Why No Mercy? A Study of Clementia in the Aeneid

The Roman poet Vergil lived through the tumultuous age of the Roman civil wars of the first century BC, and witnessed as the Roman republic was repeatedly torn apart by rival aristocrats. His great epic, the Aeneid, tells the story of how the Trojan hero Aeneas, ancestor of Octavian, escapes from Troy and sets out to find a new home for his people. He is guided by fate to Italy, but not all of the Italians are ready to accept the Trojans as friends, and war breaks out between newcomers and natives. This war, as it is fought between two peoples that are later to merge into the Romans, is portrayed by Vergil as a civil war. It is therefore natural to assume that his account of this war is influenced by his meditations on, and evaluation of, the civil wars he himself lived through. On the occasion of the restoration of the republic and the assignment to Octavian of the honorary title of Augustus in 27 BC, a shield was set up in the senate house inscribed with four virtues; virtus, clementia, iustitia, and pietas. Octavian himself mentions the event proudly in his Res Gestae, and the implicit assertion is that by exercising these four virtues he had restored the republic. However, both ancient sources and modern historians agree that the young Octavian - in contrast to Julius Caesar, his adoptive father - could lay very little claim to the virtue of clementia, or clemency. Aeneas too has at times been critized for a lack of clemency. I find it intriguing that a flaw has been perceived in the characters of both Octavian and his ancestor regarding this same virtue

Why No Mercy? : A Study of Aeneas' Missing Virtue

When Octavian in 27 BC was given the title of Augustus, a shield was set up in the senate inscribed with four virtues; virtus, clementia, iustitia, and pietas. Aeneas, the great ancestor of Octavian, is frequently praised for pietas, virtus, and iustitia in the Aeneid. Regarding clementia, however, Vergil is conspicuously silent. Indeed, in the battle scenes of books 10 and 12, Aeneas refuses to spare enemies who ask for mercy. The author examines the arguments presented in order to vindicate Aeneas' acts, and argues that the sources cited in defence of Aeneas cannot be called upon to give a clear verdict. Instead of employing contemporary sources in a bid to exculpate Aeneas, the author uses them to explain why Vergil decided to make his hero merciless. He submits that Vergil has deliberately, and in accordance with his view of contemporary political events, created a merciless hero for his epic

The language of freedom and slavery in tacitus agricola

The Agricola has long been a popular object of study for the connection that it makes between the British narrative of resistance against Roman domination and the Roman narrative of resistance against imperial domination. However, no agreement has been reached on the question of how exactly the two narratives 'affect' each other. Simultaneously, while it has often been remarked that Tacitus' language is inherently metaphorical, there have been curiously few studies devoted to Tacitean metaphor. Based on the theory of conceptual metaphor promoted by George Lakoff, this article takes the metaphors of freedom and slavery that appear in the Agricola as starting point for a re-evaluation of the connection between the two narratives. This novel approach to the text facilitates a deeper analysis of certain key passages of the text, and provides some much-needed nuance to the current scholarly debate