Table Of ContentVIRGIL’S ASCANIUS
A scanius is the most prominent child hero in Virgil’s Aeneid . He accompanies
his father from Troy to Italy and is present from the fi rst book of the epic to the
last; he is destined to found the city of Alba Longa and the Julian family to which
Caesar and Augustus both belonged; he hunts, he fi ghts, he makes speeches,
and he even makes a joke. In the fi rst book- length study of Virgil’s Ascanius,
Anne Rogerson demonstrates the importance of this character not just to the
Augustan family tree but to the texture and the meaning of the Aeneid . As a fi gure
of prophecy and a symbol both of hopes for the future and of present uncertain-
ties, Ascanius is a fusion of epic and dynastic desires. Compelling close readings
of the representation and reception of this understudied character throughout the
Aeneid expose the unexpectedly childish qualities of Virgil’s heroic epic.
ANNE ROGERSON is the Charles Tesoriero Senior Lecturer in Latin at the
University of Sydney. She has published numerous articles on the Aeneid and
its reception, and is also a regular contributor to Richard Glover’s Drive pro-
gramme on ABC radio, as a guest speaker and ancient world expert in the ‘Self-
Improvement Wednesday’ series.
CAMBRIDGE CLASSICAL STUDIES
General editors
R. G. OSBORNE, W. M. BEARD, G. BETEGH, J. P. T. CLACKSON,
R. L. HUNTER, M. MILLETT, S. P. OAKLEY, T. J. G. WHITMARSH
VIRGIL’S ASCANIUS
Imagining the Future in the Aeneid
ANNE ROGERSON
University of Sydney
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rogerson, Anne, author.
Title: Virgil’s Ascanius : imagining the future in the Aeneid / Anne Rogerson.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2017. |
Series: Cambridge classical studies | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2016045373 | I SBN 9781107115392 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Virgil. Aeneis. | Ascanius (Legendary character)–In
literature. | BISAC: HISTORY / Ancient / General.
Classifi cation: LCC PA6825 .R59 2017 | DDC 873/.01–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045373
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CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments page vi
List of Abbreviations viii
1 Introduction 1
2 The Heir and the Spare 15
3 Old Names and New 37
4 Andromache and Dido 57
5 Trojan Games 78
6 Trojan Fire 101
7 Protecting Ascanius 123
8 Growing Up 145
9 Relegating Ascanius 168
10 Conclusion 190
Bibliography 204
General Index 225
Index locorum 230
v
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began as a PhD dissertation at the University of
Cambridge, supervised by Philip Hardie and Emily Gowers. I am
extremely grateful to them both for their care and advice through-
out my candidature and in the years that have followed. I would
also like to take the opportunity here to thank others who have read
the manuscript in its entirety. My examiners, Stephen Harrison
and John Henderson, were challenging and encouraging readers;
Stephen Oakley and the anonymous reviewers of the Press have
been scrupulous and attentive; Margaret Rogerson and Daniel
Anlezark have helped to shape and refi ne the argument in innu-
merable ways, as well as acting as proofreaders extraordinaire.
Colleagues at the universities of Nottingham, Cambridge and
Sydney, and at Girton College in Cambridge, have also offered
support and friendship which I value most highly. There are too
many to name individually here, but I would like to single out in
particular Helen Lovatt, Lucia Prauscello, John Bradbury, Peter
Sparks, Dorothy Thompson, Alastair Blanshard, Tamara Neal and
Frances Muecke, who have provided an ongoing chorus of encour-
agement and good cheer. Jenny Gautun and the Gautun family
have been a constant bulwark and delight, as well as occasional
research assistants. Without them and many other colleagues and
friends not only this book but my life as well would be much the
poorer.
Sabbatical leave from the universities of Cambridge and Sydney
provided indispensable periods of time in which the book could
advance, and I am grateful to both institutions for these opportuni-
ties, and particularly to chairs of department and heads of school
who have been unfailingly supportive.
Special thanks also are owed to Lindsay Watson, who super-
vised the honours thesis many years ago at the University of
Sydney, which provided the initial impetus for this project on
vi
Preface and Acknowledgments
Ascanius. He has been an inspiration and mentor and I will always
be grateful for the enthusiasm and kindness that he and my other
undergraduate lecturers have shown me.
T he last word goes to my family and particularly my parents,
Mark and Margaret Rogerson. Their unstinting love, help and
concern has provided the foundation and the framework for the
writing of this book as for so much else. To them this book is
dedicated: parentibus optimis, sine quibus non.
vii
ABBREVIATIONS
Aen. Aeneid
Anth. Pal. Anthologia Palatina
Dion. Hal., Ant. Rom . Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
Antiquitates Romanae
FGrH Jacoby, F. 1923– . Die Fragmente
der griechischen Historiker.
Berlin: Weidmann
LIMC 1981– 2009. Lexicon
Iconographicum Mythologiae
Classicae . Zürich: Artemis
OLD Glare, P. G. W. 2012. Oxford
Latin Dictionary , 2nd edn. Oxford
University Press
TLL 1900– . Thesaurus Linguae Latinae.
Leipzig: Teubner
viii
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
Ascanius, the infant prince snatched from the fl ames of a defeated
Troy, is the A eneid ’s smallest hero, but his part in the story that
looks forward to the birth of Rome and the boundless growth of
Rome’s empire has large implications. This book argues that he
raises a series of signifi cant questions about the future, and not
only because – as a child, as his father’s putative successor and as
the ancestor of an important Roman g ens – he himself represents
the glories to come after the Aeneid . Rather, Virgil uses Ascanius
to hint at the manifold diffi culties associated with looking forward
beyond the present. These diffi culties affect not only the poet’s
contemporary readers in Rome (and indeed his later readers in and
outside Rome as well) but also the narrative itself and the char-
acters who toil in it towards the destinies that might be divinely
ordained but remain opaque, at least to them. Further, Ascanius
is used in this way despite the fact, paradoxically, that his own
future, so long in the past when Virgil was writing, might have
seemed fi xed.
When the A eneid focuses on Ascanius and shows us other
characters looking at him too, it is very often the uncertainty, the
contingency and the malleability of the future that are stressed
as the various perspectives the text offers on Aeneas’ small son
reveal how views of the future are shaped by different desires and
competing agendas. At the same time, being a fi gure closely asso-
ciated not only with the Roman future but also with the Trojan
past, which the Aeneid suggests must, to a certain extent at least,
be left behind to ensure the glories that lie ahead, this symbol of
the future is threatened by (and potentially a threat to) the evolu-
tion of that very future. All this makes Ascanius an important and
complicating factor when we consider the issues of continuity and
change that are central to Virgil’s epic. We come to see that he is
potentially too Trojan to inhabit in any comfort the proto-R oman
1
Introduction
world to which the poem looks forward and which he, supposedly,
stands for, and that he is invested not only with a sense of hope
for the future but also its deep anxieties. A nd as the Aeneid traces
his striving towards an adulthood that is several times frustrated
and never properly achieved, Ascanius provides a way of thinking
about the operation of the text itself, an epic which is notoriously
plagued by delays, and which reaches yearningly beyond the con-
straints of its own, in some ways inconclusive, ending towards an
ideal never achieved, and quite possibly unachievable .
L arge questions await, but I begin with something smaller, a n
iconic scene that stresses Ascanius’ diminutive size and encapsu-
lates much of the standard view held, both in antiquity and today,
of Virgil’s youngest hero. In it, still a small child, Ascanius clings
to Aeneas’ hand and follows in his footsteps as he escapes from
the burning city of his ancestors. When Aeneas tells the story to
Dido in Carthage, h e emphasises his son’s diminutive size ( par-
vus Iulus , 723) and suggests both that Ascanius’ infant legs make
his steps shorter than his father’s and that he might be stumbling
slightly as he hurries to keep up (n on passibus aequis , 724) :1
‘haec fatus latos umeros subiectaque colla
veste super fulvique insternor pelle leonis
succedoque oneri; dextrae se parvus Iulus
implicuit sequiturque patrem non passibus aequis;
pone subit coniunx.’ ( Aeneid 2.721– 5)
‘Having said these things, I cloak my broad shoulders and bent neck with
the covering above of a tawny lion’s pelt, and take on the burden of my
father; having attached himself to my right hand, little Ascanius follows
his father with unequal steps; my wife comes along behind.’
This is the picture of Ascanius that dominated the ancient world
from the late sixth century BCE, when black fi gure vases fi rst
show him accompanying his father on the fl ight from Troy. 2 It
became even commoner a fter the forum Augustum was offi cially
dedicated in 2 BCE. In it was a statue of Aeneas fl eeing Troy,
bearing his father Anchises and his ancestral gods on his back and
1 I use the Teubner edition of the Aeneid : Conte 2 011. Translations of the Aeneid and all
other texts are my own throughout.
2 LIMC II.1 Askanios: 2– 3.
2
