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.