<em>EGREDERE O QUICUMQUE ES:</em> GENEALOGICAL OPPORTUNISM AND TROJAN IDENTITY IN THE <em>AENEID</em>

Abstract

Tracing back one's ancestry to the mythical Trojans seems to have been a popular practice for influential families in late-republican and Augustan Rome. No less than Caesar’s family, the Iulii, claimed descent from the goddess Venus, through Aeneas’ son Iulus. Octavian, Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted son, likewise claimed such descent, and in addition traced the genealogy of his mother’s family, the Atii, back to Atys, a friend of Iulus in the Aeneid. Such improbable pedigrees served as useful devices for enhancing one’s political status. Indeed, antiquarian works such as De familiis Troianis, attributed to the scholars Varro and Hyginus, made such genealogical constructs possible even for lesser families. For a family seeking elevation to patrician status, being able to lay claim to Trojan ancestry was a coup. Rather than being fixed indicators of birth, such genealogies were flexible narratives that could enhance social prestige as well as gain and justify political prominence. Genealogical opportunism in the Aeneid provides an originary counterpart to such strategic manipulations of ancestry. In seeking to establish themselves in places where it is not always clear whether they are strangers or returning sons, the Trojans readily offer fluid and changing narratives of their own origins, rather than a fixed narrative of biological descent. Genealogies are constructed and reconstructed at will, to reappear in different guises for different purposes, and are subject to multiple interpretations. Like their putative descendants in late republican and Augustan Rome, the Trojans in the Aeneid opportunistically deploy manipulated genealogical claims for social status and political advantage.