Both this and a lengthy off-line response that I received are extremely
thoughtful and learned--enough so that I am reluctant to disagree with
the conclusion that the passage isn't at all sinister.  I'm travelling,
without access to my usual library and without time to respond at
comparable length, so let me offer something simple in the hope that it
may not be too cryptic.

Jim, you're right that the passage is etiologically retrospective, but
what I miss in your extraordinary perceptions--including your really
stunning ability to recite the intertextual weave of PL--is a sense of
how the etiological perspective emerges, in Virgil's passage, out of the
narrative situation in which the boys are performing before their
admiring fathers.  (Their mothers, of course, are off about to set fire
to the ships, unless I'm misremembering.)   The thing that fascinates me
about the labyrinth simile is the way it conducts us out of the
immediate narrative context while suggesting a certain continuity
between the gaze of the fathers and the retrospective gaze of empire. 
The dolphin-simile in the same passage seems to me a striking note in
counterpoint, evoking as it does the playful energy of the boys--and, of
course, the later transformation of the ships, the second time they're
set fire to.  

I associate the famous Virgilian retrospect-as-prospect with the
labyrinth itself.  Quint, you might remember, says that epic loves a
parade, but the parades in Virgil--this performance of the boys at their
games, but also the parade of Roman worthies in the underworld, to which
it is so suggestively adjacent--these parades in Virgil are all
structured, *as spectacles*, by the gaze before which they appear.  And
that gaze, which you call etiologically retrospective, involves a
doubling and reversing of perspective (what Auden mocks as history in
the future tense) that the Aeneid constantly both performs and
questions.

This is more than I meant to say, and less clear than I wanted to make
it.  Sorry.

David

>>> [log in to unmask] 5/23/2007 12:08 PM >>>
We'd might be on "Lenten Stuff" the rest of our lives if we bought that
one 
Anne Prescott saw in NYC.

To return to the games in Aen. V and a meaning introduced by David
Miller: 
 the whole passage is etiologically retrospective, because it explains
the 
origins of juvenile Roman practice of "Troy games," something like our

childhood with "Cowboys & Indians" or "cops & robbers."  So the passage

itself makes a claim not to be sinister.  Or, rather, to be a kind of 
replay, not a repetition of the sacrificial Cretan-Minoan labyrinth,
but a 
transformation of it into a ritual re-enactment of war.  We see why
Troy 
might come into that.  --Because there is every reason for the
surviving 
Trojans -- Aeneas' people -- to rewrite the Trojan War.  For Aeneas and

company are defeated exiles from a city of the past, who are oriented
on 
becoming triumphal city-founders in the future.  The passage goes on 
"Ascanius revived this custom of exercises on horseback and these
contests 
when he surrounded Alba Longa with walls, and he taught the ancient
Latins 
to celebrate them as he himself and the Trojan youths with him had
done. 
 The Albans taught their children; from them great Rome straightway
received 
and kept this ancestral honor; this game of the boys is now called Troy
and 
the troop Trojan."  I think the most important part of the passage that

includes the labryinth comparison for the manoeuvres would be "When
they 
were summoned back, they wheeled around and leveled their hostile
lances. 
 After this, in spaces opposite to one another, they advanced and
retreated, 
and intermingled alternate circles with circles and staged a sham
battle ... 
and later, after making peace, rode along side by side."  But they
start out 
as three groups, not two.  I would therefore see the three groups as
Latins, 
Trojans, and the Trojan's allies in Italy (the Italic Evander & Co.). 
When 
their interests are aligned, three become two, the two fight, and then
make 
peace.  The division into two companies suggests the orders to the
angels in 
Par. Lost, Book IV, for encompassing the defense of Eden:  "'Uzziel,
half 
these draw off, and coast the South / With strictest watch; these other

wheel the North, / Our circuit meets full West.'  As flame they part /
Half 
wheeling to the Shield [left], half to the Spear [right]" (ll. 782ff.).

 What the angels are defending, if only (in the event) symbolically, is
the 
integrity of Eden: as if it were a virgin city.  But what the Trojans
in the 
Aeneid are reliving -- since the Virgilian games are called after Troy
-- is 
the defeat of the city with the unspelling of its walls at their 
encirclement by Achilles, he dragging the corpse of Hector around
behind his 
horse-drawn chariot, on the same course he chased Hector around the
city's 
perimeter when the unnerved Hector was trying to escape the better
warrior. 
 This all leads to the news brought to Andromache, who drops from her
head 
her wedding snood.  The first result is recognized in Paradise Lost by
Satan 
circling the equater three times: "...argument / Not less but more
Heroic 
then the wrauth / Of stern Achilles on his Foe pursu'd / Thrice
Fugitive 
about Troy Wall" (IX, 13ff.),  The second result is recognized by Adam

dropping the wreath he his made with which to crown Eve, she being the

Hector who has died outside the city walls after entrusting the safety
of 
her community to her own abililty to take on the enemy in single
combat. 
 Satan -- like the Trojans defeated by the Greeks and victorious over
Turnus 
("or rage of Turnus for Lavinia disespous'd') -- will redeem his past
defeat 
at the hands of the Son (or redeems his honor) with his impending
victory 
over humankind.  The question in both the Aeneid and the Sataniad is
the 
hero's transferring of the onus of his old defeat to his new
adversaries.
-- Jim N.

On Tue, 22 May 2007 17:05:31 -0400
  "David L. Miller" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Anybody who's interested in other dark suggestions is welcome to
check
> out the long chapter on Virgil's *Aeneid* in my 2003 book "Dreams of
the
> Burning Child."   
> 
> Apologies for the self-ad, John.  This is what happens when you drop
a
> kind word carelessly to a fellow attention-starved academic.  
> 
> D
> 
> 
>>>> [log in to unmask] 5/22/2007 1:58 PM >>>
> I had never read Virgil's passage that way before, but David makes
his
> 
> "darker suggestion" sound plausible (it reminds me of the similarly
> dark 
> suggestion when Aeneas exits the underworld through the gate of
> ivory--the 
> gate of false dreams--which also, oddly, makes an appearance in
> Milton's 
> Paradise 4.778).  Thanks, David, for sharing this.
> 
> John
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "David L. Miller" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 1:34 PM
> Subject: Re: Mazes and murmurs in Milton's Heaven (was Re:
> Metempsychotic)
> 
> 
>>I think that the maze pattern in Virgil carries a much darker
>> suggestion, namely that the boys in their military games are being
>> inducted *into* the maze like the sacrificial Athenian youths
> annually
>> given up to the Minotaur.
>>

[log in to unmask] 
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121