Lavinia, the woman Virgil slighted in 'The Aeneid'

By Ursula K. LeGuin

Harcourt. 279 pp. $24

Reviewed by Susan Balée

The Latin poet Virgil opens

The Aeneid

promising to sing "of arms and of a man." Ursula K. LeGuin, who's penned an epic herself (the

Earthsea

books), opts to fill in the space around Aeneas and his battles.

LeGuin details the distaff side of the story in

Lavinia

, humming a tale of domestic rituals and of a woman: Aeneas' second wife.

LeGuin's heroine announces drily, "I am not the feminine voice you may have expected. Resentment is not what drives me to write my story." Lavinia has no feminist ax to grind, but immortality has given her a lot of time to think and she wants to set the record straight.

Besides, she met the shade of Virgil when she was a girl. Her family had the gift of communing with spirits and she summoned him beside the sacred spring of Albunea.

LeGuin plays with the fourth dimension. Although Virgil is not yet born in Lavinia's time when his disembodied shade visits her, he is dying in his own time.

The Aeneid

isn't finished and - bad luck - when he sees Lavinia, he realizes he left out the story of a main character. Virgil apologizes: "You're almost nothing in my poem, almost nobody. An unkept promise. No mending that now, no filling your name with life, as I filled Dido's. But it's there, that life ungiven, there, in you."

Roman Virgil's

Aeneid

, like Greek Homer's

Odysseus

before it, is a tale of a wandering warrior, capricious gods and inexorable fate. For those who can read Latin, it's also beautiful poetry. Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, is a pawn in the epic, the virgin who must marry Aeneas. But she knows better: "I was their daughter, their pledge to the future, a powerless girl yet one who could speak for them to the great powers, a mere token for political barter yet also a sign of what was of true value to us all."

Her father has been told by an oracle that she must marry a stranger who is coming to their land. This prophecy arrives just as Lavinia is being courted by numerous suitors, including a handsome young warlord named Turnus whom her mother favors.

Aeneas, for his part, knows he is to found a great empire in Italy and must seek his second wife there. His first wife was killed during the sack of Troy, though Aeneas escaped with his son and father and took a remnant of Trojans to seek a new home. A goddess-driven storm cast them up on the shores of Carthage, but despite a fling with Queen Dido of Carthage, Aeneas refused to settle there.

As he took his ships to sea, Dido stabbed herself to death on a funeral pyre. Aeneas saw the smoke and knew its meaning, but kept his rowers on a course for Italy.

Virgil has drawn the character of his main man - dutiful, pious - and much of the rest of the epic is given over to arms, just as he said it would be. Trojans and Italians do battle and various heroes are slain, treaties broken, and prophecies ignored. Lavinia's mother, Amata, commits suicide when she realizes her daughter won't marry Turnus. King Latinus becomes briefly irresolute and permits his people to attack the Trojans, despite the prophecy he's told them.

In the end, it comes down to Aeneas waging single combat with Turnus to end the slaughter. But Virgil died, so the epic concludes with Aeneas killing Turnus in a fit of rage, despite the young man's plea for mercy. Many are the critics dismayed by this ending - it certainly does not show Aeneas as a man of pious wisdom - and one Renaissance poet put his Latin to the test and added the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia and the founding of the Roman Empire to finish where Virgil left off.

LeGuin's Lavinia gives us her life after the war, too, immersing readers in early Italy's pagan life and rituals. "The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names - Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse."

But here Lavinia is at the mercy of LeGuin, who has read, her acknowledgments tell us, two compelling books on Roman rites and rituals. Hence, LeGuin has Lavinia and Aeneas performing altar duties every few pages. Lavinia, watching Aeneas perform the spring ritual, Ambarvalia, observes, "You can tell a great deal about a man from how he performs sacrifice. Aeneas' hands on the leggy ram-lamb were calm and gentle, his knife stroke sudden and sure. . . ."

Aeneas is not destined to live long, but he and Lavinia have a son, Silvius, who will. LeGuin's novel certainly enhances our understanding of

The Aeneid

, even as she tweaks Virgil for neglecting the female and domestic in favor of the male and martial.

In the end, though, Lavinia has the generosity to forgive him: "In truth he gave me nothing but a name, and I have filled it with myself. Yet without him would I even have a name? I have never blamed him. Even a poet cannot get everything right."