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how Vergil thought about myth

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asking this of Homer or the tragedians, we wouldn't get much of an answer, since they didn't have much meta-thought on what myth was to them, they just employed it

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with Virgil we have evidence of him using myth as a tool

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has large tradition of the interpretation of Homer

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Vergil is a scholar poet, an artist

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an extremely learned person

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very familiar with the traditions that he is writing and rewriting but also of the commentary of these writings

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this gives him a rich context in which to remake the traditions that are coming his way

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has a strong rationalizing impulse to him

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when he encounters strange or mystical events, he provides an explanation of these

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e.g. the love scene at the close of Book 1 where Venus decides to weaken Dido by making her fall in love with Aeneas

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Venus reshapes Amor into the shape of Ascanius, the infant son of Aeneas

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Amor

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-son of the love goddess Venus

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Cupido = desire, Amor = love

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Greek counterpart is Eros

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Ascanius [as-KAYN-ee-us]

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legendary king of Alba Longa and is the son of the Trojan hero Aeneas

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so behind this falling in love, you have a psychological tactic being employed by Venus (The Puppy Effect)

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leaving Crete

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thinking about making new city here

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but Aeneas should leave Crete because of plague

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Vergil casts the visiting of the gods in the form of a dream

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so there is not only the psychological issue of the gods telling him to go, but the physical issue of the plague

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a redundant set of causes given

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Jupiter

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is quite a grand remove from most of the events that happen in the story

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different from Zeus, who gets his hands dirty threatening people, sending messengers, etc.

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Jupiter is further removed, grander, further out

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Vergil puts Jupiter in the highest levels of the cosmos, and he stays there, he doesn't come down

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Juno

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Greek equivalent: Hera

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daughter of Saturn

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sister/wife of the chief god Jupiter

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mother of Mars

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Juno looked after women in Rome

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when Juno gets involved in events with Aeneas, she is typically a storm goddess

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blow winds and storms

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in the Greek materials, Hera is not a storm goddess, not her way of doing things

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Greek allegorists understood Hera's name as meaning "air" and air is responsible for the weather, so Juno as storm goddess is based on a long allegorical tradition

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household gods

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effigies, actual statues

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local gods of particular families, a very Roman custom, not a Greek one

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very important for Vergil's story

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actual place names

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also part of Vergil's rationalizing spirit

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his story is highly mappable

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all mappings of the Odyssey, on the other hand, are mostly creations of the map makers

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where Homer's geography is mythic, Vergil's geography is accurate

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Homer has strange and wonderful places but you can't really find them on a map of the Mediterranean

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with Vergil, every place he talks about is specifically mappable onto real geography, Romans knew these places, had grown up there or visited them

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Vergil is working with a new sense of "myth in history"

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there was quite a high amount of history in Vergil's time and constructing myth within history is not easy, but with his vast knowledge something that Vergil largely succeeds at