The Dream of Aeneas
Gift of George and Elaine Keyes in Honor of Joachim Homann
2021.9Irascible painter, poet, musician, and printmaker, Salvator Rosa delighted in creating images of scenes never before depicted. He also traded in dark, mysterious images, including paintings of the supernatural with witches and skeletonized monsters. In Rosa’s etching, the Trojan hero Aeneas has cast aside his plumed helmet and sleeps propped up on the rim of his shield after having fled Troy. While Aeneas sleeps with his mantle covering his head, the god Tiberinus visits him in a dream. With long beard and hair of streaming river weeds, the water god lounges above, leaning on his river jug and grasping the haft of his rudder. The god’s flowing mantle divides the dream world from the real world of the exhausted refugee. The god predicts a fecund sign: a white sow with thirty white piglets that will mark the site of the future city of Rome.
In his book, The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self (2001), John C. Shields makes the case that Aeneas rather than Adam should be acknowledged as a vital foundational figure for American character. Aeneas—pious, brave, family-loving, violent in vengeance, favored by the gods, a refugee fated to build a new civilization after conflict with native peoples—figured in the works of some of the earliest American writers. Shields claims that recognizing and giving credit to this classical template for early American values can allay the malaise attributed to an American sense of “historylessness.”
