Redeeming Vulcan: Aeneas, the Lar, the Hearth, and Horses in Aeneid 8.541–553
(2019) Le réseau Poésie Augustéenne — Location: Manchester, UK
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- Abstract
- Fire is a major image, theme, and element of structure in the eighth book of the Aeneid. But there is fire, and then there is fire. George Dumézil, for one, has used comparative evidence from the Vedic tradition to illuminate a basic model of fire, naturally tripartite, at Rome: there is the fire of the circular Aedes Vestae that connects Rome through its depressed penus with the earth, the fire on the altars of rectangular temples that helps connects Romans with the templa caeli, the “temples of the sky,” and there is, thirdly, lastly, and most dangerously, the feu defensive, the fires that are so hot that their holy sites are kept outside of the city, of use in helping to protect the city and its sacred fires against enemies, whether in the form of fire or in the form of objects of the smith, forged in a fire whose heat and flames might threaten habitations roundabout. In what follows, I would like to propose that something like Dumézil’s model of fire, and the resolution of its opposities, is at the center of the structural interest of the eighth book of the Aeneid. This process of resolution I have called “redeeming Vulcan,” in a double sense: first, in the sense that Vulcan’s destructive tendencies are put to the work of cosmos and imperium, thereby converting him much in the way that Aeschylus’ Eumenides is a story about the “conversion” or “redemption” of the Furies into beneficent spirits essential to the well-being of Athens; second, in the sense that here, as elsewhere in Roman cult, Vulcan must be “bought off” in order to preserve the human lives that he so often delights in taking. The ideas that I will be presenting today stemmed initially from a crossing of my first book project, on the solitary sphere of Rome, with an upcoming volume I am editing, together with Renaud Gagné of the University of Cambridge, on Cosmography in Greek and Latin Literature. Seeking to understand the earliest view we get of Aeneas in Virgil’s poem, in his cubiculum within the house of his father Anchises on the outskirts of the city of Troy, I turned to the figure of Vesta, and began to develop my theory of what I have come to call, in an article that is nearing completion, the Vesta plot of Latin literature. In presenting this work at a joint seminar of anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and classicists, Philipe Descolla of the College de France asked me whether the cosmic topography of Troy that my work on Vesta in Aeneid II had revealed stood in any particular relationship with the map of Rome that emerged within the eighth book of the same poem: an example, if any were needed, of the immensely wide culture and keen instincts of one of the world’s greatest anthropologists. What I will be discussing today attempts to do just that, and, in the process, presents a model of what could be called a “vertical reading” of Virgil’s Aeneid, on the model of those vertical readings that have been so fruitful in recent years for the study of Dante’s Commedia. Today’s paper is divided into three sections: the first rehearses what I see as the problems of fire and the Vesta plot in Aeneid II; the second looks to the problematic and conflicted role of Vulcan in Aeneid VIII; and the third attempts to show how these two strands come together in the seemingly innocuous passage I have chosen to address, lines 541 to 553 of the Aeneid’s eighth book, as Aeneas makes offerings in Evander’s city, and prepares his departure to Carae, where he will receive the shield wrought by Vulcan’s forge.
- Affiliations
Trinity Cambridge
Citations
Kachuck, A. (2019). Redeeming Vulcan: Aeneas, the Lar, the Hearth, and Horses in Aeneid 8.541–553. Le réseau Poésie Augustéenne, Manchester, UK. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/101032