Search

This article revisits the Trojan women’s lament and the subsequent ship-burning episode in Aeneid 5 in order to recuperate a positive vision of the Iliades’ agency in their choice to remain in Sicily. In the first two sections, I argue that the structural position of the women—“separated” from the Trojan men “far off” (procul) “on a lonely promontory” (5.613: in sola secretae…acta), and weeping as they “look at the sea” (615: profundum pontum aspectebant)—replicates not only the lament of the abandoned Dido, whose “polluted love” (5.5-6: pollutus amor) overshadows the Trojans’ journey at the opening of book 5 but also the archetypal lament of Latin poetry: Ariadne’s reproach of Theseus for abandoning her on the island of Naxos in Catullus 64. After seeing how Vergil appropriates a Catullan intertext to color our interpretation of the Trojans’ penultimate stop before reaching Sicily, I turn in the third section to the alternative city that the abandoned Iliades found on the island, which I suggest offers readers a counterfactual history and thus, a feminine alternative to the Augustan ideology of linear, progressive, and cursive time. Deploying Julia Kristeva’s notion of “women’s time,” I propose that the Iliades’ impulse to found a city where they are, rather than pursuing an arbitrary telos, provides a positive vision for feminine subjectivity within the brutal machinery of epic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]