Failure to Thrive: The Theme of Parents and Children in the Aeneid, and its Iliadic Models

Abstract

My argument in this paper assumes that most if not all readers of Vergil'sAeneidfind Turnus' death and the death of young men such as Lausus and Pallas a disturbing accompaniment to the poem's laudatory aspects. Critical approaches to the resultant interpretive difficulties have traditionally focused on philosophical, historical, or cultural explication in an effort to resolve or dispel the reader's questions about the poem's purpose and success. I propose here that the poem's tensions engender an uncertainty in the reader which is itself an inevitable and intentional result of Vergil's narrative, and that this response to the poem is a process deliberately set in motion by the poet. Vergil's intent is to implant in his reader a sense of conflict, not only objective (centered in Aeneas'laboresand their goal), but subjective, in that the reader recognizes tension or contradiction in his own response: he knows that Rome did emerge from Aeneas' struggles, and became, in many of the senses foreshadowed by the poem, great, but his reactions to the development of that greatness are negative. Many of the seeming contradictions in theAeneidmake sense if interpreted as efforts on the part of the poet to lead the reader to question both the claims of the narrative and eventually his own responses which once seemed certain and clear. The present essay explores one aspect of theAeneidwhich produces conflict in the reader's response, the ways Vergil constructs a tension between the future as subject of the poem and the future within the poem, a tension rooted in the fact that the future within the poem dies, while the reader himself lives in the future to which the poem refers.