While getting up a lecture on Shakespeare's _Antony and Cleopatra_ a month or so ago, I happened to notice that there are several references to a duel between Antony and Octavian. The duel never comes off, of course, but according to Plutarch (Shakespeare's primary source for the play), Mark Anthony _did_ challenge Octavian to single combat before the battle of Actium. My question is this: could this challenge have some bearing on the single combat at the end of the Aeneid? Is Turnus, in some sense, Mark Anthony?
Servius mentions Mark Anthony several times in his commentary; at no point, however, does he suggest (and now I'm getting to my real point) that Mark Anthony = Turnus. Which, I suppose, shows that Servius wasn't totally crackers. But what do you think? If you buy into the idea that there is _some_ historical allegory in the Aeneid, might not the duel with Turnus represent a climactic moment in the career of Augustus? If so, which one? Anthony's defeat at Actium? Or has Virgil taken it upon himself to represent Actium in such a way as to give Octavian credit for the duel that never fought, as if to say, "he could have done it, even though he didn't"? One other point in favor of the loose Anthony = Turnus equation I'm proposing here: they are both very sexy, very romantic, and very doomed. I am not suggesting that the duel can't be other things as well (including itself). I don't think we should be put off, though, by the idea that Virgil might be using a single combat to represent a battle that was actually fought by large armies or navies. Think, for instance, of the battle between Prince Arthur and the Souldan in Faerie Queene book 5: in the fiction of the poem, it's just two guys fighting; but it's also a transparent allegory for the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Did Spenser get the idea from the end of the Aeneid? That's harder to say, though Michael O'Connell (in Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser's Faerie Queene) has argued persuasively, I think, that Spenser's historical allegory is modeled on the practice of Virgil as expounded by Servius... But I've gone on far too long. What think ye? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, &c. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
