Drepanum and the Limits of the Aeneid

This chapter examines how Sicily stands as an emblem of empire in Vergil's Aeneid. While we are inclined to approach the Aeneid as a poem of opposites—furor versus pietas; Juno versus Jupiter; Troy (or Carthage) versus Rome—the prominence of Sicily suggests that the poem resists such an approach. Sicily offers Vergil a narrative model based as much on accommodation as on opposition. While the political and geographic view of Sicily offered in Aeneid 3 presents a dream of future empire as accommodating and inclusive, the literary and mythic approach that accompanies it in Aeneid 5 demonstrates the pragmatic difficulties of such a scheme and the problems of such an imperial plan. The literary presentation developed in Aeneid 5 looks back to mythic origins, including the abduction of Proserpina, that predate Aeneas to expose rifts in the deep substrata of empire.