Aristeo, un Enea ante liitteram? Pastori per aspera ad astra.

At Pallanteum Aeneas completes his metamorphosis from Trojan exile into a leader of a new civilization : Pallanteum is Arcadia but it is even Rome ante litteram thanks to remote blood ties and bonds of friendship between both gentes and to common principles of strength, justice, labouriousness and paupertas as well. Therefore Euander, king of the shepherds , has been recognized long ago as minor Aeneas, “shepherd “ of peoples and other “shepherds”. This interpretation has found some favor in modern criticism because it is supported by the recurrence in ancient culture of a typical symbolism that considers sheep-rearing an icon of the society : inside this society leaders play the role of “magistri”, while peoples play the role of “pecora”(sheep). A series of elements rarely considered , or better rarely considered together in the research works about the end of the Georgics encourages us to recognize in Aristaeus as well the “figure” of a Roman politician, even if he is fallible in the told circumstance. First of all there appears the civilizing function as “magister pecorum” and “hominum” that the hero carries out in Sicily and especially in Sardinia. This role was strongly emphasized by the literature during the period of the last Republic , especially by authors favorable to Caesar (as Sallust and Varro Atacinus).Moreover in the Virgilian text there are contiguous features between Aristaeus and Euander on the arcadic level of “nationality”; they are not banal if we consider the few attestations in the mythographic sources and they are even less banal in the case of Aeneas: both heroes wander about searching for a new fatherland after having been forced to leave their country; both are of divine ancestry and “pious” in their beings; notwithstanding both have caused death without intent, and in these particular instances the death of a woman. However both are destined for Heaven on condition that they bear the hard trials of a long journey per aspera ad astra and that they “purify themselves” from sins committed by chance, from passions, from wishes, in short from infirmitas mortalitatis. In the narration of the Georgics the unction occurred after the immersion in the depths of the Ocean only apparently prepares Aristaeus to the fight with Proteus, in reality it sanctions his expectations of astral immortality. After a mystic bath the hero is ”anointed” by his mother and this does not occur by chance, because she assumes the function of kourotrofos assigned to the “mother” Venus in the celebration of the Julian dynasty. Apart from the vague recall to the apotheosis of Caesar, who rose to heaven thanks to the intervention of Venus, there must be recalled the peculiar affinities between this sequence and the one of the “Parva Aeneid”, where Aeneas, “washed” in the waters of the river Numicius by his human condition, receives the chrism of immortality thanks to his own merits and to regular maternal cares.