Genus Ausonio mixtum: Shifting Models and
Blurred Identity in Vergil’s War in Italy

Stephen Smith (University of Minnesota)

Just before the end of the Aeneid, Juno asks that the name of Troy finally be allowed to die, and Jupiter replies that the Trojans and Italians will be joined as one people named after Latinus. This union will eventually result in the Roman race and thus the war between the Trojans and the Italians becomes a precursor for the civil wars which plagued the Romans. The two peoples, however, are in no position to appreciate this, and within the action of the Aeneid the prevailing model for their war is the recent war between the Trojans and the Greeks which resulted in the fall of Troy—an outcome which fuels Italian hopes for victory. From the first reference to a new Trojan War, however, that model was destabilized. The enmity between Greek and Trojan no longer exists and has in fact been replaced by friendlier relations, and the peoples of Latium and Etruria are split, not along ethnic lines such as Greek and Trojan, but along factional lines, with partisans of a different leader on each side.

This destabilization is furthered by the frequent allusions in the second half of the poem to Achilles in the Iliad. The Sibyl’s warning of a new war includes a reference to a second Achilles, whose description points to both Aeneas and Turnus. The confusion of two goddess-born warriors is not resolved by the prophecy that Lavinia will marry a foreign prince, for as Amata points out this might refer to Turnus as well—and Aeneas’ journey to Italy has already been explicitly cast as a return to the land of his ancestors. Aeneas implicitly claims the role of Achilles in Book 8, while Turnus does so explicitly in Book 9. On the other hand, Aeneas is often associated in the minds and words of the poem’s characters with his brother-in-law Hector (particularly by Andromache, Diomedes, and Aeneas himself), whereas even as Turnus claims to be the new Achilles, he performs actions reminiscent of Hector in the Iliad. Finally, Aeneas’ last words in the poem to his son Ascanius—an exhortation to emulate the courage of both Aeneas and Hector—come just before the culmination of Aeneas’ actions as the new Achilles at the end of the poem.

If Aeneas and Turnus, the greatest warriors of the opposing forces, are engaged in a constant struggle not just for the hand of Lavinia but also for the mantle of Achilles, then the roles of their supporters are also in flux—the Trojans are at one point “still” the Trojans and at another they “become” the Greeks, their erstwhile opponents, whereas the Italians in response are now the Greeks and now the Trojans. The two sides are interchangeable and thus in a sense identical. The Trojans and the Italians are already one people, and Jupiter’s prophecy of a union turns out to be a fait accompli. Thus the war in Italy is another way in which Vergil suggests that the reality of later Rome is already implicit in the distant past.