#there's a half-baked idea going on w aeneas seeing carthage and the triangle being upside down again

[foxtsumus]

Sorry to ignore explicit instruction, but I very much am going to ask you to elaborate on ur aeneid post b/c i am sensing some sexy thoughts, like people think God can.

ok. ok ok ok so this is wildly underdeveloped and i wasn’t specific enough in the original post, i’m rereading books ii and xii for a paper rn so i can talk about animal sacrifices vs human sacrifices and how they’re both used as a vehicle for and justification for the actions of an empire, but the latter’s usage in the mythical origins of rome underscores just how fucking costly rome really was. w/e man i’m not super interested in what i’m arguing in that paper but hey i’ll do my best on it. anyway The Post

yeah i’m specifically thinking about book ii vs book xii here bc reading them back to back drove me nuts. the dichotomy between the perspective of the two is enough to give me whiplash, i swear. anyway, in the light of my life, book ii, aeneas is the one telling us all of the events of book ii, and therefore the perspective for the fall of troy is from one of the many humans involved in it. the triangle is pointing up, sure, but the base is on the ground. the story is told by humans on the earth with an eye on the g-ds in the heavens. this results in something that kills me every time i read book ii- this story cannot be told from above bc there are no g-ds present to tell it.

sinon’s lie, the thing that succeeded where ten long years and thousands of ships failed, lays claim to the will of the g-ds, but it’s still a lie. the g-ds are in the minds of the listeners, but the listeners are still ultimately people on the earth, who are metaphorically looking up at them. of course, the g-ds aren’t actually present bc it was all a lie.

this book also contains the end of the proud city of troy, but according to aeneas, the g-ds aren’t there either. plenty of mention is made of their icons and their servants, from dream!hector telling aeneas he needs to save the relics and rites of their ancestral g-ds, to panthus and cassandra not being helped by apollo, to priam dying on an altar, but aeneas outright says that “when g-ds are contrary, they stand by no one”. (aeneas’ focus on the g-ds in his retelling of these events is his gaze still being turned towards them!!! the triangle is still pointing up!!!!) multiple ppl aeneas interacts with during the fall of troy have an eye on the g-ds, but they’re still stuck on the ground floor of a city that is falling.

aeneas says that venus was there, but arguably only to ensure that ascanius gets out alive and can go on to found alba longa and the julian line. the fall of troy is by this point guaranteed, but the foundation of rome is not. the g-ds now act in service of the latter, not the former. therefore, confirmed attendee venus can’t be the POV for the destruction of troy, because while she may have been present for it, she wasn’t there specifically for that.

book xii, meanwhile, sees the direct and indirect interference of multiple divinities, including turnus’ nymph sister juturna, who fakes an omen for the augur tolumnis early on. (it’s an EXTREMELY sexy reference to/inversion of what happened to laocoon earlier; we know exactly who caused this one and why instead of having to work with the trojan assumption that laocoon’s death was a punishment.) later, venus heals aeneas so he can go back out and fight turnus, and eventually jupiter himself tells juno to lay off and scares away juturna so that aeneas can fulfill his destiny. book xii’s main events are caused by the g-ds doing whatever they feel they need to in this situation, and as they gaze down on the ever-narrowing space between aeneas and turnus, you can almost feel fate closing in like a vise grip. the base of the triangle is now in the heavens as the attending g-ds react to fate in their own ways. book xii, very much returning to the familiar storytelling style of the g-dly parts of the iliad, is about the will of the g-ds, not of men--even when they tried to avoid a large-scale battle, juturna (and juno, implicitly) intervened--and it is certainly not about the will of aeneas. aeneas has been living in a divine fishbowl ever since the flames appeared above iulus’ head, but never more so than the moments before his final confrontation with turnus, when g-ds outnumber men and all of the g-ds with skin in the game are watching. the real action is up above, they’re just looking down.

(which makes it even more affecting when the g-ds fall away and it’s just the two of them and aeneas makes the choice to kill turnus. no g-d pulled his eye to pallas’ belt. no g-d whispered rage into his ear. in this moment of reckoning, aeneas, the primogenitor of rome, chose to do this. and then you go back and you read the latin and it says “ferrum adverso sub pectore condit fervidus”, 12.950, and “conderet urbem”, 1.5, and you wonder whether aeneas the character ever really had a choice at all. what is a story if not a divine fishbowl. this poem makes me insane.)

tl;dr: book ii (△) is humanity looking up to the heavens and thinking they’re looking at the g-ds, but they’re actually just looking at destiny, which is past the point of no return. the g-ds are not there. book xii (▽) is the g-ds looking down at two humans but thinking they’re looking at destiny, which is at the point of no return. then, in only 15 lines, that point is passed with violence and fury and it was not by destiny, it was by one human. 

you, the reader, are still looking at destiny.