Aeneas' encounter with Deiphobus forms a critical juncture in Vergil's "Aeneid". In the underworld Aeneas retraces his past to its beginning; so too Vergil's audience returns to its starting point: the fall of Troy. Deiphobus himself is a metonym of Troy, embodying her guilt and punishment. But Aeneas is frustrated in his attempt to reconcile himself to this past. Aeneas attempts the Homeric rites of remembrance-heroic tumulus and epic fama-but these prove to be empty gestures. The aition of Deiphobus' tomb is revealed to have miscarried. Rhoeteum was known as the tomb and shrine of Telamonian Ajax, not Deiphobus, and Octavian's recent restoration of the Rhoetean memorial would have strengthened the already close association between Rhoeteum and Ajax in the mind of Vergil's audience. Vergil exploits Rhoeteum's resonance with Telamonian Ajax and Odysseus, Antony and Octavian, to reflect on the process of constructing national memory, a process of which epic is an integral part. Vergil suggests that one hero's memorial frequently involves the appropriation and effacement of another. In a similar vein, the heroic fama of Deiphobus which Aeneas had heard in Troy is proven false. Deiphobus' narrative of his death is replete with Odyssean allusions which critique both Homeric heroism and Homeric kleos. Evocative allusions to Catullus' laments for his brother suggest eternal elegiac mourning as an alternate generic model for memorial and reconciliation with the past. But Aeneas is denied this option. At the center of the epic, at high noon, on a cosmic crossroads, Aeneas is poised between past and future, between mourning and hope, between Deiphobus and Deiphobe, between epic and elegiac. The Sibyl interrupts and moves Aeneas forward. Aeneas is not purged of his past, but rather denied the opportunity for true reconciliation, which is bestowed not by forgetting but by remembrance.
At the climax of the night episode of Aeneid 9 Nisus and Euryalus, sneaking behind enemy lines by night to deliver a message to Aeneas, are discovered by the enemy and take flight. Euryalus, weighed down by plunder and losing his way, falls behind, while Nisus, the fleetest in the foot-races of Aeneid 5, quickly escapes. Virgil specifies the place where Nisus stops to look back for his companion: Nisus abit; iamque imprudens evaserat hostis atque locos qui post Albae de nomine dicti Albani (tum rex stabula alta Latinus habebat), ut stetit et frustra absentem respexit amicum. (Aeneid 9.386-9) Nisus got away; and already without thinking he had escaped the enemy and, indeed, the places which afterwards were called Alban from the name of Alba (at that time King Latinus held them as lofty stables), as he stood and vainly looked back for his missing friend. The topographical detail in lines 387-8 is marked, yet critics are unsure of the exact identity of the site and of its significance in these verses. Philip Hardie comments: At the point of greatest suspense V. briefly distracts the reader with one of the geographical and etymological details so frequent in the Aen., contrasting past and present.. .. The formula de nomine dicti is normally used to explain proper names. . ., but loci Albani is not otherwise known as the specific designation of a region. Some ninth-century MSS read lucos (cf. Cic. Pro Mil. 85 Albani tumuli atque luci), which may be accommodated metrically by reading ac for atque; others emend to lacus (for the plural cf. Hor. Carm. 4.1.19); but the lacus Albanus, mons Albanus, and the site of Alba Longa, are all an improbably long way for Nisus to have run. 1
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