“Makes one wonder why he made him married at all. Why not just have him a bachelor, childlessly sailing to the new Italian Troy?”
“he is retelling a well known story:”
Exactly. Also, Creusa was Priam’s daughter. That made Iulus/Ascanius, J. Caesar’s and Augustus’ (by adoption) putative ancestor a descendant of the Trojan royal house on both sides of his lineage (as well as the grandson of Aphrodite/Venus). The blood of goddesses and kings flowed through Augustus’ veins (by adoption).
Iulus’ role isn’t limited to Book 4. He crops up on a number of occasions–and he’s important to Vergil’s epic on account of his supposed progeny. Conveniently (for metrical purposes), he has two alternative names.
Yes, of course you’re right that he is retelling an old story. My point was that, while few aspects of the traditional version are write in stone throughout Greek and Latin literature, Virgil did not consider that this one could have been altered ad maiorem Æneæ gloriam, and chose instead, rather than change it, to preserve the embarassing passage of Creusa’s abandonment and painting it in a dubious justification.
However, Hylander, your note that Creusa’s blood is actually historically useful as a direct link to the Trojan royal house is one that quite a lot of sense. That may have been a bargain Virgil was willing to take.
Regardless, all of this was little more than an argument ex silentio; even if hypothetically right (and it is probably wrong) it would tell us little. I will leave it here.
I think there was only a certain latitude to reshape myths. Creusa’s name was probably already too strongly attached to Aeneas to simply write her out of the Aeneid altogether. (If she had been mentioned in the Iliad, which she wasn’t, I suspect it would have been impossible for her to be severed from him.) Besides, it would probably have been unthinkable for the mature warrior Aeneas not to be married at Troy, especially since he was a prince.
But it’s true that to a certain extent poets could do as they liked with myths, which of course existed in multiple and sometimes inconsistent versions. Some think that murder of Jason’s children was an invention of Euripides that was not part of the Medea myth before his play (which would have made the murder even more shocking at the first performance). And most of Greek mythology was given its canonical shape by the Metamorphoses: many stories, such as Phaeton, which Ovid brings to life so vividly and memorably, were probably quite obscure before his poem.
I’ve nothing much to add here. Interesting that what made the greatest impression on you in bk.2, Bart, was Apparent dirae facies inimicaque Trojae | numina magna deum, when in bk.1 you fastened on Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto.
Creusa is a colourless non-individualistic name, the female equivalent of Creon “ruler.” There are dozens of them, it’s the first thing that comes to hand when you need an off-the-peg name for a royal personage. Many mythological wives’ names are not fixed—Oedipus’s, for one. That someone had a wife/daughter/3daughters tends to be a more stable datum than the actual names. Who cares what she’s called? Austin makes the nice point that Eurydice, the more(?) traditional name of Aeneas’ wife, was already taken, as it were—the Orpheus and Eurydice tale had been unforgettably told by Vergil in the final book of the Georgics. We might wonder if it was Vergil himself who originated Creusa. But probably not, given the casual first mention of her at 562 and the fact that she’s also in Livy.
Vergil does what he can to mitigate the carelessness of losing one’s wife, and of course Aeneas is properly distraught over the mishap. But he has to be rid of her before leaving, or at any rate before arriving at his destination, given her non-Greek replacement in waiting there. (Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl, but she doesn’t have a lot to say.) Better shed her before Carthage, too, or where would bk.4 be? and on the Odyssean-type Wanderings of bk.3 she’d only be in the way. But it would hardly do to witness her slain or enslaved. Instead, he has her ethereal blessing for leaving without her. In the underworld it is not Creusa he will encounter.
But what makes her necessary in the first place is really Ascanius/Iulus. Ascanius as Aen’s (+ wife’s) son is a fixture in the Greek myth. Identification as Ilus > Iulus (the fudge of 1.268) effects the link between Ilium and Rome and appropriates him for the Julian dynasty—prosopographical legerdemain. Historical Greeks fabricated heroic genealogies, so why shouldn’t Romans?
Part of the appeal of those lines is what they have in common, the word ‘apparent’ receiving full empasis by being put at the very beginning. It’s not just the fact that those swimmers are there, but that they appear one by one, helplesly popping up between the waves; and then disappear again, presumably. By taking the point of view of someone watching form one of the ships (that’s how I read it at least), Vergil takes us into the middle of the storm.
Same with those dirae facies: suddenly the hidden and horrible reality of Troy’s destruction appears to Aeneas. The mist is lifted. The gods themselves sack the city. Time to flee.