Free will

When Vegio wrote his Supplementum, he intended his work to complete what he believed to be an unfinished Aeneid. In accordance with Renaissance tradition, Vegio believed an epic should praise virtue and disparage vice. Accordingly, he wrote the Supplementum in such a way as to erase the ambiguities present in Virgil's Twelfth Book. This paper studies the effect of Vegio’s additions on three instances in Book Twelve of the Aeneid: the sudden conclusion, the use of ira and furor in the final scene, and the characterization of Turnus. In these instances, Vegio attempts to influence the text according to the standards of his time.

This article dissects the causae of the Aeneid’s plot as outlined at the beginning of the poem. After a brief examination of the way in which the narrators of the Iliad and the Odyssey lay out the motivating impetuses for their plots, I argue that Vergil deploys motivations for the Aeneid in such a way as to imitate some of the problematic aspects of the motivations for the plots of the Homeric poems, taking into account ancient commentaries on those passages and expanding on the errors and ambiguities they point to. Ambiguous and overdetermined etiology is a problem for interpreters of the Iliad, a problem that is thematized in the Odyssey and becomes the subject of metapoetic reflection in the Aeneid. Striving to imitate and surpass his Homeric models, Vergil directs our attention to the complexity of causality in the poem and calls into question the very premise of its plot.

If Virgil set out in 29 BCE to compose an epic in verse to celebrate the recently victorious Octavian as he proclaims was his intent in the Georgics, his Aeneid, the supposed fulfillment of that promise, presents a more complicated portrait of the younger Caesar. The Aeneid recounts the legend of how the Trojan hero Aeneas founded Rome on the shores of Italy after leading the war-racked and dispossessed survivors of Troy on a harrowing journey across the Mediterranean. But beneath the legend of Aeneas, Virgil works in themes that spoke directly to a weary Rome newly emerging from fifteen years of civil wars and social unrest that were provoked and sustained in large part by Octavian"s political ambitions in the wake of the first Caesar"s assassination in 44 BCE. This study will examine how Virgil"s Aeneid as a national epic reconsiders the history and future of Augustan Rome in light of its tumultuous transition from a people"s republic to an autocrat"s empire.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari. (Georgics 2.490-92) Happy he who could recognize the causes of things, and cast all fears and inexorable fate and the screech of greedy Acheron under his feet. Felix, heu nimium felix, si litora tantum numquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae. (Aeneid 4.657-58) Happy, ah, too happy, if only the Dardanian keels had never touched our shores. THE De Rerum Natura tells us that the key to happiness is to recognize the indifference of the gods and the mortality of the soul. The Aeneid shows us a world in which these principles are overturned, a world of inexorable Fate with greedy Acheron at its center.1 Yet even as Virgil denies the truth of the Epicurean world view, he recognizes its beauty. Lucretius postulates that human misery is caused by religio, superstitious fear of divine wrath; by conquering religio Epicurus made it possible for humans to live in tranquillity (e.g., DRN 1.62-79, This paper has benefited greatly from the helpful comments of editor Amy Richlin, the anonymous referees, and many friends and colleagues. In particular, I would like to thank 3.1-30).2 In the Aeneid, religio wins. The Dido episode belongs to a larger pattern in which Virgil employs Lucretian language and imagery to contradict Lucretian doctrine:3 the words of the queen herself, of the narrator, and of other characters continually remind us of the Epicurean ideal even as they show it to be unattainable. I shall argue that Virgil portrays Dido's fall partly as a clash between Epicureanism and the supernatural machinery of the Aeneid. This is not to say that Dido is an Epicurean, but rather that her shifting re lationship to Epicureanism is an important aspect of her character. Ancient "Epi cureanism" is itself a slippery term: it seems that the philosophy of temperance and tranquillity often degenerated in practice into sensualism and superstition.4 In Cicero's De Natura Deorum, an important unsympathetic source for late Re publican Epicureanism, Balbus the Stoic quips that the voluptuous variety of succulent birds and fishes suggests that Providence is "Epicurean" (2.160), while Cotta the Academic insists that Epicureans-even Epicurus himself-exhibit an extraordinarily morbid dread of death and the gods (1.85-86). Dido embodies such ironies, mouthing apparently Lucretian sentiments even as she comes to personify a Lucretian exemplum malum. She speaks words that recall ataraxia while engaging in political activities; while her poet sings a Lucretian song, she succumbs to the passion Lucretius excoriates; she sarcastically points to the gods' indifference a few seconds before she invokes their aid. Yet even an adherence to the purest Epicurean principles could not have helped her. Her serenity and her madness, her love of Aeneas and her loss of him, and finally her suicide, are brought about by that divine intervention which Lucretius declares impossible. Readers since Servius have noted an Epicurean strain in Dido that contrasts with Aeneas' "Stoicism."5 While the latter has received some fairly elaborate 2. See Kenney 1971) 3-4 for a concise summary of this philosophy and of how it differs from the common conception of "Epicureanism." 3. Mentions of this Kontrastimitation (so called by Buchheit 1972) appear frequently in discussions of Virgil's use of Lucretius; see, e.g., Farrell (1991) 169, Hardie (1986) 233 for bibliography. 4. As Kenney (1971) 4 points out, "Nothing in fact could be more misleading than the equation of Epicurean doctrine with mere hedonism. Rather the reverse is the case: the trouble with Epicureanism, and the main reason perhaps why it never enjoyed the general success of Stoicism, was not that it was too easy, but that it was too difficult, too austere, too unworldly." Pease (1927) 248 regards Dido's material and emotional self-indulgence as similar to that of "those followers of [Epicurus] who won for the term 'Epicurean' its less favorable meaning," though such indulgence is "far from the temperate and almost austere life of Epicurus himself." 5. On Aeneas' "Stoicism" see, e.g., Bowra (1933-1934) 366-76, Edwards (1960) 162-65, Galinsky (1988) 323-40. Pease (1935) 36-37 notes that "Dido exhibits not a few characteristics of the typical Epicurean, and as such stands in sharp contrast to the commonly observed Stoicism of Aeneas" (see p. 36 n. 285 for bibliography); Hahn (1931) 19 makes a similar observation and equates Dido's Epicureanism with impietas; Feeney (1991) 172-73 observes, "the urge to read an Epicurean Aeneid founders with Dido, who is herself a character with an Epicurean reading of the poem's action-a reading which is proved comprehensively wrong." Pease (1927) 246-47 also points out some of the Epicurean "hints" I discuss below: the song of Iopas (1.742-46), Dido's sarcastic Epicurean outburst (4.379-80), and Anna's question about Sychaeus' shade (4.34).