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Two Implications of the Trojan Legend
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
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It is a well-known fact that the Trojan legend provided Augustus, as it had provided Julius Caesar before him, with a means of claiming divine ancestry. Likewise the Roman people were made the descendants of a nation renowned for its former greatness and celebrated by Homer. While much attention is paid to these facts, certain implications of the legend, for which apologies were sometimes felt (especially by Virgil) to be necessary, tend to pass unnoticed. One of these is that if the gens Iulia was descended from Aeneas, it possessed in him an ancestor whose birth was admittedly divine, but whose feats of valour were decidedly overshadowed in the Iliad by those of Hector. The other implication which I wish to discuss here is that if the Romans were descendants of the Trojans, it was from a defeated nation that the conquerors of the Mediterranean world had arisen. Was the Trojan heritage, in fact, despite its obvious value as propaganda, something of which the Romans and the emperor himself could justifiably be proud?
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1955
References
page 23 note 1 Horace, , Odes ii. 4. 10–12, iii. 3. 28 (implied), iv. 9. 21–4Google Scholar; Propertius, ii. 22. 31–34Google Scholar, iii. 8. 31; Ovid, , Amor. i. 9. 35, ii. 1. 32, 6. 42Google Scholar, Metam. xi. 760, xii. 66 ff.Google Scholar, xiii. 485–7, &c, Trist. iii. 11. 27–28, iv. 3. 75Google Scholar, Epist. ex Ponto iv. 7. 41 f.Google Scholar; Culex 317Google Scholar. References to pre-Augustan literature are not included, because they are irrelevant to the matter under discussion; it was essentially a problem of the Augustan age, and especially for Virgil. These references are sufficient to show that the Homeric tradition of Hector was generally unquestioned. It is with the exceptions that the text of this article is concerned. In post-Augustan times Hector was still accepted as the great hero of Troy: cf. Statius, , Silv. ii. 7. 54–55Google Scholar; Sil. Ital. xiii. 800; Ausonius, Epitaph. xiv.Google Scholar
page 23 note 2 Ovid, , Trist. ii. 10. 17.Google Scholar
page 23 note 3 iv. 6. 38.
page 24 note 1 11. 456–93.
page 24 note 2 Proclus, , Chrestomathia 2.Google Scholar
page 25 note 1 Cf. quibus … uenisset … armis here (751) and Memnonis arma in 1. 489.
page 25 note 2 Proclus, l.c.: καὶ Θέτις τ
παιδὶ τὰ κατὰ τὸν Μέμνονα προλέγει.
page 25 note 3 As in Propertius. See above and p. 23, n. 3. There are further reminiscences of Hector in Aeneid v. 190Google Scholar (Hectorei socii) and 634 (Hectoreos amnis, Xanthum et Simoenta). Elsewhere, of course, we have the normal Aeneadae (e.g. i. 157, 565; v. 108; vii. 284, 334, 616; viii. 341, 648, &c).
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page 27 note 3 vi. 403.
page 27 note 4 xii. 99.
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page 28 note 1 Among the Augustan prose writers Livy seems most conscious of the difficulty when he carefully explains (i. 1. 1) that Aeneas escaped from Troy (instead of fighting to the death) because the Greeks, with whom he had associations of friendship, did not maltreat him as they did the other Trojans. This is a new explanation, unknown to us before Livy (cf. Weissenborn, ad. loc.; Perret, J., Les Origines de la légende troyenne de Rome (Paris, 1942), pp. 175–7).Google Scholar
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page 29 note 2 Ib. 665–6. The best MSS. have per quem. There is in this passage a possible imitation of the line of Turnus' speech quoted above from Aeneid ix. 155 (decimum quos distulit Hector in annum). If so, the addition of Aeneas here is all the more significant.Google Scholar
page 29 note 3 Ib. xiv. 108–9.