Book V, like Book III, is less dramatic than those surrounding it. The book that precedes it, which deals with the tragic love of Dido, might be described as a narrative apex whose emotional intensity is enhanced by its being in marked contrast to the generally more placid mood of Books III and V. Book V offers not only a relaxation—in this instance, an easing of tension following the account of Dido’s passion and suicide—but a more or less down-to-earth story that heightens, by way of contrast, the otherworldly atmosphere of the book that follows it, in which Aeneas will descend into the land of the dead.
While the emotional pitch of Book V is lower than that of its adjacent episodes, it has moments of excitement and contains downright harrowing incidents. The happy and festive funeral games are followed by the raging fire that, but for Jupiter’s intervention, would have destroyed Aeneas’s fleet, and by the loss of Aeneas’s beloved pilot, Palinurus, who disappears in the sea just before the Trojans reach Italy.
Stylistically, Book V’s ending is balanced by its beginning, when Virgil introduces Palinurus as Aeneas’s able-bodied, pragmatic helmsman. Palinurus’s death, which recalls Anchises’s at the end of Book III, exemplifies how Virgil interweaves the dark and bright strands of human existence to achieve a subtly balanced and nuanced vision of reality. His commitment to his theme, the glory of Rome, does not blind him to an awareness of the sorrow that accompanies even the most fortunate lives.
While Aeneas by now has been given good reason to believe that his mission is destined to succeed, he is occasionally tried to the point of doubting or forgetting that fate is on his side. For example, after the Trojan women set fire to his fleet of ships, he asks whether or not he should forgo his destiny and make his home on Sicily. Fortunately, he listens to Nautës and his father’s ghost, both of whom urge him onward to Italy. That Aeneas respects Nautës’s opinion exemplifies what a good ruler he has become. He will hear advice from any who offer it, although the final decision, of course, is his entirely. His parceling land to those Trojans who are tired of traveling and wish to remain on Sicily recalls his similar actions in Book III, after the wanderers reached Crete.
Twice in Book V, Aeneas demonstrates his savvy as a leader who knows what speech to give at the appropriate time. After the foot race in which Nisus trips Salius so that Euryalus will win, many spectators balk at Euryalus’s proclaiming victory. However, Aeneas decisively settles the matter by declaring Euryalus as the winner. Magnanimously, he gives a gift to Salius and even to Nisus. What is most noticeable is that after Aeneas passes judgment, no one questions his decision: The crowd acquiesces to his ruling. And later, when the boxer Darës loses his match to Entellus, Aeneas shifts the blame for Darës’s loss from the boxer’s lack of athletic prowess to that which the boxer cannot control: “Don’t you feel / A force now more than mortal is against you / And heaven’s will has changed? We’ll bow to that!” By using the plural “we,” Aeneas consoles Darës: If the great Aeneas cannot battle the will of the gods, why does Darës think he can? Aeneas’s tactic works well, and Darës is placated.
Another familiar role of Aeneas’s, that of the good son, is highlighted by his fulfilling the vow he made to Anchises to celebrate the anniversary of his death. Still deeply respectful of his father, Aeneas’s resolve to honor him is noble: “Were I today exiled in Libyan sands / Or caught at sea off Argos, or detained / in walled Mycenae, still I should carry out / My anniversary vows and ceremonies, / Heaping the altars, as I should, with offerings.” Aeneas sacrifices to the gods out of respect for Anchises and honors him with celebratory athletic games.
The detailed funeral rites for Anchises would have been familiar to Virgil’s contemporary readers. The exemplary piety of Aeneas as he performs the rites is another example of Virgil’s infusing the Trojans with virtues that he considered uniquely Roman. He habitually imparts prestige to Roman practices, institutions, and ways of feeling and behaving by tracing their origins to these much-admired people of legend.
Likewise, the athletic games that follow the funeral rites have Roman associations with the Actian games, which Augustus inaugurated in 28 B.C., and which were held every four years thereafter to celebrate the emperor’s decisive victory over Antony and Cleopatra in 31 B.C. Augustus was particularly fond of the “lusus Troiae,” or “game of Troy,” the display of horsemanship with which Virgil concludes the contests in Book V, thus attributing to it a prestigious Trojan origin. As Virgil notes, “Great Rome took up this glory of the founder.” This ceremonial equine procession was customarily performed by noble Roman youths, some of whose families claimed descent from the Trojans, among them Ascanius, who was the reputed ancestor of Julius Caesar, the father by adoption of Augustus. Very neatly, Virgil ties all of the genealogical strings together, linking his real Roman present with the legendary Trojan past. His appealing to the past for legitimacy, exceptionally forceful at this point in the Aeneid, anticipates the revelation of Rome’s future glory, which awaits Aeneas in the next book.
