Iuno Reconciliata:
The Triumph of Latin

Avery R. Springer (John Burroughs School, MO)

This presentation reexamines Juno’s final speech in Aeneid, Bk xii, in which she agrees at last to bow to the demands of fate, provided that conditions are met. She insists that Troy itself not be reestablished, that its name die with it, and that the Trojans cease to be Trojans and become one with the Latin natives. Jupiter’s agreement to Juno’s conditions lets Vergil neatly resolve the difficulties of the tenuous connection between Aeneas and the Romans, since several hundred years of legendary history lie between the fall of Troy and the traditional founding date of Rome. Juno explicitly connects Latium, Alba and Rome, which calls to mind of the opening lines of the poem: ‘genus unde Latinum / Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae.’

While this passage has not lacked for examination and interpretation, this presentation narrows our attention to the language the goddess uses at the end of her speech to Jupiter. She says:

cum iam conubiis pacem felicibus (esto)

component, cum iam leges et foedera iungent,

ne vetus indigenas nomen mutare Latinos

nec Troas fieri iubeas Teucrosque vocari

aut vocem mutare viros aut vertere vestem. xii.825

In her demands to subvert the culture of the invading Trojans to that of the native Latins, she lists those aspects of their culture which the Romans themselves saw as defining them in the world: their name, their dress, and perhaps above all, their language. The very words that Vergil puts in Juno’s mouth alliteratively reinforce the primacy of the Latin language. With the repetition of the sound /w/ in lines 823-5, which is reiterated by Jupiter at lines 832-3, Vergil brings to the ear of the listener a sound which would have been particularly associated with Latin. The other language most likely familiar to Vergil’s audience and also closely associated with the Trojan story, i.e. Greek, had lost that phoneme centuries before.

As is so often the case, Vergil’s unerring sense of sound and meaning combine in Juno’s speech to underscore the fated primacy of Rome, both political and linguistic.