shyness was in part an aspect of his great, even morbid passion for perfection: he could not bear to present anything to the public that was not finished to the last degree. The best-known anecdote about him (if anything because two thousand years of readers, basking in the sunshine of his genius, have not managed to understand how he could do it) is that he demanded his should be destroyed if he could not live to finish it: even dead, he could not tolerate to have unpolished work published in his name.

Like many shy people, he was proud - if being demandingly conscious of his real talent may be called pride: for it was, surely, nothing but that sort of pride that made him undertake, after the triumphant reception of the Bucolics, to make himself both the Homer and the Hesiod of Rome, producing in succession the Georgics in reply to the Works and Days and the Aeneid in reply (or rather in completion) to the Homeric Cycle. Artistically, this shows the kind of ambition rarely seen in the history of the arts: the ambition of a Dante, a Beethoven, a Leonardo, a Titian - of a man who intends to remould the artform he works in, and knows he has the means to do it. Yet we do not get, from Virgil, the sense of overwhelming presence and personality of these giants. Some of the difference, surely, is due to the change of religion (although the roots of Virgil's homosexuality are a good deal closer to that of a certain ascetic Christian temper than is commonly realized); but much more is due, simply, to the great poet's different personality.

Of all the giants mentioned, he reminds me most of Leonardo, and not only because of the obvious fact of their common sexual proclivities. There is in both men a desperate passion for perfection that results in a very small number of finished works and conceals somewhere a private wound that makes them regard existence with something like a shadow of horror. Some of Leonardo's backgrounds look not so much like dreams as like nightmares: look at the Virgin of the Rocks, with those spectral, phosphorescent plants, and in the foreground those passionately perceived, yet impossibly remote figures! Ruskin, with his typical brilliant unfairness, has drawn attention to the excessive, even brutal element of caricature in Leonardo; and that too, side by side, with the most sidereal sweetness, exists in Virgil. Think of Amata, driven and whirled by Allecto like a top whipped by children, or of the element of grim comedy in Turnus' bravado; and think, for that matter, of the savagery - worse than anything in the Iliad - of the battle scenes. These two men had some internal pessimism, some internal wound - which the biography of neither man explains - that led them to regard existence with a yearning pessimism, a sense of the not merely lost but the impossible paradise - of a world invisible that will never become visible, of a world visible that is always menaced by moral and physical deformity.