Untitled Document
Troy in Latin Literature
Michael C. J. Putnam
Brown University
Among the Latin poets Troy is persistently depicted as a place of
reverberating sorrow. This essay will examine, in particular, the
way that Naevius, Catullus, Virgil and Ovid associate the city with
notions of loss and exile. Let me preface this discussion, first with a glance
at the linkage between Roman poetic aspiration and past poetry dealing
with Troy. I will also make brief mention of the motif of the wooden horse,
powerful symbol of the nocturnal destruction that made the city the place
of the most public and, at the same time, most personal of griefs.
Let us begin with one of Lucan’s greatest inventions: Caesar’s visit to
the site of Troy, on his way to Egypt after the victory at Pharsalus. Caesar,
famae mirator (9. 961), mindful of his own repute as he is reminded of the
Trojan past, ponders the “shades that owe much to poets” (multum debentes
vatibus umbras, 963). But, after Lucan’s protagonist passes by memorials
of the burnt city and its walls, of Ajax, Paris, Hector and Priam, the poet
turns to himself and to his own power to immortalize. Exclaiming on the
enormity of the sacred task entrusted to poets (O sacer et magnus vatum labor,
980), he apostrophizes Caesar, commanding his general not to be jealous of
holy fame (sacrae famae). There will be a symbiosis, he proclaims, between
Caesar and poet. Pharsalia nostra is a joint production, consequential deeds
eternalized in deathless words.
Caesar’s self-consciousness about his repute vis-à-vis the heroes of the
past finds analogy in Lucan’s own conditional complementarity between
himself and Homer, “if it is right for the Muses of Latium to promise
anything” (si quid Latiis fas est promittere Musis). The plurality of poets that
Lucan has mentioned twice before becomes the singular Zmyrnaei . . . vatis,
the blind bard of Smyrna, author of the Iliad who continues to animate
This paper was delivered on January 5, 2007, in San Diego, at the annual
meeting of the American Philological Association, as part of a panel, organized by
President Jenny Strauss Clay, devoted to Troy.
De Bello Civili 9. 963-99. For sensitive readings of this extraordinary episode
see F. Ahl Lucan: An Introduction (Ithaca, 1976), 214-22; S. Bartsch Ideology in Cold
Blood (Cambridge, 1997), 131-37. Dio (42. 6) has Caesar crossing the Hellespont
to the province of Asia where he briefly remains to settle affairs, but he makes no
mention of a specific visit to Troy. The decision to restore the city, that Lucan puts
into the mouth of Caesar (9. 997-99), may be in part a bow to one of the other great
appearances of Troy in Latin letters, Horace c. 3. 3. 60-61.
196 the heroes past whose palpable but decaying monuments Caesar has just
traveled.
We may remark on the immediate absence of Virgil here—Rome’s
own greatest purveyor of Troy and its demise. But the thoughtful reader
will have sensed a parallel between Lucan’s address to Caesar and the
extraordinary moment in the ninth book of the Aeneid where the firstperson
speaker—let’s call him Virgil—apostrophizes Nisus and Euryalus
whose (very Homeric) adventures he has just described. Again we have
a conditional clause that averts hubris: “if my songs have any potency”
(siquid mea carmina possunt). But the clear implication is that Virgil, too,
can immortalize through his verse, whose endurance surmounts time’s
inroads. Nor is the author of the second book of the Aeneid absent from
Lucan’s inspiration. The very next episode in De Bello Civili finds Caesar, as
he continues his journey, reaching Egypt. There, fearing to put in because
of a commotion on the shore, he is greeted by a minion of Ptolemy who
rows out from the land to present him with the head of Pompey. Again, the
perspicacious reader of Virgil will recall the Aeneid’s most surreal moment
where we find Priam, killed in his palace not long before, now suddenly
a huge, nameless corpse, head wrenched from trunk. Servius, noting the
difference between Virgil’s ingens and magnus, comments succinctly: “he
touches the tale of Pompey.” Lucan follows suit.
Let us turn now, for a moment, to one of the most salient episodes in the
history of Troy’s final demise: the tale of the wooden horse.

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We know that Livius Andronicus and Naevius each wrote a play entitled Equus Troianus,
and the language of two lines in Ennius’s Alexander is so close to that used
by Virgil to describe the horse, in its second appearance during the Aeneid
(6. 515-16), that they are quoted by Macrobius as Virgil’s model. There is
Aen. 9. 446-49.
9. 1007-1012.
Aen. 2. 557-58:
. . . iacet ingens litore truncus
avulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus.
He lies, a huge trunk upon the shore, head wrenched from shoulders, body
without a name.
Servius on Aen. 2. 557.
For an expansive history of the creature’s story as it appears in Latin letters,
see R. G. Austin “Virgil and the Wooden Horse,” JRS 49 (1959), 16-25, summarized
in, R. G. Austin, ed., P. Vergili Maronis: Aeneidos: Liber Secundus (Oxford, 1964), on
Aen. 2. 15 (pp. 34-6).
Cicero twice mentions a play by that name, once with a quotation (ad Fam. 7.
16. 1), once by title alone (ad Fam. 7. 1. 2). Whether or not this is the same play as that
of Livius or Naevius is unknown.
Ennius Sc. 72-3Jocelyn (quoted at Macr. Sat. 6. 2. 25):
Nam maximo saltu superavit gravidus armatis equus
qui suo partu ardua perdat Pergama.
For with an enormous leap the horse, pregnant with armed men, has
passed over, that by its brood it might destroy the heights of Pergama.
197 a witty elaboration of the tale of the horse and its entrance into Troy put
by Plautus, at Bacchides 925-77, into the mouth of the slave Chrysalus as
analogy for the clever machinations that he is about to implement.10
Cicero delights in drawing on the creature as a symbol of trickery and
treachery, whether tragic (Verr. 2. 4. 52; Mur. 78) or comic (Cael. 67), and
twice sees it as emblematic for the gathering place for a cluster of worthies
(de or. 2. 94; Phil. 2. 32).11 Lucretius (DRN 1. 471-77) uses his summary of the
events at Troy to show off his ability to absorb Greek into Latin—the horse
is durateus, not ligneus—but also brilliantly elaborates Ennius’s suo partu
into partu nocturno (476-77), adding to the horse’s deadly, deceitful birth the
element of night’s darkness, a motif to which I will return. But the horse
receives prominent mention not only in its most famous appearance, in the
second book of the Aeneid, but also in Horace, Propertius and Ovid.12 It is
a major protagonist in Seneca’s Agamemnon, as a chorus of Trojan women
lament the demise of their homeland,13 as it is in a precis, in senarii, of the
opening segments of the Aeneid, that Petronius puts into the mouth of the
poetaster Eumolpus.14
Finally, in classical Latin, Statius offers a comparison of the gigantic, but
benign, equestrian statue of Domitian with the huge, but destructive, equus
of the Aeneid.15 Let me end this equine segment, as I will my discussion as
a whole, with St. Augustine. The great father of the Church will maintain a
creative dialogue with Virgil for his whole career, but the first book of the
Confessions tells of the necessary renunciation of his delight in the tragedy of
Dido and of that “sweetest image of the illusory” (dulcissimum spectaculum
vanitatis) which, to him, is the extraordinary sweep of events in Aeneid 2. It
is natural that Augustine begins his eleven word condensation of the book
as a whole with “the wooden horse, filled with warriors” (equus ligneus
plenus armatis).16
Let us turn now to an examination of Troy as a locus of sorrow. We
begin at the beginning of Latin letters with the fragment from Naevius’s
Bellum Punicum that Servius quotes in his comment on Aeneid 3. 10:
10 For discussion see E. Fraenkel Plautinischen im Plautus (Berlin, 1922), 61-72
(trans. as Elementi Plautini in Plauto [Florence, 1960], 57-67). Plautus makes direct
or indirect reference to the story of the horse also in Pseudolus (1063 and 1244) and
Rudens (268).
11 For further detail see R. G. Austin, ed., M. Tulli Ciceronis: Pro M. Caelio: Oratio
(Oxford, 1960), additional notes, pp. 171-72 (on 67. 12).
12 Horace c. 4. 6. 13; Propertius 3. 1. 25 (with which compare Pliny HN 7. 202), 3.
9. 41-42, 3. 13. 64, 4. 1. 42 and 53; Ovid AA 1. 364, Ibis 569.
13 Lines 611 -48 (the horse appears at 627).
14 Petronius Sat. 89, lines 1-65 (we find the minacem equum at 6).
15 Statius Sil. 1. 1. 9.
16 Augustine Conf. 1. 13. 22. The saint famously expresses his sadness over the
suffering of the Carthaginian queen at Conf. 1. 13. 20-21.
198
Amborum uxores noctu Troiad exibant capitibus opertis
flentes ambae, abeuntes lacrimis cum multis.17
The wives of both were departing by night from Troy,
their heads covered, both weeping, leaving with many
tears.
We find here concentrated together many of the elements that will recur
in later treatments of the city’s final moments. The act of withdrawal is
emphasized (exibant, abeuntes), with motion away from a beloved homeland
anticipating both exile and a spate of wandering. That the departure from
Troy takes place at night, after the city’s fall, will become a standard topos
in subsequent renderings of the tale. Likewise mourning is paramount,
conveyed forcefully by Naevius not only in its physical manifestation
through weeping (flentes, lacrimis cum multis), but also in the covered heads
of the women, a gesture closely associated with the imminent presence of
suffering and death.18 Finally the protagonists, the wives presumably of
Anchises and of Aeneas, will have their surrogates in two of the later texts
to which I will shortly turn.
My second example of Troy as a locus of personal hurt is the 68th
poem of Catullus. As this complex masterpiece evolves, the speaker
offers Laodamia’s marriage to, and loss of, Protesilaus as an analogy for
his relationship with Lesbia. The myth’s topography leads readily to a
denunciation of Troy itself (89-90):
Troia (nefas!) commune sepulcrum Asiae Europaeque,
Troia virum et virtutum omnium acerba cinis,. . .
Troy—the horror!—common grave of Asia and Europe, Troy,
cruel tomb of all heroes and heroism,. . .
This outburst in turn serves as a reminder that his brother, for whose loss he
deeply grieves,19 is also buried at the site of Troy (97-100):
quem nunc tam longe non inter nota sepulcra
nec prope cognatos compositum cineres,
sed Troia obscena, Troia infelice sepultum
detinet extremo terra aliena solo.
17 Naevius BP fr. 4Morel. For valuable commentary, see M. Barchiesi Nevio Epico
(Padua, 1962), 349-58.
18 Barchiesi (op. cit. 354) refers to Val. Max. 3. 8 ext. 4 and Q. Curt. Ruf. 4. 10. 34.
For further detail see R. Waltz “Autour d’un Texte de Sénèque,” REL 17 (1939), 292-
308, especially 299-308.
19 The intervening lines, 91-98, largely recapitulate the earlier 19-24, but are no
less powerful for so doing.
199 . . . whom now so far away, laid to rest not among familiar
graves or near the tombs of kinsfolk, but buried in ugly
Troy, Troy the misfortunate, a foreign soil claims in the
farthest land.
The setting of the Trojan War—that grand cemetery cluttered with the
results of an encounter between two clashing continents—is also the spot
where Catullus’s own private, individual suffering is focused, and which
elicits from him a moving, elegiac response. We here join the poet in
lamenting a double distancing, of the speaker from his brother’s gravesite
and of the brother from the ancestral burial place that by rights should be
his, and whence Catullus is speaking. This distance is partially bridged in
one of Catullus’s most moving poems, 101, likewise addressed by the poet
to his departed brother. There is no mention of Troy but we presume the
speaker’s presence there. I quote the initial four lines:
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus, advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem,. . .
Having traveled through many peoples and over many seas,
I arrive, brother, at these sad obsequies, that I might offer
you the last gift in death and that I might address, in vain, your silent ashes,. . .
A merger of these two poems, as combined influences, with the second
strand about Troy that we have been tracing beginning with Naevius, takes
place where we expect it: in the Aeneid, especially in book 2. Some form of
the word nox appears nine times during the course of Aeneas’s narrative of
Troy’s final, dark hours. Tears both initiate and permeate his telling of the
tale, from the lacrimae that he believes even hostile Greeks would shed on
hearing his story (Aen. 2. to Aeneas himself weeping (lacrimans, Aen. 3.
10), as he leaves his city. And of course there is the negative turn, in relation
to Naevius’s treatment of the story, that Virgil adopts, and adapts, about the
disappearance of Aeneas’s wife.20 Though she is never called uxor (Virgil is
not partial to the word), she is entitled coniunx on seven occasions, and it is
her loss that most readers remember as the salient event in the concluding
moments of Troy’s demise, as told by Aeneas in Virgil’s masterly words.
Catullus 68 and 101 often recur to Virgil whenever the subject of Troy
arises. Line 90 of poem 68, for instance
Troia virum et virtutum omnium acerba cinis
20 For a discussion of the two traditions about Aeneas’s wife, see R. G. Austin,
op. cit. note 7 above), on Aen. 2. 795 (pp. 286-89).
200 is absorbed and varied by Dido as she receives the Trojans at Carthage
(Aen. 1. 565-66):
quis genus Aeneadum, quis Troiae nesciat urbem
virtutesque virosque aut tanti incendia belli?
Who is ignorant of the race of the sons of Aeneas, who of
the city of Troy, and of the heroism, and heroes, and of the conflagration of so great a war? And the conclusion of the first line of 101
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus makes no more striking appearance in the Aeneid than when Anchises addresses his son who has sought him out in the world of the dead (Aen. 6. 692-93):
quas ego te terras et quanta per aequora vectum21
accipio! quantis iactatum, nate, periclis!
Having travelled over what lands and over what great seas,
do I receive you, buffeted by what great perils, my son!
Catullus is replaced by Anchises, brother by son. As we move from our
sublunar existence to the world of ghosts, conversation suddenly becomes
miraculously feasible between living and dead. But there is a special
poignancy here, too, as Virgil replaces the inability of his brother to respond
to the poet’s words with Aeneas’s futile attempt to embrace his father. For a
moment words can be exchanged but touch is impossible.
On three occasions Virgil blends both Catullus poems together for
a particularly powerful effect. The first is the moment in Aeneid 1 where
Aeneas, ignorant that he is addressing his mother, describes his plight to
Venus.22 His last, self-descriptive words, Europa atque Asia pulsus (driven
from Europe and from Asia), are a reminiscence of line 89 from Catullus 68
where, we recall, Troy was called the common grave of Asia and Europe.23
That same Catullan verse and its neighbor, where the word Troia begins
each line in anaphora, also figure earlier in Aeneas’s speech where Troia is
likewise repeated (375-77):
21 Virgil is fond of the ending of Catullus 101. 1. Besides the instances I quote see
also geo. 1. 206, Aen. 3. 325, 6. 335, 7. 228. For commentary see R. G. Austin, ed., P.
Vergili Maronis: Aeneidos Liber Primus (Oxford, 1971), on Aen. 1. 376.
22 Aen. 1. 385.
23 Virgil has Europamque Asiamque at Aen. 10. 91. For further parallels see S. J.
Harrison, ed.,Vergil: Aeneid 10 (Oxford, 1991), ad loc.
201
nos Troia antiqua, si vestras forte per auris
Troiae nomen iit, diversa per aequora vectos forte sua Libycis tempestas appulit oris.24
From ancient Troy, if by chance the name of Troy has
reached your ears, a storm by its own whim drove us, as
we journeyed over various seas, to the shores of Libya.25
The dual reminiscences of Catullus thus recall for the reader not only
the lengthy travel that Aeneas has experienced since his departure from
Troy—and therefore the extent of space hitherto covered in his itinerary of
exile from his homeland—but the sufferings that he underwent there, that
remain a profound part of his heritage.
A further, third, recollection of both Catullus’s poems occurs in Dido’s
first speech to Aeneas after she apprehends his preparations for departure
(Aen. 4. 311 -13):26
. . .quid, si non arva aliena domosque ignotas peteres, et Troia antiqua maneret,
Troia per undosum peteretur classibus aequor?
What, if you were not in search of foreign fields and unknown homes, and ancient Troy yet remained, would Troy be sought by your fleet through the wave-rich sea?
With the help of Catullus, Virgil has Dido remind her absconding lover
both of the “foreignness” of the unknown lands that lie in his future—the
world of Catullus’s dead brother as contrasted to that of Rome—and of
the distance that he has already journeyed away from his beloved home
country as well as of the difficulties of that journey. It also would serve
as a reminder that ancient Troy, the city of death from which Aeneas and
company have escaped, exists only as a ruin.
We should note that all the passages I have just quoted from the
Aeneid, though parts of a grand scheme, are from speeches embedded in
24 The word diversa looks in two directions. It absorbs Catullus’s multa to express
variety. But it also claims kinship with a use of the adjective at Aen. 3. 4 (diversa
exilia) where, according to Servius, it means, distant, far off. Aeneas thus suggests
to his mother both the motley aspect of the experiences that he has endured but also
the time that he has spent and the distance in space that he has covered.
25 I adopt the word “whim” from Austin’s comment (op. cit., note 21 above, ad
loc.).
26 In common between the two passages are the repetitions of Troia (in adjacent
lines) and of aliena (68. 100; Aen 4. 311 ). Non nota and cognatos (68. 97-8) become ignotas
(Aen. 4. 312) and per undosum aequor (Aen. 4. 313) varies multa per aequora (Cat.
101. 1). With inter nota sepulcra also cf. inter flumina nota (Virgil ecl. 1. 51), also a poem
where distance and loss are critical factors.
202 the narrative.27 Virgil thus absorbs and extends the rich personal response
of Catullus’s speaking “I” in one of the most forceful ways that epic can,
through the direct utterance of characters within the story who are granted
by the poet the opportunity to give vent to the intensity of their feelings
through first-person expression. There is one exception to this pattern in
Virgil’s allusions to Catullus 101, namely Aen. 6. 335 where, among the
dead that Aeneas sees waiting to be rowed across the Styx, are Leucaspis
and Orontes who “with him traveled from Troy through the windy waves”
(. . . simul a Troia ventosa per aequora vectos). Even though Aeneas is not
actually speaking, the reader senses the depth of his feelings as he pities
the two (miseratus, 332), and beholds them sad and “lacking the office due
to the dead” (mortis honore carentis, 333). The moment is especially intense.
By means of this rich allusion to Catullus, we remember that the poet,
through the ritual of his song, can at least offer to his dead brother postremo
munere mortis (101. 3), the funeral ceremony that is the last dutiful gift of an
officiant who happens to be also a wordsmith. Of even this gesture toward
his dead comrades Aeneas is incapable.
My last example of the appearance of Troy in Latin literature as a
symbol of sorrow is Tristia 1. 3, one of Ovid’s consummate masterpieces.28
From distance in space (Tomis on the Black Sea) and time (at least one
year of exile), the elegy describes the poet’s last night in Rome before his
relegation. The presentation of the speaker, whom we have every reason
to call Ovid, would seem on first reading to be a spontaneous, immediate
reflection on his fate.29 It is in fact one of the most subtly contrived poems
in classical Latin, with a literary heritage through allusion embracing
Catullus, Lucretius, Horace, Tibullus and the earlier Ovid that permeates
and enriches the text. The chief of these influences, as Ovid himself makes
directly clear and has often been noted by critics, is Virgil, especially the
Virgil of the second book of the Aeneid.30 Ovid draws the parallel between
his own misfortune and the sufferings of Troy’s final night at lines 25-26:
si licet exemplis in parvo grandibus uti, haec facies Troiae, cum caperetur, erat.
If I can adopt illustrious examples for an inconsequential
occasion, this was the appearance of Troy when it was seized.
27 Except for Aen. 6. 335, on which see below, the same holds true for the passages
from the Aeneid enumerated in note 21 above.
28 It is my hope to examine Tr. 1. 3 in detail elsewhere.
29 A recent editor (P. Ovidius Naso: Tristia, ed. G. Luck [Heidelberg, 1977], vol. 2,
p. 36) says that the poem “wirkt…nicht ‘literarisch’ ”
30 See most recently S. J. Huskey, “Ovid and the Fall of Troy in Tristia 1. 3,” Vergilius
48 (2002), 88-104, with full bibliography.
203
The “illustrious examples” are, of course, drawn from the saga of Troy’s
downfall and of the tragedy’s dramatis personae, in Ovid’s case particularly
of Aeneas and his wife Creusa. With mock modesty the poet moves from
epic to elegy, from the stuff of myth, given form in one of Rome’s greatest
acts of the poetic imagination, to the private, personal autobiography of an
individual who happens also to be a master poet, forcibly expelled from
his homeland. Ovid thus returns us to Catullus’s vision of the writer whose
loss is associated with Troy. In fact his lament gains much of its emotional
power from its deliberate comparison with, and from the brilliant turns that
it makes on, the literary tradition that we have been tracing.
The poem’s opening six lines help us at the start trace some of these
themes:
Cum subit illius tristissima noctis imago quae mihi supremum tempus in urbe fuit,
cum repeto noctem, qua tot mihi cara reliqui, labitur ex oculis nunc quoque gutta meis.
iam prope lux aderat, qua me discedere Caesar finibus extremae iusserat Ausoniae.
When the saddest image of that night recurs which was
for me the final moment in the city, when I recall the night in which I left behind so much dear to me, a tear now also glides from my eyes. Now the day was nearly at hand in
which Caesar had ordered me to depart from the bounds of farthest Ausonia.
The reader need not have waited for the explicit mention of Troy at line 26
to realize that from the start we are reliving a version of Aeneid 2. The first
verse itself looks back to Aeneas’s words to Dido summarizing the initial
effect of the battle just begun (368-69):
. . . crudelis ubique
luctus, ubique pavor et plurima mortis imago.
There was cruel grief everywhere, everywhere fear and the boundless specter of death.
Virgil’s use of the superlative plurima becomes Ovid’s more emotional
tristissima; next, his supremum and extremae stress the moment’s finalities—
one cannot supercede its sadness nor the ultimates in time and place that it
projects.31 Equally powerful is Ovid’s replacement of mortis with noctis.32 In
31 Extremae is particularly affecting. It takes us to Ovid’s perspective as he ponders
the enormity of his remoteness from Rome.
32 Virgil uses forms of the word nox nine times in Aeneid 2 (250, 260, 361, 397,
420, 590, 621, 754, 795).
204 fact the chain that takes us, within these lines, from noctis to noctem to lux is
bitterly ironic. The light that follows this night means not life or its renewal,
but merely the confirmation of what the poem itself makes patent: that we
are present at Ovid’s symbolic obsequies (funeris . . . funere, 22-3; funere, 89).
The day that dawns after the dark night of death merely confirms the notion
of exile as a form of animate, continuous death.33 The phrase supremum
tempus, though its immediate reference is to the poet’s last moments in
Rome, in fact adumbrates death itself.34
If night takes us back via Virgil to Naevius, so does the omnipresence
of sorrow.35 Ovid’s own tearful mourning in recollection leads us in two
directions. In the poem itself we have several manifestations of grief, in
particular the astonishing line 17:
uxor amans flentem flens acrius ipsa tenebat.
My loving wife, herself weeping quite bitterly, was clutching me as I wept.
But again we turn back, via Virgil and Catullus, to Naevius’s lamenting
women. And we need no reminding that, in the tradition from Naevius
on, we are dealing with departure from Troy, literally for Naevius’s
protagonists and Aeneas, metaphorically for Ovid, as he imagines his
withdrawal from Rome.
I must be more specific about one character, namely Ovid’s wife. She
enters the poem three times as uxor, twice as coniunx, and plays a major role
as foil for her departing consort.36 It is perhaps Ovid’s greatest irony that,
while he suggests a reverse Aeneas, leaving Augustus’s well-established
Rome for a world of barbarism, his wife must, in this revived but symbolic
Troy, suffer her own form of exile, a living-death on a par with that which
her husband must endure. We glance backward first to the loss of Creusa in
Aeneid 2, then to the uxores of Aeneas and Anchises in Naevius. Ovid’s woe
33 Ovid’s Metamorphoses is, from one angle, an extended meditation on change
as a form of exile and living death.
34 For supremum tempus as the equivalent of death, see, among other examples,
Lucr. 1. 546, 3. 595, 6. 11 92; Cat. 64. 151; Hor. Sat. 1. 1. 98; Ovid e. p. 2. 3. 4.
Virgil puts versions of a parallel phrase, suprema nox, twice into the mouth of
Deiphobus as he describes Troy’s final night which was also the night of his mutilation
and death (Aen. 6. 502-3, 513). The notion of departure (discedere) is picked up
by abiturus (15) and abeuntes (79) which is also Naevius’s word (abeuntes, fr. 4. 3).
35 Cf. also the uses of lacrimas (24) and lacrimis (80). For instances of grieving in
Aen. 2 see 8 (at Aeneas’s tale), 362 (for the fall of Troy), 651 (at the refusal of Anchises
to depart), 784 (tears for Creusa), 790 (Creusa lacrimantem). At the beginning of book
3 Aeneas describes himself, at his departure from Troy, as lacrimans (10).
36 Uxor occurs at 17, 41, 63; coniunx at 79 and 82. Virgil never uses uxor of
Creusa, but she is referred to as coniunx seven times (597, 651, 673, 678, 711 , 725,
738). Creusa uses the word of Aeneas at 2. 777.
205 is as culminative as it is climactic. Naevius’s wives may grieve for Troy’s
dark night, but they leave, we presume, with their husbands. Catullus’s
brother dies (but, we assume, the poet ultimately remains in Rome, or
Verona). Aeneas loses a wife (but he will gain a new one in Italy). For Ovid,
the same husband and wife both live on, but each in a form of exile, each
dead to the other. As the poet so movingly puts it (63): uxor in aeternum vivo mihi viva negatur. my wife, though alive, is forever denied to me, though I live.
Let me end with a final glance at St. Augustine, that repentant
lover of Virgil. Here in full is his summary of Aeneid 2 which closes his
acknowledgement of that poet’s supposedly former seductive hold over
him: equus ligneus plenus armatis et Troiae incendium, atque ipsius
umbra Creusae. . . . the wooden horse filled with warriors and the conflagration
of Troy and the shade of Creusa herself.

The last three words, ipsius umbra Creusae, that also bring Augustine’s
paragraph to an end, are also the final words of line 772 of the second
book of the Aeneid. It is with the recollection of the shade of Aeneas’s lost
wife, with the poetry of loss, exile and death, that the saint concludes his
renunciation. But both placement and exactitude of iteration suggest that
the memory of Creusa stayed with him, as it does with us, along with
the great poetry that influenced, or that drew sustenance from, Virgil’s
masterpiece.❖