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Chariots in the Aeneid

Alex Dent

Résumé

In this paper I argue that there is a course of imagery relating to chariots and charioteering which runs throughout the Aeneid. This ‘chariot-image’ has reference-points in previous Greek and Roman literature, the institutions of the triumph and the Circus, and draws on the interchange of metaphor between ship and chariot. The development of the chariot-image reflects, and in a sense (drawing on the metapoetic image of a ‘chariot of song’) structures, the development of epic itself. It begins with Juno’s chariot in Carthage, and Neptune’s chariot from which he calms the horse-winds of the storm in book 1. I argue that it culminates in two climaxes, which take place at – and affect our interpretation of – two of the ‘ends’ of the Aeneid itself: the first, a climax of concord, in Octavian’s triple triumph on the Shield of Aeneas, where the triumphal chariot, the solar chariot on the temple of Apollo, and possibly the Circus Maximus are all allusively depicted; and the second, a climax of discord, in the battlefield chariots and the warring bulls simile in book 12. I also argue that the Aeneid’s course of charioteering imagery mirrors that which Damien Nelis has argued for in the Georgics, and that which may have been present in Ennius’ Annales.

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1. Introduction

  • 1 For help on specific points, I am very grateful to Dr Henry Spelman, Dr Peter Agócs, Dr Fiachra Mac (...)

1In a 2008 article entitled ‘Caesar, the Circus and the charioteer in Vergil’s Georgics’ Damien Nelis outlined a course of chariot-imagery running throughout the Georgics.1 That image ran from the poem’s opening invocation (G. 1.40: da facilem cursum, ‘grant an easy course’) to Octavian’s final ascension (G. 4.562: uiamque adfectat Olympo, ‘he takes his path to Olympus’) and traced its progression from war and labour to eventual apotheosis. Nelis noted that Virgil was drawing on the poetic figure of a ‘chariot of song’ in fashioning his course of chariot-imagery. If I may spell out the logic further: a consequence of the ‘metapoetic’ implication of the chariot is that our ways of interpreting the chariot-image should be taken to resonate with, and structure, our ways of interpreting the poem more broadly. The sequence of appearances of chariots, or images of chariots, develops in tandem with the progress of the poem, the ‘chariot of song’, itself.

  • 2 Literal or figurative chariots occur at 1.17, 1.50-207, 1.468-86, 2.270-3, 3.113, 3.537-47, 5.105, (...)
  • 3 Horsfall (2013) 66 on 6.1.

2I argue in this article that a similar course of chariot-imagery runs through the Aeneid.2 Here too the chariot-image structures the course of the epic and how we interpret it. This is particularly the case when the ‘regular Greek interchange of metaphor’3 between the chariot and the ship is taken into account. The helmsman is an important part of the Aeneid’s chariot-image.

  • 4 Giusti (2019) 275 notes that modern readings of the Aeneid rely on ‘a number of interconnected but (...)
  • 5 Farrell (2021). His introduction at 1-40 is (unsurprisingly) a good place to start.
  • 6 Farrell (2021) 114; see also the critique of dichotomous readings in Giusti’s (2023) review.

3The course of the Aeneid’s chariot-image ends in two climaxes. The first occurs on the Shield of Aeneas in book 8 and is one of concordia, in which the chariot becomes an ideal emblem of triumph and harmony. The second is one of discordia in book 12, in which the imagery of the out-of-control chariot betrays book 8’s ideal, and instead brings chaos and instability. My ‘dual-climax’ reading rests on a series of polarities: between concord and discord, peace and war, control and frenzy, Aeneas and Turnus, the Trojans/Romans and the Latins. As Elena Giusti has (critically) pointed out, there is a long tradition of dichotomous readings of the Aeneid;4 a recent example is Joseph Farrell’s Juno’s Aeneid: a Battle for Heroic Identity, in which it is argued that Juno battles to change the poem’s initial Odyssean narrative into an Iliadic one, and that Aeneas is constantly challenged to choose between Odysseus’ or Achilles’ model of heroic kingship.5 But as I argue in my conclusion, the chariot-image’s dichotomy involves not a ‘battle’ but an ambiguity or mirroring, in which the same object can present ambivalence, even polyvalence. Moreover, on the path to the two climactic poles, Virgil offers considerable scope for uncertainty and complexity; the various instantiations of the chariot-image are not sorted into two simple ‘concordant and ‘discordant’ categories, but intertwine a wide variety of threads or voices. It is important (as Farrell notes) not to dissolve those complexities into a simple binary.6

  • 7 Polk (2013).
  • 8 Wilhelm (1984).

4Two previous readings of chariots and charioteering in the Aeneid should be mentioned here. The first is an unpublished PhD thesis by G.C. Polk arguing for a polarity between the negatively characterised charioteer and the more positive associations of the helmsman.7 The second is a short article by R.M.K. Wilhelm, ‘The chariot-ship. Vehicle of Augustan ideology’, in which he reads the two images of the chariot and ship as a fused representation of control.8 In general I argue against Polk’s approach, which does not map onto my reading of the course of the Aeneid’s chariot-image. My overall approach has more in common with that of Wilhelm. But I seek to move beyond his analysis in a variety of respects. Firstly, I offer a comprehensive account of the chariot-image in the Aeneid, including a series of new readings across the length of the poem. Second, I argue that the course of the chariot-image structures the Aeneid itself, with particular attention to the aforementioned ‘twin climaxes’. Finally, I argue that the Aeneid’s chariots must be read in the light of those in Ennius’ Annales and in Virgil’s own Georgics. Taken together, we see a vein of charioteering running throughout the whole course of Roman epic.

5In what follows, I first outline a very selective history of both Greek (Section 2) and Latin (Section 3) literary chariots, of which the most important for my reading are the chariots in Ennius’ Annales and Virgil’s Georgics. I also briefly consider the iconography of the early imperial Circus. I then move to a broadly sequential account of the chariot-image in the Aeneid itself, highlighting the presence of equine or charioteering imagery where necessary, and considering both intratextual and intertextual links relevant to each passage.

6My account begins (Section 4) with chariots in Carthage (that of Juno, and the Greek chariots on the Carthaginian mural of the Trojan war) and the charioteering imagery in book 1’s storm: particularly Aeolus’ horse-winds and Neptune’s chariot. I then (Section 5) turn to the appearance of four white pseudo-triumphal horses in book 3, and contrast them with the anti-triumphal Trojan Horse in book 2. In book 5 we encounter the ship-chariot interchange in both the funeral games and in Neptune’s grand marine procession (Section 6). The discordant theme within the chariot-image becomes more prominent in book 7 (Section 7), both in Latinus’s gift of horses to Aeneas and in the spinning-top simile describing Amata, which I argue contains charioteering elements. From there I turn to the two climaxes. First, that of concord (concordia) on the Shield of Aeneas (Section 8), as the Sun-chariot on Apollo’s Temple looks over Octavian’s triple triumph. I argue that that is preceded by suggestive images in book 6. Second, that of discord (discordia) (Section 9), which develops across the final books of the Aeneid, and in particular in Turnus’ chariot in book 12.

2. Chariots in Greek literature

  • 9 This is historically plausible, if Homeric armies fought in open formation, according to van Wees ( (...)

7Chariots are a recurrent presence in classical epic from the Iliad, where they act as vehicles for divine transportation (e.g. Il. 5.720-32) or for heroic transportation to the front line (where the warrior normally dismounts and fights: e.g. Il. 5.106-13).9

  • 10 Note particularly Simpson (1969). There is a very helpful overview of the chariot as a metapoetic i (...)
  • 11 For Parmenides’ influence on Pindar see D’Alessio (1995) 143-81.

8But there are other uses of chariots in Greek literature on which Virgil can draw. One of the most important is the Pindaric figure of a ‘chariot of song’.10 The chariot normally belongs to the Muses (e.g. Ol. 9.83-89), and the poem is conceptualised as a ‘path of utterance’ (Ol. 9.47: οἶμος ἐπέων). Pindar’s use of the figure may be influenced by Parmenides, who undertook a philosophical chariot-journey along the ‘famous path of the god’ (DK 1.2-3: ὁδὸνπολύφημον … / δαίμονος) following the daughters of Helios ‘to the light’ (DK 1.10: εἰς φάος).11 The chariot is both a vehicle of epinician song and a vehicle of philosophical revelation. In other words, a chariot’s course can stand for the course of the poem and the poem’s subject itself. The figure is picked up by Callimachus in the prologue to his Aitia (Aitia 1 fr.1), where he announces his poetic intention to ‘drive his chariot along untrodden paths’ (δίφρον ἐλ]ᾶνἀνὰκελεύθους [ἀτρίπτο]υς).

  • 12 Discussion in Yunis (2011) 128-30 and 140-7; different viewpoints in Rowe (1990) 233-6 and 241-5 an (...)
  • 13 Yunis (2011) 126.

9 There are also philosophical and political resonances to the Greek literary chariot. One of the most famous examples is found in Plato’s Phaedrus (246a-249c), where Socrates compares the soul to a charioteer driving one good and one bad horse. In his chariot-myth, a wise soul ascends, following the good horse, in a divine procession led by Zeus, where it perceives the Forms; a foolish soul, following the bad horse, suffers tumult and descends. The meaning of the image is controversial,12 but I would like to pick out one interpretation which considers the Phaedrus’ charioteer, good horse and bad horse respectively as analogous to the Republic’s tripartite division of Reason (philosopher-kings), Spirit (soldiers) and Appetite (δῆμος).13 On this view, the Platonic charioteer can stand for Reason guiding the soul towards divine truth, and for a philosopher-king guiding a harmonious πόλις.

  • 14 For discussion of the political resonances of the Hippika see Fantuzzi (2005) 249-68 and Kosmetatou (...)

10 The chariot is deployed in more overtly political contexts in some Hellenistic poetry. Both the Victoria Berenices which opens Callimachus’ Aitia 3 and Posidippus’ epigram AB 87 honour Berenice I, the Ptolemaic queen, and her charioteering success. The poems celebrate the aristocratic and athletic prestige of Alexandria’s ruling family and, by recording their participation in the Olympic Games, emphasise their Greek heritage.14 This political treatment of the chariot may draw on the implications of leadership and control in Plato’s chariot, and is a treatment which Virgil will extend considerably.

3. Roman chariots

11Central to the Roman background for Virgil’s chariot-image are two institutions in which chariots play a starring role: the Circus and the triumph. Both were large-scale spectacles which were appropriated or reworked to project and in some ways shape the Augustan political project. While the Circus provided a large-scale monument beneath the Palatine which Augustus used to harness the political potential of urban geography, the triumph expressed an ideal of Roman conquest, a celebration of the expansion of the empire’s borders.

  • 15 Possibly the first simile in the Annales; for discussion of this question, and allusions to this ep (...)

12 Chariots first make an appearance in Roman hexameter poetry in Ennius’ Circus simile likening Romulus and Remus’ auspice-taking to the start of a chariot race (Ann. 78-83 Sk.):15

certabant urbem Romam Remoramne uocarent.
omnibus cura uiris uter esset induperator.
expectant ueluti, consul cum mittere signum
uolt, omnes auidi spectant ad carceris oras
quam mox emittat pictos e faucibus currus:
sic expectabat populus atque ore timebat
rebus utri magni uictoria sit data regni.

The brothers were competing whether to name the city after Romulus or Remus. Everyone was anxious to see which of the two would be king. They waited, as when a consul prepares to give the sign, and everyone eagerly looks towards the mouths of the starting-gates, to see how soon he might release the chariots from their painted jaws; just so the people waited in silence, to see to which man in fact the prize of the great kingdom would be given.

  • 16 Aicher (1990) 223.

13There is a combination of historical aptness and paradox here. Romulus was thought to have founded the Circus Maximus (Cic. Rep. 2.7.12), and therefore it is fitting that the beginning of his reign is compared to the beginning of a Circus race; but Romulus ruled as a king, whereas it is a consul, the Republican answer to tyrannical kings, who presides over the simile’s Circus scene. The Circus Maximus lay between the Aventine and Palatine hills; it was on the former that Romulus and Remus took their auspices16 and on the latter that Augustus would later construct his imperial seat, overlooking the Circus itself. Virgil will exploit the potential of Ennius’ unusual ‘historical’ simile in his own first simile comparing Neptune to a Republican statesman calming a troubled populus.

14As Damien Nelis has argued, Virgil offers a sustained engagement with the chariot-image, set against a circensian and triumphal background, in his Georgics. Nelis traces a connection between the depiction of civil war as an uncontrolled chariot (1.511-4), the ‘turning-point’ at the end of book 2 (2.542: et iam tempus equum fumantia soluere colla, ‘and now it is time to release the steaming necks of my horses’), the triumphal proem to book 3 (3.1-48) and later passages on chariot racing (3.103-22, 3.179-208). Across these passages, he demonstrates that the metapoetic ‘chariot of song’, circensian allusion, and triumphal imagery together create a coherent ‘path’ for the poem as a whole, culminating in Octavian’s final apotheosis. My own analyses of the chariot in the Aeneid owe much to Nelis’ article. I believe that they both corroborate Nelis’ insights with respect to the earlier poem, and further illustrate the intricate connections between Virgil’s didactic and epic poems.

15The simile of the out-of-control charioteer at the end of Georgics 1 merits some further discussion, in anticipation of the Aeneid’s chariot-image. Virgil offers a frightening description of how war spreads (1.511-4):

            saeuit toto Mars impius orbe
ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae,
addunt in spatia, et frustra retinacula tendens
fertur equis auriga neque audit currus habenas.

Wicked Mars raged across the whole world, as when the chariots have poured themselves forth from the starting-gates, and make for the running-spaces, and the charioteer, holding the reins in vain, is borne along by his horses and the chariot does not heed his directions.

  • 17 Humphrey (1986) 62-3, 91-5), also discusses the possibility that the Temple of the Sun overlooked t (...)
  • 18 Wiseman (2019) 122-39 argues (against the conventional view) that the Temple of Apollo instead look (...)
  • 19 Grotto (2025) 15 argues along the same lines, and at footnote 88 has a useful record of the scholar (...)

16Virgil links the topography of the Circus (1.512: carceres, ‘starting-gates’; 1.513: spatia, ‘running-areas’) to that of a war-torn world (1.511: toto orbe). For his Augustan readers this link may be supported by the incipient development of a cosmic – or at least solar – ideology of the Circus at the time. It is possible that in the Augustan era a continuous circuit of seating was completed; a link to Sol was promoted by the (10 BC) erection of an obelisk from Heliopolis in the central spina (or barrier); and integrated into the Circus architecture were temples to Sol (who drove a four-horse chariot, quadriga) and the Moon (who drove a two-horse chariot, biga), each continuations of shrines that pre-dated the Republic.17 Overlooking all was the Palatine, crowned by the Temple of Apollo (dedicated in 28 BC) above whose pediment was a sculptural group of the solar quadriga (Prop. 2.31.11), which I discuss further below;18 the complex therefore promoted an alignment between imperial power, the cosmos, and the Circus Maximus. Admittedly the fullest interpretations of the Circus in these terms are late (e.g. Tert. de spect. 8-9), and Virgil died before the obelisk was erected; but there is good reason to think that an alignment between Circus and cosmos was conceived of by the Augustan age.19 Virgil is figuratively situating the civil war in an urban space devoted to grand-scale order, in addition to emphasising a loss of civic stability through an out-of-control auriga. The disorder expressed here, and attempts to control it, will become programmatic for the Aeneid itself.

17I also wish to focus briefly on the proem of Georgics 3 (3.1-48). In describing a future templum de marmore which Virgil will construct in Octavian’s honour, the poet probably looks towards a later panegyrical epic (if not yet the Aeneid as eventually written). The most significant passage for our purposes is 3.8-23:

            temptanda uia est, qua me quoque possim
tollere humo uictorque uirum uolitare per ora.
primus ego in patriam mecum, modo uita supersit, 10
Aonio rediens deducam uertice Musas;
primus Idumaeas referam tibi, Mantua, palmas,
et uiridi in campo templum de marmore ponam
propter aquam, tardis ingens ubi flexibus errat
Mincius et tenera praetexit harundine ripas. 15
in medio mihi Caesar erit templumque tenebit:
illi uictor ego et Tyrio conspectus in ostro
centum quadriiugos agitabo ad flumina currus.
cuncta mihi Alpheum linquens lucosque Molorchi
cursibus et crudo decernet Graecia caestu. 20
ipse caput tonsae foliis ornatus oliuae
dona feram. iam nunc sollemnis ducere pompas
ad delubra iuuat caesosque uidere iuuencos,

I shall try the path, by which I also may raise myself from the Earth and as a victor fly across the lips/before the eyes of men. I shall be the first, if only I have enough time left, to bring back the Muses with me to my homeland, returning from the Aonian summit; I shall be the first to bring Judaean palms to you, Mantua, and I shall lay down a temple of marble on the green plain next to the water, where the broad Mincius wanders in slow bends, and covers its banks with soft reeds. In the middle I will have Caesar, and he will hold the temple; for him I, victorious and distinguished in Tyrian purple, will drive a hundred four-horse chariots to the river. For me, all Greece will leave behind Alpheus and the groves of Molorchus, and will compete in races and boxing in raw gloves. I myself will bring gifts, my head adorned with cut wreaths of olive. Now already it is pleasing to lead solemn processions to shrines, and to see cattle slaughtered…

18The idea of travel in uia activates the ‘path of song’ topos and continues the chariot-image initiated by the preceding reference to Pelops’ charioteering (3.7-8: Pelops acer equis, ‘Pelops fearless with horses’). For Virgil this path lies in ‘raising himself from the ground’ (3.9: tollere humo), and he sees the poetic chariot as an elevating force in the manner of Parmenides and Pindar. This poetic chariot is matched by the chariot of the uictor, as Virgil envisions himself returning from Greece in poetic triumph to found a temple for Octavian in thanksgiving, and by those participating in the celebratory chariot races. It is neat that a feature of the ‘Muses from the Aonian summit’ (3.11) which Virgil brings back to Rome is the Greek figure of a ‘chariot of song’, combined here with the emphatically Roman triumphal chariot.

  • 20 Argued for in Wilkinson (1970) 286-90.
  • 21 First discussed in Thomas (1983) 92-113, who argued convincingly for Callimachean influence in resp (...)
  • 22 See Meban (2008), particularly 155-67.
  • 23 Skutsch (1968) 18-20. For discussion of Nobilior’s temple see Heslin (2015) 202-7.

19In fact we can develop these themes by considering Virgil’s sources more closely. There are allusions here to Pindar,20 Callimachus’ Victoria Berenices,21 the general Roman practice for dedicating temples upon completion of a military victory,22 and Ennius’ Annales, whose fifteenth book (the final in the first edition) probably ended with an account of his patron Marcus Fulvius Nobilior’s triumph and dedication of the Aedes Herculis Musarum.23 The Victoria Berenices opens Aitia 3 with a Ptolemaic panegyric which centres on Berenice’s victory in a chariot race, while Virgil opens Georgics 3 with a Caesarian panegyric, in the course of which the poet himself claims he will organise (presumably poetic) chariot races: another piece of poetic plunder brought back from the ‘Aonian summit’. Meanwhile M. Fulvius Nobilior brought back statues of the Muses from his campaign in Ambracia and therefore Virgil is following in his footsteps in leading the Muses from their Greek home. If it is right that the first version of Ennius’ Annales ended with M. Fulvius Nobilior’s triumph and temple, and if it is right that the chariot race simile was the first simile in the Annales, then the first Roman hexameter epic was framed by circensian and triumphal chariots, and culminated in the temple foundation which Virgil emulates in this passage. Charioteering here becomes a central part of both Virgil’s imagery and his intertextual programme. Moreover, there are obvious connections between this passage and the depiction of Octavian’s triple triumph on the Shield of Aeneas in Aeneid 8, which I discuss below.

4. The storm, Neptune and Carthage: first strands

  • 24 Austin (1971) 36 on 1.17.

20Book 1 contains various beginnings for the Aeneid’s treatment of the chariot. The very first chariot we encounter in the Aeneid is Juno’s at Carthage (1.16-17: hic illius arma, / hic currus fuit, ‘here the goddess kept her armour, here was her chariot’), a seemingly incidental detail which alludes to the lengthy description of Juno’s flying chariot at Iliad 5.719-31. R.G. Austin suggests that it is a reference to an image of Juno in her chariot in her Carthaginian temple.24 The Aeneid’s first chariot is therefore found in Rome’s future enemy city, and belongs to the deity most opposed to Aeneas’ mission. Dido’s Carthage displays the vengeful chariot of Juno in her temple, whereas Augustan Rome instead is overseen by the solar quadriga on the Palatine Temple of Apollo. Just as Aeneas must first pass through the newly founded Carthage before founding Rome, the Aeneid’s chariot-image must also commence in Carthage (with all its own imperial ambition) before the triumphal Roman climax on Aeneas’ Shield sweeps these associations away.

  • 25 Kopff (1981) strongly argues that Virgil had read the original Epic Cycle texts (e.g. at 921). By c (...)

21There are other ‘anti-Trojan’ chariots in Carthage’s Temple of Juno which Virgil describes in book 1. On the mural depicting the Trojan war, Aeneas sees first Troilus, defeated by Achilles, dragged behind his own chariot (1.476-7: fertur equis, curruque haeret resupinus inani / lora tenens tamen, ‘he is borne by his horses, and hangs supine from the empty chariot, still holding onto the reins’); then Hector’s lifeless body dragged behind Achilles’ chariot (1.483-4: ter circum Iliacos raptauerat Hectora muros / … Achilles, ‘three times Achilles had dragged Hector around the walls of Ilium’). Troilus receives only a mention in the Iliad as one of Priam’s dead sons (Il. 24.257); Virgil here appears to draw on the Cypria (in which Achilles kills him) and on Sophocles’ Troilus (in which he was ambushed while exercising his horses).25 Both Troilus’ chariot and Hector’s disfiguration behind Achilles’ chariot represent complete Trojan defeat, which (like the Carthaginian chariots) will ultimately be superseded by Roman victory.

  • 26 Feeney (1991) 132.

22The Homeric chariots which we see in Juno’s temple provide a baseline, or even a negative image, against which Virgil’s depiction of the chariot as a vehicle of Roman imperium may be measured. Juno keeps not only her chariot but also her arma (‘weapons’, 1.16: the second occurrence of the word in the Aeneid) at Carthage, in a challenge to the arma uirumque (‘weapons and the man’, 1.1) which will found Rome. The chariot, which will (in its triumphal and Apollonian guises) come to be a symbol for world domination in the final scene of Aeneas’ Shield, is here harnessed for implacable opposition to Rome. But Virgil is careful that this future world domination and its symbolic chariot is not overshadowed, even implicitly. The solar quadriga, sculpted on the Palatine Temple of Apollo before which Octavian sits on Aeneas’ shield, can fly through the aether (upper air); Juno’s Iliadic chariot can only fly between the earth and the starry heavens (Il. 5.769), and in the Aeneid Juno is emphatically queen of the aer (lower heaven).26

23 The Carthaginian chariots come either side of the other major instance of charioteering imagery in book 1: the storm, in which we see horse-winds first loosed by the quasi-charioteer Aeolus then tamed by Neptune from his divine chariot, which serves as the vehicle for his mastery of wind and wave, and as a programmatic symbol for future Trojan-Roman history.

  • 27 Grotto (2025) 1-15.

24My reading of the winds as equine is supported by Francisco Grotto’s recent article ‘Horses in the tempest: the shape(s) of the winds in Aeneid Book 1’, in which he convincingly argues that Aeolus’ winds, as described at 1.50-86, are to be envisioned as horses, and in particular horses racing around the Circus.27 He points to a variety of textual markers, including 1.53 carcere frenat (‘he reins them in their prison’; note that carcer can also be used of the starting gate of the Circus, OLD 3) and 1.63 et premere et laxas sciret dare iussus habenas (‘he knew how to tighten and to relax the reins in accordance with his orders’), and the long tradition associating winds and horses, of which the earliest poetic attestation is the simile at Il. 10.437 comparing Rhesus’ horses to the winds.

  • 28 See Hardie (1986) 322-5.

25Grotto suggests that one consequence of his reading is that the horse-winds threaten Jupiter’s ordered cosmos-Circus. Aeolus, the divine charioteer-cum-magistrate, is supposed to protect a threefold merism that represents the cosmological order, maria ac terras caelumque profundum (‘the sea and the earth and the deeps of the sky’, 1.58);28 his personal authority as rex is guaranteed by the supreme rex Jupiter. However, he instead releases chaos, and it is Neptune who must calm the storm from his chariot, like a statesman subduing a mob (1.147-56):

            rotis summas leuibus perlabitur undas.
ac ueluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est
seditio, saeuitque animis ignobile uolgus,
iamque faces et saxa uolant—furor arma ministrat; 150             
tum, pietate grauem ac meritis si forte uirum quem
conspexere, silent, arrectisque auribus adstant;
ille regit dictis animos, et pectora mulcet,
sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor, aequora postquam
prospiciens genitor caeloque inuectus aperto 155               
flectit equos, curruque uolans dat lora secondo.

On smooth wheels he glides over the crests of the waves. As often when a riot has arisen amongst a large crowd, and the unruly mob runs riot, and torches and rocks are sent flying – their fury finds weapons for their hands; then, if by chance the people have seen some man who has some weight amongst them for his goodness and his deeds, they fall silent, and stand with their ears pricked; he commands their passions with his words, and soothes their hearts; so the whole crashing of the sea fell silent. Then Father Neptune, looking out across the sea, and carried into the open sky, turns his horses and gives them their head, flying in his following chariot.

26The divine sea-charioteer Neptune, acting with serene authority (cf. 1.128: summa placidum caput extulit unda, ‘he lifted his head calmly from the crests of the waves’), reasserts control over the out-of-control horse-winds. His reassertion of control, moreover, is grounded in a sense of Olympian hierarchy (he chastises Aeolus for acting meo sine numine, ‘without my divine authority’, 1.133) and is described in cosmological terms (1.142-3: tumida aequora placat / collectasque fugat nubes solemque reducit, ‘he placates the swelling seas, disperses the banked clouds, and brings back the Sun’); although Neptune’s chariot is not the quadriga of Sol, it momentarily assumes its celestial function and leads the Sun on its path.

  • 29 For discussion of the possibility that the statesman may be identified with Cato the Younger, see H (...)
  • 30 Humphrey (1986) 61-2.

27 The statesman simile also points to the Circus via allusion to Ennius’ Circus simile in the Annales; there, a populus awaited a signal from a presiding consul, while here a populus are calmed by a Roman statesman (a quasi-Republican atmosphere is created by such language as seditio, uolgus, and magno in populo).29 It is perhaps significant that Neptune was associated with the Consualia through his connection to hippodromes;30 a nexus emerges between Ennius’ consul, Virgil’s statesman, the Circus games over which the consul presides, and Neptune himself. Virgil ensures that the historical Circus (and its political potential) is embedded from the outset in his chariot-image.

  • 31 See Feeney (2014) 215 for further discussion of this idea.
  • 32 Cf. TLL s.v. arrigo, which draws parallels for arrigere aures with horses from Ov. Met. 15.516, Sil (...)
  • 33 Cf. Eleg. in Maecen. 1.127-8 tu mulcere iubam, cum iam torsisset habenas / procedente die, respicie (...)

28Virgil also extends to the crowd the equine imagery used to describe the winds.31 They prick up their ears as horses do (1.152: arrectis auribus astant);32 Donatus notes on Terence’s Andria 933 (arrige aures, ‘prick up your ears’) that the figure is translatus ex pecudibus (‘brought across from animals’). The speech has an effect on them comparable to an equestrian with a horse: mulcet (1.153) suggests ‘stroking’, as Aeolus does with the waves of the sea at 1.66 (mulcere), and as one does with a horse; the orator’s actions could literally be translated as ‘stroking the chests’.33 It also echoes Aeolus’ control of his winds, mollitque animos et temperat iras (‘he soothes their spirits and tempers their wrath’, 1.57), which appeared, like the crowd, as unruly horses.

  • 34 Nelis (2015) 156.
  • 35 Freudenburg (2019) 301.
  • 36 Horace’s Odes 1.3, which warns Virgil of the folly of navigating the seas as he prepares to cross t (...)

29There are two final observations to be made about book 1’s storm. First, Damien Nelis has shown that the storm, with reference to a Lucretian metaphor (DRN 6.34: uoluere curarum tristis in pectore fluctus, ‘to revolve the sad waves of cares in his breast’), reflects the troubled mind of Juno, and its calming (both by Neptune and the statesman) represents the first demonstration in the Aeneid that ira can be tamed.34 Kirk Freudenburg has in turn exploited this insight to suggest that Neptune’s chariot, which represents divine harmony in contrast to the storm’s furor, alludes to the chariot in Plato’s Phaedrus.35 The chariot is both a divine instrument and the restorer of order. Second, the storm can be interpreted in metapoetic terms as a burst of furor to propel the epic in medias res.36 Neptune’s chariot may therefore rescue both Aeneas and the Aeneid from shipwreck (for a ‘ship of poetry’, cf. e.g. Ov. Fasti 3.790: et des ingenio uela secunda meo, ‘and may you give sails to my second burst of genius’), and provide a stable poetic basis on which Virgil may initiate a heavenwards journey in a chariot of song (1.155-6: caeloque inuectus aperto / flectit equos, curruque uolans dat lora secondo).

30Book 1 therefore initiates several major themes for the chariot-image. On the one hand are the chariots of Carthage, the images of violence and Trojan defeat, and the chaos of Aeolus’ uncontrolled circensian horse-winds. On the other there is the charioteer Neptune, the beneficent restorer of both political and psychological order, whose vehicle propels Virgil forwards on his ‘path of song’. These are the incipient strands with which Virgil will develop his charioteering themes of discord and concord.

5. Triumphal beginnings

31Virgil first turns semi-explicitly to the triumphal chariot in his description (and Anchises’ interpretation) of the Italian horse-omen in book 3 (3.537-43):

quattuor hic, primum omen, equos in gramine uidi
tondentis campum late, candore niuali.
et pater Anchises ’bellum, o terra hospita, portas:
bello armantur equi, bellum haec armenta minantur. 540               
sed tamen idem olim curru succedere sueti
quadripedes et frena iugo concordia ferre:
spes et pacis’ ait.

Here I saw four horses on the grass, the first omen, grazing far and wide on the plain, their coat of snowy white. And my father Anchises said ‘You bear war, O foreign land: the horses are armed with war, this herd threatens war. But nonetheless the same horses may one day be accustomed to be fitted to a chariot and to bear the reins and yoke in concord: there is a hope, also, of peace.’

  • 37 The other occurrence of concors describes the souls of Caesar and Pompey in Elysium: 6.825.
  • 38 For concordia, see Cairns (1989) 85-108; see also Putnam (1980) 10-1.

32The omen presents the same sequence of bellum before pax, and the same polarity between discordia and concordia, which we have already seen in Neptune’s calming of the winds. Future bloodshed (3.539-40: bellum bello bellum) constitutes a necessary prelude to a possible establishment of peace (3.543: spes et pacis). The image of horses united in concord (3.542: frena iugo concordia ferre) is also essential for the promise of peace after war. This is one of only two occasions in the Aeneid where the adjective concors is used (the noun concordia is never found);37 beyond pointing to the harmony of four yoked horses drawing a quadriga (3.541: curru succedere sueti), it identifies concordia as an important theme both in the Aeneid’s chariot-image and in the Augustan pax Romana which the poem anticipates.38 It is only in the Augustan pax that conflict will truly be resolved, and that the concord which the horse-omen ultimately promises will be achieved.

  • 39 Discussion and bibliography in Horsfall (2006) 379 and Heyworth and Morwood (2017) 220.
  • 40 Weinstock (1971) 326-30.

33The sequence of peace (or at least conquest) after war is exactly what is celebrated in the triumph: it is therefore appropriate that there are allusions to the Roman triumphal chariot in this horse-omen.39 The quattuor equos foreshadow the four horses of the triumphal quadriga. After seeing the omen, the Trojans (worshipping Minerva) are described as ouantis (3.544): possibly simply ‘praising’, but also suggesting the ouatio, that species of second-tier triumph, of which Octavian celebrated two in 40 and 36 BC.40 A quadriga was not used in the ouatio, but the description of Salmoneus (6.785-94, discussed below), who also rides a quadriga and is described as ouans (6.589), supports the idea that Virgil is alluding to Roman military celebration. Precise triumphal language is naturally not to be expected here to describe a people not yet even Roman. The significant point is that Virgil has associated the chariot with the cycle of bellum and pax, and through the chariot has nodded to the triumph, the ceremonial celebration of this cycle in future Rome.

  • 41 For discussion of white horses in a triumph, see Weinstock (1971) 68-75. Versnel (1970) offers the (...)

34Virgil also nods towards the triumph in the horses’ white colour, candore niuali (3.538), a iunctura which is echoed at 8.720 of Apollo’s temple (niueo candentis limine Phoebi, ‘on the white threshold of gleaming Phoebus’) and at 12.84 of Turnus’ horses (qui candore niues anteirent, ‘who surpassed the snows for whiteness’). There is some evidence that in the early Republic white horses in a triumph were perceived as a deity-imitating aberration: Livy (5.23.5-6) records an outburst of disapproval when Camillus used white horses in his 396 BC triumph over the Gauls, on the grounds that white horses properly belonged to Jupiter and Sol, not overreaching generals. But whatever its origins, by the early Imperial period there is a clear association between white horses and the triumph. Propertius (4.1.32) ascribes four white horses to Romulus’ triumphal chariot, as does Ovid (Fasti 6.723) to that of Aulus Postumus Tubertus in 431 BC; Tibullus (1.7.8) mentions white horses in his celebration of Messalla’s triumph. It is also recorded in Suetonius (Augustus 94) that Augustus’ father dreamt of his son in a triumphal chariot drawn by twelve white horses.41

  • 42 It is also tempting to compare the Horse’s entry through a wall which the Trojans break down (2.234 (...)
  • 43 There is a full discussion in Horsfall (2008) 209-21, who suggests that ritual may be viewed as an (...)
  • 44 For the singing girls and boys, cf. Horace Car. Saec. 6 and Livy 27.37.13; for the ceremonial folia (...)

35The horse-omen’s triumphal links are therefore plain. However, I suggest that the Aeneid’s chariot-image has already obliquely alluded to the triumph in the Trojans’ reception of the Wooden Horse in book 2. But here the triumphal chariot is nightmarishly distorted, a grotesque hybrid horse-vehicle, bringing doom rather than celebrating peace. The Horse moves by rotarum lapsus (‘the gliding of wheels’, 2.235-6) with which we might compare Neptune’s sea-chariot (1.147: perlabitur undas) and a racing chariot at the Olympic games (G. 3.180: rotis praelabi flumina, ‘to glide by the river on wheels’).42 The reception of the Horse is suffused with hints of Roman processional or ritual usage:43 the choruses of girls and boys (2.238-9: pueri innuptaeque puellae / canunt, ‘boys and unmarried girls sing’) and the leafy coverings (2.249: festa uelamus fronde per urbem, ‘we cloak throughout the city in festal foliage’) point to a festal atmosphere suitable for a triumph and juxtaposed against the looming tragedy.44 If we read the Horse as a monstrous kind of triumphal chariot, it represents a continuation of the sequence of ‘anti-Trojan’ chariots in the Temple of Juno in book 1. It is simultaneously the cause and the celebration of the Greek victory over the Trojans.

36Besides the comparison to book 3’s horse-omen, there is also a network of connections in the destruction of Troy to the equine storm-winds of book 1. The Greek attack on Aeneas’ band of men is compared to a storm of clashing winds and a turbulent sea (2.416-9), in which the East wind rejoices in its horses (2.417-8: laetus Eois / Eurus equis, ‘the happy East wind, with its horses of the dawn’); the trident used by Neptune to refloat the ships cast on the rocks by the storm (1.145: leuat ipse tridenti, ‘he raised them with his trident’) is instead deployed by Nereus, whose daughters follow Neptune (5.822-6), to whip up the waves (2.418-9: saeuitque tridenti / spumeus atque imo Nereus ciet aequora fundo, ‘briny Nereus raged with his trident and hurls forth the seas from the lowest deep’). These correspondences activate a connection between the cosmic rupture of book 1’s storm and Troy’s urban catastrophe of book 2. That connection is drawn more broadly by the sequence of storm similes in the destruction of Troy (2.304-8: Aeneas watching the sack like a shepherd watching the south winds driving a fire; 2.516: Hecuba and her daughters hiding like doves from a storm). But whereas book 1’s storm is calmed by a chariot, the storm-like destruction of Troy is initiated or inflicted by an unnatural horse-chariot.

37The strands which we have identified in Book 1 have therefore been developed and intertwined. The Wooden Horse, and the Trojan collapse which it initiates, pick up the anti-Trojan Carthaginian chariots and the storm’s chaotic horse-winds. Virgil’s depiction in book 3 of a four-horse team which might draw a triumphal chariot is, in many ways, a vision of victory and concord which continues the themes of Neptune’s divine chariot. However, the Wooden Horse also offers a nightmarish anticipation of the implied triumphal chariot in Book 3, which itself explicitly alludes to the spectres of warfare and discord.

6. Book 5: the ship race and the marine procession

  • 45 Cf. Perry (2013) for a discussion of the funeral games in their Homeric and Bronze Age context.
  • 46 Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) on Horace Odes 1.14 offer a useful introduction to the metaphor.

38We encounter the Aeneid’s most explicit engagement with the Circus in the ship race at 5.114-243. Three important motifs or intertexts should be borne in mind when reading this passage. The first is the regular ship-chariot interchangeability (to which I have alluded above). The second is the scene’s Homeric model: the chariot race in Iliad 23 which begins Patroclus’ funeral games (as this begins the games celebrating the first year of Anchises’ death), refracted through the prism of the ship-chariot interchange. Just as the τιμή-centric values of Homeric society are reflected in those games,45 so Virgil emphasises the Roman values of the Circus in his own ship race: skilful helmsmanship (or charioteering), communal spectacle, and benevolent leadership. Third, and essential for the political resonances of the ship race, is the common motif of the ship-of-state, as deployed for instance by Horace in Odes 1.14 (alluding to Alcaeus’ allegory for the government of Mytilene).46 I wish to integrate the ship race into the Aeneid’s broader network of charioteering imagery and in particular to tease out a connection between the ship race and Neptune’s marine procession later in book 5.

  • 47 Cf. Nelis (2001) 210-221.

39 A further general point concerns the Sicilian location of the games. The verb circumflectere (5.131, of ships rounding the meta or ‘turning-point’ of the ship race) recalls Helenus’ prophecy at 3.374-462, in which Aeneas is advised to round the metae of Sicily (3.429-30: praestat Trinacrii metas lustrare Pachyni / cessantem, longos et circumflectere cursus, ‘it is better to round the turning-point of Sicilian Pachynus, taking longer, and to go round the lengthier route’). These metae may primarily denote the limits of the island; but Helenus also perhaps projects the Trojan journey as a kind of chariot race, in which Sicily is a meta between Troy, Carthage and Rome.47 The ship race is a re-enactment in miniature of that much grander course.

  • 48 Feldherr (1995) 245-65.

40Andrew Feldherr has convincingly shown that the ship race is replete with allusions to the Augustan Circus, and that Virgil may well be responding to a cosmic conceptualisation of the Circus.48 Here I only wish to pick up on some of the implications of Virgil’s circensian allusions. First must be considered the simile which makes explicit Virgil’s connection between the ship race and circensian chariot races (5.144-7):

non tam praecipites biiugo certamine campum
corripuere ruuntque effusi carcere currus, 145
nec sic immissis aurigae undantia lora
concussere iugis pronique in uerbera pendent.

Not so swiftly have chariots taken the field in the two-horse contest and rushed on, released from the starting-gates, and not thus have charioteers struck their waving reins on their yoked team, and they strain forwards to the blows.

41Virgil’s simile makes explicit the connection between his ship race and a chariot race. It also points to an agonistic desire for his own poetic race to surpass those of his predecessors, including the chariot race of Il. 23 and perhaps Ennius’ simile which likens a ship race to a chariot race (Ann. 463-4 Sk.), and his Circus simile at 78-83 Sk. (discussed above). The poetic figure of the ‘chariot of song’ accentuates this intertextual contest. There is therefore a series of competitions initiated in the simile: between the ship race’s contestants themselves, between Virgil and previous epic poets, and between the heroic helmsmen of the ship race and the modern charioteers in the Circus. A darker undertone may also be present: first through the allusion to Ennius’ Circus simile, which may call to mind the legendary strife of Romulus and Remus, and second if we press on the verbal parallel between effusi carcere currus (‘released from the starting-gates’, 5.145) and the simile ending Georgics 1 (1.512: ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae, ‘as when the chariots have poured themselves fourth from the starting-gates’), which compared civil war to an out-of-control chariot.

42 The chariot-simile’s implications anticipate the balance between order and control on the one hand, and excessive laudum cupido (‘desire for glory’, 5.137-8) on the other, which characterises the ship race itself. The ship’s name Chimaera, after the two-headed monster which also appears on Turnus’ helmet and symbolises his furor (‘madness’, 7.786-7), connotes the ship-chariot’s civilising power; the monster itself has, at least notionally, been tamed for sport. By contrast Aeneas appears in the beneficent role of a presiding magistrate, whose presence alone is sufficient for communal harmony (5.107-8: laeto complerant litora coetu / uisuri Aeneadas, ‘they filled the shore in a contented gathering to see the sons of Aeneas’).

  • 49 For naufragium as a charioteering term see Sinclair (2013) 495; for its usage in political contexts (...)
  • 50 Nelson (2023) 247-8.

43But Sergestus surrenders a gubernator’s self-discipline (5.202: furens animi, ‘frenzied in spirit’), tries to turn too close to the meta (5.202-3: prora ad saxa suburget / interior, ‘urges his prow inside towards the rocks’) and suffers shipwreck (5.204: saxis in procurrentibus haesit, ‘was fixed on the jutting rocks’). Sergestus, moreover, is the ancestor of Sergius Catilina (5.121: domus tenet a quo Sergia nomen, ‘from whom the house of Sergius takes its name’), of whom Cicero famously asks quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia (‘to what end will your unreined recklessness hurl itself’, In Cat. 1.1) in response to his attempted overthrow of the Republic. Sergestus’ calamity in the ship-chariot race is presented as a failure of leadership with destructive consequences, just as his descendant’s later political destructiveness is described with a common equine metaphor by Cicero. Note that naufragium can describe a shipwreck, a chariot crash in the Circus, and a political calamity: the Sergii are guilty of all three.49 Retrospectively, the name Phaethon, here a name of the Sun, but hinting perhaps at the Sun’s doomed son, at the dawn of the day of the games is an early warning of the dangers of overreaching charioteering (5.105: Auroram Phaethontis equi iam luce uehebant, ‘now the horses of Phaethon brought the dawn and its light’). In support of this proleptic reading of Virgil’s ship race, it has been recognised, most recently in Thomas Nelson’s Markers of Allusion in Archaic Greek Poetry, that Patroclus’ funeral games allude proleptically to future events.50 Virgil is once more reworking techniques which he has drawn from the Iliad.

44A trio of helmsmen-charioteers rounds off book 5. The first of the three is Neptune in his sea-chariot, leading his marine procession (5.816-26):

his ubi laeta deae permulsit pectora dictis,
iungit equos auro genitor, spumantiaque addit
frena feris manibusque omnis effundit habenas.
caeruleo per summa leuis uolat aequora curru;
subsidunt undae tumidumque sub axe tonanti 820
sternitur aequor aquis, fugiunt uasto aethere nimbi.
tum uariae comitum facies, immania cete,
et senior Glauci chorus Inousque Palaemon
Tritonesque citi Phorcique exercitus omnis;
laeua tenet Thetis et Melite Panopeaque uirgo, 825
Nisaee Spioque Thaliaque Cymodoceque.

When these words had soothed the glad heart of the goddess, father Neptune yoked his horses with gold, and put bits in their wild and foaming mouths, and gave them full rein with his hands. He flew across the surface of the sea in his blue-green chariot; the waves were stilled and the swelling sea with its waters subsided beneath his thundering axle, and the clouds fled from the vast vault of heaven. Then appeared the diverse visages of his companions, the huge sea-beasts: the old band of Glaucus, and Palaemon son of Ino, the swift Tritons, and the whole army of Phorcys; on the left there was Thetis, with Melite and the maiden Panopea, Nisaee and Spio, Thalia and Cymodoce.

45Venus has called on Neptune as the authoritative charioteer-deity, the calmer of the tempest, whom we saw in book 1. She recalls the storm as an instantiation of Juno’s wrath (5.781: Iunonis grauis ira …, ‘the deadly anger of Juno’; 5.789-90: maria omnia caelo / miscuit Aeoliis nequiquam freta procellis, ‘she stirred up the whole sea and the sky to no avail with the help of Aeolus’ winds’), and Neptune responds in terms which similarly equate the storm with mental frenzy (5.801-2: saepe furores / compressi et rabiem tantam caelique marisque, ‘I have often checked the rages and such wild fury of the sky and the sea’). Verbal echoes between books 1 and 5 reinforce both Neptune’s capacity to calm Venus just as the statesman calmed the crowd (5.816: permulsit pectora dictis; cf. 1.153: ille regit dictis animos et pectora mulcet), and the supernatural nature of his sea-chariot (5.819: per summa leuis uolat aequora curru; cf. 1.147: rotis summas leuibus perlabitur undas). But whereas Neptune’s sea-chariot is only briefly depicted in book 1 (1.147, 1.155-6), here Virgil (as if fulfilling a deferred promise) offers a full and magnificent description, from the yoking of the horses with gold (5.817: iungit equos auro genitor) to the trailing constellation of marine deities.

  • 51 tonanti is used of Jupiter’s thunder: OLD II.B.

46Virgil first describes the alien and monstrous elements of the procession (5.822: uariae comitum facies, immania cete), and then depicts them in terms of structured array (5.824-25: Phorcique exercitus omnis laeua tenet Thetis et…); just as Neptune dictates their physical positioning, so Virgil’s exquisite Graecising display of mythological knowledge (5.826: Nisaee Spioque Thaliaque Cymodoceque) imposes a kind of artistic order on the immania cete. According to Hesiod, the nymph Cymodoce (‘wave-receiver’ in Greek) is capable of calming storms and winds (Theog. 252): she is therefore another representative of concord, a worthy follower of the god who calmed the storm from his chariot in book 1. Propertius depicts a similar marine procession in celebration of Octavian’s victory at Actium (4.6.61-2: prosequitur cantu Triton, omnesque marinae / plauserunt circa libera signa deae, ‘Triton showed favour with his song, and all the goddesses of the sea gave applause around the standards of freedom’); Octavian’s control of his fleet may be compared to the divine control which Neptune’s chariot symbolises. The orderliness of the marine procession is mirrored in the cosmic order induced by Neptune’s chariot’s progress (5.821: sternitur aequor aquis, fugiunt uasto aethere nimbi), a cosmic order in fact encoded in the chariot itself: its thundering axle (5.820: axe tonanti) may hint at a union of power between Neptune and Jupiter.51

47Even Neptune’s disquieting demand for an offering (5.815: unum pro multis dabitur caput, ‘one life will be given for many’) from the Trojans, which is satisfied by Palinurus’ death, is framed in terms which emphasise communal protection secured by sacrifice. He must be understood as a superhuman charioteer-helmsman, whose divine chariot leads his imposing procession and civilises the monstrous, and whose duty to protect divine order surpasses merely human concerns like the doomed Palinurus.

  • 52 Lewes House Gems no.105, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
  • 53 Zanker (1988) 39-43.
  • 54 Williams (1972) 452 on 5.822-3 records the suggestion of Pliny Nat. Hist. 36.26.

48I finally note some evidence that Virgil’s depiction of Neptune’s chariot draws on contemporary political and material associations. First there is a small cameo from the early imperial period which depicts Octavian in the guise of Neptune, accompanied by a dolphin and Triton, driving his sea-chariot and holding a trident.52 Following his victory over Sextus Pompeius in 36 BC, Octavian’s iconography began to incorporate Neptune as a tutelary deity,53 and the marine chariot was clearly an emblem of divine favour and control for the princeps. Second, it is plausible (as R.M. Williams suggests) that Virgil is drawing on a sculpture by Scopas of Neptune’s marine procession in the Circus of Flaminius, which would a reflect an engagement with the topography of Rome, and with the interplay, important for the whole course of the Aeneid’s chariot-image, between racing chariots in the Circus and divine chariots of control.54 It is in this context that the Aeneid’s marine procession, based on Poseidon’s chariot-journey attended by sea-monsters at Iliad 13.23-31, should be understood.

  • 55 Noted in Fratantuono and Smith (2015) 702; the connection was first made by Putnam (1962) 225-6.
  • 56 In contrast to Silius’ circuit around the horizons (Punica 5.24: curriculo nigram nox roscida metam (...)

49In contrast to Neptune the two final helmsmen-charioteers of book 5 are all too human: Palinurus, the helmsman of the Trojan fleet who is killed by Somnus to satisfy Neptune’s demand from Venus for sacrifice, and Aeneas, who subsequently steers the fleet to Italy. A connection between the ship race and Palinurus’ death is drawn by a verbal detail in Virgil’s description of night reaching its midpoint (5.835-6: iamque fere mediam caeli nox umida metam / contigerat, ‘now the dank night had almost reached the turning-point in the middle of the sky’).55 Here meta, the ship race’s turning-point (5.129), denotes a turning-point at the sky’s summit (TLL III.B.2.a.α), as Servius explains (meta est ἀναβιβάζοντος circuli, ‘the meta is the turning point of the rising orbit’):56 there is a parallel between the course of the ship race, which Aeneas lays out, and the course of the heavenly bodies, which the gods ordain. There is also a contrast between the leaders of the contesting ships, the divine guidance of the stars’ course, and Palinurus’ careful but doomed helmsmanship. The celestial meta also recalls the description of Sicily as a meta in Helenus’ prophecy; the concept of the Trojan voyage to Italy as a chariot race reaches cosmic proportions. Both Palinurus’ and Aeneas’ helmsmanship continue the allusion to the ship-of-state metaphor: the adjectival phrase princeps ante omnis of Palinurus (‘leader before all’, 5.833) perhaps hints at the role of the pre-eminent princeps, whose distant ancestor Aeneas subsequently takes over the (literal and figurative) helm (5.867-8: cum pater amisso fluitantem errare magistro / sensit, et ipse ratem nocturnis rexit in undis, ‘when father Aeneas sensed that he was adrift without a helmsman, and took control of the ship himself amidst the waves of the night’) just before his fleet lands at Italy.

50At the end of book 5, then, Virgil has engaged with the Circus in ways which reflect its capacity for cosmic representation and which draw on the ship-chariot interchange’s political resonances. Moreover, he has connected the ship race to Neptune’s procession (and from there to Neptune’s storm-calming chariot ride in book 1) and Palinurus’ and Aeneas’ helmsmanship, both to emphasise the sense of divine control in the ship-chariot, and to highlight the ambivalence inherent in the Aeneid’s ship-chariot imagery.

7. Book 7: rounding the meta

51I turn now to the development of the chariot-image across the second half of the Aeneid (deferring discussion of book 6’s chariots to my next section). In my discussion of the Aeneid’s chariot-image so far, I have analysed how, at its extremes, it may be seen as an image of concordia, or – as a sort of mirror-image, when out of control – as an image of discordia. I have also shown how, far from establishing a sharp dichotomy, Virgil intertwines both themes in the various instances of chariots in the poem. It is fitting that book 7, like book 1, contains a series of images which point to both ends of the concordia-discordia spectrum, and which complicate any easy division between the two.

52The first chariots which we encounter in book 7 are those driven in the here and now of the main narrative on the campus before the Latin city (7.163: exercentur equis domitantque in puluere currus, ‘they exercise with their horses, and train chariot-teams in clouds of dust’), and, secondly, those driven in the past, which now hang at the doors of Latinus’ palace (7.184: captiui pendent currus, ‘captured chariots are hung’).

  • 57 See discussion in Horsfall (2000) 141-2.
  • 58 There is discussion of epic and the Circus in Lovatt (2005) 23-54.
  • 59 Parallels to both the Palatine and the Capitol are noted in Horsfall (2000) 146-7 on 7.170-91.

53The vision of iuuenes exercising on a campus outside a city would most likely remind a reader of the Campus Martius,57 and the games of book 5, particularly the equestrian lusus Troiae, or ‘Game of Troy’ (5.585-603), which was later enacted in the Roman Circus.58 Latinus’ palace, which in some respects recalls that of Augustus on the Palatine, presents another parallel to early imperial Rome.59 The triple aspect of regia ‘palace’, curia ‘senate-house’ and templum ‘temple’ (7.174) recalls the proximity of Augustus’ domus to the Palatine Temple of Apollo, in which the Senate frequently came to sit (Suet. Aug. 29.3), while the weapons fixed to the doorposts (7.184: sacris in postibus arma, ‘weapons [are hung] on the posts of the sacred doors’) anticipate the booty fixed to the doorposts of Apollo’s Temple (8.721-2: aptatque superbis / postibus, ‘and he hangs them high on the posts of the doors’). The military exercises practiced and the military achievements memorialised in Latinus’ city, and their allusions to the triumphant Augustan city, appear to resonate with the positive ‘pole’ of the chariot-image. This makes sense in anticipation of the peaceful union promised between the Trojans and the Italians (7.285: pacemque reportant, ‘and they bring messages of peace’).

  • 60 It is also significant that only the Latin warriors, never the Trojans, use chariots. Heinze (1993/ (...)

54But (as in book 1) Juno’s intervention, causing conflict between the two peoples, changes the chariots’ connotations; they are no longer the military instruments of a concordant people allied to the future Romans, but will be opposed to Aeneas’ ultimate success, like the quasi-Homeric chariots on the mural in Carthage which recalled Trojan defeat: puluere (‘dust’, 7.163) recalls the same dusty earth in which Troilus is dragged (1.478: uersa puluis inscribitur hasta, ‘his overturned spear traced a line in the dust’). Those hung from the walls of Latinus’ palace-temple become similar threats of prowess in warfare and may recall the chariot which was housed in the temple of Juno in Carthage (a chilling predecessor to Apollo’s Palatine temple). The Latin chariots therefore anticipate scenes of Roman athletic prowess, military victory, and imperial majesty, but also allude to the future Trojan-Latin conflict, the future Rome-Carthage conflict, and the past Trojan-Greek conflict.60

55There is a similar ambivalence in the third appearance in book 7 of a chariot, which is presented as a gift, together with its yoked horses, by Latinus at 7.280-3:

absenti Aeneae currum geminosque iugalis 280 
semine ab aetherio spirantis naribus ignem,
illorum de gente patri quos daedala Circe
supposita de matre nothos furata creauit.

For the absent Aeneas, he chose a chariot and yoked pair of heavenly stock, breathing fire from their nostrils, from the descendants of those horses which cunning Circe had brought forth by stealing one of her father the Sun’s stallions to mate with a mare.

  • 61 Cf. Lyne (1989) 138-9, who suggests that in a sense Aeneas here gets his own horses back.
  • 62 Lyne (1987), 138-9.

56The Iliadic model for horses surreptitiously sired from divine stock are the horses stolen from Aeneas by Diomedes (Il. 5.265-273, 321-7), which Anchises reared after illicitly putting his mares to Laomedon’s stallions of Zeus. Virgil has already invited his readers to recall these horses in Dido’s questions to Aeneas (1.752: quales Diomedis equi, ‘what the horses of Diomedes were like’) and will do so again in a battlefield taunt at Aeneas (10.581: non Diomedis equos cernis, ‘these are not the horses of Diomedes which you look upon’). The allusion triggers the memory of both Aeneas’ personal defeat and that of Troy as a whole.61 If we then consider the chariot which Virgil has added to the Homeric model, we can see that Latinus’ gift allusively joins the series of chariots (initiated by that of Juno in Carthage, and those on the Carthaginian mural) associated with violence and Trojan defeat.62

  • 63 Nelis (2001) 287 discusses the Apollonian resonances in this ‘strange gift’.
  • 64 Forms of iugalis occur at 4.16, 4.59, 4.496, 10.497, 7.280 (here) and 7.320.
  • 65 Compare McOsker and Fratantuono (2025) 79-83 on Virgil’s allusive play between two namesake Harpaly (...)

57This passage, connecting fire-breathing horses and a father-in-law, also evokes the episode in Apollonius’ Argonautica (3.401-1407) in which Aeetes, the king of Colchis, keeper of the Golden Fleece and father of Medea, challenges Jason to yoke his fire-breathing bulls (Ap. Rhod. 3.410: στόματι φλόγα φυσιόωντες, ‘pouring forth flame from their mouths’).63 The adjective iugalis (7.280), used here to describe the horses ‘under the yoke’, is used on five other occasions in the Aeneid, always connoting a marital yoke,64 and the double meaning perhaps emphasises the prospective relationship of father-in-law and son-in-law between Latinus and Aeneas, in parallel to that between Aeetes and Jason. Moreover, Jason must yoke these bulls on πεδίον τὸ Ἀρήιον (Ap. Rhod. 3.409), which translates to Latin as campus Martius: Jason’s demonstration of skill and daring will be paralleled by the charioteering Latin youths and the future athletes of Rome itself. The half-line spirantis naribus ignem (281) replicates a half-line in Lucretius’ description of Diomedes’ horses (DRN 5.31: et Diomedis equi spirantes naribus ignem, ‘and Diomedes’ horses, breathing fire from their nostrils’); this is a different Diomedes to that above, the king of Thrace not the son of Tydeus, although this level of nuance and ambiguity is a characteristic feature of Virgilian allusion.65 Latinus’ horses, like the bulls of Aeetes, have supernatural characteristics which disturb the order of a chariot’s yoked team.

  • 66 Moorton (1988) 254.
  • 67 Noted in Segal (1968) 430-6 and Putnam (1970) 412-21, and discussed further in Hardie (1992) 62-9.

58This kind of uncanny beast is naturally the domain of Circe, who created the stock when she put the stallions of her father Sol, to Italian mares (7.283-3). They are presumably a family heirloom,66 since Circe was married to Latinus’ father Picus (7.189: equum domitor, ‘tamer of horses’). According to Hesiod’s genealogy, Circe is also the sister of Aeetes (Theog. 956-7), which further anchors Virgil’s allusion to the Argonautica. Aeneas has narrowly avoided Circe, the dea saeua (‘wild goddess’, 7.19), on his journey to the Tiber, but several readers have seen Circe’s thematic influence in the animal transformations and monstrous images (Picus/bird, Allecto’s snake/Amata’s clothes, Allecto/priestess, and Turnus’ Chimaera) which populate Virgil’s Italy.67 My analysis of Latinus’ gift supports this reading of the beginning of Book 7. In the dawn following the Trojan fleet’s passage past Circe’s island, shot through with the promise and innocence of a new beginning (7.25-36), it appears as if dawn’s chariot (7.26: Aurora in roseis fulgebat lutea bigis, ‘saffron-yellow Dawn glowed in her rosy chariot’) sweeps away the night and Circe’s insidious magic. But instead Circean dangers still await Aeneas in Italy, and in this instance take the form of Latinus’ chariot and pair.

59In his description of the horses and their currus, Virgil has therefore established multiple resonances. He has drawn a parallel between Jason and Medea and Aeneas and Lavinia, evoked the potential for conflict in Aeneas’ and Latinus’ marriage alliance, recalled Diomedes’ theft of Aeneas’ horses, and connected the horses to Circe’s wiles. It is easy to read Latinus’ gift as a grim foreboding of discordia. But since the solar quadriga plays such a large role both in the iconography of the Circus and in the imagery of Octavian’s triple triumph on the Shield of Aeneas, I suspect that a gift of solar horses to Aeneas (even if a pair, rather than the four required for a quadriga) cannot be solely a precursor to conflict: it is beneath the solar quadriga on the Temple of Apollo (8.720: sedens in niueo candentis limine Phoebi, ‘sitting on the white threshold of gleaming Phoebus’) that Octavian himself sits, surveying the conquered nations of the world, in the supreme image of Roman concord. Moreover, once they have received the solar horses and chariot, Aeneas’ ambassadors bring back/report peace (7.285 pacemque reportant). Latinus’s gift in one sense does anticipate the harmony between the Latins and the Trojans which will be brought about by Aeneas’ and Lavinia’s marriage, and which Rome will represent. However, the ambiguity in reportant (which can mean ‘report’, as well as ‘bring back’) subtly emphasises that ‘peace’ remains only the Trojans’ hopeful expectation.

60If the Latin chariots develop the Aeneid’s charioteering imagery in a variety of directions, then the simile likening Amata to a spinning-top (7.378-387) is more decisively an image of discord:

tum uero infelix ingentibus excita monstris
immensam sine more furit lymphata per urbem.
ceu quondam torto uolitans sub uerbere turbo,
quem pueri magno in gyro uacua atria circum
intenti ludo exercent. ille actus habena 380
curuatis fertur spatiis; stupet inscia supra
impubesque manus mirata uolubile buxum;
dant animos plagae: non cursu segnior illo
per medias urbes agitur populosque ferocis.
quin etiam in siluas simulato numine Bacchi 385
maius adorta nefas maioremque orsa furorem
euolat…

But then unhappy Amata, driven out of her mind by her monstrous affliction, raged in a wild frenzy across the whole city. She was like a spinning-top, flying under the plaited whip, which boys, engrossed in their game, make go in great circles around empty halls. The top, driven by the whip, is borne on its curved course; the young band look down, astonished and confused, in wonder at the spinning boxwood; their blows give it life. It was this swiftly that Amata went through the middle of the city and the fierce Latin peoples. She then flew out to the woods, pretending that she was possessed by Bacchus, and rose to a greater crime and greater madness…

  • 68 Fittingly, since the top is an image of Dionysiac possession. This was noted in Hirst (1937) 65-6; (...)

61Juno, initiator of the storm’s disorder in book 1, has deployed Allecto to inspire madness (7.375: furiale malum, ‘evil maddening substance’) in Latinus’ wife, to derail the marriage-alliance with Aeneas; Amata acts like a Bacchant68 (7.379: sine more furit lymphata per urbem) and although her madness is a psychological discord (note particularly the maiorem furorem in 7.386), it also causes discord for her city (7.384: per medias urbes), her family (in her disagreement with Latinus), and ultimately in the ensuing war with the Trojans.

  • 69 For uerbera and habenae together cf. Stat. Theb. 6.523: uerberibusque iubas et terga lacessit haben (...)

62It seems not hitherto to have been noticed that the top simile is full of horse-training and circensian language. A general equestrian tone is initiated by the use of uerber (7.378: torto sub uerbere), which can be used of the whip applied to a horse (OLD 1b), and habena, which here connotes a strip of leather (TLL A.2) but commonly signifies a horse’s rein (TLL A.1.a).69 There is more specifically a thread of circensian allusions: the curuatis spatiis (7.381) of the top’s course suggest the Circus’ laps; the top moves magno in gyro (7.379), which describes a turning motion, but can be used of a circular space for running horses (G. 3.115-6: frena Pelethronii Lapithae gyrosque dedere / impositi dorso, ‘the Lapiths of Thessaly gave us the bridle, and the circuit, mounted on horseback’). The top’s course is a cursus (7.383 non cursu segnior illo), frequently used of a chariot race (TLL I.A.2.b), and the fact that speed is the point of comparison (segnior) sharpens this possible double-meaning. A group of boys playing a game (7.379-80 pueri intenti ludo) may perhaps also recall the lusus Troiae (‘Game of Troy’) of 5.545-603 in which pueri (5.553) participated, and present a negative pendant to the echo of the lusus Troiae in the exercises outside the Latin city.

  • 70 Nelson (2025) 1217-8. There is general discussion of the influence of Callimachus’ epigram on this (...)
  • 71 Gutzwiller (1998) 224-6.
  • 72 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this point.

63My argument is supported by the charioteering elements which Thomas Nelson has shown to be present in Virgil’s source for the top simile, Callimachus’ Epigram 1.70 In Callimachus’ epigram Pittacus has advised an unnamed stranger to heed some boys (ἔρχεομετ᾽ ἴχνια, ‘go after their footsteps’), whose cries of ‘drive your own track’ (τὴν κατὰ σαυτὸν ἕλα) while urging on their tops lead the stranger to marry a woman of his own social status. Nelson notes that the ἴχνια and the use of a form of ἐλαύνω (‘I drive’) in Epig. 1, which has been read as the programmatic opening of his epigrams,71 seems to allude to Callimachus’ programmatic prologue to his Aitia (Aitia 1 fr.1), where he sets out his poetic programme ‘to drive his chariot along untrodden paths’ (δίφρον ἐλ]ᾶν ἀνὰκελεύθους [ἀτρίπτο]υς) and to avoid ‘the footsteps of others’ (ἑτέρων ἴχνια). Virgil therefore appears to actualise the charioteering image which Callimachus has embedded, by his allusion to Aitia fr.1, in Epigram 1.72 Amata ignores Callimachus’ advice and rejects a fitting choice of marriage-partner for her daughter; accordingly she is depicted as an out-of-control top/chariot who is not ‘driving her own track’.

64Virgil also, of course, enriches his Callimachean model with a pattern of circensian allusions. In Book 5 the Circus was allusively represented as a grand theatre of control (for both the charioteers and the presiding magistrate or emperor). In this simile, that backdrop is contrasted with the top/Amata, which do not control themselves (as emphasised by the passive verbs actus, fertur and agitur) and which unleash chaos. Her behaviour is allusively presented as a violent aberration from – and even an assault against – the established order of the Circus. We may also compare Latinus’ own loss of power, which is presented figuratively as a charioteer (or equestrian) surrendering the reins (7.600: rerumque reliquit habenas, ‘he released the reins of affairs’). He undergoes in the political sphere what Amata experiences in the familial and urban sphere.

65Book 7 as a whole offers a movement from the chariots outside Latinus’ city, which emblematise martial prowess, civic sport, and harmony while recalling book 5’s games and book 3’s horse omen, to the charioteering-inflected spinning-top simile with which Virgil depicts Amata’s frenzied possession. We also encounter the chariot drawn by Sun-sired horses which Latinus gifts to Virgil; an anticipation, in a supernatural minor key, of the solar chariot at the culmination of the ecphrasis of Aeneid’s Shield, which I now discuss.

8. The climax of concordia

  • 73 See Hardie (1997) for the distinct ‘endings’ of the Aeneid.

66This is the climax which comes earlier in the poem, even if it is in fact the endpoint of the Aeneid’s teleology:73 Octavian’s triple triumph depicted on the Shield of Aeneas at the end of book 8. However, it should be read in the light of a variety of triumphal and divine (or imitations of divine) chariots which we encounter in book 6, the other book in which Virgil offers an extended vision of Rome’s glorious future. Similarly, those book 6 chariots are best read in connection with the ultimate triumph on the Shield in book 8. I first consider those briefly, before considering the chariots on Aeneas’ Shield themselves.

Book 6: the chariots of the underworld

67The first chariot in book 6 presents a perverted and doomed anticipation of the climactic image on the Shield, of a solar chariot harnessed in triumph by a human ruler. This is the chariot used in both the offence and the punishment of Salmoneus in Tartarus (6.585-94):

uidi et crudelis dantem Salmonea poenas, 585
dum flammas Iouis et sonitus imitatur Olympi.
quattuor hic inuectus equis et lampada quassans
per Graium populos mediaeque per Elidis urbem
ibat ouans, diuumque sibi poscebat honorem,
demens, qui nimbos et non imitabile fulmen 590

aere et cornipedum pulsu simularet equorum.
at pater omnipotens densa inter nubila telum
contorsit, non ille faces nec fumea taedis
lumina, praecipitemque immani turbine adegit.

I also saw Salmoneus suffering cruel punishment, while he still mimics the flames of Jupiter and the rumblings of Olympus. It was he who, riding his four-horse chariot and brandishing a torch, went triumphing through the peoples of Greece and the city in the heart of Elis, laying claim to divine honours for himself, fool that he was, to copy the storm and the inimitable thunderbolt with the rattle of bronze and the beat of his horses’ horned feet. But through the thick clouds the almighty father hurled his lightning – no smoky light from torches of pitch for him – and sent him headlong in a monstrous spin into the abyss.

  • 74 Horsfall (2013) 411 on 6.591.

68Salmoneus was doomed for his hubristic imitation of Jupiter’s divine array: notably his thunderbolt (6.586: sonitus Olympi), his lightning (6.586: flammas Iouis), and his chariot (6.587: quattuor hic inuectus equis). In fact his imitation of the thunder and lightning is achieved with his chariot (6.591: aere et cornipedum pulsu equorum), through a combination of wood, brass and small pebbles in the vehicle’s construction.74 The number of horses matches that of the triumphal quadriga, and the participle ouans may, for a Roman reader, carry associations with a triumph, in both cases echoing the horse omen in book 3. As with the Trojan Horse, Virgil is creating a distorted replica of a triumph, a picture of discord grotesquely mirroring the supreme Roman concord of the ceremony. By contrast, in Octavian’s triple triumph depicted on Aeneas’ Shield, Octavian is aligned with (although not identified as) Apollo, in his position on the Palatine temple’s threshold: his relationship with divinity is careful and concordant.

  • 75 For the historical background on Roman worship of Cybele, see Wiseman (1984) 117-28 and Beard (1994 (...)
  • 76 In relation to Cybele, the duality is stressed by the two intertexts on which Virgil draws: Lucreti (...)

69 Two actual divine chariots which appear in book 6 also require mention: those of the Magna Mater (Cybele), which is described at 6.781-7, and of Bacchus, in his guise as victor over the East, which appears at 6.804-5. Virgil’s depiction of the two divine charioteers merits considerably more discussion than I can offer in this synthetic account of the Aeneid’s chariot-image. I restrict myself to the following. First, both Cybele and Bacchus embody the twin poles of concord and harmony on the one hand, and discord and frenzy on the other.75 Both are capable of being portrayed as grand civilising forces, but are the subject of orgiastic cults and are associated with the East.76 Second, Cybele’s chariot has appeared in Anchises’ explanation of the Cretan origins of Troy (3.111-3) and the lions which draw it appear again on Aeneas’ ship (10.156-8). It is therefore associated with Trojans’ first (abortive) attempt to found a city in their ancestral homeland, and with Aeneas’ journey towards victory in the Italian new world. In broad sweep, then, the chariots of Cybele and Bacchus express the Aeneid’s, and its chariot-image’s, overarching teleology: the journey from East to West, and the victory of civilisation and concord – but also the discord and conflict which all too often accompany that victory.

  • 77 Note also the triumphal chariot of Lucius Mummius, which appears at 6.836-7, where he celebrates vi (...)

70 I wish to mention one other occurrence of chariots in book 6.77 In Elysium, when Aeneas sets eyes upon his Trojan ancestors (6.648-655), he ‘admired from a distance their weapons and empty chariots’ (6.651: arma procul currusque uirum miratur inanis), and their horses which ‘roamed freely and grazed across the plain’ (6.652-3: passimque soluti per campum pascuntur equi). Their ‘love for their chariots and their weapons’ (6.653-4: gratia currum / armorumque) remains, but in this place of peace they lie unused. That vision of rustic Elysian peace enjoyed by the Trojan ancestors is an image of concord standing in suggestive contrast to that orchestrated by Octavian, to which I now turn.

Book 8: the concordant apotheosis

  • 78 The place to start is Hardie (1986) 355-8.

71A triple triumph was celebrated in 29 BC to commemorate Octavian’s victories in Illyria, Actium and Alexandria. Virgil’s depiction of it on Aeneas’ Shield, after a sequence of scenes from Roman history, is central to the poem. It has been read convincingly as the ultimate alignment between cosmic order and Roman imperial government, in a conclusion of eternal victory.78 The relevant passage is 8.714-28:

at Caesar, triplici inuectus Romana triumpho
moenia, dis Italis uotum immortale sacrabat, 715
maxima ter centum totam delubra per urbem.
laetitia ludisque uiae plausuque fremebant;
omnibus in templis matrum chorus, omnibus arae;
ante aras terram caesi strauere iuuenci.

ipse sedens niueo candentis limine Phoebi 720
dona recognoscit populorum aptatque superbis
postibus; incedunt uictae longo ordine gentes,
quam uariae linguis, habitu tam uestis et armis.
hic Nomadum genus et discinctos Mulciber Afros,
hic Lelegas Carasque sagittiferosque Gelonos 725
finxerat; Euphrates ibat iam mollior undis,
extremique hominum Morini, Rhenusque bicornis,
indomitique Dahae, et pontem indignatus Araxes.

But Caesar, conveyed into Rome in triple triumph, paid undying vows to the gods of Italy, and consecrated three hundred great shrines throughout the whole city. The streets rang with joy and festivities and applause; there was a chorus of mothers at every temple, at every temple there were altars; before the altars slaughtered bullocks were strewn on the ground.

Caesar himself, sitting on the white threshold of gleaming Phoebus, inspected the gifts brought by the peoples of the world and hung them high on the posts of the temple’s doors; the defeated nations walked in long procession, as varied in their language as in the style of their clothes and in their armour. Here Mulciber had moulded the Nomads, and the Africans with their streaming robes; here too the Lelegeians and the Carians of Asia, and the arrow-bearing Gelonians. The Euphrates was now flowing with a gentler current; here were the Morini, the most distant of men, the two-horned Rhine, the unconquered Dahae, and the river Araxes chafing at its bridge.

  • 79 Horsfall (2013) 536 on 6.785 offers parallels for inueho used of being carried on a chariot.
  • 80 Miller (2000) 410-4 comments on the fact that the triumph appears to end at the Palatine Temple to (...)

72We first see Octavian riding into Rome on the triumphal quadriga (8.714: at Caesar, triplici inuectus Romana triumph / moenia),79 and then seated at the threshold of the Palatine Temple of Apollo, overseeing the triumphal procession of defeated peoples (ipse sedens niueo candentis limine Phoebi).80 The slight anachronism (the Temple was dedicated in 28 BC, a year after Octavian’s triple triumph) only contributes to a general sense that the chronological progress of history, which has characterised both Rome’s rise and the previous scenes of the Shield, is dissolved in the timeless peace achieved by Octavian and immortalised by Vulcan and Virgil.

73I would like to draw attention to two other charioteering focal points, beside Octavian’s triumphal quadriga, which are impliedly depicted in this scene. The first is the statuary group of the solar quadriga, placed above the pediment of Apollo’s Temple (Prop. 2.31.11: in quo Solis erat supra fastigia currus, ‘on which, above the pediment, was the chariot of the Sun’). It is beneath this sculpture of a divine chariot that Octavian sits as he reviews his procession. In a sense Octavian’s triumphal chariot is apotheosed and frozen in the sun-god’s sculptural quadriga on the temple. Octavian, moreover, oversees the gifts of the conquered nations of the world (8.721: dona recognoscit populorum), as the Sun overlooks the worldwide Roman empire in a prophecy made to Latinus (7.100-1: omnia sub pedibus, qua sol utrumque recurrens / aspicit Oceanum, uertique regique uidebunt, ‘they will see the whole world turn and be guided beneath their feet, where the Sun in its recurring course looks down on each Ocean’). Octavian appears as a quasi-Apollo, a sun-king and a solar charioteer.

  • 81 Beard (2007) 91-105; Miller (2000) 411 fn.9 considers the possibility that Octavian looks over the (...)
  • 82 Note the arguments of Wiseman (2019) 122-39 against this, which I have already discussed in fn. 20.
  • 83 For concord in this passage see Hardie (2019) 104-6 and Hardie (forthcoming).
  • 84 For the motif see Fitzgerald (2016) 73-83.

74The other focal point is the ‘greatest’ charioteering space of all: the Circus Maximus, through which triumphs processed,81 and over which the Temple of Apollo possibly (but not certainly) looked.82 It is accordingly tempting to posit that Octavian, sitting on the temple’s steps, looks down upon the Circus, just as Aeneas oversaw a prefiguration of the Roman Circus in book 5, and within this space sees an image of cosmic concordia.83 The various languages and appearances of the gathered nations (8.723: quam uariae linguis, habitu tam uestis et armis) create an image of unity in diversity.84 This is a grand image of the concord which was promised in the frena concordia (3.542) with which the Italian horses could be yoked to a chariot: and if it takes place in the Circus Maximus, possibly already coming to be a symbol of cosmic order, then that image is made still grander.

75Amidst this scene there are three connections to be drawn out which point to the wider structure of the chariot-image. The first is that the snow-white colour of the four Italian horses (3.538: candore niuali, ‘snowy whiteness’) is recalled in the marble of the temple (8.720: niueo candentis limine Phoebi, ‘the snowy white threshold of gleaming Phoebus’) by the verbal echo niueo candentis. The triumphal implications of the horse-omen, and Anchises’ interpretation which balanced bellum and spes et pacis (3.539-43), have been fully realised in Octavian’s triumph, and in the triumphal Temple of Apollo. There may be another nexus too: as I suggested earlier, the white horses of the omen, and those associated with triumphs more broadly, may have in origin be linked to Jupiter. In Octavian’s triple triumph on the Shield, the Palatine Temple of Apollo substitutes for the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter. The ‘snowy-white’ horses on Apollo’s Temple may therefore be quasi-Jupiterian, and allude indirectly to the traditional destination of a Roman triumph.

  • 85 Thucydides 1.29.3 attests to the presence of a temple to Apollo at Actium; see Wardle (2014) on Sue (...)
  • 86 See Humphrey (1986) 61-2, who points out that the Greek Ποσειδῶν Ἵππιος was connected with the tara (...)

76The second connection, or nexus, to be considered is that between Apollo, Neptune, Octavian, and charioteering. Apollo in this scene is the solar charioteer, but in his guise as Apollo Actius is also associated with the sea (Prop. 4.1.3: nauali Phoebo, ‘naval Phoebus’), overseeing Octavian’s victory at Actium, as indeed he was depicted in the Shield’s preceding scene of the Battle of Actium (8.704: Actius haec cernens arcum intendebat Apollo, ‘Actian Apollo saw all and stretched his bow’).85 Neptune’s presence is more allusive: in the passage describing the triple triumph, the rivers of the world are tamed under Octavian’s leadership (8.726: Euphrates ibat iam mollior undis; 8.728: pontem indignatus Araxes), which echoes Neptune’s calming of the wind and waves in book 1 (1.142: tumida aequora placat; 1.55: indignantes [of the winds resenting their curbing]). Moreover, as I have shown, Neptune is a divine sea-charioteer, both as calmer of the storm and in his magnificent marine procession. He also enjoys an ancient connection to the Circus.86 Octavian, his successor, who now controls elemental violence and rules the waters, and who conquered his arch-rival at sea at Actium, has assumed Neptune’s role. This connection may also draw once more on the ‘ship-chariot interchange’, of whose two strands Octavian is the ultimate unifier.

77The third connection looks beyond the Aeneid and posits another long-deferred fulfilment. A triumphal temple, such as that of Apollo at 8.720, which stands at the end (whether in chronological or narrative order) of an epic recalls M. Fulvius Nobilior’s temple of Hercules Musarum which almost certainly stood at the original end of Ennius’ Annales (see Section 3 above). I have already discussed this temple as one inspiration for Virgil’s marble temple in the proem to Georgics 3, and suggested that Nobilior’s triumph stood as the culmination of a sequence of charioteering imagery in the Annales. In recalling the temple here, as the climax both of Octavian’s triple triumph and of the charioteering imagery in his own epic, Virgil perhaps creates a superstructure of charioteering imagery from the beginning of Roman epic, and Ennius’ Circus simile, through to the world-victory which fulfils the teleology of the Aeneid and his version of Roman history itself. The progress of Roman civilisation, and concord’s ultimate triumph over discord, are symbolised in the chariot’s course.

78 Two earlier scenes on the Shield draw out these themes. The first is positive: in the battle of Actium itself, Octavian himself appears as the pre-eminent leader of his fleet (8.680: stans celsa in puppi, ‘standing on his high stern’), which (through the ship-chariot interchange) may anticipate his charioteering role in the triumphal finale. Anchises himself was described in the same terms at the first sighting of Italy (3.257: stans celsa in puppi), as was Aeneas at 4.554 as he set sail from Carthage (4.554: celsa in puppi iam certus eundi, ‘on the high prow, now fixed in leaving’). Octavian has replaced his distant Trojan ancestors at the helm of the ship-of-state, at the moment when Aeneas’ descendants are finally about to achieve the world-peace which is promised to him.

79But the second is a vision of Rome and the chariot more characterised by discord: the punishment of Mettus Fufetius (dictator of Alba Longa) (8.642-5). His refusal to side with Rome against the Etruscans, in defiance of a treaty between the Albans and Romans, was punished by a chariot-driven sparagmos (8.642-3: citae Mettum in diuersa quadrigae / distulerant, ‘the swift chariots tore Mettus apart’); as a fitting punishment for shattering the political concordia, he undergoes a bodily discordia. It is these images of discord which Octavian will sweep away in the cosmic harmony of his triumph in the following scene on the Shield; but we are to meet several more such images before the main narrative of the epic is complete.

9. The climax of discordia

80I now turn to trace the development of the chariot-image across the final books of the Aeneid. In the scheme of the chariot-image for which I argue, this development arrives at a second climax in book 12, in which the chariot becomes a symbol of discordia as it incites psychological or cosmic instability, foments strife, and careers out-of-control across the Trojan-Latin war.

81The two strands of the chariot-image are held in suspension in Vulcan’s subterranean workshop in book 8. There Vulcan crafts the chariot-image’s triumphal first climax on the Shield of Aeneas; but before he does that, his labouring Cyclopes had been constructing the chariot with which Mars will create disorder, indeed discordia, across the battlefields of Italy (8.433-4: parte alia Marti currumque rotasque uolucris / instabant, quibus ille uiros, quibus excitat urbes, ‘in another part they were continuing with a wing-wheeled chariot for Mars, in which he stirs up men and cities for war’). In the last book of the poem, on the Italian battlefield Turnus himself will be compared to Mars in his chariot (12.331-6). In Vulcan’s workshop Virgil therefore presents us with a neat fork, pointing in opposite directions, to the two climaxes of the chariot-image.

82In what follows I subject to close reading a sequence of passages involving chariots or charioteering imagery from books 10 to 12. In my first subsection I consider three passages marking the new, darker development of the chariot-image, which are preliminary to what I argue is the ‘climax proper’ in book 12. These passages are the battlefield chariots of Niphaeus and Lucagus and Liger in 10.570-601 (as exemplars of all battlefield chariots); the chariots in Pallas’ funereal procession (11.29-99), which may be viewed as a sort of anti-triumph; and the chariots which draw Turnus and Latinus to their meeting with Aeneas (12.161-8). In the following subsection I consider the climax proper, in Turnus’ chariot and two similes concerning it, and in the simile comparing Aeneas and Turnus to two warring bulls. In general I consider how Virgil explores the battlefield chariot as a counterpoint, or a troubling mirror-image, to the triumphal chariot signifying peace on the Shield of Aeneas. The course of the two climaxes which I sketch out may shed a little further light on the much-discussed problem of ‘the ending of the Aeneid’.

Books 10 and 11

  • 87 Chariots used in war occur at 9.124, 9.316-9, 10.399-404, 10.439-453, 10.570-4, 10.575-601, 11.88, (...)
  • 88 They could, after all, have built them in their new camp.

83In the ‘Iliadic’ books of the Aeneid it is to be expected that the appearances of chariots are, generally, on the battlefield.87 It is perhaps less to be expected that in the Aeneid only warriors on the Latin side use chariots. This seems a significant fact, and the purely logistical explanation that the Trojans could not have brought chariots with them on their ships is not fully satisfying.88 My own suggestion, which fits with my ‘dual-climax’ scheme of the chariot-image, is that the Latin war-chariots allow Virgil to explore the discordia strand of his chariot-image. In book 8 Virgil depicted the triumphal and Roman vehicle of world-peace; he subsequently turns to the vehicles opposed to the Roman project, and the bellum before the spes et pacis which book 3’s horse-omen promised.

84I do not propose to analyse every appearance of a chariot on the Aeneid’s battlefields, but will discuss a particularly interesting sequence of war-chariots which occurs at 10.570-4 and then at 10.575-601. In the first passage Aeneas, the uictor (10.569), causes the four horses which draw Niphaeus’ chariot (10.571: quadriiugis in equos, ‘the four horses of his chariot’) to turn back and throw Niphaeus from the vehicle (10.573-4: retroque ruentes / effunduntque ducem, ‘and rushing back they threw out their leader’). Given Virgil’s deliberate engagement with the triumph throughout the Aeneid’s chariot-image we can read this through a triumphal lens. Aeneas is the rightful triumphator as uictor; he accordingly causes the triumphal vehicle (the quadriga) to throw off Niphaeus, who has undeservingly appropriated it. Although I have focussed on the triumph primarily as a symbol of victory and ultimate peace, it is of course a reward for a successful general in war, and Virgil is gently insisting on that martial element here. The point is perhaps sharpened by the fact that Niphaeus’ name means ‘snowy’ (from the Greek νιφάς ‘snowflake’), and may therefore recall the ‘snowy whiteness’ (3.541: candore niuali) of book 3’s quasi-triumphal horse-omen, which of course promised ‘a hope of peace’ (3.543: spes et pacis) only after war (bellum).

  • 89 The image of a turbo (‘whirlwind’) recurs in several passages which invoke the chariot-of-discord t (...)

85Immediately after the grand quadriga (four-horsed chariot) comes the smaller biga (two-horsed chariot) which Lucagus and Liger, two Latin brothers, drive to their deaths at 10.575-601. Their chariot’s white horses (10.575: biiugis infert se Lucagus albis, ‘Lucagus rushed on in a chariot drawn by two white horses’) echo the earlier Italian horses and their candore niuali (3.538), and the immediately preceding Niphaeus; but the triumphal suggestions of the omen are negated, partly because this is a biga not a quadriga, but more significantly because this chariot is under the influence of feruor and furor. Lucagus and Liger are described at 10.578 as tanto feruore furentis (‘raging with such fervour’); and their psychological tumult is mirrored in Aeneas’ own frenzied slaughter (10.603-4: turbinis atri / more furens, ‘raging like a black whirlwind’).89

86There is also a disquieting set of allusions activated by Liger’s taunt to Aeneas that it is not the Greek enemies from whom he escaped that he now confronts (10.581: non Diomedis equos nec currum cernis Achillis, ‘this is not Diomedes’ horses or Achilles’ chariot which you see’): Liger’s chariot, it is supposed, will really be the end of Aeneas. Liger appears to remember Diomedes’ and Achilles’ Iliadic battlefield encounters with Aeneas (Il. 5.297-351, Il. 20.156-352). The Homeric chariots were vehicles of battlefield frenzy, engines of the Trojans’ and Aeneas’ defeat, and in my discussion of the Carthaginian mural (where Achilles’ chariot was depicted, 1.483-7) I suggested that they were a negative image against which the ultimate climax of concord may be measured. Here that negative image is recalled on the battlefields of Italy, and this time to be conquered by Aeneas, rather than to conquer.

  • 90 Comprehensively detailed in Horsfall (2003) 66-7, with an important note of caution that that some (...)
  • 91 The collocation is also used at 2.766 (of pauidae matres), 6.482 (ghosts of the Dardanidae), and (...)
  • 92 So Horsfall (2003) 101, who also notes that in this instance currus is most likely a poetic plural. (...)

87A further unsettling development of the chariot-image is seen in Pallas’ funeral procession (11.29-99), where Virgil, as he did in relation to the Trojan Horse, offers a distorted reflection of the triumph. Several aspects of the funeral procession may allude to different triumphal practices.90 Most significant for our purposes is the procession itself, including the long line of booty (11.79: longo praedam iubet ordine duci, ‘he ordered that the booty be brought in a long procession’), the army leaders carrying enemy trophies with labels attached (11.83-4: indutosque iubet truncos hostilibus armis / ipsos ferre duces inimicaque nomina figi, ‘he ordered that the leaders themselves carry tree trunks draped with the enemy’s weapons and labelled with their hated names’), the ‘chariot(s) spattered with Rutulian blood’ (11.88: Rutulo perfusos sanguine currus), and the ‘sad formation’ of allied troops behind (11.92: maesta phalanx). The last time Virgil described something in longo ordine was the procession of conquered nations which Octavian oversaw from the Palatine (8.722);91 the grand pageant of conquest, normally triumphal, occurs here in a funereal context. The chariot itself, coming between Acoetes and Aethon (one of Hector’s horses at Il. 8.185, and the name for a horse of Sol in Ovid Met. 2.153-4), is most probably Pallas’ own,92 in which case it is perhaps a bloodstained, funereal mirror to the triumphal quadriga, to match the triumphal-funereal procession in which it participates.

88But Virgil is careful to emphasise that Pallas is not experiencing some kind of posthumous triumph. Aeneas laments that the fates denied him a victorious chariot-ride back to his father (11.43-4: inuidit Fortuna / neque ad sedes uictor ueherere paternas, ‘Fortune did not allow you … to ride back in victory to your father’s house’), and asks bitterly whether ‘these really were his and Pallas’ anticipated returns and triumphs’ (11.54: hi nostri reditus exspectatique triumphi). Turnus, meanwhile, is emphatically labelled as ‘victor’, and ‘carries off his triumphal plunder’ (11.91-2: cetera Turnus / uictor habet). What we see in Pallas’ procession is really a funeral; an illusory triumph without a victor, which takes place before the war which it celebrates is even finished. The chariot at its centre is severed from the associations of peace, order, and victory which a triumph would normally grant.

Book 12: Latinus and Turnus

89In book 12 the discordant strand of the chariot-image reaches its climax on the battlefield. But the first appearance of a chariot in the final book is in the context of a treaty, rather than warfare, and (once more) offers a distorting mirror to aspects of the chariot-of-concord (12.161-8):

interea reges ingenti mole Latinus
quadriiugo uehitur curru (cui tempora circum
aurati bis sex radii fulgentia cingunt,
Solis aui specimen), bigis it Turnus in albis,
bina manu lato crispans hastilia ferro. 165
hinc pater Aeneas, Romanae stirpis origo,
sidereo flagrans clipeo et caelestibus armis
et iuxta Ascanius, magnae spes altera Romae…

Meanwhile the kings arrived. Latinus, with enormous gravity, was conveyed in a four-horsed chariot, and encircling his shining temples were twelve golden rays, proof that the Sun was his grandfather. Turnus went in a white two-horsed chariot, balancing twin spears of broad blades in his hand. From the other side came father Aeneas, the founder of the Roman race, blazing in his starry shield and heavenly arms; and next to him was Ascanius, the second hope of the greatness of Rome…

  • 93 Humphrey (1986) 94 (with bibliography).

90Latinus’ radiate crown highlights his descent from Sol. Turnus, on the other hand, is drawn bigis in albis (12.164), which (in colour and form) recalls the moon’s bigae, and perhaps the bigae drawn by white horses in which Lucagus and Liger were slaughtered. Their two chariots therefore present Latinus and Turnus in the image of the two principal heavenly bodies, and in the image of the two deities to whom the shrines built into the Circus were consecrated;93 Latinus is the apparent sun-king, and the two of them may be taken to represent the grand order both of the cosmos and the Circus which their divine counterparts oversee. Both Latinus and Turnus, however, will fail to live up to their counterparts. Latinus is reduced to incoherence (12.657: mussat rex ipse Latinus, ‘King Latinus himself was dumbfounded’), while Turnus will rage across the battlefield in a display of uncontrolled furor before being killed. Virgil alluded to Sol’s chariot at dawn on the day of the treaty (12.114-5: alto se gurgite tollunt / Solis equi lucemque efflatis naribus efflant, ‘the horses of the Sun reared up from the deep sea, and breathed out light from their opened nostrils’); Latinus appears as a weak and feeble imitator of the Sun’s cosmic power.

  • 94 TLL 2.c, which cites Ov. Met. 15.192-3: ipse dei clipeus … mane rubet, ‘the god’s own shield is red (...)
  • 95 Cf. Tarrant (2012) 133 on 12.164 for the difficulties in reconciling this account of Sol’s genealog (...)

91We may contrast Latinus and Turnus with Aeneas and Octavian. Aeneas, as we know, was given Latinus’ fire-breathing horses, descended from Sol’s stock (7.280-3); they are not mentioned, but it is tempting to speculate that Aeneas was drawn by them to the treaty-meeting. He appears in full fiery lustre, ‘blazing in his starry shield and heavenly arms’ (12.167); the word sidereo draws attention to the sidus Iulium engraved on the shield (8.681) and invites us to recall other parts of the shield ecphrasis, particularly Octavian (the culmination of Aeneas’ Romanae stirpis) portrayed as an Apollonian sun-king in the quadriga of his triple triumph. Through the shield, Aeneas (and his progeny) is elevated to the divine solar status to which Latinus unsuccessfully aspires. The starry shield creates an impression of brightness; since clipeus can also be used of the disc of the Sun,94 it may even appear that Aeneas has harnessed Latinus’ ancestor Sol himself.95 In the competing sun-quadriga visions there is a hint of the discordia which will characterise book 12. However, it should also be noted that if the foedus had been observed, Latinus and Aeneas would have been united in peace, and the image of Latinus as Sol in his chariot could have prefigured the triumphal scene on Aeneas’ Shield.

Book 12: the battlefield chariots

  • 96 See Harder (2012) 826 on the ‘horse’ Zephyros in Callimachus’ Aitia fr. 110.52-8 and other horse-wi (...)
  • 97 See Tarrant (2012) 113 ad loc.: ‘The link to Rhesus aligns T. with another doomed opponent of the G (...)

92 I now turn to book 12’s battlefield chariots, which constitute the ‘climax of discordia’ in my scheme. This climax is more diffuse, or less unified, than the climax of concordia in book 8. The first element to be considered is the horses which draw Turnus’ chariot, described in great detail at 12.81-6. I wish to pick out two points. First, they were a gift to Pilumnus from Orithyia, the wife of the north wind Boreas (12.83: Pilumno quos ipsa dedit decus Orithyia, ‘Orithyia herself had given them to Pilumnus to honour him’), and can outrun the winds (12.84: qui candore niues anteirent, cursibus auras, ‘they surpassed the snows in whiteness and the winds in speed’). They are instances of the frequent interchange between horses and winds,96 and resonate with the chaotic horse-winds which Aeolus unleashes in the storm of book 1. The second point is the horses’ white colour (candore niues anteirent, ‘they surpassed the snows in whiteness’). The phrasing recalls book 3’s Italian horses (3.538: candore niuali), but it is unlikely that there is this scene has triumphal resonances. It instead creates another disturbing friction between the concordant and discordant strands of the chariot-image, which is further reinforced by the allusion to Rhesus’ horses at Iliad 10.437 (λευκότεροι χιόνος, θείειν δ᾽ ἀνεμοῖσιν ὁμοῖοι ‘they were whiter than snow, and like the winds in speed’), which Diomedes (with Odysseus) steals (Il. 10.465-514); Aeneas’ horses (as discussed above) were also once stolen by Diomedes.97 In Turnus’ horses, therefore, Virgil is pulling various threads together: the echo of the chaotic horse-winds of book 1, which Neptune calms to banish cosmic disorder; the parallel to the lineage of Trojan horses; and the white colour, which is a ghostly reflection of the white horses associated with triumph throughout the Aeneid.

93Turnus’ chariot is then the subject of two similes, in which it becomes the archetype of an out-of-control chariot, both a symptom and cause of disorder or furor. In the first, Turnus is likened to Mars driving on war in his chariot (12.331-6):

qualis apud gelidi cum flumina concitus Hebri
sanguineus Mauors clipeo increpat atque furentis
bella mouens immittit equos, illi aequore aperto
ante Notos Zephyrumque uolant, gemit ultima pulsu
Thraca pedum circumque atrae Formidinis ora 335
Iraeque Insidiaeque, dei comitatus, aguntur…

Like Mars, spattered with blood, charges along the banks of the icy Hebrus, and clashes sword on shield and urges on his frenzied horses, stirring up war; the horses fly across the open plain before the South and West winds, furthest Thrace groans with the beat of their hooves, and around the god ride his companions, the black faces of Fear, Rage, and Treachery…

  • 98 It comes as a surprise at 12.469 to learn that Turnus’ chariot is actually driven by the charioteer (...)

94As I noted earlier, Virgil has already explored a connection between Mars and chariots at Georgics 1.511-4, in a simile which subverts the charioteer’s (and Octavian’s) paradigm of control, and the ordered civic space of the Circus, amidst the swirling madness of civil war. Where it was unclear to whom or what the auriga in the Georgics simile corresponds, in the Aeneid’s simile the charioteer is unambiguously Mars, corresponding to Turnus, who at 12.327 wields the reins himself.98 The battlefield disorder is reflected by a sense of psychological disorder (as in the case of Lucagus and Liger): Mars’ horses are furentis (12.332; etymologically connected to furor), and Mars is accompanied by the deified personifications of ‘Fear’, ‘Anger’, and ‘Treachery’.

  • 99 The locus classicus for analysing Virgilian similes in terms of multiple-correspondence is West (19 (...)

95The passage also appears to allude to the ‘horse-winds’ which first reared their heads in Aeolus’s storm in book 1. The description at 12.334 of Mars’ horses outrunning the South and West winds (ante Notos Zephyrumque uolant, ‘they fly before the South and West winds’) recalls Aeolus’ winds at 1.85 (una Eurusque Notusque ruunt ‘the East and South winds rush together as one’). It also corresponds (in a typical Virgilian multiple-correspondence effect)99 to the fact that Turnus’ horses are swifter than the winds (12.84). Those horses, as I have shown, themselves are connected to the horse-winds of the storm. The horse-winds were capable of overthrowing the cosmic order; here Mars’ horses pick up their capacity for grand-scale discordia and re-create it in a battlefield context.

96The second simile comes when Turnus’ sister Juturna knocks his human charioteer Metiscus out of his chariot, and takes over the reins herself (12.468-72). The simile likens Juturna to a swallow and suggests the disorder and powerlessness which his chariot now represents (12.473-8):

nigra uelut magnas domini cum diuitis aedes
peruolat et pennis alta atria lustrat hirundo
pabula parua legens nidisque loquacibus escas, 475
et nunc porticibus uacuis, nunc umida circum
stagna sonat: similis medios Iuturna per hostis
fertur equis rapidoque uolans obit omnia curru…

Like a black swallow flies through the great house of a rich man and circles high halls with her wings, collecting little pieces and scraps for her chattering young in the nest; sometimes she is heard in empty colonnades, sometimes around damp pools; just so was Juturna borne through the middle of the enemy and went flying through everything in her swift chariot…

  • 100 Although note that Tarrant (2012) 215 argues that fertur does not connote someone ‘borne along help (...)

97The chariot, even driven by a deity, is reduced to a small bird circling an indoor space; the charioteer is weak and vulnerable.100 There is a contrast between the desire of the swallow, and the charioteer, to nourish and support its charges, and the failure of control which makes fulfilling this desire impossible. Turnus no longer careers in a divine vehicle of carnage and bloodshed, as when he was compared to Mars; now he is borne in helpless and desperate flight.

  • 101 She is turned into a nightingale in Ovid Met. 6.401-674; see Lyne (1987), 140-4.

98There may also be an implied comparison here with the figure of Amata. The swallow to which Juturna is compared flies through ‘high halls’ (12.474: alta atria), while the top to which Amata is compared spins in empty halls (7.379: uacua atria circum); the swallow’s movement (12.474: lustrat) echoes Amata’s circular Bacchic celebrations (7.391: te lustrare choro). The atria point to a quasi-domestic environment, a structured, confined space in which the chaos of the chariot-of-discord is further amplified. A further link between Juturna and Amata may be discerned if we follow Oliver Lyne’s suggestion that the swallow-simile alludes to a version of the story of Procne and Itys, in which Procne murders her son for revenge against her husband Tereus, who lusted after her sister Philomela, before being turned into a swallow.101 The pattern of a sorrowful mother driven to destructive behaviour would characterise both the swallow-simile and Amata’s narrative. Juturna’s charioteering is doomed to fail, just like Amata’s stratagems, and just like Turnus’ impersonation of Mars.

99There is one last refraction of the chariot-image in this nightmarish climax of discordia. Before their final duel Aeneas and Turnus are compared to two bulls fighting for leadership of their herd (12.715-22):

ac uelut ingenti Sila summoue Taburno 715
cum duo conuersis inimica in proelia tauri
frontibus incurrunt, pauidi cessere magistri,
stat pecus omne metu mutum, mussantque iuuencae
quis nemori imperitet, quem tota armenta sequantur;
illi inter sese multa ui uulnera miscent 720
cornuaque obnixi infigunt et sanguine largo
colla armosque lauant, gemitu nemus omne remugit…

Just as when two bulls on vast Sila or the peak of Taburnus clash their heads together and come to fierce battle; the herdsmen stand back in terror, the whole herd stands silent with fear, and the heifers low quietly waiting to see who will rule the grove, whom the whole herd will follow; the bulls are locked together exchanging blows with mighty force, and they fix their horns into each other, and wash their necks and shoulders with broad streams of blood; the whole grove rings with their lowing and groaning…

  • 102 Hardie (2024), 154-6.
  • 103 A hapax in Virgil; see Tarrant (2012) on 12.719.

100The primary models for this simile of two fighting bulls are Apoll. Rhod. Argon. 2.88-9 and Georgics 3.219-23. Philip Hardie has pointed out that this is also the last in the Aeneid’s series of allusions to Ennius’ simile comparing the crowd awaiting Romulus and Remus’ auspices to the crowd awaiting the start of a Circus race.102 In both similes we see a fearful crowd (12.718: stat pecus omne metu; cf. Enn. Ann. 82 Sk. sic exspectabat populus atque ore timebat) awaiting the outcome of a contest which will decide the future leader of their herd/race: the crowd around Romulus and Remus is concerned with who will become induperator, and the herd of cattle await to see who will command them (12.719: imperitet).103 Virgil’s pauidi magistri (12.717) allude to the Annales Circus simile, both through the fearful (timebat, Enn. Ann. 82 Sk.) crowd in the Circus, and through the consul (himself a magister) who gives the signal for the chariot race to begin.

101But Virgil appears to use these correspondences to point up the contrasts between the two scenes. Ennius’ simile suggests the concord of the four horses of a quadriga yoked and racing in the same direction (cf. 3.542: frena iugo concordia ferre); the Virgilian simile presents the discord of two bulls clashing against each other. The image is a kind of inverted chariot race, a picture of strife in place of an arena mirroring the ordered cosmos. The allusion to Romulus and Remus sharpens this picture of strife. The bulls, and therefore Aeneas and Turnus, are associated with the fratricidal conflict which initiates the recurrence of discordia throughout Roman history. The chariot which allusively lurks behind the warring bulls simile concludes an arc from possibly the first simile in Roman hexameter epic to one of the final similes of the Aeneid. I return to this theme in my conclusion below.

10. Coda: the ending of the Aeneid?

102The course of the chariot-image in Virgil’s Aeneid begins with Juno’s chariot in Carthage (1.17) and ends with Ennius’ Circus chariots sitting allusively behind the simile comparing Aeneas and Turnus to fighting bulls. The more sonorous strand of chariot-imagery explores how the chariot functions as a symbol of concordia, of harmony, control, and power. It is a symbol of prestige, familiar from both the Circus and the triumph, harnessed by the Sun and the Moon. But Virgil is equally fascinated by the inverse of this vision: how concordia subverted can so easily lead to discordia; how a chariot which, when controlled, is a symbol of harmony may, particularly when out-of-control, both symbolise and incite chaos and disorder; how the triumphal vehicle of peace is also the pre-eminent vehicle of war.

103 How we are to interpret ‘the ending of the Aeneid’ and its myriad tensions is a well-traversed question. I hope that in some ways my analysis of the Aeneid’s chariot-image and its two climaxes allows for another angle, which I draw out briefly. The chariot-image is a kind of thread which intertwines two of the poem’s possible ‘endings’: its temporal end in the triple triumph on Aeneas’ Shield, and its narrative end with Aeneas’ meeting and killing of Turnus. The differing uses of the shared chariot-image in each ‘ending’ invites a direct comparison between the two. If we pursue that comparison, we might conclude that the chariot is an inherently unstable symbol of control and concord, and that that may activate a perception of the instability of the pax Romana created by Octavian and depicted on Aeneas’ Shield. It is telling, in this respect, that in the poem the climax of discordia comes after that of concordia. After the dazzling vision of world-victory, of a triumph proceeding through the Circus, overseen by Apollo’s solar chariot and Octavian sat beneath it, the poem actually ends with a depiction of the conflict which must first be surmounted. The chariot is both emblem and cause of that conflict, but also of the triumphant concord to follow.

104 My final observation speculatively connects the ending of the chariot-image in the Aeneid to that in Ennius’ Annales. As I have already pointed out, what was possibly the first simile in that first Roman hexameter epic compares the start of Romulus’ and Remus’ conflict to a chariot race, and the Annales may well end with the triumph of Marcus Fulvius Nobilior and his dedication of a temple. The latter episode appears to be recalled in the triple triumph on Aeneas’ Shield, and the former in the conflict between Aeneas and Turnus in book 12, in which the chariot-image plays an allusive role. There may therefore be a grand chariot-image which begins in the first simile of Ennius, a simile which concerns conflict and competition, and runs through the triumphant end of the Annales; it then culminates first in the world-victory promised on Aeneas’ Shield and actually achieved by Octavian, and for a second time in the clash between Aeneas and Turnus. That clash echoes that between Romulus and Remus in the Annales, despite the fact that it actually occurs chronologically earlier. This grand chariot-image moves backwards and forwards in time, encompassing the extremes of concordia and discordia, the foundational conflicts of Rome and the imperial peace which it imposes, and shows how each is intertwined, in its path from the Annales to the end of the Aeneid.

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Notes

1 For help on specific points, I am very grateful to Dr Henry Spelman, Dr Peter Agócs, Dr Fiachra Mac Góráin, and Prof. Richard Hunter. I also thank Prof. Damien Nelis, who read over a first draft of this article, and the anonymous readers for Dictynna, who provided many useful and thought-provoking suggestions. Finally, I am most indebted to Prof. Philip Hardie as a source of unfailing knowledge, guidance and encouragement. For Virgil I use Mynors’s (1969) Oxford Classical Text. Translations of excerpts of the Aeneid are based on D. West’s translation for Penguin (1990), with some changes. Translations of other texts are my own.

2 Literal or figurative chariots occur at 1.17, 1.50-207, 1.468-86, 2.270-3, 3.113, 3.537-47, 5.105, 5.144-7, 5.721, 5.816-26, 6.485, 6.535, 6.651-5, 6.585-94, 6.784-6, 6.804, 6.836-7, 7.26, 7.163, 7.184, 7.280-3, 7.378-84, 7.655-6, 7.686, 7.724, 7.765-82, 8.433-4, 8.642, 8.714-23, 9.12, 9.124, 9.316-9, 10.215-8, 10.253, 10.399-404, 10.439-53, 10.570-4, 10.575-600, 11.88, 11.661, 11.670-3, 12.77, 12.81-6, 12.114-5, 12.161-5, 12.287-8, 12.326-382, 12.468-487, 12.494-5, 12.509-12, 12.529-34, 12.614-83.

3 Horsfall (2013) 66 on 6.1.

4 Giusti (2019) 275 notes that modern readings of the Aeneid rely on ‘a number of interconnected but distinct dichotomies (e.g. Jupiter-Juno, heaven-hell, male-female) that mark the poem as one of the milestones of Western dualism’. She wishes to ‘attempt a dismantling’ of such dichotomies.

5 Farrell (2021). His introduction at 1-40 is (unsurprisingly) a good place to start.

6 Farrell (2021) 114; see also the critique of dichotomous readings in Giusti’s (2023) review.

7 Polk (2013).

8 Wilhelm (1984).

9 This is historically plausible, if Homeric armies fought in open formation, according to van Wees (1994) 1-18. See also Kirk (1985) 360-3, who discusses Nestor’s apparent suggestion of a (unique) massed chariot assault at 4.297-309 and 11.743-9.

10 Note particularly Simpson (1969). There is a very helpful overview of the chariot as a metapoetic image in Greek and Latin literature in Briand and Nelson (2025). On Pindar, see Agócs (forthcoming) on metapoetry and Nünlist (1998) 142-61 and 255-76.

11 For Parmenides’ influence on Pindar see D’Alessio (1995) 143-81.

12 Discussion in Yunis (2011) 128-30 and 140-7; different viewpoints in Rowe (1990) 233-6 and 241-5 and Belfiore (2006) 185-217.

13 Yunis (2011) 126.

14 For discussion of the political resonances of the Hippika see Fantuzzi (2005) 249-68 and Kosmetatou (2004) 225-46.

15 Possibly the first simile in the Annales; for discussion of this question, and allusions to this episode in the Aeneid see Hardie (2024) 149-56.

16 Aicher (1990) 223.

17 Humphrey (1986) 62-3, 91-5), also discusses the possibility that the Temple of the Sun overlooked the Circus’ finish line; this would create a clear alignment between the solar obelisk celebrating Augustus’ Egyptian victory and the Temple of Sol which may have overlooked any Circensian victory (see fn. 20).

18 Wiseman (2019) 122-39 argues (against the conventional view) that the Temple of Apollo instead looked north-east, away from the Circus; Lipps (2020) offers a strong rebuttal in his BMCR (2020) review.

19 Grotto (2025) 15 argues along the same lines, and at footnote 88 has a useful record of the scholarship in favour of this proposition.

20 Argued for in Wilkinson (1970) 286-90.

21 First discussed in Thomas (1983) 92-113, who argued convincingly for Callimachean influence in response to Wilkinson (1970) above.

22 See Meban (2008), particularly 155-67.

23 Skutsch (1968) 18-20. For discussion of Nobilior’s temple see Heslin (2015) 202-7.

24 Austin (1971) 36 on 1.17.

25 Kopff (1981) strongly argues that Virgil had read the original Epic Cycle texts (e.g. at 921). By contrast Gärtner (2015) 546-9 is more sceptical and will positively assert only that Virgil likely was familiar with the subject matter of the Epic Cycle.

26 Feeney (1991) 132.

27 Grotto (2025) 1-15.

28 See Hardie (1986) 322-5.

29 For discussion of the possibility that the statesman may be identified with Cato the Younger, see Harrison (1988) 55-6; this would fit the prevailing Republican tone, although Augustus is obviously also a candidate. For the Ennian background see Hardie (2024) 151-2.

30 Humphrey (1986) 61-2.

31 See Feeney (2014) 215 for further discussion of this idea.

32 Cf. TLL s.v. arrigo, which draws parallels for arrigere aures with horses from Ov. Met. 15.516, Silius 10.458, and Columella 6.29.2.

33 Cf. Eleg. in Maecen. 1.127-8 tu mulcere iubam, cum iam torsisset habenas / procedente die, respicientis equi (‘you were worthy to stroke the horse’s mane, as it looked back on its nocturnal course, when Dawn turned the reins for advancing day’).

34 Nelis (2015) 156.

35 Freudenburg (2019) 301.

36 Horace’s Odes 1.3, which warns Virgil of the folly of navigating the seas as he prepares to cross to Athens, may also be a warning against overweening poetic ambition such as Virgil demonstrates in narrating Juno’s storm.

37 The other occurrence of concors describes the souls of Caesar and Pompey in Elysium: 6.825.

38 For concordia, see Cairns (1989) 85-108; see also Putnam (1980) 10-1.

39 Discussion and bibliography in Horsfall (2006) 379 and Heyworth and Morwood (2017) 220.

40 Weinstock (1971) 326-30.

41 For discussion of white horses in a triumph, see Weinstock (1971) 68-75. Versnel (1970) offers the synthesis that the triumphing general represents both god and king. However, note the scepticism of Beard (2007) 219-257, and particularly 234-6 on the white horses.

42 It is also tempting to compare the Horse’s entry through a wall which the Trojans break down (2.234: diuidimus muros, ‘we broke apart the walls’) to the quasi-triumph which Nero celebrated, described by Suetonius (Nero 25). Nero enters Rome in the same manner (albis equis introit disiecta parte muri, ut mos hieronicarum est ‘he entered drawn by white horses through a hole in the wall which had been made, in the manner of a victor in the Greek games’) before proceeding not to the traditional Capitol, but to the Palatine (25.2: Palatium et Apollinem petit, ‘he made for the Palatine and the Temple of Apollo’).

43 There is a full discussion in Horsfall (2008) 209-21, who suggests that ritual may be viewed as an offering to Pallas.

44 For the singing girls and boys, cf. Horace Car. Saec. 6 and Livy 27.37.13; for the ceremonial foliage cf. Tert. Apol. 35.4 and Verr. Flacc. ap. Macr. 1.6.15.

45 Cf. Perry (2013) for a discussion of the funeral games in their Homeric and Bronze Age context.

46 Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) on Horace Odes 1.14 offer a useful introduction to the metaphor.

47 Cf. Nelis (2001) 210-221.

48 Feldherr (1995) 245-65.

49 For naufragium as a charioteering term see Sinclair (2013) 495; for its usage in political contexts see TLL I.C.i.b.

50 Nelson (2023) 247-8.

51 tonanti is used of Jupiter’s thunder: OLD II.B.

52 Lewes House Gems no.105, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

53 Zanker (1988) 39-43.

54 Williams (1972) 452 on 5.822-3 records the suggestion of Pliny Nat. Hist. 36.26.

55 Noted in Fratantuono and Smith (2015) 702; the connection was first made by Putnam (1962) 225-6.

56 In contrast to Silius’ circuit around the horizons (Punica 5.24: curriculo nigram nox roscida metam / stringebat, ‘the dew-filled night was drawing near the black finishing-post in its circular course’).

57 See discussion in Horsfall (2000) 141-2.

58 There is discussion of epic and the Circus in Lovatt (2005) 23-54.

59 Parallels to both the Palatine and the Capitol are noted in Horsfall (2000) 146-7 on 7.170-91.

60 It is also significant that only the Latin warriors, never the Trojans, use chariots. Heinze (1993/1903) 159 explains that this is because the Trojans could not have transported chariots on their ships. I consider this further in Section 9.

61 Cf. Lyne (1989) 138-9, who suggests that in a sense Aeneas here gets his own horses back.

62 Lyne (1987), 138-9.

63 Nelis (2001) 287 discusses the Apollonian resonances in this ‘strange gift’.

64 Forms of iugalis occur at 4.16, 4.59, 4.496, 10.497, 7.280 (here) and 7.320.

65 Compare McOsker and Fratantuono (2025) 79-83 on Virgil’s allusive play between two namesake Harpalycae.

66 Moorton (1988) 254.

67 Noted in Segal (1968) 430-6 and Putnam (1970) 412-21, and discussed further in Hardie (1992) 62-9.

68 Fittingly, since the top is an image of Dionysiac possession. This was noted in Hirst (1937) 65-6; discussion in Levaniouk (2007), particularly 194-5.

69 For uerbera and habenae together cf. Stat. Theb. 6.523: uerberibusque iubas et terga lacessit habenis, ‘and he struck their necks and backs with whips and reins’.

70 Nelson (2025) 1217-8. There is general discussion of the influence of Callimachus’ epigram on this simile in Bleisch (1996) and briefly in Coffey (1961) 72.

71 Gutzwiller (1998) 224-6.

72 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this point.

73 See Hardie (1997) for the distinct ‘endings’ of the Aeneid.

74 Horsfall (2013) 411 on 6.591.

75 For the historical background on Roman worship of Cybele, see Wiseman (1984) 117-28 and Beard (1994) 164-91. For Augustus’ emulation of Bacchus, see Mac Góráin (2021) 90-102.

76 In relation to Cybele, the duality is stressed by the two intertexts on which Virgil draws: Lucretius DRN 2.598-660, which depicts Cybele as an allegory for the bountiful earth, and Catullus 63, in which Attis travels to Phrygia and in an orgiastic frenzy becomes a gallus (a castrated priest of Cybele). See Nauta (2005) 600-25 for Cybele in Catullus 63. Nauta (2007) 79-93 and Hardie (2012) 225-9 discuss the relationship between Catullus 63 and the Aeneid in detail.

77 Note also the triumphal chariot of Lucius Mummius, which appears at 6.836-7, where he celebrates victory over the Achaeans: a sort of intermediate revenge for the Trojans’ descendants on their old Greek enemies.

78 The place to start is Hardie (1986) 355-8.

79 Horsfall (2013) 536 on 6.785 offers parallels for inueho used of being carried on a chariot.

80 Miller (2000) 410-4 comments on the fact that the triumph appears to end at the Palatine Temple to Apollo.

81 Beard (2007) 91-105; Miller (2000) 411 fn.9 considers the possibility that Octavian looks over the Circus Maximus.

82 Note the arguments of Wiseman (2019) 122-39 against this, which I have already discussed in fn. 20.

83 For concord in this passage see Hardie (2019) 104-6 and Hardie (forthcoming).

84 For the motif see Fitzgerald (2016) 73-83.

85 Thucydides 1.29.3 attests to the presence of a temple to Apollo at Actium; see Wardle (2014) on Suet. Aug. 18 for further details of the cult of Apollo at Actium.

86 See Humphrey (1986) 61-2, who points out that the Greek Ποσειδῶν Ἵππιος was connected with the taraxippos of Greek hippodromes.

87 Chariots used in war occur at 9.124, 9.316-9, 10.399-404, 10.439-453, 10.570-4, 10.575-601, 11.88, 11.661-2, 11.670-3, 12.81-6, 12.287-8, 12.326-382, 12.468-487, 12.494-5, 12.509-12, 12.529-34, 12.614-83.

88 They could, after all, have built them in their new camp.

89 The image of a turbo (‘whirlwind’) recurs in several passages which invoke the chariot-of-discord theme: see 1.83 (the storm-winds), 6.594 (Salmoneus), 7.378 (Amata/the top), 12.531-2 (Aeneas killing Murranus).

90 Comprehensively detailed in Horsfall (2003) 66-7, with an important note of caution that that some triumphal practices may in fact be standard rituals used also in funerals.

91 The collocation is also used at 2.766 (of pauidae matres), 6.482 (ghosts of the Dardanidae), and at 6.754 (the start of the Heldenschau, or parade of heroes).

92 So Horsfall (2003) 101, who also notes that in this instance currus is most likely a poetic plural. This would be the only chariot we see on the side of the Trojans and their allies, but it is never depicted in warfare.

93 Humphrey (1986) 94 (with bibliography).

94 TLL 2.c, which cites Ov. Met. 15.192-3: ipse dei clipeus … mane rubet, ‘the god’s own shield is red in the morning’.

95 Cf. Tarrant (2012) 133 on 12.164 for the difficulties in reconciling this account of Sol’s genealogy with that of book 7; auus must be taken as ‘great-grandfather’ here.

96 See Harder (2012) 826 on the ‘horse’ Zephyros in Callimachus’ Aitia fr. 110.52-8 and other horse-winds in classical literature. Grotto (2025) also contains a host of useful points.

97 See Tarrant (2012) 113 ad loc.: ‘The link to Rhesus aligns T. with another doomed opponent of the Greeks at Troy’.

98 It comes as a surprise at 12.469 to learn that Turnus’ chariot is actually driven by the charioteer Metiscus.

99 The locus classicus for analysing Virgilian similes in terms of multiple-correspondence is West (1969).

100 Although note that Tarrant (2012) 215 argues that fertur does not connote someone ‘borne along helplessly’, but is a ‘middle voice’ verb.

101 She is turned into a nightingale in Ovid Met. 6.401-674; see Lyne (1987), 140-4.

102 Hardie (2024), 154-6.

103 A hapax in Virgil; see Tarrant (2012) on 12.719.

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Alex Dent, « Chariots in the Aeneid »Dictynna [En ligne], 22 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 14 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/dictynna/4447 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15a2e

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