Sibylline syllables: The intratextual Aeneid

Abstract

As recent scholarship on the poem has demonstrated, the Aeneid is punctuated by reiterated episodes of opening. These ruptures, often violently produced, release violence into the world of the poem, prolonging the epic action by postponing its appointed end. The pattern is set in the first book when Aeolus strikes at the mountain that houses the winds, unleashing the storm that drives Aeneas off course, from Italy to Carthage. What is ‘opened’ here is at once something within the poem (the cavernous prison of the winds) and the poem itself, which restarts, as it were, when it seemed on the verge, with Aeneas' approach to Italy, of shutting down. Much valuable work has been done to illuminate and complicate this convergence of the action in the poem with the action of the poem, with one focus being the agency of Juno, a figure especially closely linked here with openings and beginnings.