The Iapyx Episode of "Aeneid" 12 and Medical Tales in Myth and Mythography

Abstract

This paper attempts to investigate an episode of the final book of Vergil's Aeneid about which criticism has been remarkably reticent. The episode, Aeneid 12.391-429, is that in which Iapyx, a doctor absent from earlier battles in the epic, attends the wounded Aeneas. This battlefield-surgeon heals the hero at once with a miraculous drug provided through divine intervention. Apart from commentaries which elucidate individual points of grammar or clarify obscure aspects of lore, no full interpretation of the episode exists, at least not one that satisifies the criteria that I argue need to be met. Such a full interpretation should take account of the mythological and cultural perspective of the passage. Its narrative function, its Homeric and post-Homeric antecedents, and what can be called the medical fictions in the minds of its original audience, all deserve attention. This requires a mixture of structuralist, new-historicist, readerresponse, and philological tactics in approaching the text, but the understanding of the text, not the method or combination of methods, is paramount, because the intent is to show that the passage is not some sort of minor digression, as the absence of full, critical discussion might imply, but is carefully wrought and ought to have a substantial impact on readers' reaction to the climax of the Aeneid. The treatment of Aeneas' wound by the doctor Iapyx in Aeneid 12.391-429 has an obvious source in Iliad 4.190 ff. There, Machaon, who is both a warrior-chieftain and a battlefield-surgeon, is summoned by Agamemnon's herald Talthybios and comes to treat the wounded Menelaus. Vergil knew Homer's descriptions of battlefield-doctoring either from Iliad 4.213-219 or from 11.828-848, where Eurypylos gets surgical and pharmaceutical help from Patroklos, while Machaon and Podaleirios are busy fighting. But Vergil makes considerably more of these scenes than he found in Homer. And the first thing to consider is Vergil's manipulation of these Homeric passages. Over the past two decades criticism has made it quite clear that Vergil engages in what has been called the creative imitation of his sources generally. And even the subtle changes that Vergil makes in Homeric material transform it, often with the effect of emphasizing the distance between Homer and himself or between his world and the world of Homeric epic.l Thus, while acknowledging Vergil's