Spellings such as Anquises for
Anchises were likewise impossible.
A key moment in the Aeneid (viewed propagandistically as Virgil's endeavor to link the glories of Troy to Augustan Rome) is the prophecy by Aeneas' father
Anchises in Book Six: 'the stern decrees of Fate' that dictate that he would die for 'the land of Romulus' (Virgil, 2008: 211).
In the sixth book of his Aeneid, Virgil recounts Aeneas's descent into the underworld and his interview with his father
Anchises, a dialogue that becomes a narrative (prophetic from Aeneas's perspective, historical from Virgil's) of the events occurring between the mythical life of Aeneas's son Iulus and the historical age of Augustus.
For Aeneas holds no traditional chariot race at the funeral games for his father
Anchises and never fights either from a chariot or on horseback in the Aeneid as all his major opponents in Italy do.
Although in classical and later culture the Virgilian emblem of Aeneas bearing his father
Anchises on his back as he escapes the ruins of Troy became a notable encapsulation of patriarchal dedication to patrilineal duty and inheritance, Aeneas's self-effacing and self-immobilizing gestures before the statue of Priam in Marlowe both shock his companions and underline a desperate psychological need, even abject weakness.
This type of action is what is made possible for Aeneas through the prophetic revelation of the goal of history, vouchsafed by
Anchises to his son in Book VI, and it is ratified in the ekphrastic revelation on the shield procured for Aeneas by his mother in Book VIII.
There he meets his father,
Anchises, who proceeds to give him a grand tour that ranges from the mythical past to the historical present, explaining to him not only the economy of reincarnation, but displaying for him the entire history of Rome, the city that Aeneas has not yet founded, from the reign of the hero's posthumous son Silvius to the untimely death of Marcellus, the nephew of Augustus, the ruler of Rome in Virgil's time.
Appropriately, the first is a passage from Book VI, in which
Anchises, Aeneas' father, explains to Aeneas why the spirits of the Underworld return to their bodies.
Anderson proposes that
Anchises intends for his parade of distinguished Romans to persuade Aeneas that life is worth living (60-61).
Look back to the Tabula Capitolina, and we find a striking iconographic motif at its compositional centre: Aeneas--the mythical founding father of Rome--is shown with his own father
Anchises and son Ascanius (this particular schema was very famous in Rome, serving as a sort of 'logo' for Augustus' principate).
Following the Enlightenment and the growth of a meliorist, progressive sensibility, the believers in a just war seem inspired by the Virgilian outlook that fate, as well as the violence and unspeakable (infandum) cruelties incarnate in war, can be transcended by the eventual triumph of reason, rational order, and peace, as
Anchises described Rome's future to his son Aeneas in the Aeneid: the rulers must remember "to impose the habit of peace, to be merciful to the vanquished, and to overcome the mighty" (Commager 8-9).
In the Underworld
Anchises has set a new ethical paradigm for the behaviour of a conquering hero towards his defeated foe (Putnam 2011:106).
