In this essay I want to perform an experiment on the Aeneid: what if we see it as a parole for the Homeric langue? Or, to address the problem with Homeric cross-references that I summarized above, what if we take the Aeneid as a synchronic snapshot of the Homeric langue, as an individual performance of Homeric themes in Homeric language for a particular audience at a particular moment in time? Characterizing the Aeneid in this way will allow us to examine cross-references between a specific parole and the diachronic langue.

Probably the most striking repetition of arma virumque comes in Book 9, when Turnus kills Cretheus:

A sympathetic connection between this unfortunate poet and Virgil himself has not been missed by many critics (Hardie 1994 on 777): Cretheus sings his own version of the Aeneid, a poem whose subject is arma virum. Our first network of meaning begins to take shape around this idea, for similar self-conscious references occur several times in the Homeric poems as well. For example, in Book 9 of the Iliad the embassy finds Achilles in his tent singing the κλέα ἀνδρῶν, “glorious deeds of men.” (Iliad IX 189). The Iliad, of course, is itself poetry on this subject, especially in Book 9, where the preceding eight books have shown us the aristeia of various heroes, Greek and Trojan. The theme of the Iliad as stated in its proem is μῆνις, but this rage springs from the culture portrayed in the poem, in which men are valued by the spoils they win by accomplishing the very things Achilles sings of in his tent while he sulks; if anything, κλέα ἀνδρῶν represents more of the Iliad than μῆνις does. And we should note that Achilles sings of κλέα ἀνδρῶν because he cannot participate in them, despite his status as the greatest of all ἀνδρῶν. Aeneas too, the vir of Virgil’s poem, is absent from battle as Cretheus sings, since he is seeking assistance from Evander. Virgil’s typology of Aeneas as Achilles is not based solely on similar actions; here we find the connection made through the recurrence of the proem form.

Cretheus’ use of arma virum recalls all three of these Homeric singers, and so extends the meaning of Virgil’s programmatic phrase. In the opening line of the Aeneid, virum was accusative, but in Cretheus’ song the word is genitive plural, ‘of men’—thus in the first line of the Aeneid the word translates exactly the first word of the Odyssey, and in Cretheus’ song it translates exactly the genitive plural ἀνδρῶν of κλέα ἀνδρῶν. The virum of arma virum thus translates the subject of the Odyssey or the subject of the Iliad, as conceived by Achilles, depending on whether it is taken as accusative or genitive. If genitive, the metonymy between arma and the Iliad tightens considerably—arma virum becomes a paraphrase for κλέα ἀνδρῶν, with arma filling in for the κλέος of the war. And since Demodocus conceives of κλέα ἀνδρῶν as a phrase for all epic poetry, arma virum signals not only Virgil’s imitation of the Homeric epics but his conception of the Aeneid as part of the same poetic milieu as Homeric poetry.

There are other signs of this positioning as well. Demodocus’ third song in Odyssey viii is about the Trojan horse (Od yssey viii 499–520), and Cretheus’ poetry is not limited to arma virum but to equi as well. In other words, Cretheus does not seem just to know about the current mission of the Trojans in Italy, but about the whole story of Troy, including, we might imagine, the Iliad itself. He is a poet who brings the Iliad and the Aeneid together into one poem. The often observed connection between Cretheus and Virgil is justified, for Virgil is a poet who accomplishes the same feat. In fact the above connections indicate that the phrase arma virum marks passages in which Homeric precedents may be particularly keenly felt.

What does have a Homeric precedent in this passage is the simile of the eagle and the snake, which describes Tarchon and Venulus wrestling on the horse:

The event described in this simile is found in the Iliad in Book 12, when the Trojans, hesitating before pressing on toward the Greek ships, see an eagle carrying a snake. The snake bites the eagle and the eagle drops it and flies away (Il iad XII 200–207). Polydamas interprets this to mean that the Trojans may reach the ships but will not be able to return home with their booty; Hector dismisses him as superstitious and presses on. Polydamas is correct that the portent is ominous for the Trojans; they do not, in the end, destroy the ships, and although many do escape, probably just as many die. Tarchon creates a similar oracle to encourage the Trojans, the difference being that he does not drop his prey, Venulus, even though he fights back fiercely. The Trojans of the Iliad were doomed, and the dropped snake of their oracle reflects that, but the Trojans of the Aeneid must triumph; Tarchon knows that as long as he can hold on to his snake, as it were, his homemade oracle will be effective in portending Trojan victory.

In fact, we never find out what happens to Tarchon and Venulus; after the simile the narrative shifts to Arruns and Camilla. This lack of resolution in a passage that refers to an eagle seizing prey recalls another Homeric omen that ends with an unresolved image. At Iliad II 308–319 the Greeks, debating their future at Aulis, see a snake eat nine sparrows and their mother, after which Zeus turns the snake to stone as a monument for all time. Calchas interprets this to mean that the Greeks will take Troy in the tenth year; the omen is their assurance that Troy will soon fall. Tarchon and Venulus may not be turned to stone in the narrative of the poem, but the only image of them that the poetry provides is of them wrestling, without end. This limited perspective is a type of petrification—the words on the page describe the state in which Tarchon apparently remains, triumphantly clutching arma virumque. It is a portentious image, as the simile of the snake and the eagle, in connection with their Homeric precedent, shows, and it is a frozen image, like that of the snake in Book 2 of the Iliad. And just as Odysseus reminds the Greeks in Iliad II that after nine years only one remains, the Trojans here may sense that they are nearing the end of their conflict; Turnus’ death and the end of the war are only a book away.

This network of passages is perhaps less than spectacular in its depth, for it only involves one or two Homeric precedents for a Virgilian scene. Still, it shows some ways that we can build an interpretation of a particular Virgilian passage such as that of Camilla and Tarchon out of the network of Homeric passages invoked by those scenes. A potentially more fruitful network takes shape in Aeneid VI: while traveling through the underworld, Aeneas and the Sibyl reach “the most distant fields, separate [from the rest of the underworld], which the famous war heroes populate” (Aeneid VI 477–478). Aeneas stops and talks to the Trojan heroes, who in turn are eager to speak with him. The reaction of the Greeks, however, is quite different.

This variation of arma virum has a Homeric quality to it—the epics make clear that one aspect of rhapsodic virtuosity was to reshape formulaic language into different metrical units for different narrative situations. The Greeks feel fear on several occasions in the Iliad, but this passage refers specifically to the Greeks’ flight to their ships in Book 15 shortly before Patroclus asks Achilles for his armor: “The Achaeans fled because of their weakness, for Apollo sent fear upon them, and gave honor to the Trojans and Hector” (XV 325–327). The implication is that Aeneas appears to the Greeks in the underworld as Hector appeared to them on that day.

But even as they connect Aeneas to the heroism of his ancestors, these passages recall several Homeric scenes that work together to foreshadow Aeneas’ future heroism. The phrase fulgentia arma is something of a formulaic phrase in the Aeneid, appearing ten times in various contexts. By comparison, the Homeric equivalent, τεύχεα παμφανόωντα, appears only twice. One of those appearances comes in Thetis’ plan to request arms for Achilles from Hephaestus in Iliad XVIII: εἶμι παρ’ Ἥφαιστον κλυτοτέχνην, αἴ κ’ ἐθέλῃσιν / υἱεῖ ἐμῷ δόμεναι κλυτὰ τεύχεα παμφανόωντα (“I will go to the famous smith Hephaestus, to see if he would be willing to give to my son glorious shining armor”; XVIII 143–144). Here the network of connections takes the kind of turn I am interested in, one that shows how Virgil integrated the Homeric structure into his own; the Virgilian passage, via fulgentia arma, recalls a Homeric passage, Thetis’ request for Achilles’ arms, which then evokes a Virgilian passage, Venus’ request to Vulcan for Aeneas’ arma: “arma rogo, genetrix nato. te filia Nerei, te potuit lacrimis Tithonia flectere coniunx” (“I ask for arms, a mother for her son. The daughter of Nereus and Tithonus’ wife were able to convince you [to do this] with their tears”; Aeneid VIII 383–384). I call attention to this passage because Virgil explicitly invokes the Iliad and the epic cycle; the wife of Tithonus refers to Aurora, who in the Aethiopis requests armor for her son Memnon. If more of the Aethiopis had survived than the four lines we have, we could follow this reference into that poem as well. As it is, I can only observe that Virgil had not only Homer but the whole epic cycle as the structure under his work.

The other instance of τεύχεα παμφανόωντα in the Iliad comes in Book 5: ἤριπε δ’ ἐξ ὀχέων, ἀράβησε δὲ τεύχε’ ἐπ’ αὐτῷ / αἰόλα παμφανόωντα, παρέτρεσσαν δέ οἱ ἵπποι / ὠκύποδες (“He fell from the chariot, and his arms rattled on him, shimmering and flashing, and the swift-footed horses swerved in fear”; Iliad V 294–296). This is the death of Lycaon at the hands of Diomedes, which may at first seem like an interpretive dead end, but the passage connects back to the Aeneid in a startling way: it is Aeneas who arrives to defend the body of Lycaon, and for the first but not last time in the Iliad, he only narrowly escapes death with divine aid and is thus able to go on to found the Roman race. So while this Homeric passage does not actually invoke any Virgilian passages, it nevertheless is an extremely important passage for the story of Aeneas.

To return to Aeneas’ encounter with the Greeks in the underworld, we find a similar network in an Odyssean passage alluded to there, namely the appearance of Heracles in the Nekuia: “Around him there was the screaming of the dead, as of birds fleeing terrified in every direction” (Odyssey xi 605). We may conclude that in some sense Aeneas in the underworld is a Heracles figure. But we can go further, because this Homeric passage gestures back, as it were, to a Virgilian passage: we make the connection between the Virgilian Aeneas and the Odyssean Heracles, and can then make a further connection between Aeneas and the Virgilian Hercules of Aeneid VIII. Hercules is a legendary hero for Rome before it was Rome, and so will Aeneas be a legendary hero for the next stage of the history of the site of Rome, the stage in which Rome reaches the height of its glory. And without the Homeric connection of Aeneas to Heracles, the resonance of this connection between Aeneas and Hercules in Book 8 could not be felt. And I have only scratched the surface of this network—as I mentioned earlier, the phrase fulgentia arma is repeated nine more times in the Aeneid. Aeneas’ encounter with the Greeks in the underworld refers to all nine, and each of those scenes marks the start of yet another path through the Homeric and Virgilian worlds.

One final example shows how dense the network of meaning can be, how the trail of reference can lead from the Aeneid into Homer and then back to the Aeneid, connecting Virgilian passages that would have no connection without the Homeric intermediary. Again we start with arma virum, as Dido, unable to convince Aeneas to stay in Carthage, resolves to kill herself and gives Anna instructions:

Dido is trying to convince her sister that burning Aeneas’ possessions will quench her love, but in reality she is planning her own death—the whole tragedy of Book 4, the inability of Aeneas to be what Dido wants him to be, is contained in her contemptuous use of the phrase arma viri, which is here used with Aeneas as the referent of vir for the first time in the narrative. The phrase recurs in reference to another pyre, this time in Book 6. Before Aeneas can enter the underworld, he must bury Misenus, who lies dead on the beach, killed when he challenged Triton to a trumpet-playing match. After his men perform most of the preparations for the pyre, Aeneas adds the finishing touch: At pius Aeneas ingenti mole sepulcrum imponit suaque arma viro remumque tubamqu e (“But Aeneas dutifully placed the tomb on a huge pile, along with the man’s arms, his oar, and his trumpet”; Aeneid VI 232–233). This pyre for a deceased companion calls to mind many Homeric scenes; the burial of Elpenor, killed when he fell from the roof of Circe’s house in a drunken stupor; the burial of Patroclus, killed and stripped by Hector; the burial of Hector himself; the burial of Greeks and Trojans during the temporary truce of Iliad VII; Agamemnon’s description of the burial of Achilles in the underworld in Odyssey xxiv; and Andromache’s burial of her father, Eetion. Of these pyres I want to highlight Elpenor’s and Eetion’s because, like Misenus’ and Dido’s pyres, they include arms, Elpenor’s because he did not die in battle and Eetion’s because Achilles did not take them.

First, Elpenor: αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ νεκρός τ’ ἐκάη καὶ τεύχεα νεκροῦ, / τύμβον χεύαντες καὶ ἐπὶ στήλην ἐρύσαντες / πήξαμεν ἀκροτάτῳ τύμβῳ εὐῆρες ἐρετμόν (“But when the corpse and the dead man’s arms were burned, after raising a mound and dragging a gravestone upon it, we planted a well-shaped oar on the top of the mound”; Odyssey xii 13–15). This passage is itself a Homeric doublet: Elpenor requests to be buried this way at Odyssey xi 74. Heubeck ad loc. notes that Elpenor may have had arms, but that he was not a warrior at all, but merely an oarsman. Misenus, trumpeting on the beach while his companions made camp, is a similar sort of man. We could ask then what it means for the programmatic phrase of the Aeneid to appear in a description of a pyre that commemorates a man manifestly different from the heroes of the Trojan war, Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector, whose arms could not be included in their funeral, and that rather honors a man who died an unnecessary, natural (and therefore somewhat cowardly) death. Misenus’ funeral-with-arma also recalls that of Eetion, described by his daughter Andromache in Iliad VI as she begs Hector not to return to the fighting.

Another reference to Eetion comes in Iliad XXII, as Andromache, lamenting the death of Hector, calls her father δύσμορος (XXII 481). And in this same speech Andromache describes what will be the pyre for her absent spouse: “But in your house there are clothes, fine and pleasing, made by the hands of women. But I will surely burn all of these things in a blazing fire—they are no use to you, since you will not lie in them” (XXII 510–514). Through this connection we come back to Dido’s pyre, which twists the details of the Homeric scene: Aeneas, the spouse, is absent, as Hector was, but Dido, unlike Andromache, burns herself: “We were both born for a single destiny,” mourns Andromache at Iliad XXII 477—one of suffering. Dido, too, was born for suffering, but the problem is that she and Aeneas were born for separate destinies. We might infer that she had wanted Aeneas to be another Hector, and she had wanted to be his Andromache. Now she sees the impossibility of this arrangement, that Aeneas cannot be another Hector. The damage has been done, though, and ironically she can only perish in anguish, like Andromache. Another relevant feature of Andromache’s speech is her lament for her son: “For even if he escapes the sorrowful war with the Achaeans, there will always be toil for him, and troubles in the future” (Iliad XXII 487–488). She goes on to describe the loneliness Astyanax will face, the alienation, the roaming. This passage reminds me, at least, of another passage from Aeneid IV, which would not have been recalled by the Aeneid’s pyre scene alone, Dido’s raving wish that she and Aeneas had produced a son: “At least if some offspring had been conceived in me from you before you fled, if some little Aeneas were playing in my courtyard, whose face would remind me of you, I would not seem to have been so completely deceived and abandoned” (Aeneid IV 328–330). The irony, of course, is that Aeneas does have a son, Ascanius, whose promised future is a factor in the decision to leave Carthage; Mercury tells Aeneas, “If the glory of such great things does not move you, think of Ascanius, growing up, and the hope of your heir Iulus” (Aeneid IV 272–274). Ascanius’ future as the first king of Alba Longa and the forefather of a distinguished race is quite the opposite of what Andromache expects for Astyanax, but like Andromache Dido is left with no future. This is a particularly striking effect because it is generated by a network between passages that starts in Aeneid IV, moves by allusion to Odyssey xii, to Iliad VI, to Iliad XXII, and then back to a different passage in Aeneid IV, a move not possible if we rigidly take the Aeneid to refer only to the Iliad as an earlier text, rather than as part of the same network of meaning created by the Homeric poems. And we can even form further links between these passages and those previously discussed. As we learned in Iliad IX, Achilles got the lyre with which he sang the κλέα ἀνδρῶν when he sacked the city of Eetion (Iliad IX 188), whose pyre (after Achilles killed him) forms one of the crucial links in the network under discussion here.

If we return to our original passage, Dido’s lament, we can follow this network in yet another direction. When Dido uses the words lectum iugalem (‘marriage bed’, Aeneid IV 496), she calls to mind the marriage bed of Odysseus, which Penelope uses as the final test to determine whether Odysseus is really who he says he is (Odyssey xxiii 205–206). But while the marriage bed of Odysseus and Penelope serves as a symbol of their undying love and a verification of their reunion, the lectum iugalem of Aeneas and Dido is a symbol of the impossibility of their having such a relationship; indeed, Aeneas would deny that it was iugalis at all. Consequently Dido burns it on a pyre reminiscent of the pyre on which Andromache burned Hector’s possessions, which she described as οὐδὲν σοί γ’ ὄφελος (‘No use to you’; Iliad XXII 513). But through this connection Aeneas is not completely absent. Odysseus describes how he built the olive-tree bed at Odyssey xxiii 200–201: “inlaying it with gold and silver and ivory,” among other things. Dido’s first view of Aeneas after he emerges from Venus’ cloud is described in these same terms: “for his mother had shed upon her son beauty … the beauty the hand gives to ivory, or when silver is set in yellow gold” (Aeneid I 592–593). Dido’s ironic, and pitiful, invocation of the marriage bed of Odysseus thus becomes an invocation of Aeneas himself.

These four sample passages—Cretheus, Camilla, Aeneas in the underworld, and Dido’s pyre—generate their own networks of meaning, and yet the four are not unconnected; indeed, they are all part of the network of meaning around arma virum, a phrase that appears several more times in the poem. That is, all four of these examples can be seen as part of the same network of meaning, which, I am arguing, is as interpretively robust as any that has been found in Homeric poetry. Along the way I have indicated some ways I think these networks could be interpreted; as for the overarching network around arma virum, it would be interesting to see how the meaning of that phrase changes throughout the poem, as Aeneas and the Trojans fulfill their destiny.

And so I return to my original question about whether Virgil understood the nature of Homeric poetry. The connections between repeated language and themes in the Aeneid can stand up to the same scrutiny as those in Homer, and Homer’s poetry itself is a critical part of these networks. As for Virgil’s understanding, I see three possibilities. First, perhaps Virgil understood nothing, and it just looks like he did because the networks I have described are in fact a feature of all language. In this case the distinction between oral and written poetry is perhaps not so defined as some might like. The second possibility is that perhaps Virgil did understand Homer as a formulaic poet, along with all the resonances that an Archaic Greek audience would have felt. In this case (and I do not think it is too much of a stretch to claim) Virgil was the most attentive, versatile, and hard-wired audience that Homer ever had. A third possibility is that he did not understand anything about formulaic poetry, but that it did not matter: his imitation of Homer was so thorough that he unwittingly, as it were, created a piece of literature that functioned, in this respect at least, as a truly formulaic poem would.