ABSTRACT
This study explores Virgil’s representation of ‘the good king’ in the Aeneid in the light of Philodemos’ contemporary treatise ‘On the Good King According to Homer’. The ancient Lives of Virgil (collected in Brugnoli and Stok 1997) report that he was a lifelong student of philosophy, and associate him in his youth with the Epicurean teacher Siro on the Bay of Naples. Extant papyrus fragments from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum (e.g., P.Herc. Paris. 2) show that he was also one of four addressees of Siro’s friend and fellow Epicurean Philodemos’ work Peri Kolakeias (‘On Flattery’), part of his major work on Vices and Their Corresponding Virtues dated to the middle of the first century bce. It is clear that Virgil, like Horace, enjoyed privileged access to Philodemos’ teaching, and given his longstanding interest in Homer it would be surprising if he remained ignorant of Philodemos’ treatise on kingship theory. To the best of my knowledge, however, the treatise has garnered no attention in this respect. Francis Cairns mentions the treatise in his extensive discussion of ‘kingship’ in Virgil’s Augustan Epic, but he privileges the neo-Pythagorean texts on kingship by ‘Diotogenes’, ‘Sthenidas’, and ‘Ekphantus’, all of which (as he acknowledges) likely postdate Virgil’s composition of the Aeneid. Yet Philodemos addressed his work on kingship theory to his patron L. Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Caesar’s father-in-law and consul in 58 bce, and the work has long been recognized as relevant to Roman politics in the waning years of the Republic. Indeed, Philodemos’ explicit focus in the treatise on what makes a Homeric king good implicitly addresses the question of what makes a Roman political leader good. For in his discussion of Homer, Philodemos looks for ‘starting points for correction’ that are assumed to have contemporary relevance (col. 43.16–20). Virgil too, in the Aeneid, depicts kings (and queens) acting in circumstances that engage with the philosophical questions regarding royal rule and I argue that he shapes their behaviour and attitudes with attention not only to Homeric but also to Philodemean precedent.
