Whereas it may be easy to construe the Aeneid as a tale with a clear delineation between masculine and feminine centring around the stability, self mastery and rationality of the male characters versus the irrationality and anarchic impulses of the female characters, it is less a case of gender being clear cut than it is to view the masculine and the feminine as being a far more complex affair, co-existing within the same characters and almost irrelevant to the actual sex of the character.
Oliensis upholds that ‘Virgil associates the feminine with unruly passion, the masculine with reasoned self mastery’ and determines that ‘in narrative terms this leads to mean that women make trouble and men restore order’[1] but the very nature of literary characters is that they are constructs of the author and, especially considering the doctrine that preceded and influenced Virgil, affected by social and cultural considerations. The antithesis between male and female may therefore not be the simple battle of the sexes represented in clear cut terms such as Dido (the female) versus Aeneas (the man) Ideological considerations as well as being structured around this antithesis are as likely to inform as well as be informed by such dialectic. Nonetheless the objective remains to reflect upon scenes in which the masculine and the feminine can be said to be brought to clash or conflict and to consider what issues arise from such a consideration.
Perhaps the first antithesis between the male and the female occurs in Book 1 of the Aeneid in the chaos unleashed by Juno, and the orderly reorganisation of the elements and the scattered Trojan fleet by Neptune. This is not the immediate clash between a sole feminine disruption of natural order and a purely masculine calming presence for the East and the West winds which are taken to task by Neptune have been freed by Aeolus, a male figure, and it is to Aeolus that Neptune directs the snub ‘illa se iactet in aula Aeolus et clause ventorum carcere regnet.’[2] Nonetheless Neptune is not fooled, he has sensed the designs of Juno in the storm and indeed it is she who has put Aelous up to this act of aggression against the Trojans and trespass upon Neptune’s realm. Most importantly the sweetener in the deal for Aeolus was the offer of marriage to Deiopea, a sea-nymph of considerable beauty and so from the outset of the Aeneid the antithesis between male and female is not so much that women cause trouble and men sort out the resulting mess rather than men can be compelled to act chaotically or wickedly because of women and the power that women can hold over them; in this case desire. Whilst this does not exonerate women from the charge of being troublemakers it acts as a reminder that the men in the Aeneid are not without blame themselves. It also so sets a precedent for the inherent ‘wickedness’ of desire, an exclusively female power which is as insidious as it is disruptive.
The first woman in Aeneas’ tale life is Creusa, his wife. Creusa is a character who may at first seem a rather feeble creature, she spends most of her role in the Aeneid in a state of fear before failing to keep up with Aeneas and dying in some unknown manner yet she hardly fits the bill as a trouble making woman. One of her first acts is to implore Aeneas not to rush out into the battle again, or if he does then to take her an Iulus along with him. This is not an actual request but a clever insinuation that Aeneas in abandoning his family for battle may as well take his defenceless wife and child with him since to leave them amidst the conflict would be tantamount to putting them directly in harm’s way. Creusa then actually recalls to Aeneas his duties to his family, reminding him ‘cui paruus, cui pater et coniunx quondam tua dicta relinquor?’[3] That he is not a hot-blooded young warrior with nothing to lose but a son, a father and a husband. The order in which Creusa lists these words is telling in itself of where she herself feels herself to fit into the hierarchy that Aeneas will soon demonstrate himself. Both Aeneas and the reader know that fighting is useless and escape is all that is left as a viable option since Hector’s ghost has already told Aeneas ‘heu fuge, nate dea, teque his ait eripe flammis’[4] so his desire to fling himself into the midst of a losing battle is as irrational as it is vainglorious. Nonetheless it is impossible to tell whether Aeneas would have heeded his wife’s words no matter how sensible they may have been since immediately after she has finished speaking omens from Jupiter inspire Anchises to abandon the city along with his son and grandson and it is this that precipitates their escape rather than any effect Creusa has.
Aeneas’ escape from Troy, whilst displaying a pious commitment to father, son and Penates, the mysterious household gods that are destined for Italy, shows little regard for Creusa. ‘longe servet vestigia coniunx’[5] is his command and he does not even give her the honour of a name but rather uses the impersonal (curiously masculine or feminine) noun ‘coniunx’. R.D. Williams records that Servius attempted to exonerate Aeneas by changing longe to valde, something that Williams describes as impossible but even if it was a possibility then we can see that not long after this disastrous command Aeneas has little thought for his wife during his flight from Troy. Creusa trails in the wake of Aeneas who supports his father on his shoulders and leads his son by the hand. Indeed his concern is wholly for the male side of the family and when he submits to what appears to be panic induced furor he flees without a thought for the wife following behind him. His thoughts for her only return once he has reached the collection of Trojan refugees rallying around the barrow of Ceres. He is quite emphatic that he had no concern for her during his flight since in a dramatic reversal of the story of Orpheus he does not look back until it is too late. Perkell describes the association of pietas with Aeneas as being a purely Virgilian invention and stresses that since the ‘exclusive maleness of Aeneas’ pietas, as reflected in his flight from Troy…occurs as a result of Aeneas’ forgetfulness of Creusa, Virgil may have intended it to express Aeneas’ own unarticulated and unacknowledged values’[6], that is, Aeneas’ prioritisation of father and son over his wife, exemplified in word and deed is an instinctive adherence to the Roman cultural values of late Republican Rome. Divorce law maintained the rights of the father over his children since a father ‘needed an heir to inherit the family property and continue its name.’[7] An historical parallel for the prioritisation of children over wife can be found in the tale of Spurius Carvilius a nobleman who divorced his wife due to her alleged barrenness despite the fact that he is ‘said to have greatly loved the wife that he repudiated.’[8] Like Carvilius Aeneas appears to have felt a great deal for his wife and when he discovers that she is missing rages against the injustice of the gods. Having delivered his father and son into the relative safety of his fellow Trojan survivors he returns to the stricken city to search for Creusa. This is not a particularly rational act for he is much less likely to find Creusa than his to be caught and killed by marauding Greeks. Aeneas is described as ‘insanus’ by Creusa’s shade, something Aeneas appears to concede in his own narrative as he describes how he wandered the streets calling her name. Eventually he is saved from inevitable destruction by the appearance of Creusa’s shade which comforts him, reminds him of his fate and then disappears to leave a distraught Aeneas hugging the air. The parallel between Aeneas’ attempt to embrace Creusa’s shade and Odysseus’ attempt to embrace his mother’s shade in Book 11 of the Odyssey is reasonably clear. Perkell describes Odysseus, along with Hector as ‘the most positive models of male behaviour towards women’[9] so if Aeneas is paralleled with Odysseus here then his actions towards Creusa may be equally positive. More to the point, Aeneas has clearly suffered a grievous loss and this has been in part due to his panic and confusion in leaving Troy. If he has suborned his wife to his child and his father during his attempt to escape it has backfired badly and led Aeneas to foolishly re-enter Troy. In this case it is not the man who brings the woman to her senses but the woman who brings the man to his senses.
Thus the importance of the antithesis between the masculine and the feminine, that is self mastery and unruly passion, is to be found reversed, positioned outside the considerations of the biological sex of the character. It is unfair to blame Creusa for getting lost since it was caused more by Aeneas’ poor plan and sudden panic and whilst Aeneas seems intent on wildly rushing into battle or traipsing the streets of Troy in what appears to be a constructive suicide attempt Creusa, both in life and in death, is there to remind Aeneas of his duties and commitments. Indeed the implication that furor be feminine and self control be masculine is like most gender divisions, apparently socially constructed. Gender being ‘the product [and process] of various social technologies…and of institutional discourses, epistemologies and critical practices, as well as practices of daily life’[10]the antithesis between the masculine and the feminine might be construed as more of an antithesis between the powerful and the powerless, better understood as a power relationship that anything definitively gender based. For example Oliensis describes what she terms as a form of ‘homophobia’ in Rome but it was not simply aimed at men who desired other men but at ‘men who acted like women, and in particular to men who chose ‘passivity’, ‘enduring the woman’s role’(viri muliebria pati.)’[11] The differentiation between the active and the passive is inherent in the very construction of the Latin language thus the very manner in which such relationships were articulated were coloured by the consideration. Via a historical process explicated in excellent detail by Gerda Lerner in her book ‘The Creation of Patriarchy’ Man found a way to deal with his existential dilemma, that is, his ability to control his environment contrasted with his subordination to birth and death, by the creation of symbols language of course being one such formation. One thing that he symbolically had to achieve dominance over was nature and the system of reproduction on which he was reliant upon for his survival, both of which were symbolically female. If we may apply a class analysis to a pre-industrial society it would be likely that Rome would appear to be a class based society based upon the exploiter and the exploited, this was as internal as it was external; Lerner’s argument that class dominance was first established by men over women and then extrapolated to the dominance of some men over other men (indeed she sees this as the first step to the creation of a slave class) then articulated via symbolism and language thus supports the hypothesis that in patriarchal society, weakness and passivity are seen as female, strength and dominance as masculine. This was the system which underpinned the whole structure of class relationships reflecting a ‘natural order’ which was more constructed by man than by anyone else. Badian stresses the understanding of power relationships when he states ‘the obedience of the weak to the strong, to the Roman aristocrat, was nothing less than an eternal moral law.’[12] This structured masculine roles just as it did feminine and so to return to Oliensis’ point about men who allowed themselves to be penetrated, it was seen as such a base matter because gender roles were being swapped and the very basis of class exploitation was attacked, such power relationships underpinned Roman Society, the Roman economy, Roman politics and Roman Imperialism. To put it brutally the Roman ruling class preached a system of ‘fuck or be fucked’, as it was in the private sphere of the bedroom so it was in the public sphere of the forum and never more sharply brought into focus than in the ‘kill or be killed’ equation of the battlefield, as Oliensis suggests ‘sexual intercourse was articulated in terms of social hierarchies and the ‘senior’ partner was expected to maintain and enact his seniority in bed’[13] As an interim conclusion from this discussion it can be posited that the antithesis between male and female within the Aeneid is not a simple calculation of man versus woman but of the exploiter versus the exploited and that it is necessary to look beyond the immediate biological differences between characters if we are to understand this. As a result, in the situations involving Creusa and Aeneas, Dido and Aeneas and even Turnus and Aeneas the actual sex of the character is a literary construct not a literal truth. To illustrate let us consider the scene in Book 4 of the Aeneid when Aeneas is attempting to leave and Dido is urging him to stay.
Certainly there have been some interestingly gender influenced readings of this passage, Perkell herself records that ‘to many critics Aeneas’ leaving of Dido has seemed a heroic assertion of resolve and responsibility against the temptation to self-indulgent, merely personal happiness’[14] and in a slightly more light-hearted manner a recent discussion revealed a distinction between the male view that Dido is ‘clingy and pathetic’ with the female view being that Aeneas is a ‘love rat.’[15]In more literary terms Keith’s view is that this scene results in a contrast ‘which the steadfast Aeneas presents to the changeable Dido exemplifying a consistent pattern of antithesis between male and female in the Aeneid’[16] but I would argue tentatively that this antithesis between male and female is merely expressed by the characterisation of an ideal man and what could be termed a ‘straw woman’ what is really going on is a power struggle between the two characters which is made all the more uncomfortable to a Roman reader by the fact that a ‘female’ is vying with a ‘male’.
Dido’s claims to Aeneas in her speech are truly extraordinary if Republican cultural values are anything to go by; there is a claim of marriage ‘per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos’[17] which Aeneas denies emphatically ‘nec coniugis umquam praetendi taedas aut haec in foedera veni.’[18] There is an aggressive self-assertion in Aeneas’ denials of a marriage contract between Dido and himself which reveals a peculiar renunciation of the masculine authority inherent within (especially ancient) marriage. Interestingly this hypothetical contract of marriage has been entered into not ‘by equal parties to lead an equal life with equal restraints and privileges on either side’[19] indeed it was Aeneas who in any economic sense was in the weaker negotiating position, the homeless exile to Dido’s Queen with a country and a city. Initially he was also psychologically drained and therefore emotionally vulnerable. This ‘contractual’ argument can be taken further in that at no point was Aeneas actually consulted as to any terms to his and Dido’s relationship, especially those that demand he remain in Carthage. His sudden resort to a semi ration-legal argument is an attempt to reassert control but it is not a particularly ‘masculine’ one. The dynamic of power in the relationship between Dido and Aeneas is not simply the clear cut antithesis of masculine and feminine represented by the female and the male character respectively.
Perkell notes that ‘troubled by Aeneas’ lack of courage and nobility here, some critics attempt to defend him, saying that his love was so great he dared not voice it.’[20]It is less that Aeneas has a love so great he can’t give it voice and more that he is in risk of becoming the dominated in this situation and he gets out of it despite his obvious desire to pander to Dido’s passions. She has claimed a right over his freedom of movement, attempted to guilt him into staying with her and even made an attempt at claiming some right to a child from Aeneas. In her outburst she reminds him of the material benefit she has brought him, something no different from a man demanding sexual or marital subordination from a woman on the basis that he provides economic support for her. Whilst he does not succumb ‘to Dido as Anthony had to Cleopatra’[21] he does not so much overcome her as escape from her, it is fair to say that Aeneas performs a role more akin to a ‘woman’, passive and objective whilst Dido performs that of a ‘man’ active, dominant and subjective. The fact that Aeneas asserts his will over that of Dido and leaves Carthage against her wishes can be seen as the ‘masculine’ quality of self-mastery and control being reasserted within the male character where was a genuine risk that control and dominance was about to be asserted by the female character. Aeneas’s consolidation of his piety and his masculine duties is likely to have caused relief as much as it did pride in the male Roman reader. The consequent destruction of Dido’s powerful female figure in her suicide sets the precedent for the killing of both Camilla and Amata, equally strong and notably threatening female characters.
In conclusion the antithesis between male and female in the Aeneid is as Oliensis states ‘complicated and crossed.’[22] If order and control are masculine qualities and chaos and madness feminine qualities then we can be sure that the men are not fully masculine, considering Aeneas’ panic in Troy or his furor in Book 12; and in Creusa’s sound advice and Dido’s attempts to control Aeneas we can see that the women are not fully feminine. The actual gender considerations of the poem are very much a result of the patriarchal nature of Roman society. Virgil is unlikely to have been a feminist, if indeed such terms can be applied to a society that operated two millennia ago, but he was clearly an intelligent and sensitive individual, much of what is articulated within the Aeneid in reference to gender roles is ambiguous and complex and it is the same for the themes of war, imperialism, religion and fate. A simple dialectic between male and female does not occur between the men and women of the Aenied but instead extends outside the borders of the sexual characteristics of the characters and becomes a more political issue. The true antithesis seems to be more centred round the distribution of power and the relationship of competing wills to one another.
[1] Oliensis, pg 303
[2] Virgil, I, 140-1
[3] Virgil, II, 677f
[4] Virgil, II, 289
[5] Virgil, II, 711
[6] Perkell, pg 362
[7] Fantham et al, pg 229
[8] Fantham et al, pg 229
[9] Perkell, pg 357
[10] Keith, pg 7
[11] Oliensis, pg 296
[12] Badian, pg 15
[13] Oliensis, pg 296
[14] Perkell, pg 363
[15] Anon, I don’t want to embarrass anyone
[16] Keith, pg 25
[17] Virgil, IV, 316
[18] Virgil, IV, 338-9
[19] Pateman, pg 154
[20] Perkell, pg 346
[21] Fantham et al
[22] Oliensis
Bibliography
Badian. E, Roman Imperialism in the Late Republic, 1967
Fantham. E . et al. Women in the Classical World, Oxford, 1994
Keith. A. M. Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic, Cambridge, 2000
Lerner. G. The Creation of Patriarchy, Oxford, 1986
Oliensis. E. ‘Sons and Lovers. Sexuality and Gender in Virgil’s Poetry’ Cambridge Companion to Virgil, Cambridge
Pateman.C. The Sexual Contract, Polity Press 1988
Perkell. ‘On Creusa, Dido and the Quality of Victory in Virgil’s Aeneid’ Foley. H edd. Reflections of Women in Antiquity, New York, 1981
Virgil. The Aeneid, Mynors edd, Oxford Classical Texts 1969
