Multa variarum monstra ferarum:
Monsters in the Aeneid

David F. Bright (Emory University)

The Aeneid is populated with scores of “monsters” of all stripes. This paper attempts simply to suggest a framework for a more comprehensive approach to them. Among the questions raised:

1. What or who qualifies as a monster?  What blend of appearance, genealogy, behavior or inner demons will bestow membership in the club?  Is it enough to have an unnatural form (e.g., a centaur) or must transgression of somatic norms be accompanied by violent, destructive or impious behavior?  Can “mere” criminality, however grand the scale, make one unambiguously monstrous?
2. Can we work through this bewildering array to develop a taxonomy of monsters? Some are traditional, others modified or apparently invented by Vergil. Personifications (Fama, Rumor), traditional hellhounds like Allecto, hybrid creatures (e.g., the Harpies), perversions of the human such as Polyphemus or Cacus; even another culture’s gods (the Egyptian divinities on the Shield of Aeneas [8.696ff]); unique portents like the bleeding bush formerly known as Polydorus; “normal” human monsters (Mezentius); the historical monsters Catiline and Cleopatra, and of course the teeming underworld of Book 6 with its multa variarum monstra ferarum. The list is endless: how to map this biodiversity?
3. Monstrous figures commonly stand as the Other for accepted norms of human appearance and behavior; but if they stand apart from normal humanity, all the more do they serve to define the heroic by an opposition of qualities, aims and actions. This yin and yang of the monstrous and the heroic will repay further analysis of physical descriptions, rhetoric and place in the dispensation of the gods and fate.
4. The monster as teacher: i.e., not merely id quod monstratur but quod monstrat.  Monstrum and portentum overlap significantly (cf. Isid. Eytm. XI.3). Aeneas is far from alone in gaining crucial information by encountering or even seeking out the prophetic / revelatory gifts of  monstrous beings (Polydorus, Polyphemus, Celaeno and others).  This role grants a privileged place in the narrative to otherwise marginal figures whose other features and actions set them apart from either human or divine company.
5. The temporary monster. Whether briefly or at length, several key figures cross the bounds of the acceptable, the rational or even the explicable, and become monsters of the moment, exuberant vehicles of furor with a destructive violence that seems born of itself: Dido, Amata, Turnus, the maddened boxer Entellus—and Aeneas himself.  Even though the impetus to such transgression of boundaries may come from a divinity or deputed agent, their behavior takes the same form and is described in the same terms as the monsters we regard as fundamentally at odds with the heroic, the civilized or the pious. Just as “admirable” figures including Aeneas accept information from these marginal creatures, so they also borrow their behavior.  The worlds of the monstrous and the heroic are interdependent.