A Hellenistic influence in Aeneid IX

Abstract Attention to certain passages shows that the episode on the death of Euryalus in Aeneid IX owes much to the poetry of Bion of Smyrna, not only his Epitaph on Adonis but also the fragments from his poem on the Evening Star and perhaps from those on Orpheus and Hyacinthus. The result is a characteristically Hellenistic mixture of love and death. Key words: Virgil, Bion, Nisus and Euryalus, Aeneid, Hellenistic poetry, Adonis. Resum. Una influència hel·lenística a Eneida IX Com es veu per l’estudi d’uns quants passos, l’episodi de la mort d’Euríal en Eneida IX té molt a veure amb la poesia de Bió d’Esmirna, no sols el seu Epitafi d’Adonis, sinó també la seva obra fragmentària, incloent-hi poemes sobre l’estel vespertí i possiblement Orfeu i Jacint. En resulta una barreja de l’amor i la mort típicament hel·lenística. Paraules clau: Virgili, Bió, Nisos i Euríal, Eneida, poesia hel·lenística, Adonis. Aphrodite’s lament in the Epitaph on Adonis by Bion of Smyrna has been cited for some two hundred years as a close precedent for Juturna’s lament for her own immortality (compare Aeneid 12.880-81 to Adonis 53).1More recently, Brenk has explored the similarities between Anchises’ lament for Marcellus (Aeneid 6.8834) and Bion’s appeal to heap flowers on the corpse of Adonis, together with his references to crimson flowers (Adonis 75 with 35, 65-6); the assimilation of Marcellus to Adonis, Brenk observes, both idealizes the youthful beauty of the Roman and places «the tragic loss of Venus’ descendant in the context of her earlier sorrow for the Adonis of myth.»2A similar comparison, traceable in the death of Euryalus in Book 9, is the object of the present study. I begin by looking at a series of young deaths in the Aeneid, including that of Euryalus, that use 1. Heyne ad loc.; see also Barchiesi 118 n. 27, Boella. The authorship of the Epitaph on Adonis, which in the MSS is anonymous or mistakenly ascribed to Theocritus, was first made by Camerarius in 1530 and is virtually certain; see Reed 15, 77-8, 194, 202. 2. Brenk 222-3 = 91-2. Faventia 26/1, 2004 27-42 A Hellenistic influence in Aeneid IX J.D. Reed University of Michigan. Department of Classical Studies Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA [email protected] Data de recepció: 2/9/2002 Faventia 26/1 001-136 10/1/05 17:15 Página 27 imagery and wording from Bion’s Epitaph on Adonis; then I move to echoes of Bion’s fragments in the Euryalus epsiode, and finally, more speculatively, to potential influence from Bion’s lost works. In passing I shall notice a few other recollections of Bion in Virgil’s work. Since Virgil’s close repetitions from Bion guarantee the place of the Greek poet in the background of the Roman epic, I move from his clearest use of Bion to his least clear (where possible I cite other poets’ use of a Bionean passage to show that Virgil was not alone). I The general setting of the Euryalus episode parallels that of Bion’s Adonis. In his search for Euryalus, Nisus wanders through a forest of oak trees and dense thorn bushes (9.381-2 silva fuit late dumis atque ilice nigra / horrida, quam densi complerant undique sentes, 393 dumisque silentibus errat); likewise in her search for the dying Adonis Aphrodite wanders through oak forests and dense thorn bushes: 20-22 ν δρυµς λληται/πεναλα νπλεκτος σνδαλος, α δ βτοι νιν/ρχοµναν κεροντι (note also the similarity in sound between dumus and δρυµς).3The closest similarities, however, are with Bion’s initial description of Adonis (Epitaph on Adonis 7-11): κεται καλς !Aδωνις ν #ρεσι µηρν $δντι λευκ%& λευκν $δντι τυπες κα' K(πριν νι% ) λεπτν ποψ(χων+ τ δ ο µλαν ε-βεται α.µα χιονας κατ σαρκς, 0π1 $φρ(σι δ1 3µµατα ναρκ% ), κα' τ 4δον φε(γει τ& χελεος. With this passage the death of Euryalus shares not only turns of phrase and patterns of description, but the general tone of erotic appraisal (Aeneid 9.431-7)4: sed viribus ensis adactus transadigit costas et candida pectora rumpit. volvitur Euryalus leto, pulchrosque per artus it cruor inque umeros cervix conlapsa recumbit: purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro languescit moriens, lassove papavera collo demisere caput pluvia cum forte gravantur. The blood that runs over Euryalus’ «beautiful limbs» is like the blood that runs over «beautiful» Adonis’ «snowy flesh.» Both stricken parts (thigh, chest) are 28 Faventia 26/1, 2004 J.D. Reed 3. The silence of Nisus’ surroundings, explained by commentators since Servius as contrasting with the clamor he hears in the ensuing lines, also contrasts with the natural setting that loudly mourns for Adonis (31-9). 4. The similarities were first noticed, to my knowledge, by Martin (on Ad. 9), who also compares Aen. 11.67 to Ad. 71 and Ad. 40 to Aen. 11.39, intertexts I too shall deal with. He cites many other Latin scenes of mourning and is not concerned specifically with the imagery that we are studying. Faventia 26/1 001-136 10/1/05 17:15 Página 28 white (λευκν, candida). Both passages enumerate body parts. Virgil’s flowersimiles, which come from Homer and Catullus and use the red flowers commonly associated with the death of a youth, can also be considered to enlarge upon the trope whereby Bion calls the vanishing color of Adonis’ lips a «rose» (11; note also the flower imagery at 35 and 76). The death of Euryalus thus anthologizes in miniature the three great traditions that Virgil’s epic subsumes: the Homeric, the Latin, and the Hellenistic. Bion-like, in general, is Virgil’s emphasis on Euryalus’ body and its beauty. Certain elements in the Latin intensify the eroticism: recumbit exposes a sensuality latent in κεται (which here means primarily «lies dead or dying»), and pulchros recalls Adonis’ characteristic epithet καλς (repeated often in Bion’s poem from the first line onward). The candor of Euryalus’ chest is not the paleness of death, but a gleaming, beckoning fairness of complexion, preserving the sensual connotations of Bion’s χιονας. Indeed, it is the sensibility of the passage —the erotic gaze on a dying youth, reinforced by elements of the sermo amatorius5— that seems traceable to Bion (even more compellingly than any accumulation of parallel words or images), and for which Virgil adapts Bion’s words even more explicitly in passages on other dying warriors. A prominent example is the death of Camilla at 11.818-19, which virtually translate Adonis 10-11 (as Ahrens 1855 notices): labitur exsanguis, labuntur frigida leto lumina, purpureus quondam color ora reliquit. It is noteworthy that these lines pick up where the looser reworking in the Euryalus passage left off. Frigida even transmits Bion’s odd usage of ναρκ% ), «go numb,» for eyes. Were we cannily to look for a displacement of the metaphor φε(γει (ousted by reliquit), we would find it just below in Camilla’s death (831 vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras), where it replaces πταµνη…βεβκει in the Homeric model (Iliad 16.857 = 22.263). The verb simultaneously recalls the words of Aphrodite at Adonis 50-51, where φε(γεις is almost equivalent to «die»: σ( µε…φε(γεις,/φε(γεις…κα' 7ρχεαι ε8ς 1Αχροντα. Although fugit seems natural in context, and the reuse of the line for the death of Turnus (12.952) has made it even more familiar, it is a notable catachresis —a syllepsis, in fact, of Bion’s two catachreses.6Like those on Euryalus, the lines on Camilla impart a gaze upon physical beauty. The repeated verb labor makes her descent gentle, like cervix conlapsa recumbit in Euryalus’ death; but it is the «crimson color» (purpureus color), a reduction of Bion’s trope 4δον, that seems to concentrate the diffuse sensuality of the lines on her person. Purpureus evokes the blushing glow of youth: compare the lumen iuventae purpureum bestowed on A Hellenistic influence in Aeneid IX Faventia 26/1, 2004 29 5. On individual terms see Pichon. 6. Cf. Ov. Am. 3.9.49 fugientis pressit ocellos, in an elegy deeply imbued with Bion’s influence. For this sense of the verb TLL VI 1482.33-40 lists other post-Virgilian passages (with or without a directional phrase like «to the shades»). Ctesias FGrH 688 F 24 already uses πφευγε absolutely, in the sense «is dead». Faventia 26/1 001-136 10/1/05 17:15 Página 29 Aeneas at 1.590-91 (the purpureus flos to which Euryalus is compared at 9.435 has this connotation too). We are made to see the signs of Camilla’s youthful beauty as they disappear forever. Consider now Aeneas’ first view of the dead Pallas (11.39-41): ipse caput nivei fultum Pallantis et ora ut vidit levique patens in pectore vulnus cuspidis Ausoniae, lacrimis ita fatur obortis… The paiderastic attractiveness (rightly noted by Servius) that is signalled by the «smooth chest» of «snowy Pallas»7recalls Euryalus’ candida pectora, and the two youths share not only the sensual imagery but also Bionean wording. Pallas’ «snowiness» recalls Adonis’ χιονα σρξ (the first attested use of that adjective for complexion)8; the allusive economy characteristic of Virgil’s style should have made us expect to find the exact epithet elsewhere.9The structure of these lines («when he saw» with the wound as object, introducing a lament in direct speech) closely follows the section of Bion’s poem where Aphrodite first sees the dying Adonis (Adonis 40-42): ;ς -δεν, ;ς νησεν 1Αδ<νιδος =σχετον >λκος, ;ς -δε φονιον α.µα µαραινοµν%ω περ' µηρ%&, πχεας µπετσασα κιν(ρετο, “µενον !Αδωνι…”10 The same structure is also evident in Aeneas’ reaction to the dead Lausus (10.821-3): at vero ut vultum vidit morientis et ora, ora modis Anchisiades pallentia miris, ingemuit miserans… (The separation of Bion’s ;ς -δεν…;ς -δε —recalled by Virgil’s ora, ora— into two instances of ut vidit exemplifies what Wills calls «divided allusion»). The sensual «languishing» or «wilting» thigh of Adonis in 41 implicitly likens him to a dying flower, as do lines 11 («the rose flees from his lip») and 75-6 (cast flowers on his bier: «with him, since he has died, all flowers too have wilted»). One 30 Faventia 26/1, 2004 J.D. Reed 7. See Putnam 10-11. 8. See Papanghelis 64 on Prop. 2.13.53-4, where Adonis is called niveus in a passage that shows other debts to Bion. It is easy to imagine Virgil and Propertius discussing the Bionean passage together. 9. On Virgil’s allusive economy see Wills, esp. 279-81 (in a discussion of the problems of recognizing and delimiting a «divided allusion,» one diffracted into diverse parts of the imitating text) and 296302. 10. Ovid reworks the same lines for his Adonis myth at Met. 10.720-21. Another Bion-influenced poem where the formula «when she saw…» persists is the late Anacreonteum E8ς νεκρν !Aδωνιν 1-2 !Aδωνιν ? Kυρη/;ς ε@δε νεκρν Bδη… Faventia 26/1 001-136 10/1/05 17:15 Página 30 remembers Euryalus’ flower-similes, especially 436 languescit moriens. Virgil uses this trope again at 11.67-70, where Pallas, lying on his bier, is like a plucked flower that has not yet lost its beauty: hic iuvenem agresti sublimem stramine ponunt qualem virgineo demessum pollice florem seu mollis violae seu languentis hyacinthi cui neque fulgor adhuc nec dum sua forma recessit. The voluptuous passivity of the «soft» violet and «languishing» hyacinth liken Pallas to the dying Euryalus (note the recurrence of the verb langueo). The motif of beauty persisting after death recalls the corresponding passage of the Epitaph on Adonis (68-71): µηκτ1 ν' δρυµοσι τν νρα µ(ρεο, K(πρι+ οCκ γα στιβς στιν 1Αδ<νιδι φυλλς ρµα.11 λκτρον 7χοι, Kυρεια, τ σν νDν νεκρς !Aδωνις+ κα' νκυς Fν καλς στι, καλς νκυς, ο.α καε(δων. But the real tip-off to Bion’s influence at Aeneid 11.67-70 is Virgil’s odd mention of an agreste stramen. The noun, unattested before this passage (stramentum is old), stands out, and the rustic motif is not obviously motivated in the episode; but the usage replicates Bion’s peculiar use at 69 of στιβς (normally an improvised pallet of leaves and branches) for a proper bed, in contrast to a pile of leaves, on which the dead Adonis is to be laid out. The use of Bion intricately interconnects these scenes. In 11.39-40, for example, the specification of both Pallas’ face and chest-wound as objects of Aeneas’ gaze forms a bridge between Aphrodite’s view of Adonis’ thigh-wound (relocated to suit Pallas’ condition) and Aeneas’ view of Lausus’ face. A similar bridge: in Camilla’s death, the word ora, which can denote either «mouth» or «face,» neatly conflates Camilla’s intertextual and intratextual comparanda, the lips of Adonis and the faces of Lausus and Pallas (10.821-2, 11.39). The purpureus color that deserts her ora seems to exchange the boldly concrete floral metaphor of Adonis’ lips for a more abstract «crimson color» —yet when we read Camilla’s death against those of the others, purpureus resumes distinct floral associations from the «crimson flower,» purpureus flos, to which Euryalus is compared (9.435). These connections could also lead us into other parts of the Aeneid. Pallas’ wound (11.40 in pectore vulnus) recalls, by both wording and metrical position, Bion’s description of the metaphorical «wound in the heart» that assimilates Aphrodite to her beloved (Adonis 16-17): A Hellenistic influence in Aeneid IX Faventia 26/1, 2004 31 11. In 69 οCκ is Ahrens’s emendation for MS 7στ1 (presumably a dittography): see Ahrens 1854:66-7, Fantuzzi 105-6, Reed 234. Elements of 68-9 are strongly recalled by Aen. 11.843-4 (on Camilla’s death) nec tibi desertae in dumis coluisse Dianam / profuit… Faventia 26/1 001-136 10/1/05 17:15 Página 31 =γριον =γριον >λκος 7χει κατ µηρν !Aδωνις, µεζον δ1 H Kυρεια φρει ποτικρδιον 7λκος. We could compare the two wounds of Dido: 4.66-7 est mollis flamma medullas / interea et tacitum vivit sub pectore vulnus and 4.689 infixum stridit sub pectore vulnus. Those wounds, one metaphorical and one corporeal, hearken back to the word-play of the Epitaph on Adonis and revise Bion’s line-end ποτικρδιον 7λκος using Bion’s own model, Theocritus 11.15 0ποκρδιον 7λκος (a «window-reference»12 in miniature). Pallas’ in pectore vulnus changes Dido’s sub pectore vulnus exactly as Bion’s ποτικρδιον changes Theocritus’ 0ποκρδιον. The connection with Dido’s story recalls the combination of eroticism and death found in these images and its place not only in the wider sphere of the epic, but in a Hellenistic tradition; if I have emphasized the element of direct influence in these intertextual comparisons it is to bring out the historical sense of a process, a transfigurative effect of Virgil’s reading of Bion. Isolated stories of love ending in death, received from Classical tragedy and elsewhere, became in later Hellenistic hands the vehicles for a new sensibility. Clua traces in Euphorion’s Thrax a treatment of death (alongside betrayal) as «el fruit de l’amor,» the crystallizing precedent for the stories of doomed love taken up by the «New Poets» and Ovid: «En efecte, el contrast ‘amor’-‘mort’ esdevé un dels temes preferits dins el corrent poètic que neix a Euforió, passa a través de Parteni fins a arribar a Roma, on influeix en la formació del gust per l’horrible i macabre»13. Bion’s Adonis and the Virgilian figures that reflect him present less a contrast than a morbid superimposition of love and death, with the element of the horrible and macabre enveloped in the sensual. Bion contributes to this tradition by transvaluing a Homeric motif, the beauty that tragically marks a warrior fallen in his prime,14 to the realm of erôs; Adonis’ (and Pallas’) beauty abiding in death, for example, is prefigured in the divine preservation of Hector’s corpse (Iliad 24.418-20). The focalization by Adonis’ lover Aphrodite, who commands the narrative viewpoint almost from the first line (although she does not actually speak until line 42), enables this thematic shift; following Bion, Virgil’s style of narrative puts the reader in the place of a desirous viewer (not always to be strictly identified with a stated viewer like Nisus or Aeneas). His erotic death-imagery will in turn become part of later epic: the death of Statius’ Parthenopaeus combines studied readings of Euryalus, Pallas, and Camilla (Thebaid 9.877-85); the death of Silius’ Sarmens telescopes that of Euryalus (Punica 4.203-5), his Bibulus follows Camilla (7.631-3), and his Cinyps combines details from all four of Virgil’s figures (12.225-50). 32 Faventia 26/1, 2004 J.D. Reed 12. Thomas 1986: 188-9 = 1999: 130-32 (on Virgil’s practice): «the very close adaptation of a model, noticeably interrupted in order to allow reference back to the source of that model». 13. Clua 1988: 93-4; cf. 1992: 63. 14. This is the usual connotation of καλς of warriors in early Greek poetry; see Il. 22.71-3, 21.10810 (cf. 22.370); Tyrt. fr. 10.27-30 West. Faventia 26/1 001-136 10/1/05 17:15 Página 32 The special status of Euryalus and the others is thrown into relief by comparison with another death for which Virgil uses imagery from the Epitaph on Adonis, that of Misenus at 6.218-24: pars calidos latices et aëna undantia flammis expediunt, corpusque lavant frigentis et unguunt. fit gemitus. tum membra toro defleta reponunt purpureasque super vestis, velamina nota, coniciunt. pars ingenti subiere feretro, triste ministerium, et subiectam more parentum aversi tenuere facem. The image of different mourners at different tasks recalls the more rococo tableau at Adonis 79-85, where various Erotes (χF µν …Iς δ…; cf. Virgil’s pars…pars…) busy themselves about the bier, making offerings of their arrows, bow, and quiver and performing different funereal tasks, including the bathing of the corpse (but with a golden basin, not bronze as in Virgil).15 Even Virgil’s switch between verb tenses reproduces a mannerism Bion employs there. Memory of Adonis 79 κκλιται Hβρς !Aδωνις ν εJµασι πορφυροισιν, «gorgeous Adonis lies in crimson-dyed sheets» (but literally «crimson-dyed garments»), accounts for Misenus’ being placed purpureas super vestis.16 That those textiles are velamina nota—a pathetic touch, indicating that they were Misenus’ own, familiar possessions («ipsi cara,» as Servius explains)—reminds us that the dead Adonis was laid out on Aphrodite’s bed, upon the very sheets in which he had often passed the night with her (Adonis 72-3). The word for bier in 6.222, feretrum, attested here for the first time in verse, puns on Bion’s φαρτραν «quiver» in the same metrical position at Adonis 82.17 The lowered torch at 6.223-4 recalls the torches that Hymenaeus douses for Adonis’ wedding, frustrated by death (Adonis 87). Virgil uses Bion here as thoughtfully as he does in the passages we have just noted. The description of the dead Pallas is especially comparable, particularly in details like the crimson-dyed robes (like Dido’s robe that shrouds Pallas at 11.72) and the term feretrum (used again at 11.64, 149). Yet the focalization is different. There is nothing erotic about our view of Misenus, not even the hint of Adonis’ habrosynê that Bion allows (79).In the laving of the body Bion specifies Adonis’ thighs (with the sentimentalizing diminutive µηρα), the locus of both his wound and erotic attraction; but Virgil’s specification of the mere corpus of A Hellenistic influence in Aeneid IX Faventia 26/1, 2004 33 15. This scene became a staple of artistic depictions of Adonis’ death; see LIMC i.1.226 no. 35, Schober, Koortbojian 38. Cf. the late Anacreonteum E8ς νεκρν !Aδωνιν 11-14. 16. Behind Bion and Virgil lies Il. 24.796 (of the cremated Hector’s bones) πορφυροις ππλοισι καλ(ψαντες µαλακοσιν (cf. Ad. 72 κτε νιν µαλακος ν' φρεσι). 17. On another allusive interlingual pun in the Aeneid see Konstan on 4.492-3. At 6.458 sidera doubtless puns on a now lost Callimachean σιδρ%ω (cf. Catul. 66.42 ferro). Before Virgil feretrum occurs at Var. L. 5.166 ubi lectus mortui fitur, dicebant feretrum nostri, Graeci φρετρον. Isid. 18.9.1 connects feretrum, φαρτρα, and fero/φρω. Faventia 26/1 001-136 10/1/05 17:15 Página 33 frigentis Misenus effectively chills any eroticism aroused by the reminiscence. Reponunt replaces the softer κκλιται. Instead of Catullus’ epithalamia (which will echo in the flower-similes Virgil provides Euryalus and Pallas), one hears Catullus’ epigram on the death of his brother (101.7-10): nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias, accipe… More parentum is in the same metrical position; Virgil’s triste ministerium is like tristi munere. The themes of Catullus 101 that resonate at Aeneid 6.223 are ancient tradition, weary journeying, and the unresponsiveness of the deceased (Misenus—unlike his doublet in misfortune, Palinurus—never gets the chance to account for himself). Catullus’ Trojan setting is the source of the mos parentum in Virgil; and the Odyssean intertext that the opening of Catullus’ poem heralds is part of the background of Aeneas’ travels too, especially now when he is about to repeat Odysseus’ furthest-flung adventure. We are being prepared for the journey through the Underworld, where Aeneas will hear a thing or two about the mores parentum and the need to hand them down to future generations, and where all the Trojan ceremony of Misenus’ exequies will come to seem etiological for the Roman funerals Anchises foretells, particularly that of Marcellus. In favor of these themes, Adonis’ sensuality is blocked in Misenus. Yet it would be a mistake to let these themes cut Misenus off from Euryalus, Lausus, Pallas, and Camilla. Those characters, too, are charged with themes of tradition and regeneration (note, for example, the emphasis on their parents’ hopes) and so join Marcellus as glamorous symbols of frustrated posterity (a theme that resonates strongly in the Bionean elements Brenk finds in Anchises’ lament at 6.883-4); Turnus is another such figure who is assimilated to Bion’s Adonis (by Juturna’s lament). Adonis himself is a powerful symbol of such frustration, and in this regard the Aeneid passages might be considered to enlarge upon Bion’s references to the lost marriage of Adonis and Aphrodite (Adonis 24, 59, 87-90). In repeatedly evoking a paradigmatic description of Adonis, Virgil not only assimilates his characters to a literary paragon of beauty and untimely death, but unites a group that symbolizes the contingencies and sacrifices (or, more pessimistically, waste) involved in Aeneas’ national foundation. II Euryalus’ death-scene stands apart from the others in one respect: its borrowings from the Adonis join borrowings from other poems by Bion in the surrounding episode. As Nisus aims his spear at Euryalus’ assailants he prays to Diana (9.404-9): Tu, dea, tu praesens nostro succurre labori, astrorum decus et nemorum Latonia custos… hunc sine me turbare globum et rege tela per auras. 34 Faventia 26/1, 2004 J.D. Reed Faventia 26/1 001-136 10/1/05 17:15 Página 34 The prayer corresponds to Iliad 10.277-95 (in the Dolon episode that furnished a model for the whole escapade),18 and is the first in a series, complemented by the pair in Book 11: Metabus’ prayer to Diana as he aims the spear that will carry his infant daughter Camilla to safety (11.557-60), and Arruns’ prayer to Apollo as he aims his spear at Camilla and kills her (11.785-93). Why does Nisus pray to Diana? She is the protectress of woods, such as the one in which he finds himself; he alludes to this in the second of the two titles by which he calls her in 405, nemorum custos. She is the patron of hunters, and he is a kind of hunter as he aims. But the first phrase by which Nisus addresses her, astrorum decus (that is, Diana as the moon), hints at a more immediate reason: he is requesting light to aim by—ironically, when we remember that the very moonbeams he prays for were the undoing of Euryalus (374; cf. 457), and even more so against his warning to Euryalus about the approach of light at 355. Schlunk 68-74 shows that this motif gathers and reworks, with hints from the ancient commentators, a complex of motifs from Iliad 10. Nisus’ general status as desperate lover here activates the topos of a prayer to the moon for light by the comast, or lover on his way to importune his beloved19; moreover, the comastic undertones of his prayer have a specific model in Bion fr. 11.1-3, where a rustic comast performs a variation on this topos by praying to the Evening Star for light (since, as he will explain, the moon has set too early): LEσπερε, τMς ρατMς χρ(σεον φος 1Αφρογενεας, LEσπερε, κυανας ερν, φλε, νυκτς =γαλµα τσσον φαυρτερος µνας Nσον 7ξοχος =στρων… In κυανας νυκτς =γαλµα, «adornment of the dark night,» we find the model for Virgil’s use of decus at 405.20 The basic sense there, «(glittering) adornment (for the body),» will occur at 10.134-5 qualis gemma micat…aut collo decus aut capiti; Turnus had already used the word in a celestial metaphor earlier in Book 9 (18 Iri, decus caeli…).21 Nisus’ apostrophe astrorum decus conflates the ends of Bion’s lines 2 and 3 and reinstates the moon (whose light the bucolic comast must do without) as addressee.22 Bion’s νυκτς is possessive or objective (night holds the ornament or is adorned); in Virgil’s phrase the genitive becomes partitive, with the moon understood as one of the astra (compare [Seneca] Octavia 425 Astraea virgo, siderum magnum decus). In the person of Nisus, A Hellenistic influence in Aeneid IX Faventia 26/1, 2004 35 18. Pavlock 103-4. 19. Cf. Mel. A.P. 5.191, Ov. Her. 18.59-74. 20. Bion is reworking Arat. 453 γλµατα νυκτς 8ο(σης, on the constellations as «figures» (see Kidd ad loc.; Almirall i Sardà punningly chooses gales de la nit que transcorre). Two later prayers to the moon pick up Bion’s phrase: [Orph.] H. 9.9, PGM 4.2786 = Heitsch 59.10.3 (4th c. A.D.). 21. The trope endures in Hor. Saec. 2 (Apollo and Diana) caeli decus; Sen. Phaed. 410 (the moon) noctis decus, which seems to reach back through Virgil to Bion; Aetna 70 (stars?) decus mundi; Apul. Soc. 1 lunamque…noctis decus. 22. Farrell 94-5 discusses Virgil’s way of condensing his model’s passages, combining e.g. the close of one line with the opening of the next. Faventia 26/1 001-136 10/1/05 17:15 Página 35 WIGODSKY, M. (1972). Vergil and Early Latin Poetry. Hermes Einzelschriften 24. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. WILHELM, F. (1906). «Zu Augusteischen Dichtern.» RhM,61, p. 91-106. WILLS, J. (1998). «Divided Allusion: Virgil and the Coma Berenices.» HSPh, 98, p. 277-305. 42 Faventia 26/1, 2004 J.D. Reed Faventia 26/1 001-136 10/1/05 17:15 Página 42