Turnus represents furor in just about its purest terms: unconstrained, unthinking madness. How Aeneas acts is much more controversial. Some suggest that he "is presented as achieving [his] goal not through the operation of pietas There is evidence in the text for both viewpoints. On one hand, Aeneas is often described as acting with 'anger' or 'rage':. Seeing that Turnus had driven off, well out of reach, He repeatedly called to witness Jove and the altar of the broken treaty, and then at last went in at the foe, with the flood-tide of battle behind him, gave rein to the pent up fury within him, and terribly unleashed a fierce, indiscriminate slaughter.
But Aeneas' rage is always something that he decides to use, unlike Turnus', which is uncontrollable. The use of 'giving rein' and 'unleashing' is significant, given the simile used to describe Turnus earlier. Aeneas' furor is held in check by his pietas.
Before he can 'indiscriminately slaughter' Italians, he must first remind himself and the gods of the oath they have broken, and the use of 'repeatedly' and 'at last' show that this is not a process he takes lightly. This is typical of Aeneas' behaviour on the battlefield. It is violent and unrelenting, but always tempered by his pietas, and in many ways tied to it - his foe is presented is being impious in some way, much as the Greeks were presented in Book 2, and Aeneas' furor is thus justified.
Killing Magus is framed as a victory of pietas over desire, with Magus offering bribes and Aeneas refusing while invoking Ascanius and Anchises The violence of killing Lausus is tempered by weeping for the Pius bond he had with his father And when the Italians break the treaty, Aeneas holds them back, remaining loyal to the now-broken truce Thus, while there is reason to see the death of Turnus as a failure of pietas, there is also room in the text to read it as a victory of pietas.
And now what Turnus had said was taking effect, was making him more and more indecisive, when on his enemy's shoulder he noticed the fatal baldric, the belt with its glittering studs - How well he know it! Aeneas fastened his eyes n this relic, this sad reminder of all the pain Pallas' death had caused. Rage shook him. Possibly the most convincing of these is the idea that Aeneas owed some kind of duty to Pallas and Evander. This explains why Aeneas is "indecisive" up until he sees Pallas' belt, prompting a bout of Pius rage.
The belt reminds him of his duty, to Pallas as a follower and a surrogate son, to Evander as a friend and ally, and crucially, to the "debt" Evander bestowed upon Aeneas when Pallas died:. In addition to this filial piety there is a second thread of pietas at work in this scene, of duty to the gods. When Turnus takes the belt he is described as "ignorant of fate" Despite being an instrument of fate though, if Aeneas is not even aware of his role he can hardly be said to be acting the higher principle which is pietas, and as I have argued, the importance of pietas to the poem is the strive for it, not necessarily the results.
However, there is still a possible religious element to killing Turnus. The taking of the belt was "wrong in terms of ancient religious thought and practice [ In contrast to the preceding battle scenes where it acts as a restraint on Aeneas' actions, in this scene pietas is operating as it does in earlier books and driving him to act.
This dual purpose is why Aeneas often seems so 'inconsistent', but is also what makes pietas so powerful. Rather than being a driving force as, for example, Odysseus' desire to return home is pietas can be seen as a moderating force. It allows him neither to become too complacent and settle down, nor to become too possessed by furor and act inappropriately. Pietas as a moderating force not only has obvious links to the stoic idea of moderation, but to more general Roman morals as well, in which moderation was seen as the antidote to a continuous moral decline, typified in Vergil's own description by the Italians of the Trojans as easterners:.
The Aeneid is about the founding of Rome, and so Aeneas having his pietas and his moderation tested and proved is ultimately about the founding of the Roman character. The meaning of the ending, as a triumph or failure of Aeneas' pietas, is determined by one's opinion on recent events in Roman history, how they reflected on the Roman character, and whether or not one believes Vergil was cynical or supportive of it.
I would contend that the ending of the poem is deliberately confronting and deliberately left open in terms of consequences and moral judgments, for precisely this reason. While the poem goes to great lengths to explore the challenges to, consequences of, and meaning of Pietas, the interpretation of whether Aeneas and Rome succeed in attaining it in the poem's final lines is left to the mind of the reader.
Pietas does not just adequately describe Aeneas' character. It is absolutely central to understanding him. It is central to understanding the way he makes decisions.
It is central to understanding why he behaves with such seeming inconsistency. Struggling with it is central to making his character as flawed and complex as it is.
Striving towards it is, narratively speaking, what moves the entire plot of the poem forward - without pietas, Aeneas would have been killed in Troy, or settled in Crete, or stayed with Dido, and there would be nothing to drive him onwards as a character. To the reader it is just as crucial. Our understanding of the ending of the poem especially as a modern reader, potentially unfamiliar with the philosophy of the ancients is based on how well we as readers can make sense of pietas.
Our interpretation of the poem's final moments is ultimately based on comparing Aeneas' actions with that understanding of what it means to be Pius - exactly as Aeneas himself would. Galinsky, K. Book Book 1 Quotes.
A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this. Related Characters: Aeneas speaker. Related Themes: Piety.
Page Number and Citation : 1. Explanation and Analysis:. Even here, the world is a world of tears and the burdens of mortality touch the heart. Book 3 Quotes. Search for your ancient mother. There your house, the line of Aeneas, will rule all parts of the world. Related Characters: Apollo speaker. Related Themes: Fate. Page Number and Citation : 3. Book 5 Quotes.
You trusted—oh, Palinurus—far too much to a calm sky and sea. Your naked corpse will lie on an unknown shore. Page Number and Citation : 5. Book 6 Quotes. Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide, but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air—there the struggle, there the labor lies.
Related Characters: Sibyl of Cumae speaker. Page Number and Citation : 6. Book 12 Quotes. I shall not command Italians to bow to Trojans, nor do I seek the scepter for myself. May both nations, undefeated, under equal laws, march together toward an eternal pact of peace. Page Number and Citation : Decked in the spoils you stripped from the one I loved—escape my clutches? Never—Pallas strikes this blow, Pallas sacrifices you now, makes you pay the price with your own guilty blood!
Accordingly, they are stripped of affection, which has been assigned to furor, and physical and emotional connection to blood relatives is discouraged. Given the extended meaning of the word, this tiny nugget of information implies a whole otherwise unattested tradition that would place Aeneas in close parallel with Achilles against Agamemnon, who is after all the Achaean equivalent of Priam.
As we learn from the work of Ioannes Kakridis, however, other classical texts as well as modern fieldwork actually attest two forms of the motif that he calls the ascending scale of affection, both the one reflected in the stories of Meleagros, of Patroklos and Achilles, and of others in the Iliad, in which the person most dear is the person to whom one is tied by the strongest bonds of affection, plus another, in which the ties of blood are most dear.
It also occurs in the tale of the wife of Intaphrenes in Herodotus 3. There is a spirit who dwells in the earth, the story goes, who will not permit the bridge to stand unless a human victim is buried alive beneath it. Should I offer my father, where can I find another father? Should I offer one of my brothers, where can I find another brother?
I shall offer my wife, since I can find another wife. In the Iliad as well as the Aeneid , however, the situation is not as simple as my analysis to this point and folksongs like the one just cited may make it appear.
Earlier in scroll 9, Achilles had spoken of his attachment to Briseis. By line Ajax is addressing him directly in the second person singular: 9. Iliad 9. Even someone whose brother has been killed or his very own child accepts compensation for the dead person; the one [the murderer] remains there in the district after paying much in exchange, and the other, his heart and proud spirit are restrained when he accepts the compensation.
But unstoppable and bad the gods have made your spirit because of a girl , just a girl; and now we are offering you seven of them who are by far the best, and lots of other things beside them.
So make your spirit appeasable, and show respect for the roof: we are in fact under your roof, of all of the Danaans, and beyond all the others we are eager to be the most cherished and dearest to you as many as there are Achaeans. Iliad There is nothing I could possibly suffer that would be worse than this, not even if I were to hear news that my father died — who is now in Phthia weeping gently about losing the kind of son that he has, and here I am, this son that I am, in a foreign country, and I am waging war here for the sake of that dreadful Helen — or if I heard news that my son died, the one who is being brought up in Skyros — if in fact godlike Neoptolemos is still living.
If we then move forward to the end of the Iliad , we see Achilles acting out this very parallelism as he grieves with Priam. So he [Priam] spoke, and indeed he roused in him [Achilles] a longing for lament of his father; then grasping him by the hand, he pushed the old man away a little bit; and the pair of them brought to mind, the one man-slaying Hector, weeping uncontrollably, huddled before the feet of Achilles, and then Achilles weeping for his own father, and again at other times for Patroklos: their wailing rose up all along the dwellings.
Allen, W. Cambridge [Eng. Cairns, D. Braund, pp. Clausen, W. Hahn, E. Heinze, R. Virgils epische Technik. Kakridis, J. Homeric Researches. Knox, B. Lowenstam, S. Muellner, L. New York. Nagy, G. Revised ed. Ann Arbor. Otis, B. Virgil, a study in civilized poetry. University of Oklahoma Press. Paschalis, M. Patton, K. Putnam, M. The Poetry of the Aeneid.
Ithaca, N. Chapel Hill.
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