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HERCULES AND THE STONE TREE: AENEID 8.233–40
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2020
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In ancient literature and religion, Hercules—in common with many other deities—is frequently associated with particular trees or types of tree. There are tales connecting him with the wild olive, laurel and oak, but his most prominent and frequent arboreal link is with the poplar (populus Alcidae gratissima, ‘the poplar is most delightful to Hercules’, Verg. Ecl. 7.61), an association mentioned twice in the Hercules-heavy first half of Aeneid Book 8 (276, 286). The festival of Hercules celebrated by Evander and his people takes place just outside the city within a ‘great grove’ (Aen. 8.103–4) of unspecified species, in an area surrounded by less defined expanses of trees. Trees crowd the banks of the Tiber, leaning out for wonder as Aeneas’ fleet passes by (Aen. 8.91–2) and soon uariisque teguntur | arboribus, uiridisque secant placido aequore siluas (‘[the Trojans] are covered by different trees and cut their way through green woods on the calm water’, Aen. 8.95–6); looking up through the sacrificial smoke on the altars, Pallas and his friends are initially frightened ut celsas uidere rates atque inter opacum | adlabi nemus (‘as they saw the tall ships glide towards them through the dark grove’, Aen. 8.107–8). When Evander later shows Aeneas around, the emphasis on trees recurs, with the huge grove destined to become Romulus’ Asylum (Aen. 8.342), and the bramble- and god-haunted woods of the Capitol (Aen. 8.347–54). Later, Aeneas and his men camp in a vast grove of Silvanus, as Venus approaches to bring her son his new shield (Aen. 8.597–607).
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References
1 E.g. [Theoc.] Id. 25.208–10; Plin. HN 16.240; Paus. 2.31.10, 5.7.7. Pindar, by contrast, connects Heracles with the cultivated—not wild—olive at Ol. 3.13.
2 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.40.1.
3 Plin. HN 16.239.
4 Cf. Theoc. Id. 2.121; Verg. G. 2.66; Ov. Her. 9.64; Phaedrus, Fab. 3.17; Plin. HN 12.3; Paus. 5.14.3.
5 The appearance of Tiberinus from amongst poplar branches (Aen. 8.31–2) is fitting enough for a river god, but may also glance forward to the importance of the tree's better-known patron as the book progresses. See further Armstrong, R., Vergil's Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine (Oxford, 2019), 131–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 This is not to argue that woods and rocks are necessarily mutually exclusive—indeed, elsewhere in Aeneid Book 8 they can be found in ominous combination: lucum ingentem … | et gelida … sub rupe Lupercal (‘a huge grove and the Lupercal beneath the chilly crag’, 8.342–3); iam tum religio pauidos terrebat agrestis | dira loci, iam tum siluam saxumque tremebant (‘even then terrible religious awe of the place terrified the cringing country folk, even then they trembled at the wood and the rock’, 8.349–50).
7 This simile is evocative of the Homeric pattern of hero-falls-like-tree: e.g. Il. 4.482–9, 13.177–81, 14.414–17, 16.482–4. See Gagliardi, P., ‘L'albero e il guerriero: funzione e storia di un topos omerico’, Silvae di Latina Didaxis 8.20 (2007), 5–42Google Scholar. In the death of Bitias, Virgil returns to a kind of fractured analogy between stones, trees and people: compared earlier along with his brother to a tall oak tree (Aen. 9.679–82), when Bitias comes to die, his fall is not like a tree but like a stone pile, sic illa ruinam | prona trahit (‘so it falls prone, stretching out its ruin’, Aen. 9.712–13). On gigantomachic elements here, see Hardie, P., Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford, 1986), 143–6Google Scholar.
8 Virgil does not reserve the adjective opacus and its related verb opaco only for woods, but it is nevertheless true that he applies them particularly frequently to dark clusters of trees in the preceding sections of the Aeneid: 6.136, 195, 208, 283, 673; 7.84; 8.107.
9 The verb seems later particularly to appeal to Ovid in his arboreal ekphraseis: stat uetus … silua (Am. 3.1.1); lucus | stabat (Am. 3.5.3–4); stat uetus … lucus (Am. 3.13.7); silua uetus stabat (Met. 3.28); stabat … quercus (Met. 8.743); stabat … ficus (Fast. 2.253); silua uetus … | stabat (Fast. 4.649–50).
10 See Hardie (n. 7), 113–16 for a reading which places more emphasis on Hercules’ feat of strength in toppling the rock in the first place.
11 Once thinking along these lines, a pun between silex and ilex feels tempting if probably also fanciful. The combination of birds nesting and that nesting site toppling also brings to mind the grove-cutting scene of the Georgics: et nemora euertit multos ignaua per annos, | antiquasque domos auium cum stirpibus imis | eruit; illae altum nidis petiere relictis (‘[the farmer] toppled the groves which stood idle through many years, and overturned the ancient homes of the birds together with the very roots; the birds made for the heights, leaving their nests behind’, G. 2.208–10).
12 See in particular the great elm with its roosting dreams at Aen. 6.282–4, introduced with the still more emphatically ecphrastic in medio. Admittedly, a further connection here is with the monstrous Harpies, potential dirae uolucres (Aen. 3.262; cf. 3.210, 228, 235), whose habitat seems at least as much the rocks as the trees (rocks: 3.225, 229, 245; woods: 3.258, and 3.230 if it can be reclaimed from editorial excision on the grounds of interpolation from 1.311).
13 See Lyne, R.O.A.M, Words and the Poet: Characteristic Techniques of Style in Vergil's Aeneid (Oxford, 1989), 128–9Google Scholar.
14 The metaphorical uprooting of things which have no roots in the biological sense is of course perfectly common, but poets like Vergil are more than capable of reanimating ‘dead’ metaphors.
15 On the simile type, see n. 7 above.
16 In contrast with the death of the Minotaur, whose fall like that of a great tree (Catull. 64.105–9) evokes sympathy. Apollonius’ Talos may provide a still closer connection here in a combination of monstrosity, rocks and trees: the giant bronze man keeps his enemies away in classic giant style by casting boulders, but, brought low by Medea's evil eye, he falls like a great pine tree, uprooted and making an enormous crash (Argon. 4.1677–88).
17 On an intriguing painting of Hercules actually hugging a tree, see Hunt, A., Reviving Roman Religion. Sacred Trees in the Roman World (Cambridge, 2016), 224–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nevertheless, as the anonymous reviewer rightly observes, in his choice of weapons to use against Cacus, Hercules combines both rocks and trees: ramis uastisque molaribus instat (‘he attacks with branches and great mill-stones’, Aen. 8.250). Here a Virgilian stone-based hapax legomenon alludes to a Homeric hapax legomenon (molaris = μύλαξ, Il. 12.161), which may subtly emphasize the priority of rocks in this moment even while undeniably drawing in tree branches too. On the hapax legomenon, see Wills, J., ‘Homeric and Virgilian doublets: the case of Aeneid 6.901’, MD 38 (1997), 185–202Google Scholar, at 194–5. On the broader ambiguities of the presentation of Hercules in the Aeneid, a helpful summary (together with particular interpretation) is offered by Morgan, L., ‘Assimilation and civil war: Hercules and Cacus, Aeneid 8’, in Stahl, H.P. (ed.), Vergil's Aeneid : Augustan Epic and Political Context (Swansea, 1998), 175–98Google Scholar.
18 Intuitively, perhaps rocks seem less obvious candidates for sympathy than trees, and the frequent connection in the Aeneid between rocks, mountains and the monstrous may add to this sense (cf. Hardie [n. 7], 100–3, 264–5). Nevertheless, one might find at least some pathos in moments of lapidary anthropomorphism, as when the anxious Latinus is like a wave-battered rock (Aen. 7.586–90, parallel to the Aeneas-as-storm-battered-tree simile of Aen. 4.441–6), or the man-mountain Atlas at Aen. 4.246–51, as well as the fall of Bitias (see n. 7).
19 Contrast, notoriously, Aeneas’ removal of Faunus’ sacred oleaster at Aen. 12.766–73: see Thomas, R.F., ‘Tree violation and ambivalence in Vergil’, TAPhA 118 (1988), 261–73Google Scholar.