Introduction

The passage cited above, Aeneas' killing of Turnus at the end of Virgil's Aeneid, has served in recent years as a focus for debate on the project which is central to this volume. The project is that of trying to place the representation of the passions in Roman literature in its contemporary intellectual context, in a way that can help to inform our interpretative responses to this representation. In this chapter, my contribution to this debate is to highlight a pattern in Roman poetry to which the killing of Turnus seems (at least partly) to belong, and to explore the shaping influences on this pattern. The pattern that I have in view is one in which the figure's surrender to emotional forces, following inner conflict (in some cases, ‘akratic’ self-surrender), generates a certain kind of madness. This kind of madness is not the ‘raving’ insanity, involving fundamental changes in physical state and perception, that is a recurrent feature of, instance, Greek tragedy, but a more fully psychologised, and moralised, madness. The state of mind involved is marked, in general, by violent, often fluctuating emotion, and sometimes by defective or strained reasoning and miscommunication with other people.