David Wilson-Okamura's posting about what Virgil thinks of nature in The Aeneid led me to start looking for passages for discussion and the first I came upon was in Book 1, lines 184-193 where stags lead a herd of deer towards the beach and Aeneas shoots seven of the animals with a bow and arrow for his seven ships.
First I think this reinforces the idea that the little fleet has arrived at what appears to be a wilderness (as Virgil says in line 308 "nam inculta videt"). The passage also made me reflect on how powerful deer images have been over the millennia from the earliest cave paintings to modern manifestations like The Deerhunter (surely there are reflections of Virgil in that film). There is also that neat juxtaposition of culling and conservation: Aeneas kills only seven deer, enough for each of the ships. You should only take from nature what you need to take - Virgil's hero kills for essential food, not for fun, though he does appear to enjoy the process. This kind of issue is still debated where I live here in England and deer have to be controlled in the local woods. The episode also seems to me to have a rather iconic or formulaic quality. My own experience with deer tells me that if a lead stag was shot with an arrow, whether it fell where it stood, or ran around for a bit, the others would be off out of bow shot immdiately. I am sure Virgil would have known this, but he had a point to make that needed seven dead animals delivered to the men by one hand. Patrick Roper ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
