Chapter 3, section 1: THE OPENING OF BOOK 12  (pp. 50-59)

But frightened by the terms of this new duel,
the queen, weeping, prepared to die, held fast
her raging son-in-law:"Turnus, by these
tears and by any reverence you still
feel for Amata—you, the only hope
and quiet left my sad last years:
the honor and power of Latinus is with you;
this house in peril stands or falls with you;
I beg one thing: you must not meet the Trojans.
For in this duel that you so wish to enter,
whatever waits for you waits for me, too;
together with you, I shall leave this hated
light; for I will not be a captive, see
Aeneas as my son-in-law." Lavinia's
hot cheeks were bathed in tears; she heard her mother's
words; and her blush, a kindled fire, crossed
her burning face. And just as when a craftsman
stains Indian ivory with blood-red purple,
or when white lilies, mixed with many roses,
blush: even such, the colors of the virgin.
His love drives Turnus wild; he stares at his
Lavinia; even keener now for battle,
he answers Queen Amata with few words. . .
(12.54-71)

At the opening of Book 12 Turnus confronts Latinus and reaffirms his decision to fight Aeneas in single combat. Latinus, torn by bad conscience since he knows what Fate has commanded and knows, too, that he has been impotent to fulfill those commands, begs Turnus to desist from his plan and to submit to the will of Heaven, both for the good of the Latins and for his own good. Latinus' passionate plea fades with a skillful compressed echo of Iliad 22.38-76, Priam's shrewd appeal to filial love:

Pity your aged father: even now his native
Ardea holds him far from us, in sadness.
(12.43-45)

So, far from convincing Turnus to yield to the inevitable, Latinus' common sense and his concern serve only to inflame Turnus the more:

Words cannot check the violence of Turnus:
the healing only aggravates his sickness;
his fury flares.
(12.45-46)

The oxymoron ("he sickens because of the cure") emphasizes Turnus' irrationality (this is the second use of violentia [violence] in this scene...) even as it illumines much of what is strange about the opening scene as a whole. If aegrescitque medendo [the healing only aggravates] corresponds to anything in its Homeric model in Iliad 22, it can only be to the two occurrences of "nor did he persuade Hektor’s heart" (78 and 91). The spare precision of Homer’s phrase gains force with repetition (neither Priam nor Hecuba can change Hector's heart with their separate pleas), and its lack of imagery brings into clear focus the heightened imagery of sickness with which Vergil chooses to complete the confrontation of Turnus and Latinus. It is not enough to say that Vergil desires to show by his oxymoron the wide difference between Turnus' state of mind and that of Hector (Turnus' unbridled passion as against Hector's controlled excitement and resolve...) in order to emphasize, by this artful contrast, the full force of Turnus' violentia. The chief function of the oxymoronic metaphor is to dissolve the outlines of a scene that never quite gets under way. As we move from Turnus' second outburst to Amata's outburst, to Lavinia's blush, and, finally, to Turnus' third and last speech, we sense that Latinus' gesture is, like all of his gestures, futile: not because it is in itself unreasonable, but because Turnus suffers from an irrational sickness that is beyond this help or any help.

In the case of Hector, the fact that both Priam and Hecuba fail to persuade their son to desist from his resolve does not mean that persuasion could not possibly work in this instance; it means only that it happens not to work in this instance because both Fate and Hector's own character are more powerful even than the cunning, honest, and elemental rhetoric of his parents. Homer's world in this scene, as in his other scenes, is the common world where health and rational discourse are the norm from which sickness and irrationality deviate. In this world the outlines of events and the motives of the human beings who participate in those events are generally extremely clear. Priam and Hecuba know what they are doing, and what they are doing is reasonable. Hector knows what he is doing, and his choices and behavior are at once utterly rational and utterly honorable. But the motives, the behavior, and even the dilemmas of Turnus are far less clear than are those of Hector.

Vergil cannot present them with the clear outlines and exact articulations that Homer uses for his scene because Turnus is sick, as Vergil emphasizes with his powerful oxymoron, and because the causes of this sickness (and indeed the fact of the sickness itself) are unknown to Turnus, himself, to Latinus, to Amata, and even, in a way, to Vergil and to us. The sickness that destroys Turnus, that is in some ways the central concern of Book 12 and therefore in some ways the central concern of the epic as a whole, is not susceptible to rational analysis and is therefore not susceptible to firm design and the sequential clarity that are the hallmarks of Homer's mode of beholding. Vergil will not, or, as I propose, cannot show us what Turnus suffers and does in this scene. Rather, what he does is to suggest the emotions that Turnus unconsciously suffers while under the illusion that he is performing a conscious, rational act. In saying this I do not mean to suggest that what Vergil offers us here is a psychological analysis of Turnus; that he is, to use another metaphor, being subjective rather than objective; or, to alter the same metaphor slightly, that he is turning from the outward appearance to the inward reality.

What Vergil offers here are clusters (not a series or groups) of blurred images that suggest but do not and cannot try to define the fluctuations and uncertainties of Turnus' distorted perceptions; what Vergil offers are not inner realities, but illusions. The fact that these perceptions are distorted from the outset (from, say, the moment when Allecto's magic firebrand becomes a real torment that really drives Turnus mad) means that they can never crystallize for him and for us into a true conception of who he is or what he is up against. Thus, whereas Hector has a fairly good understanding of the fate he moves toward inevitably and of why he confronts it, why he must confront it, Turnus gropes in blind frenzy to a death that is finally terrible and unredeemed (Hector's, as I shall try to show, is, essentially, redeemed) in exact proportion as it is finally hellish and incomprehensible. Both for Turnus' "point of view" in this scene, then, and for Vergil's own mode of beholding at crucial moments throughout his epic, the image of sickness as madness is, perhaps paradoxically, exact, and it shows "a clearness of the unclear" that is, to my mind, a prime characteristic of Vergil's art. But for our present purposes, I wish to emphasize that the oxymoron stresses, by its twisted graphic antithesis, the essential futility of the interview between Turnus and Latinus: the diseased irrationality that is violentia has grown to such proportions that its virulence feeds on what should cure it. In its striving to suggest the nature and degree of Turnus' violentia, the oxymoron signals that there can be no further dramatization of Turnus' inner conflicts, and it dissolves such drama and reality as have been faintly sketched just before it. At this point we realize that Turnus, now so fully identified with his madness as to be indistinguishable from it, can neither speak to the issue with Latinus nor can Latinus speak to him; he is, in a very real sense, a phantom wandering through the broken images that constitute his delusions, his consciousness.

In this regard, it is useful to contrast the general outline of the scene with its Homeric counterpart. Book 22 opens, as Book 21 has ended, with the routed Trojans trampling one another in their efforts to get inside the walls of the city. Apollo, who has disguised himself as Agenor and so led Achilles on a wild-goose chase, mocks his victim and meets with an angry, defiant response from him; then Achilles wheels around and rushes back to the city. He is immediately seen by Priam, who is on the ramparts and who immediately begins to beg Hector to retire inside the walls. The setting for the first main action of the book, the parents' entreaties to the doomed warrior, is sketched with quick and characteristic economy and clarity. The transition between Book 11 and 12 of the Aeneid is less directly handled than is that between Books 21 and 22 of the Iliad. The rout of the Latins and the subsequent confusion and terror at the gates are briefly reflected in Turnus' view of this event (ut infractos adverso Marte Latinos, defecisse videt [he saw how the Latin strength had failed, as the battle turned against them]), but there is a time lapse, which could best be called vague, between the two books (sua nunc promissa reposci, / se signari oculis [he saw how they signalled with their eyes that they held him to his promise]). The transition between the time when Turnus apparently feels forced to make good his promise to meet Aeneas in single combat (ultro inplacabilis ardet, / attollitque animos [his passion rose, burning and implacable] [3-4]) and the time when he announces his decision to Latinus is supplied by the simile of the wounded, defiant lion (4-9); but where Turnus comes from and where Turnus goes to meet Latinus are left to the readers' imaginations (we may supply, I suppose, a room in the palace). It is perhaps churlish to suggest that we must also imagine for ourselves the entrances or presences of Amata and Lavinia; we must allow, to continue the contrast with Homer, that in a sense Hecuba also arrives on the scene out of thin air. Yet in Homer's shaping of the scene, once Priam is clearly and naturally represented as standing anxiously on the ramparts, responding to the commotion at the gates, it is hardly difficult to imagine that Hecuba, also concerned by the sudden commotion and thereby worried about Hector, is by his side. The appearance of Latinus has been briefly (yet more or less adequately) prepared for by the sudden and effective appearance (at court?) of Turnus:

just so did violence
urge on fanatic Turnus. Hectic, he
cries out to King Latinus with these words....
(12.9-10)

But Amata, whose presence and speech correspond to the presence and speech of Hecuba in the Homeric model, bursts into the scene without preparation; so, without preparation, the even more shadowy Lavinia glides into it. The effect of these entrances or sudden presences suggests less the theatrical (or dramatic) appearance that is typical of Homer than the incantatory evocation of personae that one hears, say, in an ensemble reading of The Wasteland. This is not to say, of course, that there is no visual excellence in this scene; indeed, I shall soon argue that this particular scene shows a highly elaborate and highly effective visual organization. Rather, I am suggesting that the conventions of visualization that are common in Homer are emphatically flouted by Vergil here, as happens frequently.

Here, the clarity of picture that logical and sequential articulation makes possible yields to a deliberate blurring. Vergil's queen has a form and gestures as well as a voice and emotions and thoughts, but picture and gesture — because of the lack of careful articulation and because of stylization and compression of representation — do not mesh and are not meant to mesh. Here, not only because of what Amata has to say but also because of the manner in which Amata is rendered in her speaking, we are reminded of Greek tragedy and, strangely enough, of Seneca. When our attention becomes fixed on Amata, we become aware that we are now confronted with a distancing, a stylization, almost a contempt for verisimilitude that are utterly foreign to Homer but not at all alien to the stages of Athens or Milan. Hecuba may be larger than life, but, since she is Homer's creature, she is also full of life (the miracle of stylization and, almost, of naturalism that we witness in and loosening her garment, with one hand she showed her breast [22.80] defies imitation even as it defies analysis); Amata, on the other hand, cannot hide the fact that she is, whatever else she is, a mezzo-soprano: flebat, et ardentem generum moritura tenebat [weeping, prepared to die, she held fast to her raging son-in-law] (55). "Virgil's besetting sin," wrote Housman to Mackail, "is the use of words too forcible for his thoughts, and the moritura [on the verge of death] of Aeneid 12.55  makes me blush for him whenever I think of it." It is not recorded, that I know of, whether Ribbeck blushed also; but he did the next best thing. He emended. Monitura tenebat [about to warn him, she held fast]. She becomes, that is, a sensible woman. She does not rush upon him, throw herself in his way as he attempts to stride from the room, catch him, and cling to him as if her life depended on him (as it does). Rather, having sage advice to give him, she takes him by the arm. No, the scene as Vergil imagines it, with the madness of Turnus expanding at each moment, demands precisely the extravagance, the histrionics, that moritura [prepared to die] confers. Whether the word connotes only an adumbration of her resolve to die if Turnus dies — which she is to announce momentarily — or, with more excess, foreshadows her actual death (603), or represents a sudden deathly pallor, or suggests to us that we are supposed to feel the pathos of her situation (the word is used once again of Amata [602]; four times of Dido; once, brilliantly of Lausus [10.811]), it is unrealistic if what is wanted is a precise imitation of the emotions and state of mind of a woman in Amata's situation. Housman blushed, I presume, because his sensibility was embarrassed by what it took to be a failure of mimetic decorum. But Vergil is not trying to proffer intelligible realities; he is, through the eyes of Turnus, trying to imagine the incomprehensibility of reality by the disintegration of images. Moritura, then, is not Vergil's way of describing what Amata looked like or how she felt at this particular moment; it is rather a way of indicating a penumbra of doom that Turnus vaguely senses and that we observe — for us, a dreadful flash of clarity. An omniscient, an Homeric, narrator might very well have described Amata as being overcome by excitement or hysteria or anxiety. That he would have described her as moritura is doubtful. But the sinister, jarringly unrealistic prescience of the word, its emotional editorialization, is suitable to the frame of mind or of madness that Turnus is in, and for the purpose of suggesting how Turnus misperceives reality the word is as exact as its extravagance is troubling.

And so with violaverit [stains]. Perhaps, unwittingly, Housman blushed because he remembered Lavinia's blush, which is, of course, unforgettable. But why does she blush? What is it that her mother says that conjures up this manifestation of simple embarrassment or of delicate, shy, turbulent eroticism? Ardentem generum / generum Aenean [(her) raging son-in-law / (her) son-in-law Aeneas]? We know nothing whatever of Lavinia's conscious thoughts, much less of her private fantasies. Does she respond to the passion of Turnus? Has she toyed with notions of the glamorous Asiatic barbarian, a white sheik come to brighten her humdrum existence? One may speculate, but Vergil has seen to it that such speculation is as fruitless as it is boring. We are given nothing but a fleeting, tantalizing vision of possible erotic excitement, but that vision is as incisive and as artistic as anything Vergil wrote. Yet it was not imagined in order that we might understand something about Lavinia; it was imagined in order that we might understand something about Turnus. We do not know if Latinus or Amata notice their daughter's manifestation of shyness or involuntary revelation of hidden desires. But Turnus notices and he thinks he knows what her blush means. Sexual jealousy causes his own romantic notions to kindle higher, and his eroticism adds fuel to the martial fires that are already blazing out of control — the violentia of this scene can increase no more.

My point here is that we see Lavinia blush through Turnus' eyes, and it is Turnus' passion and his point of view that cause Vergil to select violaverit [stains] in order to render and to distort in the rendering the Homeric miênêi  [stains] of Iliad 4.141. What might otherwise seem, then, another flagrant example of gratuitous mannerism or slakeless cacozelia [affectation] turns out to be determined by Vergil's careful shaping of Turnus' point of view. Violaverit echoes the violentia of Turnus that dominates this scene, as do ardor [passion], rubor [redness], rubent [they blush], rubebit [he will burn] (77), ardentem generum [raging son-in-law]. But it is also a projection of Turnus' violentia onto Aeneas; it is also, possibly, a way of fantasizing punishment of Lavinia for her suspected impurity. It is erotic, sensuous, and violent, crystallizing the images of blood, anger, roses, the dawn of vengeance into a single, complex, ineffable feeling. The flawlessly mixed simile describes the confused manner in which Turnus see Lavinia's blush, and the way he sees the blush and reacts to it describes the confusion that has now taken full possession of him as this final book opens and that will keep possession of him for the remainder of the poem.

Again, a contrast with Homer is in order. In its relation to Menelaus (Iliad 4.141-147) the ivory dyed with crimson is emblematic both of the glory of his wound (kosmos, kudos [145]) and of his vitality and his health as warrior:

When a woman from Maeonia or Caria stains with purple dye a piece of ivory that is destined for a bridle, it comes to be stored in the royal treasure and is coveted by many riders; but in the king's treasury it remains, at once an ornament for the horse and a special distinction for its rider. So, Menelaus, your thighs were stained blood-red, and your trim legs and your fine ankles.
(4.141-147)

Here the neat repetition, mianthên [stained], serves as an ironic foil to the brightness and health that are imagined in euphuees [trim] and kala [fine]: blood from the wound might be thought to defile Menelaus' health and beauty, but in fact it only accentuates them. In Vergil's simile, on the other hand, however lovely Lavinia's blush is, however much it betokens her delicacy, there is a suggestion of possible corruption; as her beauty is momentarily spoiled by her tears (lacrimis . . . flagrantes perfusa genas [her hot cheeks were bathed in tears]), as the lilies are at once denatured and perversely beautified by their mingling with the red roses, so, in the mind of Turnus, the beauty of Lavinia and her innocence are jeopardized by what appears to be her equivocal response to her mother's speech. Without violaverit [stains] the mixed similes would be perfectly unexceptionable; with it, they take on an elusive but ineradicable tinge of corruption; they are, with this single word, gathered into the confusion, frenzy, and suspicion that grip Turnus' mind and heart.

An essential aspect of Homer's narrative art is his ability to achieve inimitable unity from multiplicity. If we compare Vergil's scene with Homer's in respect of point of view, we discover that Homer, using an omniscient narrator, moving from the throng at the gates; to Apollo and Achilles; then to Hector, Priam, and Hecuba; and, finally, to Hector alone, has been able to bring Hector and the tragedy and inevitability of his death into a steady, unshakable focus. In Vergil, on the other hand, the epic narrator merges imperceptibly with Turnus himself; we begin and end the scene by viewing Turnus from outside, but in the center of the scene we hear and see the other characters for the most part as Turnus hears and sees them, and, as a result of this shifting of focus and this absence of narrative distancing, we find ourselves in the situation that confronted us in Book 4 with Dido: because we are, in some ways, too close to the narrator-protagonist, we are often unable to distinguish between what is taking place and what the hypersensitive narrator-protagonist believes is taking place, and we are at last unable to extricate ourselves from the illusions of a character whose words and actions we are supposed to be evaluating at some degree of distance. In the case of Turnus, as in the case of Dido, we are necessarily by turns critical and sympathetic, yet we have finally no absolute index which enables us to distinguish truth from illusion; even though we understand that their perceptions are to some extent deranged, we do not know, cannot know, to what extent they are deranged, and, in any case, we must frequently depend on the information they offer us because no other information is available. In the case of Turnus, the shifting of narrative focus, the fluctuation of rhetorical emphasis, the hyperbole that is indicative of distortions that cannot quite be corrected, result in a baffling, disquieting uncertainty about who Turnus is, what he is doing, what is destroying him. This is not to suggest that Turnus is a complicated character and Hector a simple one. Hector shows pride, vanity, heroism, sense of responsibility and love, even as Turnus does, but in the scene in question the proof of Hector's final integrity is the desperate soliloquy in which he confronts and (unconsciously) masters his own uncertainties about himself. The measure of Turnus' final confusion about his motives and himself is the bluster and ranting that mark this scene's close. The crazed arrogance of Turnus' final speech in this scene compares unfavorably both with the vitality and candor of his speech against Drances in Book 11 and with Hector's self-scrutiny and essential humility in the soliloquy of Book 22. The vestiges of Turnus' earlier heroism dissolve before our eyes into the deceptive, destructive sweetness of the mixed similes. Soldier's honor, gallant patriotism, lover's passion are separated from one another at the very moment they ought to be united. Whereas Hector pulls himself together, is pulled together by the momentum of Homer's narrative, in Vergil's narrative Turnus in this scene is unmanned, and his image disintegrates under the pressure of the violentia which is reflected in oxymoron, hyperbole, blurred simile, and shifting point of view. A deliberately violent and disordered poetics faithfully records a turbulent unintelligibility; this deliberate failure of images is a way of showing darkness.