Sacrificial crisis in the epic

The Aeneid begins and ends with sacrifice. In terms of absolute chronology the main narrative starts in book 2 with the dilemma presented to the Trojans by the Wooden Horse (‘an offering’ to Minerva, Aen. 2.31), a dilemma resolved by the words of a Greek, Sinon, who claims to have escaped the fate of human sacrifice, and by the suffering of a Trojan, Laocoon, who, in the act of sacrificing a bull, is himself, together with his sons, cast into the role of a human victim at his own altar. The last action of the epic is another human sacrifice: as Aeneas plunges his sword into Turnus' breast he cries out (12.948–9) ‘It is Pallas, Pallas who sacrifices (immolat) you with this wound’. Other ways of reckoning beginning and end also bring us up against sacrifice: Juno's first speech, launching us in medias res, ends with the bellicose goddess' anxiety that unless she avenges herself men will no longer pay her altars the honour of sacrifice (1.48–9). The paradigm of Oilean Ajax, to which she appeals, inverts the motif of the scapegoat, ‘one for all’ unus pro omnibus (the Palinurus model), as Juno recalls the destruction by Minerva of the whole Greek fleet and its men ‘because of the crime of one man’ (1.41). The furthest forward limit of epic prophecy, the triumph of Augustus on the Shield of Aeneas, confirms the pax deorum with the sacrifice of bullocks at all the temples of Rome (8.719).