In book two, parallel to what happens in
the Odyssey, Aeneas takes over the story and now begins to narrate for his
Carthaginian hosts, his own past and what's happened to him.
This of course goes right to the Trojan War.
The Trojan War has, has ended and Virgil has our hero Aeneas talk about what has
happened in his relatively recent past, this awful thing that has just gone on the
fall of his beloved city. Virgil gives us a customary twist right
away. No, the story doesn't just sit with
Aeneas, as he keeps telling and telling what happened the story gets turned over
early on to this figure Sinon. Sinon is a Greek whom the Trojans meet
near the end of their undoing. It seems that the Greeks have all left, so
they go outside Virgil or Aeneas with them.
And they run across this vagabond Greek who claims to have been abandoned by his
Greek countrymen and as they come and talk to him, they see next to him this giant
wooden horse. At this point we say, you know, who's this
Greek? We can't trust him.
What this thing? We can't trust this.
Sinon tells such a beautiful lie and a well constructed lie that the Trojans buy
it. They un, they think that he's telling them
the truth. What he tells them is that they, there's
this evil crafty Odysseus, Ulysses and he has abandoned Sinon.
Sinon has been pushed away now so he's now ready to betray the Greeks and give away
their secret. The Greeks have built this horse because
they understood from Athena that she was very angry with them for stealing the
Palladium. They're now, as a substitute, they have
constructed this beautiful horse on the hopes that the horse will never be brought
into Troy because if it is brought into Troy, then Troy would never be able to be
conquered. The Trojan are listening to this they, has
an air of truth about it, Sinon is a very good liar and seem to be interested in it.
Now there's this other person, Laocoon, who says, no, no, no,
Don't believe any of this. It's a terrible lie.
Well, up out of the sea come serpents that come and bite him famously depicted in
many art, art, art forms from our past. The serpents come up and bite Sinon,
Oh sorry, bite Laocoon and he instantly dies.
Now, When that happens, the Trojans take this
as a divine sign, reasonable enough for them to do so, that Laocoon in objecting
to this is all wrong, and that now the Trojans have a redoubled urgency of
bringing this horse inside their city. What happens when they do, we all know,
focusing on sign on for a second, it's interesting to look what happens, well in
the, odyssey, think about the number of times Odysseus lies, and the number of
times Homer seems to admire him for doing it, also we get in the case of, Athena a
kind of egging him on to lie. She's delighted when he lies.
The gods like it. Humans like it when he does.
Everyone is entertained by Odysseus's lies.
Well here we have yeah, more lies coming from a Greek.
You can imagine the Romans thinking about these Greeks as being great liars.
But in this case, there's nothing charming about it at all.
It means the undoing of the people that Virgil's story cares most about.
So lies are definitely associated with the Greeks but they're not at all something
that we smile about and like. They're terrible, terrible things.
At this point now we get the definitive version of what happens at the end of the
Trojan War, yes in deed written 1200 years after the fact in Virgil's account.
This is the definitive version of what happens at the close of the Trojan War,
including the Trojan Horse and the other things.
The Greeks come out the horse in the middle of the night, after there has been
great drinking and revelry, the Trojans are not ready for war and the Greeks run
riot. When they do they annihilate the city,
this is a terrible, terrible, Terrible thing.
Virgil, narrates it with great detail. And also with, great concern, on the part
of Aeneas. What's happening to his countrymen, what's
happening to his family, what's happening to his city.
Aeneas is going through all of this. Part of what's being built into the story,
such as, Virgil lavishes it, to us through Aeneas's eyes is a sense that Aeneas has
this hero figure. And a hero who's actually going to be
founded on a core sense of duty and following through.
The first thing he's going to have to do in order to get our story started is to
abandon Troy. He's not going to go down with the ship.
We're going to find that that's a strange thing in Virgil.
Mostly what happens is that Aeneas is able to get his men through.
People that have all their other men disappear from their own on missions where
they are in charge, that's a problem. The great Roman generals are supposed to
go down with the ship. So Riddle's got to start a story based on
an abandonment of Troy through this figure of Aeneas, whose main core skill is his
piatas, his duty, his ability to follow things through.
But there are, of course, plenty of good reasons, for, Virgil or for Aeneas, to
abandon what's happening. There are, figures that come down and tell
him to. We have divine Gods that come.
Ghosts that come and tell him. Other human beings.
His wife herself, in the end, comes and begs, Aeneas to leave.
So there's lots of reasonable, premises built into the story as to why Ineas has
to leave, of course he does. There's a wonderful one that I just wanted
to point to, in the case of Venus and Fitzgerald is in lines 780 to 825, 780 to
825 and it brings home a very specific kind of Virgilian twist how to present
scenes of disaster like this. There is an eerie proof.
To Aeneas that all is lost. You'll recall in this part of the epic
Venus actually lifts the veil of reality and allows Aeneas to peer back behind the
superficial surface of things to see what's actually happening in the
underlying structure of things, The structure of the cosmos such as we
hear Yopof singing about. When she peels that back, what does Aeneas
see? He witnesses the gods themselves in these
shadowy forms, hulk, in these hulk-like forms,
Dismantling the walls of Troy. Now,
That's a terrifying thing to see. To see human beings do it with grand
weaponry and huge formations, that in itself is just awful to imagine, but to
imagine the hidden forces the cosmos actually dismantling the walls of Troy
deeply sinister. For Homer there is anger and there is
rage. For Virgil there's a kind of existential
menace, the whole universe seems to be kind of operating with behind the scenes
forces that sometimes could have deeply sinister ends to them.
Virgil's world is build on a sense that there may be depths of sinister forces
operative in a world that otherwise we as humans might be ignorant of it's depths.
So, we get to see the Troy engulfed in flames, in this broad sense.
And then we get to see Virgil, send Aeneas out.
Virgil brings his father with him, on his shoulders, and his household gods.
Father, coming with him can here would be a nice representation of Virgil's, sorry,
of Aeneus's past and tradition. He's carrying that forward as a burden to
bring that forward with him. And, he's also guiding his son by the
hand, the future in other words, He's guiding forward into the next stage
of things. Destiny is bringing him forward via his
son whereas tradition in the past comes with him, as his father is up on his
shoulders. Is he then going to breezily march into
some new found future with his father and his son?
Well, not at all. Virgil's world is a world that is
characterized by darkness. It's characterized by shifting surfaces.
Be careful as you're reading. It's a strange world to enter in to.
Homer, I think, is quite brightly lit, most of the time.
We get to see what's happening. Finding all the connections between the
things we can obviously see is, is part of the challenge.
For Virgil, there's a difficulty in just getting at what the even what basically is
happening. There'll be a surface level, there'll
always be other levels perating at the same time.
That's happening for Virgil and it's happening for us as we read the story,
It's also happening for Aeneas. He's not going to be in full command of
all the things that are happening around him.
He's being pulled along by this grand destiny toward a future that he is on his
way to, to meet but there'll be lots of pain, struggles and suffering along the
way so watch for these hidden forces.