Guided Pathway

In these images of Neptune in the Aeneid narrative, the god, with wind-blown hair and beard twinning the wild manes of his hippocampa and the curling of the waves, is shown with twisting torso, his powerful form turning away from, not towards, retaliative action. (5, 6, 17) The tension of emotive action becomes a resistance, and this is the god’s strength. Fathered by Saturn, his character is anchored in a melancholic stoicism; his force finally is not passionate but measured. In Neptune’s broken utterance “whom I—“ we witness the transformation of untempered emotion to a social and historical balancing force. The simile that Virgil chooses to animate the god’s calming power over storm is the image of an orator with the skill to tame a violent mob: “He soothes with sober words their angry mood,/ and quenches their innate desire of blood” (Book I, 219-220) Neptune does more than placate nature, and Juno’s destructive jealousy; he restores Aeneas to his historical and political fate. In doing so, he shifts foundational agency from east to west.