THE BARATHEON-TYRELL STORY... TAKEN FROM THE AENEID?

This essay does not seek to pin down a causal relationship of influence between Vergil and Martin. Instead, it engages the question of intertextuality between the two authors on many such levels: local similarities of characterization, action, and narrative features such as the mise-en-scene; commonplaces running through the epic and romance traditions; and the plot structures 4 associated with particular genres. The Aeneid is to be found in Westeros, whether or not Martin took Vergil as an explicit literary guide. For a reader versed in the Aeneid, I suggest, the Nisus and Euryalus episode provides a template for Renly and Loras, but it is a template they follow partially, and with interesting variations. The setting aside of intentionality frees us to ask what work the Vergilian intertext, and the logic of Vergilian epic more generally, enables Martin’s characters and plots to do, and how it helps to bring out some important points in higher relief. It does not seek to establish the Aeneid as a primary explanatory paradigm, but rather as one option among many. The Aeneid provides, nevertheless, a salutary comparison, and I conclude by suggesting that similarities and differences in Martin’s handling of the type-scene have further implications for the dynamics of plot and genre in the work. What do I mean by ‘the logic of Vergilian epic’? Within the Aeneid, the Nisus and Euryalus episode performs various functions beyond narrating the tragic deaths of the young warriors. For example, the episode reflects on youth and its characteristics in a time of war, and obliquely offers an alternative view of epic emplotment. As Nisus doubles back to find Euryalus, he recalls Aeneas’ pointed failure to find Creusa, a gender-bending allusion that is characteristic of the episode’s reception tradition. Within this allusion is embedded also a generic commitment to teleological narrative – Aeneas as an epic hero cannot look backwards, whereas Nisus, a more romantic figure, must retrace his steps towards an inevitable death. Even as a minor narrative, and in fact precisely because of it, the subplot of Renly and Loras responds precisely to the digressive quality of Nisus and Euryalus’ night raid.
Both episodes are likewise a mise-en-abyme, a miniature narrative of failed conquest within works dedicated to narratives of failed leadership. And the topos more generally functions as a cautionary tale against youthful excess, as well as offering a tragic view of lost hopes and might-have-beens. As such, Martin’s characters participate in an elaborate type scene, which exists within a European tradition that stretches from the Homeric Doloneia through Statius to Ariosto and beyond, and which is formative for and emblematic of our broader understanding of epic, especially in its concern with heroism, pathos, and eros.

CLASSICAL CONTINUITIES: STRUCTURE AND THEMES

The intertextuality between Game of Thrones and the Aeneid is cued by two structural elements: first, the ambiguous sexual status of either pair’s relationship, and second, the sequence of killing and frenzy operative in both episodes. The nature of the relationship between Renly and Loras has been somewhat controversial, especially after the HBO adaptation presented it decisively, and with Martin’s approval, as sexual. Nisus and Euryalus, too, whether Vergil meant them as lovers or the best of friends, certainly echo other such doomed pairs, chiefly Achilles and Patroclus. More specific verbal echoes support the intertextuality as well, especially with the younger half of the pair. Both Loras and Euryalus are young, beautiful, and characterized by floral imagery. Loras is known as the Knight of Flowers, whose armor and other chivalric equipment display all manner of flowers, and whose sigil is the rose:

Sansa had never seen anyone so beautiful. His plate was intricately fashioned and enameled as a bouquet of a thousand different flowers, and his snow-white stallion was draped in a blanket of red and white roses. (Game of Thrones 297)

Euryalus, meanwhile, is introduced as the loveliest of the young Trojans, in possession of verdant youth - Verg. Aen. 5.295 ‘Euryalus, noted for his beauty and flourishing youth’ (Euryalus forma insignis uiridique iuuenta ) – and is famously likened to a drooping flower at the point of his death: uoluitur Euryalus leto, pulchrosque per artus it cruor inque umeros ceruix conlapsa recumbit: purpureus ueluti cum flos succisus aratro languescit moriens, lassoue papauera collo demisere caput pluuia cum forte grauantur. (Aeneid 9.433-7)
Euryalus collapses in death, his blood flows over his beautiful limbs, and his neck, bent, droops on his shoulders: just as a crimson flower, cut by the plow, languishes dying, and the poppy flower with weary neck lowers its head when, by chance, rains weigh it down.

The similarities extend to the level of plot structure. We encounter both Renly and Loras and Nisus and Euryalus in two separate phases: first a ludic context, games or tourneys, followed by actual, and deadly, war. When the narrative refocuses on each pair during the war, both pairs further follow the same pattern: expedition, separation, death and frenzy. So, Nisus and Eurylaus compete in a footrace in Aeneid 5, while Loras and Renly participate in a chivalric tournament early in Game of Thrones, the first novel of the series. Both Loras and Euryalus win their events with the aid of a trick: Loras rides a mare in heat in order to agitate his opponent’s stallion, while Nisus trips up a competitor to help Euryalus win the race. After the victory, in each case there is some argument about the awarding of prizes. Loras faces the wrath of the knight he had defeated and ends up forfeiting his reward, while Nisus, who had slipped on a patch of blood in the race, demands some prize as compensation for his bad luck. Some time later, after both texts shift to a context of civil war, both pairs embark on a daring military enterprise. On the eve of battle, Renly and Loras are separated as they tend to their own commands, while Nisus and Euryalus are involuntarily separated as they get lost during their raid of an enemy camp. One of each pair dies – Renly and Eurylaus – and the other – Nisus and Loras – goes mad and seeks revenge.

IMITATION AND THE REAL

Even this very schematic outline already points up some interesting differences, primarily that the neat equivalence between the pairs is often complicated. For instance, Renly, unlike Nisus, leads an army – rather than just a single companion – and not for a mere night raid, but with the rather grander aim of asserting his claim to the throne. If he is the Nisus to Loras’ Euryalus, however, he is nevertheless a very unwarlike iteration of the trope. Crucially, where Nisus has a glorious aristeia to his name, Renly’s participation in combat is patchy: where his brothers are warriors of renown, Renly himself was a young child during the war which brought his family to power, and his subsequent appearances track him as he comes ever nearer to fighting, moving steadily from court schemer, to royal spectator, to, at the very last, an almost-warrior. Thus, he jousts in the Tournament of the Hand, but is eliminated in the early rounds; he presides over, but does not participate in, the war games held during preparations for his campaign; and his premature death stops short what would have been his first full-scale military engagement.
What this pattern exposes, however, is a deeper consistency between the two texts, and one that engages one of Vergil’s fundamental concerns in book 9. Nisus, who is introduced in book 9 as a companion of Aeneas (Aen. 9.177 comitem Aeneae), is also one of a set of younger and less experienced men left behind when Aeneas departs to seek reinforcements. Indeed, Nisus and Euryalus embark on their doomed mission in order to find Aeneas and bring him back to the Trojan camp, which is meanwhile run by Iulus and a council of elders, all of whom are barely able to sustain the Trojan line against Rutulian attacks. The book is thus in important ways both suggestively counterfactual and proleptic, exposing the worrying consequences of removing Aeneas from the epic plot, and establishing his centrality to the epic present as well as the Roman future. This situation parallels the situation in A Song of Ice and Fire: a king who is absent first due to drink and then, more permanently, due to his death, and a kingdom run by councilors and later on by children. Much like Renly’s campaign, populated by young and optimistic soldiers – the so-called ‘knights of summer’ in one character’s phrase- the build-up to Nisus and Euryalus’ raid offers a view of youthful excess when left unsupervised, their good intentions notwithstanding. In a very obvious sense, therefore, both texts demand that their heroes mature quickly in order to achieve success, and derive their poignancy from the heroes’ failure to do so. This miniature bildungsroman is figured also in the broader plot, which progresses relentlessly from heroic play to a fullyfledged, and deadly, war. Like Iulus, and like Nisus himself, Renly too substitutes for, but fails to improve upon, a stronger character. Renly, in fact, is emphatically described as the living image of his elder brother, the late King Robert:

In their midst, watching and laughing with his young queen by his side, sat a ghost in a golden crown. Small wonder the lords gather around him, with such fervor, she thought, he is Robert come again. Renly was handsome as Robert had been handsome; long of limb and broad of shoulder, with the same coal black hair, fine and straight, the same deep blue eyes, the same easy smile. (Clash of Kings 250)

The ghost metaphor, compounded by the anaphoric ‘same’, has various ramifications, but it immediately establishes Renly as an imitation, a shade of the real thing – the brother whom he seeks to replace. The ghost image finds full realization in Renly’s own death, when he becomes more literally a ghost in the morning mist. Moreover, in a later battle, fought after Renly’s murder, rumor has it that Renly’s ghost appears to fight beside Loras, but this turns out to be a substitution of a different kind – not a ghost, in reality, but merely someone dressed in Renly’s armour. Like the Homeric Patroclus dressed in Achilles's armour, Renly in confirmed as essentially yet another iteration of a fundamentally mimetic figure, with all the literary allusivity such repetition entails. The closer we seem to move to an imitation of the Vergilian intertext, and the closer Renly comes to battle, the more superficial or illusory is the character himself.
The abortive movement from imitation to the real is replicated in Loras’ story arc as well, though here it manifests itself in aesthetic rather than political terms. In Loras’ formal entrance into the plot quoted above he is introduced as the Knight of Flowers. Sansa’s gaze, which focalizes the episode, fetishizes the armour of the young man, just as the poet’s gaze lingers on Euryalus’ beauty in death. The moment lies at the intersection of a number of thematic concerns. At the tournament, Loras rides a mare in heat to distract his opponent’s horse, and he himself has much the same effect on Sansa, gazing at him with somewhat mindless adoration. The eroticism of the tournament also intersects with a systematic Vergilian concern, as Euryalus is only one of a sequence of young virgins whose death evokes the blood of virginal defloration. Flowers thereby become a loaded symbol in this allusive economy, and indeed both youths are attended by floral imagery. The opening description of Loras informs the reader that his armor is worked into a ‘bouquet of a thousand different flowers, and his snow-white stallion was draped in a blanket of red and white roses’ (Game of Thrones 297). The detail of the roses is meant to catch the eye, both of the internal audience, to whom Loras offers the flowers, and of the reading audience, for whom roses might hold a range of symbolic meanings, from the Wars of the Roses to the emblem of romantic love. When Loras appears next, however, his floral armament changes, and tellingly so:

When the Knight of Flowers made his entrance, a murmur ran through the crowd, and he heard Sansa’s fervent whisper, ‘Oh, he’s so beautiful.’ Ser Loras Tyrell was slender as a reed, dressed in a suit of fabulous silver armor polished to a shining sheen and filigreed with twining black vines and tiny blue forget-menots…Across the boy’s shoulders his cloak hung heavy. It was woven of forgetme-nots, real ones, hundreds of fresh blooms sewn to a heavy woolen cape. (Game of Thrones 314)

The description this time is focalized through Sansa’s father, Lord Eddard Stark, and despite the differences in gender and age, Lord Eddard responds to Loras in much the same terms as his daughter: a nearly ekphrastic fascination with the details of the armor. Unlike the previous joust, where cape and arms bore different flowers, now the flowers on Loras’ cape and suit of armor are identical, a similarity to which the text draws explicit attention (‘forget-me-nots, real ones…’). The difference between the two appearances is explicable as the vanity of a young knight, and both occasions are clearly meant as a spectacle of wealth and excess, a token of Loras’ nom de guerre. Precisely as such, however, the flowers betoken identity and its stabilization, and their duplication calls attention exactly to the gap between what is real and what is imitative. Loras himself, a storybook knight whose prowess, at least so far, is ludic rather than martial, hovers between the two realms. Here the shapes begin to rearrange themselves. I have so far treated Loras and Renly’s allusive traits as two parallel lines, but in the following section I move to discuss the plot not as the linear and teleological progression of epic, but as the cyclical and repetitive wanderings of romance. The change is triggered by Renly’s death, which in turns orders the allusions chiastically. Renly becomes Euryalus, and therefore also Loras; Loras becomes Nisus, and therefore also Renly. At a greater remove, the catastrophe of Renly’s death forces Loras from the idyllic world of song into the frenzied realia of warfare, while in Vergil, the young lovers’ death forces them out of the world of war and into immortality in verse (fortunati ambo!).

DEATH, ROLE REVERSAL, AND THE CYCLICAL PLOT

Before focusing on the cyclical plot, however, it is worth dwelling for a moment on Renly’s death itself, which also participates in the sequence from imitation to the real highlighted above. Renly’s death, and his aborted first battle, both take place below the castle of Storm’s End, the family’s ancestral seat and the place of his birth. Our last view of Renly in life is of dressing for battle, the classic build-up for the epic aristeia, and he is slain, by a mysterious shadow cutting through his gorget, just at the point when he is about to pick up his helmet to complete the arming scene:

‘Cold,’ said Renly in a small puzzled voice, a heartbeat before the steel of his gorget parted like cheesecloth beneath the shadow of a blade that was not there. He had time to make a small thick gasp before the blood came gushing out of his throat…The king stumbled from her arms, a sheet of blood creeping down the front of his armor, a dark red tide that drowned his green and gold. More candles guttered out. Renly tried to speak, but he was choking on his own blood. His legs collapsed, and only Brienne’s strength was holding him up. (Clash of Kings 367).

There is much of interest in the scene: blood and shadow have been thematic concerns throughout Clash of Kings, programmatic not only of the family drama of the Baratheons, but also of the developing unrest throughout the kingdom. Blood, and especially its dark red color, is also characteristic of epic heroic death and defloration, and as such, the scene recalls also the death of Euryalus, quoted above, a role Renly takes up through his death. Two more elements are worth drawing out. First, that Renly’s death itself participates in the broader pattern of progression from imitation to reality, corresponding to, and making real, his only appearance in combat. In a brief passage during the Tournament of the Hand, in which we first meet Loras, Renly is driven from his horse in the early rounds, where the detail of the antlered helm once again appears:

Renly was unhorsed so violently that he seemed to fly backward off his charger, legs in the air. His head hit the ground with an audible crack that made the crowd gasp, but it was just the golden antler on his helm. One of the tines had snapped off beneath him. (Game of Thrones 296)

The moment dissolves quickly into humor, as the crowd fights over the golden antler until Renly walks among them to restore order, foreshadowing his attempt to claim the throne through popularity and alliance. The breaking of the tine, however, is ominous, especially in the symbolic economy of Game of Thrones, in which heraldic symbolism is strongly referential of its owner’s characteristics, and here it stands explicitly for the snapped neck the tournament audience fear, and proleptically for the severed neck that will mark Renly’s eventual death. As so often in epic, what is farcical in games becomes all too real in war. The fact that the movement of Renly’s life and death follows the sequence from imitation to reality has important consequences, not least in suggesting that Renly and Loras each moves towards becoming the other. This idea of such a character inversion has some textual support. The switching of roles is marked in particular by the violent frenzy with which Loras responds to Renly’s death. The motto of Renly’s family, House Baratheon, their ‘words’ in Martin’s terminology, reads Ours is the Fury. And yet that fury is one that Loras, in his maddened response to his lover’s death, explicitly takes upon himself. Thus, Renly becomes Euryalus, and Loras Nisus. This technique, whereby identities blur, usually at the climax of a duel or in the heat of battle, is a familiar Vergilian technique, as David Quint and Alessandro Barchiesi have observed, as well as a particularly salient feature of the episode’s reception history. In Statius and later in Ariosto (who relies equally on his Vergilian and Statian models), the Nisus and Euryalus roles are regularly switched between the heroic pairs, Hopleus and Dymas in the Thebaid and Medoro and Cloridano in the Orlando Furioso. Statius and Ariosto go further than simple switching, however. Both poets, for instance, sever the pair’s games-to-warfare sequence, Ariosto completely, and Statius by relegating Dymas to a minor appearance in the funeral games, and transferring the Nisus/Euryalus model instead to Parthenopaeus (yet another virgin, as his name suggests) in the footrace. The reception tradition is therefore inherently flexible, and against its background the Vergilian intertext stands out as uniquely fitting for Renly and Loras’ plot. This flexibility accounts also for the presence of Brienne of Tarth at the crucial moment of death, since it is she, rather than Loras, who first assumes the role of Nisus through her view of Renly’s death and consequent grief. Her anger anticipates Loras’, and in both cases the anger and the violence that follow stand metonymically for the battle Loras and Brienne now have no purpose in fighting. Loras’ fury also corresponds to Nisus’ reaction to Euryalus’ death, and closely traces the movement from frenzy to revenge.

simul ense recluso ibat in Euryalum. tum uero exterritus, amens, conclamat Nisus nec se celare tenebris amplius aut tantum potuit perferre dolorem: … sed uiribus ensis adactus transadigit costas et candida pectora rumpit. uoluitur Euryalus leto… at Nisus ruit in medios solumque per omnis Volcentem petit, in solo Volcente moratur.

At once he [i.e. Volcens] drew his sword and went for Euryalus. Then Nisus, frightened witless, shouts, unable to hide in the shadows any longer, or bear such anguish….the sword was thrust with force and pierces the ribs and bursts the white breast. Euryalus collapses in death…but Nisus rushes amidst them and through them all seeks only Volcens, dwells only on Volcens.

Most striking here is Nisus’ terrified madness – he is both amens and territus – and his vengeful focus on Volcens, whose name Vergil repeats to emphasize Nisus’ intensity: solumque… / Volcentem … in solo Volcente (439). Madness and revenge, together and individually, are typically epic sentiments, which are often used to drive the plot. The formative example is Homer’s Achilles when he hears of the death of Patroclus, and the hero’s reaction is crucial for the narrative of the Iliad, since it reinstates Achilles into the main plot, gives him the motivation to fight again, and sets him on the path that will lead to his own death. In miniature, that is what Nisus does too – a maddened quest for vengeance, followed shortly by death, and with it a resolution of the subplot. Anger and revenge, however, likewise drive the Aeneid, from Juno’s vengeful ire at the opening of the poem (1.4, memorem Iunonis ob iram), to Aeneas’ revenged-fuelled furor at its close (12.946 furiis acensus et ira). Here, too, Nisus follows in Aeneas’ footsteps, losing himself in his final moments in the poem to a madness that threatens to typify him as an epic paradigm.

Madness, likewise, plagues Loras. Just as Nisus loses his mind when he witnesses Euryalus’ death, so too Loras loses his upon seeing Renly’s corpse. But Euryalus, too, was ‘raging’ (perfurit) at 9.343, so drenched in battle fever that Nisus has to turn him away from the slaughter. Hence, madness characterizes Loras through both his intertextual predecessors. But if he successfully matches the madness of Vergil’s characters, what he singularly fails to do is to die, and thus fulfill, finally, the paradigm established by Nisus and Euryalus. Vengeance here has more immediate consequences than in Vergil, since it sets up a sequence of repetitive attempts to re-enact old battles. Loras is something of a specialist in holding such grudges, even before Renly’s death. Late in Game of Thrones, he volunteers to lead an expedition against the same knight whom he had tricked to win the joust.

When the echoes of his words had died away, the Knight of Flowers seemed perplexed. ‘Lord Eddard, what of me?’ Ned looked down on him. From on high, Loras Tyrell seemed almost as young as Robb. ‘No one doubts your valor, Ser Loras, but we are about justice here, and what you seek is vengeance.’ He looked back to Lord Beric. ‘Ride at first light. These things are best done quickly’ (Game of Thrones 470)

Lord Eddard’s recognition is certainly proleptic, but whereas, before Renly’s death, Loras’ desire for revenge seemed part and parcel of the chivalric quest for glory, Renly’s death concretizes this desire and transforms it into a narrative engine, driving Loras to enact repetitively the battle Renly’s murder effectively pre-empted. The first such repetition was the battle supposedly involving Renly’s ghost. Despite Loras’ being on the winning side in that battle, however, there is no resolution for him, nor indeed for the reader, faced with five volumes yet to come. The second iteration – a suicidal attack on an island fortress – almost realizes the Nisus-like sacrifice that Loras ought to have made some time ago. And yet we hear no confirmation of his death and his fate is left hanging for another book. This repetition compulsion and deferral, as Quint has shown, is characteristic of a particularly epic view of the plot of romance, coded as endlessly circular, even as epic tells a more linear story of progress and victory. Moreover, the fact that the bereaved Loras seems to embody the tension between epic and romance only re-enlivens the Freudian terminology underlying Quint’s narrative theory: desire, repression, grief, deathwish, and transference here function at the levels of character psychology and plot structure, and in doing so they firmly place Martin’s work in the most canonical of literary - and literary critical - traditions.

CONCLUSIONS

The reading I have offered proceeds from a flexible model of reception, one that employs the Vergilian paradigm in multiple ways and to various effects. The Nisus and Euryalus intertext functions as a structuring device or template, certainly, but it operates in different ways for Renly than it does for Loras, and most importantly it is an imperfect paradigm. Especially when it is imperfect, it highlights important aspects of the character and of the plot. Thus for Renly, who seems to play both the Nisus and Euryalus roles somewhat passively, the campaign is an attempt to inhabit more fully his elder brother’s persona en route to inhabiting his own. For Loras, on the other hand, the intertext holds up an image of failure, and reveals his drift into the repetitive plot structures of romance. Later in the series, when the dust has settled, Loras says of Renly ‘He was the king that should have been. He was the best of them’ (Storm of Swords 923). He is being overly sentimental, perhaps, but between the Homeric overtones – Achilles was the best of the Achaeans – and the Vergilian pathos, he captures also the double valence of the intertext, as it reveals the vulnerability of epic to the disappointments of romance.
I want to conclude, however, with one final thought on the utility of this exercise. Given the current interest in classical outreach, there is no need to belabor the value of encountering Vergil in unexpected places; likewise, one should not exaggerate the importance Martin has for Vergilian studies. Nevertheless, the presence of a well-known Vergilian theme in this hugely popular text affords us an opportunity to assess the presence of the classics in contemporary popular culture beyond overt re-interpretations, such as Petersen’s Troy. More practically, however, this sort of exercise models a way of reading that is classically inflected, and which connects what we do in our scholarship and in the classroom with the critical skills students are expected to take away from their university education. Such links are not, in the end, trifling, especially as the value of the humanities is increasingly questioned; and they can, perhaps, help to exemplify the continued currency of ancient literature and modern criticism within contemporary culture.