The Child and the Hero: Coming of Age in Catullus and Vergil (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Child and the Hero: Coming of Age in Catullus and Vergil Christine Perkell Mark Petrini. The Child and the Hero: Coming of Age in Catullus and Vergil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 152 pp. Cloth, $37.50. This brief study of youthful figures in the Aeneid proposes that Vergil represents the “coming of age” or initiation into adulthood as the devastating collision of the innocent child with the treacherous, deceitful adult world. Failure of youth to thrive, analogous to (according to this reading) the portended failure of Augustus to achieve his goals of Roman renewal, has causes embedded in “human nature, in nature itself, and therefore in history” (2), so that the question implicitly posed by the poem, specifically in this motif of early death, becomes, for Petrini: can the future ever be different from the past? Iulus, poised on the edge of childhood, functions in the poem as a symbol of the possibility of reconciliation of Roman hopes of renewal (as in the prophecy of Apollo, 9.641–44), on the one hand, versus a set of “facts,” as constructed by Vergil, of politics, nature, and history that would suggest that such hopes are illusory (2). Whether there could be a glorious Roman future if Iulus could shake free of the past or whether he is doomed to repeat the worst of Troy remains unresolved through the end of the poem by virtue of Iulus’ suspension in youth. [End Page 464] This argument is set forth in Petrini’s introduction, summarized above. The main part of the book runs to six chapters, represented here by citing some of the author’s own summary remarks. Chapter 1: The Child and the Hero. Child characters, writes Petrini, “exemplify various ideals of innocence—cultural simplicity, enduring love, pietas, an idealized heroic past—and they flourish briefly and die as they come of age” (8). The deaths of the young signify the loss of renewal (9). Another related theme revolves around what the author terms Homeric heroism, read as an expression of cultural innocence. The failure of Homeric heroism in the world of the epic thus marks for Petrini a kind of cultural decline: “Vergil presents the ideals and tokens of conventional heroism—spolia, laudes, virtus—as illusions that betray and deceive in an inverted heroic world” (12). Chapter 2: Catullus. Petrini suggests that failure of innocence, pathology of adulthood (19), faithless love, friendships betrayed, death as separation (17)—motifs found in Catullus 64, 65, 66—were imitated by Vergil. It is from these texts especially that Vergil develops his own themes of the innocence of youth and the deception of the adult world. Chapter 3: Nisus and Euryalus. Petrini finds an elaboration of this initiation into death and corruption theme in the Nisus and Euryalus episode, wherein “Euryalus’ departure from his mother and participation in the night mission become the death of innocence in a corrupt world . . . , and his initiation from childhood to adulthood is a travesty of natural growth” (47). Euryalus “is out of context in battle and the throng of heroes, and in his death we feel the passing of simplicity and delicacy, the destruction of an ideal of amor” (48). Euryalus is initiated into adulthood by Nisus, whom Petrini reads as a cultural primitive, as denoted, for example, by his wearing of a lion skin, thus a representative of precivilized innocence (25). He attributes the failure of the mission of Nisus and Euryalus to the corrupt world they find in Italy and not, in the first instance, to their own reckless choices. In fact he reads the question of whether their actions are right or wrong as negligible; his interest rather is in what he sees as the inevitability of their behavior in the corrupt world of the epic (25–32). Chapter 4: Pallas. “Aeneas’ tutelage of Pallas and the introduction of the younger hero to the world of the older is presented as an assault on innocence, and Pallas’ death as the violation of a figurative childhood. The puer, innocent and inexperienced, is drawn to the attractions of heroism; the rewards and values of the heroic world emerge as illusions, which threaten and...