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The Hunter and Hunting in the Aeneid

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

J. Roger Dunkle
J. Roger Dunkle*
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College
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Extract

Hunting is a frequent and thematically important activity in the Aeneid. Aeneas hunts in book one then meets his mother who is dressed like a huntress. He hunts along with Dido and Ascanius in book four and the latter precipitates a war by hunting in book seven. Similes in books two and twelve present Aeneas in the guise of a hunter. Similes in books one and four compare Dido and Aeneas respectively to the huntress Diana and the hunter Apollo. Aeneas is compared to a hunting dog in book twelve. There has been no lack of scholarship on the problem of the hunting motif in the Aeneid. In this criticism there seems to be general agreement that Vergil intended the hunting motif to be symbolic. The repeated use of this motif urges the reader to look for a significance beyond the literal and for crossreference among the occurrences of the motif. As Hornsby has written citing the motif of hunting as an example: ‘We have come to see that motifs, themes and ideas are repeated in a variety of ways and in each repetition a new aspect of the motif, theme or idea is illuminated. But, further, each occurrence reflects on the previous ones, so that we have a series of crosscurrents created in the work, which … reveal not only how the Aeneid is organized but what it signifies.’ However, despite previous scholarship's recognition that hunting in the Aeneid is symbolic, there has not been an attempt to analyze the meaning of the symbol itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , 1973 , pp. 127 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1973

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References

1. See Pöschl, V., Die Dichtkunst Virgils (Innsbruck 1950) 113;Google ScholarOtis, B., Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford 1963) 75–6;Google ScholarAnderson, W., The Art of the Aeneid (Englewood Cliffs 1969) 26, 43, 68;Google ScholarHornsby, R., Patterns of Action in the Aeneid (Iowa City 1970) 2–3, 28–9, 60, 90–5, 120, 134–5Google Scholar.

2. (above, n. 1) 2.

3. See Knauer, G. N., Die Aeneis und Homer (Göttingen 1964) 373Google Scholar.

4. The Attic tragic poets also saw in the hunter an image of civilized man. Aeschylus in his Prometheus Bound omits hunting from Prometheus’ two catalogues of his civilizing gifts to man (436–71; 476–506) but only to make it more prominent by making Prometheus a hunter in his searching out of fire, the source of technology and therefore civilization for man (109–11):

I hunted out the furtive spring of fire filling the hollow of the reed which, once disclosed, was a teacher of every craft to man and a great resource.

Aeschylus has given new significance to the primitive myth of Prometheus the fire-stealer by his use of the image of hunting. Hesiod’s version of the myth makes Prometheus a cunning trickster who stole fire and gave it to man (Op. 51, 55; Th. 565). Aeschylus sees Prometheus in a different, more civilized light. Prometheus becomes a hunter, an intelligent searcher of fire which is itself an image of human reason, the origin of man’s technology and control of nature (cf. Havelock, E. A., Prometheus (Seattle 1968) 15)Google Scholar.

Sophocles prominently includes the hunter in his list of man’s achievements in the famous second ode of the Antigone (332–75). Man, in addition to his skills as a sailor, farmer, tamer of wild beasts and horses, yoker of bulls, master of speech, social being and builder, appears as a hunter of birds, wild animals and fish (343–52). This celebration of man’s rational control of nature, however, is undercut by lines 354–64 which point out one aspect of nature which man cannot control, i.e. death. The ode ends darkly by saying that man’s ingenuity can lead to evil as well as good and the evil doer can have no part in the civilization of the city.

Ch. Segal has shown in an important article (‘Sophocles’ Praise of Man and Conflicts of the Antigone’, Arion, 3 (Summer 1964) 46–66Google Scholar), how crucial this ode is to the proper interpretation of the Antigone. In the action of the play Antigone appears as the hunted victim, an emotional force which the ordered reason of Creon is finally unable to control. The events of the play illustrate how man’s attempts to make irrational nature follow the dictates of his reason are doomed to failure. Death, which was pointed out in the ode as the most important obstacle to man’s total control of nature, frees both Antigone and Haimon who as Segal points out are identified with nature and uphold the non-rational law of love against Creon’s attempts to force his will upon them. Thus man’s hunting along with his other conquests of nature is seen to be an empty and at best temporary victory. Unlimited irrational nature is ultimately much more powerful than man’s limited reason. Sophocles cannot share Aeschylus’ confidence in the value of human progress through the manipulation of nature. Nature is a higher force with which man cannot equally contend.

Euripides uses the motif of the hunter as the central image of his Bacchae. Pentheus in his attempt to control the irrational Dionysiac behaviour of his mother and aunts and to imprison Dionysus himself is described as a hunter (228, 1020, cf. 434). But as in Sophocles’ Antigone man’s effort to conquer nature as represented in the Bacchae by Dionysus ends in complete failure and in even more terrible destruction. The elusiveness of nature for the hunter-controller is magnificently illustrated in a simile which the chorus of Bacchantes use to describe their Dionysiac behavior (866–77):

Like a fawn sporting in the green pleasures of a meadow when it escapes the frightening hunt beyond the well-woven toils of the net-watchers, the hunter crying aloud urges on the pursuit of his hounds and with speedy whirlwind effort it bounds across the plain by the river, rejoicing in places free of man and in the sprigs of the woods shady with leaves.

Man’s attempt as a hunter to ensnare animal nature is totally frustrated by the elusive fawn. The hunter despite his technical devices cannot suppress the freedom in which the fawn delights. Animal nature in fact completely abhors man.

In the second half of the play Euripides, employing tragic irony, reverses his application of the hunting imagery. Pentheus who earlier in the play was seen as a hunter now becomes the hunted victim of his mother and aunts (732, 1203–4, 1215, 1237, 1241, 1278).

5. (above, n. 3) 158–9.

6. Cf. Hornsby (above, n. 1) 90–1.

7. (above, n. 3) 162.

8. See Otis (above, n. 1) 67.

9. For a summary of this unfavourable opinion see Pöschl (above, n. 1), 101–3.

10. (above, n. 1) 110.

11. (above, n. 1) 71.

12. For the dance cf. Hymn. Horn. 27.15 and hunting cf. Horn. Il. 5.53; 21.483; Soph. Trach. 214.

13. Dido may be committed to a real physical virginity thus making the parallel with Diana more exact. She came as a virgin to her husband (1.345) whom Pygmalion may have killed before the consummation of the marriage. (Is it too much to read this into postquam primus amor deceptam morte fefellit, 4.17?) A desire to preserve her virginity after her sexual expectations had gone unfulfilled with the death of Sychaeus might explain her rather strange disgust with the idea of marriage (4.18).

14. cf. Suet. Tib. 72.2.

15. The hunting motif here is similar in meaning to the Hellenistic motif of the hunter as lover. Callimachus used the hunter as an image of the lover who pursues only the girl who resists and ignores the girl who is readily available (Epigr. 31). In Latin poetry both Horace (.Sat. 1.2.105–9) and Ovid (Amor. 2.9.9; 19.36) employed this image in imitation of Callimachus. The identification of the hunter as lover was perhaps due to the depiction of Eros as an archer (cf. Xen. Mem. 1.3.13) which first occurred in Euripides (IA 548–9).

16. cf. Hornsby, R. ‘The Pastor in the Poetry of Vergil’ CJ 63 (1968), 148Google Scholar.

17. cf. Newton, F. L., ‘Recurrent Imagery in Aeneid IV’ TAP A 88 (1957) 38.Google Scholar

18. cf. 1.191.

19. cf. Austin‘s, R. G. commentary on book four of the Aeneid (Oxford 1955) 64Google Scholar.

20. The Homeric Gods (tr. M. Hadas) (Boston 1954) 74–77Google Scholar.

21. cf. Putnam, M. C. J. ‘Aeneid VII and the Aeneid’ AJP 91 (1970) 418Google Scholar.

22. Vergil’s use of animal imagery here is similar to his portrayal of the irrationality of Aeneas’ armed resistance to the Greeks’ destruction of Troy (2.314) by means of a simile which compares Aeneas and his men to hunting wolves (355–8).

23. cf. Commager’s, S.(The Odes of Horace, New Haven 1962, 339)Google Scholar comment on a similar image in Horace involving Bacchus and his yoked tigers in Carm. 3.3.13–15: ‘Animal energy submits itself to a principle of order.’ Horace, as does Vergil, here uses the Hellenistic image of Bacchus as a culture hero, bringer of civilization, a picture quite different from Euripides’ representation of the god as a symbol of uncontrollable irrational nature.