American Journal of Philology

Until the publication of Philip Hardie's important new discussion "Fame and Defamation in the Aeneid: The Council of Latins" (1998), Virgil's extended treatment of the Latin council had passed a generation of relative neglect—neglect all the more surprising because the debate occupies a quarter of the eleventh book.¹ But then the book itself is generally treated as a lowering of tension, a diversion of focus from the heroic business of male combat to an exchange of rhetoric and the ancillary exploits of the woman warrior Camilla. And despite his long– standing interest in Virgil's Iliad (e.g., 1984), K. W. Gransden's recent commentary on book 11 (1991) shows little interest in Virgil's sophisticated narrative technique.

Virgil's writing in this book is no less serious than in its neighbors, and deserves further scrutiny. The Camilla narrative has begun to receive its due, but the rhetoric of the extended council, which includes Turnus' longest speech and the second longest formal speech in the Aeneid, has usually been passed over as alien to the concerns of epic.²

This is certainly not Hardie's approach, though it is motivated in part by the same negative attitude toward rhetoric. For him the debate is primarily a starting point for a more far–reaching inquiry into the [End Page 259] ways in which Virgil uses the secondary narrative of speakers to project dissonant versions of events the audience has already experienced, and, by thus casting doubt on their credibility, extends a further shadow of doubt over the narrative enterprise. He states his aim as "to resituate the place of rhetoric within the Aeneid, with especial reference to the most elaborate and most formal exchanges between human actors in the poem. The focus of . . . discussion is not so much on the formal markers of a rhetorical manner, as on the relationship between the truth–functions of rhetoric and of a supposedly authoritative epic voice" (1998, 243).

Now Hardie would probably accept a definition of rhetoric fairly close to "speech designed to persuade." But his reading of the episode shows a mistrust not simply of its most clearly dishonest speaker, but of the entire debate. He opens with Virgil's summary, Illi haec inter se dubiis de rebus agebant / certantes (445–46). Yet insofar as the sphere of rhetoric (as opposed to logic) is, as Aristotle declares, what is debatable, the uncertainty or insecurity of the Latins' circumstances hardly entitles Hardie to damn the entire council as "hot air . . . just so much rhetoric" (244). It seems that despite his magnificent understanding of epic, Hardie has no sympathy for rhetoric.³ For him "rhetoric" is only the abuse of eloquence. He equates it with public speeches invalidated by the speaker's misreading of circumstances, by distortion of the speaker's own experience,⁴ by misjudgment swayed by emotion,⁵ or by misrepresentation to deceive the audience—whereas the only error of several of these speakers is human ignorance of the divinely ordained consequences. Not only Latinus, "careful to provide the optimal conditions for a faithful account by the envoys," but the honest Venulus and right–minded Diomedes are discredited along with Drances, as if no valid speech were possible in a political context. [End Page 260]

Hardie has many acute and rewarding comments on the debate, but his major critical contribution lies outside it, reaching even beyond the framework of the Aeneid. The more restricted approach I originally adopted toward the Latin debate, while composing earlier drafts of this essay, does not seem to have lost its usefulness: it is even possible that Hardie's long–sighted vision has produced a distortion that needs to be corrected by a study with a shorter focus. As in the subtle intertextual study by Burke (1978), my point of departure here is the effect of Drances' speech not only on the behavior of Turnus, but on the audience's or reader's reception of Turnus' reply and assessment of his character.⁶

To start, then, let us briefly review the form and content of the council, paying special...