Vulcan Forges Aeneas' Shield

She comes to him at night, in his bed.

Venus wants a favor from her husband — a husband she largely ignores, a husband the gods consider the least attractive of all the Olympians, a husband who knows exactly what it means when his wife comes to him in the dark and presses close and speaks softly. Vulcan is the god of the forge, the divine craftsman, rejected by his mother Juno who threw him from Olympus for being ugly (or born ugly because he was thrown — the myths conflict), limping on the foot that never healed from the fall.

He is brilliant. He is lame. He is married to the most beautiful goddess in the world, who visits him when she wants something.

He knows. He says yes anyway. He goes to work.

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The forge is under the volcanic islands.

The Aeolian Islands — Vulcano, Stromboli, Lipari — erupt and smoke, and the Romans understood this as the exhaust of Vulcan’s workshop in the volcanic chambers below. He descends. The Cyclopes — in Roman tradition, the one-eyed giant craftsmen who assist the god — are already at work on projects: a thunderbolt for Jupiter, still unfinished; a chariot for Mars; an aegis for Pallas Athena, bristling with golden snakes.

Vulcan tells them to stop everything else. He gives the dimensions of what he needs to make: armor for a mortal, the son of a goddess, who is about to fight a war in Latium.

The Cyclopes work all night. Their hammers fall in alternating rhythm — Virgil renders the sound in a famous onomatopoeic line. The bellows inhale and exhale like giants breathing. The volcanic rock glows orange in the heat. Metal is worked to the limit of the possible, and beyond: this is divine workmanship, which means the limits of the possible do not apply.

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The shield is the last piece to be finished, and the most important.

Virgil spends more than one hundred lines describing what Vulcan engraved on its surface. He describes the scenes in order, working from the earliest to the latest in Roman history, which means working from myth toward what was, to Virgil’s contemporary readers, nearly current events.

The she-wolf with Romulus and Remus. The rape of the Sabine women. The execution of Mettus Fufetius for treachery, torn apart by chariots going in opposite directions. The attack of the Gauls on Rome, repelled by the geese on the Capitoline. Catiline in Tartarus. Cato giving laws to the just.

Then the center of the shield: the battle of Actium.

Augustus on the prow of his ship, flanked by the gods of Rome. Agrippa leading the fleet. Antony with his Eastern ships and his Egyptian wife — Cleopatra, named on the divine shield, the queen of Egypt reduced to a notation on a piece of divine armor. Neptune and Venus and Minerva fighting on Rome’s side. Apollo drawing his bow from the height of Leucas. The Eastern forces breaking and fleeing. Augustus standing at the triple triumph in Rome afterward, receiving the peoples of the world, looking at the temples and gifts, while the nations march in their difference and submission.

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Aeneas receives the shield without being able to read it.

He does not know the events, but rejoices in their image, lifting onto his shoulder the fame and fate of his descendants.

This is Virgil’s quietly devastating line. The man who will set in motion everything depicted on the shield cannot read what is written there. He sees pictures — beautiful, clearly important, clearly divine — and he puts them on his back and carries them into battle because his mother gave them to him and the metal is excellent and the craftsmanship protects.

He is carrying Rome’s entire future without knowing it. He is carrying Augustus — the man who commissioned the poem in which Aeneas carries the shield — without knowing who Augustus is. He is carrying, in the most literal possible sense, the weight of what comes after him.

The shield is the Aeneid’s structural joke and its deepest truth: the hero is always carrying the future without being able to read it. The future is always engraved on the shield, and the shield is always too close to the body to be seen whole.