Featured Article - In the Footsteps of Aeneas - To Etruria
Featured Article - In the Footsteps of Aeneas - To Etruria
Guest Article
Author: Anthony Adolph
The myth of Aeneas’s transition from burning Troy to Italy is both a story of the evolution of a myth – that Aeneas laid the foundations for the rise of Rome – and also the story of a journey. Between about 2005 and 2019, when researching the second half of my book In Search of Aeneas, we tried to retrace Aeneas’s journey, going to all the places he is said to have visited, and all the places mentioned in his story, an idea inspired by Robin Lane Fox in his excellent book Travelling Heroes (which is about, amongst other things, the origins of the Greek alphabet that was used to record Homer’s own story of Aeneas, and Troy). We did not quite succeed, because the Arab spring made Carthage unappealing, and then the COVID-19 pandemic brought a temporary halt to all travel, and enforced a growing awareness that endless foreign travel is not, ultimately, very good for the environment. However, in those heady years, we did manage to visit a great many of Aeneas’s places, great and small, well known and thoroughly obscure.
The main sources for the journey were not only Virgil’s Aeneid, but also the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Ovid’s ‘mini Aeneid’ at the end of his Metamorphoses, to name but a few. Virgil (d. 19 AD) was a Roman, from Mantua, working mainly in Rome and Naples; Dionysius (d. post 7 BC), was a Greek historian working in Rome, and Ovid (d. c. 17/18 AD) was a Roman who was exiled to Tomis on the Black Sea. Dionysius collected a vast body of old Greek and Roman writings about Aeneas (and many other things) and recorded them faithfully, always stating his sources, a practice too seldom followed by ancient historians or indeed modern history-writers. His work reveals how many different stories there were, and by putting them in chronological order one can see Aeneas’s myth evolving, from the time of Hellanikos of Lesvos, who lived about 490-405 BC, and who wrote ‘Aeneas came into Italy from the land of the Molossians after Odysseus and became the founder of the city, which he named after Rome, one of the Trojan women. He says that this woman, growing weary with wandering, stirred up the other Trojan women and together with them set fire to the ships. And Damastes of Sigeum [c. 400 BC] and some others agree with him’. Virgil and Ovid were poets, not historians, who each forged their own poetic narratives about Aeneas out of all the old stories, and in both cases enhanced what had come before with their own knowledge of the Mediterranean.
All of which makes nonsense, incidentally, of one modern writer’s assertion that Virgil’s story was based on a true story of Aeneas sailing around the North Sea; the literary remains of Aeneas’s story in the Mediterranean go back many centuries before Virgil’s time.
We did not make a single, long journey, in strict chronological order. Instead, for each trip, we chose part of Aeneas’s journey, researched all the places in advance, and then flew to the nearest airport, hired a car, and started exploring, taking in other interesting archaeological sites, such as those associated with those other inveterate travelers, Odysseus and Hercules, about whom you have to know, too, if you want to understand Aeneas. The planning of such trips entailed much research. Sometimes simply trying to work out the location of a place that the ancient writers mentioned entailed careful searches through other sources, such as the Greek geographers Pausanias and Strabo, and more recent travel and archaeological reports. Reaching the places was often eye-opening. Few of the places are on the well-beaten tourist trails, so often we spent holidays seldom if ever hearing English spoken, in obscure backwaters far from the souvenir stalls and postcard stands, where real people led lives a little closer, we often felt, to the ancient past we were trying to rediscover.
The ancient writers made up their different versions of Aeneas’s journey, often due to the presence of temples to his mother Aphrodite (Venus), so most places on the list had archaeological sites. Few were easy to find: if there was a sign off the road, you could guarantee that the track would then branch; of course there would be no sign then to help and only by exploring all options did we eventually find our goal. We once ended up driving a what felt like 45 degrees along the lower slope of a mountain and, on another occasion, we drove down a woodland track that narrowed alarmingly to become almost a footpath, running alongside, but irrevocably sundered by a steel barrier from, a perfectly good main road. Few people we asked even knew there was an archaeological site nearby and if there was, why on earth did we want to see it? We became adept at working our way around the high, wire fences that invariably surrounded the sites themselves, looking for the inevitable gap through which other enthusiasts like ourselves had made their intrepid way in.
All this effort was at times frustrating, alarming, and (when the hire cars were returned covered with scratches, or with parts dangling off underneath), expensive. But what we gained was immense. Evenings in lonely tavernas watching the stars while the family who ran the place watched incomprehensible foreign TV game shows; friendships with various Mediterranean cats and dogs struck up by giving them fish heads or chicken heads; and many instances of great kindness – a man who turned out to be the former mayor spent a whole afternoon sitting on our back seat, directing us to each different place of archaeological interest in his neighbourhood, no matter how slight. Mainly, it led to insights into the stories. There was a temple to the goddess here because, from here, you could see a mountain that looked like a breast, or a recumbent female figure. This place made sense in the context of Aeneas’s overall journey because it was within distant sight of another place also mentioned in the journey. The local histories, signboards and archaeological museums often gave some unexpected insight into specifically why this place laid claim to Aeneas as a visitor; often, we realized, it was in order to curry favour with the rising power of Rome. Sometimes, events occurred that were coincidental – a full moon over a tranquil bay, or a furious thunderstorm over the mountains – which simply drew us further into the magic and wonder of Aeneas’s story: for although we were subjecting myths to rigorous investigation, their power was based in poetic wonder; and it is this poetic wonder that has caused them to endure in the Western imagination for two thousand years.
Etruscan places
In books 8 and 10 of the Aeneid, Virgil gives a short, dense, account of Aeneas’s foray into Etruria – modern Tuscany – where he received from his mother a suit of armour to protect him in his forthcoming war with Turnus of the Rutulians, and became leader of the united forces of the Etruscan cities. Our initial aim when visiting Tuscany in 2016 was to find the place (Caere, modern Cerveteri) where he received his armour, but as we were going to be there anyway, we decided to try to visit all the other places Virgil mentioned too.
Our exploration was enhanced immeasurably by a copy of D.H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places, published posthumously in 1932, about the journey made by the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover with the painter Earl Brewster in 1927, to try to find and explore the cities and tombs of the Etruscans. Their journeys were by train, then horse and cart or on foot, finding hotels or other lodgings as they could, usually paying boys to act as guides, sometimes not finding what they wanted, but often stumbling across painted tombs beyond their imaginations. The book made a good guide to the sites that existed in his time.
Throughout the book, Lawrence was aware of the rise of Fascism in Italy, which he regarded as a shabby farce, especially when compared with the magnificence of the past to which the Fascists claimed to aspire. In Cività Vecchia, they were menaced by an official demanding to see their passports. ‘I was furious’, Lawrence wrote, ‘supposing I had not been carrying my passport… what amount of trouble would that lout have made me! Probably I should have spent the night in prison, and been bullied by half-a-dozen low bullies’. To Lawrence, with his fascination with the physical body, the Etruscans represented an ideal of ancient harmony. At Tarquinia, he sat at a café table in the evening, musing that the ‘young [Etruscan] nobles would come splashing in on horseback, riding with naked limbs on an almost naked horse’ up through ‘the throng of red-brown, full-limbed, smooth-skinned peasants’. He contrasted this with the ‘drab peasants, muffled in ugly clothing’ he saw there. ‘To-day in Italy, in the hot Italian summer, if a navvy working in the streets takes off his shirt to work with free, naked torso, a policeman rushes to him and commands him insultingly into his shirt again’.
Two thousand years before D.H. Lawrence, Virgil looked back from what was in his eyes a flawed present to Italy’s Trojan past with equally rose-tinted vision. Those very naked-limbed Etruscan nobles are the very ones he imagined flocking to Aeneas’s cause, as he descended from the hills of Caere in his new, god-given armour. This past was also the one looked back to, ironically, by Italy’s Fascist ruler Mussolini, who in the decade after Lawrence’s visit, erected plaques that we discovered dotted around Italy, commemorating places where Virgil said Aeneas had been, hoping to draw some of the reflected glory of Aeneas down to himself.
Lawrence’s enthusiasm for the Etruscans took over and, temporarily abandoning Aeneas, we visited Volterra. He and Brewster got there by train. ‘After a bit of backing and changing, the fragment of a train eases up to a bit of a cold, wayside station, and is finished. The world lies below. You get out, transfer yourself to a small ancient motor-omnibus, and are rattled up to the final level of the city’. They found it cold and grey; we breezed in by car and found it damp and rainy. They found the Porta dell’ Arco quickly, ‘the famous old Etruscan gate… almost a tunnel’, with ‘strange, old Etruscan heads’, worn featureless now but still with ‘a peculiar, out-reaching life of their own’. Less than two decades later, the Nazis occupying Volterra heard of the advance of the Allied troops (including, probably, my own grandfather), so they decided to blow the gate up: but the locals, who loved their gate, and wanted the Germans gone as soon as possible, went out at night and collected enough stone from the fields to fill it solid, and thus preserved it – and saw the Fascists packing at last.
We saw the Porta dell’ Arco restored and open ‘with its three dark heads craning out in the evening light’, as my diary for 31 May reminds me, ‘and glimpses of the huge valley lit up by the sudden appearance of the evening sun’. They now say the heads are Hellenistic, not Etruscan, but they are so worn it hardly matters, and perhaps they replaced something earlier. Cortona, which we also visited, has similarly massive Etruscan gates and walls, and here they found two statues of gods, Selvans and Clusems, gods respectively of the fields and city that the gate divided, no different in origin, probably, to Rome’s Penantes, despite later Roman mythology asserting that Aeneas had brought those statues all the way from Samothraki. But knowing how these ancient Italian cities had always had their own city gods increased my confidence in arguing that the Penantes had been in Rome all along, and only became ‘proof’ of Aeneas’s journey by an extremely circular argument.
Our efforts to find all the places Virgil mentioned paid off. He appeared not to mention Tarquinia, which is full of extraordinary Etruscan tombs which we, like Lawrence, explored with wonder, even if they are now better cared for but with strict, paid-for opening hours that would have enraged his free spirit. But as we were determined to find a place on Virgil’s list, ‘feverous Graviscae’, I did more background research and found that it was the name of Tarquinia’s port – so Tarquinia was on the list, albeit obliquely.
Virgil also mentioned ‘ancient Pyrgi’. That took some research too, for it is now called Santa Severa. My diary for 15 June, after seeing Tarquinia, notes ‘tried to drive to S. Severa but the road sign got us onto the motorway going the wrong way. Eventually righted ourselves and had a late lunch on the beach. Saw two people almost drown, first a little boy and later a man – in both instances, the life-guard came sprinting along too late, and could only observe the actual rescues’. Later, we ‘found a gap in the “no access” fence which stops you going south from the castle, and thus found in the fields the Roman walls of Pyrgi going right down to the sea, where there was a gate’, and from there went over the fields ‘to find the Etruscan temple-bases, built in Greek style. Astarte’s was very photographic, the excavated parts flooded due to all the recent rain, the pools alive with frogs. We’d seen much more of ancient Pyrgi that I had thought was possible’.
Both Graviscae and Pyrgi were Etruscan places that sent contingents to swell Aeneas’s army in the Aeneid, but Volterra, with its massive acropolis and impressive walls and gates, is not mentioned. Eventually, the penny dropped. Almost all of Virgil’s list relates to places on, or close to, the Via Aurelia, but Volterra is not. Virgil’s knowledge of Etruria came from travelling the Roman road across it, but not from exploring, as D.H. Lawrence did more intrepidly, far off the beaten track. But, to be fair on Virgil, he did not have the benefit of steam trains – or hire cars.
About The Author
Anthony Adolph (www.anthonyadolph.co.uk) is a professional genealogist and broadcaster. His books include Brutus of Troy (Pen & Sword, 2015) and In Search of Aeneas: Classical myth or Bronze Age hero? (Amberley, 2023)
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