Lavinia

“How is it that you understand me, who lived twenty-five or thirty centuries ago? Do you know Latin? But then I think no, it has nothing to do with being dead, it’s not death that allows us to understand one another, but poetry.”

Lavinia notices inconsistencies in her reality, like the fact that the Trojans and the Latins understand each other in Lavinia and in the Aeneid. Instead of trying to puzzle out a solution to this problem, Lavinia accepts that communication can go beyond language and speaks through time to readers.

“‘Are these scenes of Troy?’ I ask him, and he shakes his head.

‘I do not know what they are,’ he says. ‘They may be scenes of what is yet to come.’

‘What is yet to come is mostly war, then,’ I say.”

When Lavinia looks at Aeneas’s shield, she sees the future. The tension inherent in the theme of Accepting and Resisting Fate is at play here: Although what she sees horrifies her, she knows that what the shield shows is inevitable.

“Mars has no altar in the city. Men worship him. A girl, a virgin, I could have no business with him and wanted none. The house I kept was closed to him, as his was to me. But I honored the sanction. He did not.”

The lives of men and women were largely separate in ancient Latin society; women tended to the household and were expected to keep separate from matters of war, which were considered men’s domain. However, Mars (war personified) didn’t respect the boundaries between men and women; Lavinia knows all too well how war affects everyone.

“I am not here in my body. My body is lying on the deck of a ship sailing from Greece to Italy, but I don’t think I’ll get to Brundisium even if the ship does. I am sick, I am dying, I am on my way to…to Acheron.”

When the poet predicts that he won’t make it to Brundisium he’s almost correct: He died in the Brundisium harbor on September 21, 19 BCE, at age 50. He believes that he’s headed for Acheron, the river leading to the underworld. In the Aeneid, the poet describes the souls of the newly dead being ferried across the river and into the underworld.

“‘She came to Albunea by herself,’ he said, speaking into the darkness, ‘and knew the sacred names of the river, and had no wish to be married. And I knew nothing of all that! I never looked at her. I had to tell what the men were doing…Perhaps I can—’ But he broke off, and presently said, ‘No. No chance of that.’”

The poet is struck by Lavinia’s richness and complexity as a character and deeply regrets how little life he gave her in his poem. Concerned with the deeds of warriors and heroes, epic poets gave little thought to the life of a woman. It’s too late for him to change his poem now, so Lavinia’s fate is sealed.

“It wasn’t singing like the shepherds’ songs, or rowers’ choruses, or the hymns at Ambarvalia and Compitalia, or the songs women sing all day at spinning and weaving and pounding and chopping and cleaning and sweeping. There was no tune to it. Its words were all the music of it, its words were its drumbeat, clack of the loom, tread of feet, oarstroke, heartbeat, waves breaking on the beach at Troy away across the world.”

When the poet describes the fall of Troy to Lavinia, he sings, but not in the style that she’s used to. Rather, she describes a tuneless, rhythmic pattern to his words that is unlike anything she has heard before. What she’s describing here is the rhythm of dactylic hexameter, which characterizes the Aeneid.

“‘Do you have to decide how it ends before you get to the end?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t, in fact. It’s not exactly a matter of deciding. Rather of finding out.’”

Although he’s the author of the Aeneid, the poet doesn’t feel that he chooses what happens to the characters; rather, he finds out what happens to them. This calls his position as author into question, prompting Lavinia to ask whether he make them all up or recorded what was revealed to him.

“He went on, hesitant, ‘It was the Sybil who guided Aeneas…What man did I guide? I met him in a wood, like this. A dark wood, in the middle of the road. I came up from down there to meet him, to show him the way.’”

Although a real poet, Virgil (or Vergil) is also a character in Dante’s work The Divine Comedy, where he guides the 14th-century poet through the underworld. As the poet approaches death, the past and future bleed together for him. Like Lavinia, he’s bound by the stories he inhabits.

“And I remember, always, that I am contingent. So, of course, were they.”

Lavinia recognizes that she, Aeneas, and the poet are all contingent, dependent on the actions of others and the whims of fate. In the never-ending battle that the theme of Accepting and Resisting Fate represents, she knows that whatever choices they make, she can’t harbor any anger toward the poet for her fate.

“‘Why must there be war?’

‘Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is! Because men are men.’”

The poet’s response here is akin to the cultural norms of Lavinia’s Latin society, which considers men and women fundamentally different. Like the Latins, the poet sees war as men’s domain; the Roman war god Mars represents an intrinsic, inevitable part of men that can’t be avoided.

“‘Who is the hero?’

‘You know who the hero is.’

‘He kills like a butcher. Why is he a hero?’

‘Because he does what he has to do.’

‘Why does he have to kill a helpless man?’

‘Because that is how empires are founded.’”

In Greek and Roman epic poems, heroes are necessarily men who kill; they fight wars and often kill defenseless people. Lavinia struggles to reconcile heroism with brutal killing, but for the poet, this kind of violence is an important part of the nation-building project of the Aeneid.

“To hear myself promised as part of a treaty, exchanged like a cup or a piece of clothing, might seem as deep an insult as could be offered to a human soul. But slaves and unmarried girls expect such insult, even those of us who have been allowed liberty enough to pretend we are free. My liberty had been great, and so I had dreaded its end.”

Lavinia acknowledges that to be promised as part of a treaty is indeed insulting. However, as the theme of Duty and Piety indicates, her values require her to marry, and the insult is one she expected. For women in her time, freedom was extremely limited, and marriage wasn’t always a choice.

“When the poet sang me the fall of Troy, his story told of the king’s daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard.”

Cassandra, King Priam’s daughter and Paris’s sister, predicted the fall of Troy as a result of Paris’s actions, but no one listened to her. Lavinia compares herself to Cassandra in this moment: She can see the truth, but no one will to listen to her.

“Perhaps women have more complicated selves. They know how to do more than one thing at one time. That comes late to men. If at all. I don’t know if I’ve learned it yet.”

In ancient Latin and Greek societies, social differences between men and women were stark. Here, Aeneas demonstrates his belief that women are more selfless, make greater sacrifices, and display more emotional maturity than men.

“The horrible list of carnage my poet had told me on the last night, that was what they were making ready for. But why, what was it for? For a pet deer? For a girl? What good would that be?

Without war there are no heroes.”

The poet tells Lavinia that wars are necessary to make heroes. The theme of Accepting and Resisting Fate figures heavily here; the characters must obey not just the poet’s story but also their fates. Lavinia wishes that the war didn’t have to happen, but without the war, there’s no story.

“The poem was finished…No, but it was left unfinished.”

The theme of Storytelling and Immortality persists throughout Lavinia. Turnus’s death marks the end of the Aeneid, though some debate whether the poem’s author meant to end it there. Either way, the story is not over; it continues, and Lavinia lives on forever.

“The owl he saw—just before you met with Turnus—he said he doesn’t know if he saw an owl flying around Turnus’ head, beating at him with its wings, or if he saw something Turnus was seeing, that wasn’t actually there.”

The owl motif keeps the story on course. It’s unclear whether the owl that Turnus saw was real or a harbinger of his doom. Either way, the owl weaves together storytelling and fate: Turnus is fated to die at Aeneas’s hands, and the owl ensures that he keeps to the path laid out for him.

“‘There’s a saying,’ Aeneas said: ‘Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts.’ He spoke wryly. ‘Horses, particularly.’

‘I’ll keep the horses, then,’ my father said.”

Aeneas paraphrases the idiom “beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” which refers to the Trojan Horse. During the Trojan War, the Greeks built a large wooden horse, filled it with soldiers, and offered it to the Trojans as a gift. Once inside the city walls, the soldiers emerged and sacked Troy.

“Go on, go. In our tongue it is a single sound, i. It is the last word Aeneas said. So in my mind it is spoken to me, said to me. I am the one to go, to go on. Go where? I do not know. I hear him say it, and I go. On, away. On the way. The way to go. When I stop I hear him say it, his voice, Go on.”

Lavinia is the only character in the story who can “go on” forever, since she doesn’t die but is thematically bound by Storytelling and Immortality. The command to go on is repeated many times throughout Lavinia: It’s spoken by Latinus, Deiphobos, Creusa, Aeneas, and Lavinia.

“He never spoke, but he was not dead, then. So long as Achates told me the story, Aeneas was not dead.”

The thematic link between Storytelling and Immortality is again evident. Although Aeneas is dead, Lavinia and Achates keep him alive through storytelling. On a meta-narrative level, this is true of all characters in the Aeneid: They’re immortal because they live on in the poem, kept alive by it.

“I was afraid of the shield, but the child was not; the power that had made it and dwelt in it was in his blood. He put out his hand to the golden cuirass, following the curves and decorations with palm and fingers, smiling.”

Lavinia fears Aeneas’s shield because of the future she sees in it. As Aeneas’s heir, Silvius feels no such fear and knows that one day he’ll have to shoulder the responsibility of ruling the kingdom. While Aeneas’s armor and shield are too heavy a burden for Ascanius, Silvius knows he can do what needs to be done.

“Aeneas had not been there with me as a man in the flesh, nor had Anchises spoken. It was the poet who spoke. It was all the words of the poet, the words of the maker, the foreteller, the truth teller: nothing more, nothing less.”

Lavinia hears the poet’s words because she lives inside his story. His words are her entire world. Although she wants to imagine that she saw Aeneas or heard Anchises speak, she knows the truth: They’re simply extensions of those words.

“I was fated, it seems, to live among people who suffered beyond measure from grief, who were driven mad by it. Though I suffered grief, I was doomed to sanity.”

Unlike those who are overwhelmed by grief and thus may resist fate, Lavinia is sane because she accepts her fate. She knows that she’s in a story and that her fate is already decided for her.