Deception and Sacrifice in Aeneid 2.1-249

Deception and Sacrifice in Aeneid 2.1–249 Rebekah M. Smith It is striking how often in Book 2 death seems to have sacrificial overtones. Not only does Laocoon die at an altar in the act of sacrificing, but even the simile introduced to illustrate his cries keeps within the same framework of reference . . . and before all this the motif of human sacrifice forms the ominous basis of Sinon’s lying tale. —E. L. Harrison (1990) Sacrifice as a theme in the Aeneid takes many forms, one of which is human death cast as or described in language that suggests the ritual religious killing of a sacrificial victim. Harrison is perceptive in associating the death of Laocoon, the simile that describes his cries, and the motif of human sacrifice in Sinon’s story. 1 The lying tale with which Sinon deceives the Trojans in book 2 narrates the only actual sacrifice in the Aeneid wherein the intended victim is a human being, and Laocoon’s death at the altar while performing a sacrifice to Neptune is famously an ironic complement to Sinon’s alleged escape from death at a Greek altar. It is my purpose here to press farther in considering the two together, Sinon’s lying tale and Laocoon’s death. The many ironies and reversals of expectation in the passage have been extensively discussed, including trickery and sacrifice as dominant themes and Laocoon’s death as in a sense a completion of Sinon’s lying tale. But a closer look at precisely how the theme of sacrifice runs through the passage will show that Virgil shaped the Sinon-Laocoon episode to be a story of the systematic perversion of religious sacrifice—a perversion, furthermore, that turns at every stage on the perversion of human knowledge. Nowhere is the goal, execution, or outcome of ritual sacrifice what it ought to be, and while sacrifice is prompted by unholy human ends and turned into a violent portent by the gods, human awareness throughout the episode is both prominently at issue and helplessly deceived. I suggest [End Page 503] that in his version of the Sinon and Laocoon episode of book 2, Virgil deepened and complicated the themes of deception and sacrifice by methods that vary from literary modeling to simple contrast of events, entwining them at many levels from beginning to end in a progression. They all culminate in an articulation of the dark and utter hopelessness in the fall of Troy. Girard, Bandera, and Hardie Scholarship on the Sinon and Laocoon episode has generally dealt with Virgil’s use of his sources, the efficacy of Sinon’s deception, and the overall dramatic power and irony of the episode. 2 Sacrifice as a theme has been treated as one element among many. Linking the image of the twin serpents with the theme of deceit and destruction, Putnam called Laocoon the first symbolic sacrificial victim in the destruction of the city. Manuwald has drawn attention to the heightened elements of sacrifice in Sinon’s story, mainly the Trojan Horse figured as votum and the role of Calchas, arguing that these serve to strengthen the force of Sinon’s deception. Block’s thesis that Virgil forces a double consciousness on his reader includes comment on the ironic juxtaposition of the Greeks’ need for a parting sacrifice and Laocoon’s death. Hardie does likewise in identifying Lucretian echoes of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia. 3 [End Page 504] An important development has been the use of René Girard’s theory of “sacrificial crisis” in interpretation of the Aeneid as a whole and of specific episodes. Bandera (1981) identifies the Sinon and Laocoon episodes as being Girardian “sacrifice gone wrong,” thus (1) beginning an escalating series of violent deaths that leads to that of Turnus and (2) making the element of deceit in Virgil’s rendering part of a Girardian trickery inherent in the act of sacrifice. Because I argue specifically that the deception of human knowledge in Aeneid 2 is of a different kind, I must briefly address Bandera’s study and the theory he applies. My remarks are confined to Girard’s early work Violence and the Sacred ([1972] 1977), on which Bandera

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