know well, since he is Hermes’ son 2 ; for example, Cacus’ terrifed fight from Hercules is described with a metaphor which ‘does not seem found before Virgil’ 3 : pedibus timor addidit alas ‘fear had given wings to his feet’, Aen., 8.224 – winged feet, like those of Hermes/Mercury 4 . An interesting example of Evander’s manipulative attitude is his relocation of Cacus to the Aventine, while he usually lived on the Palatine, more specifcally, on the Germalus – certainly near to, or, better still, at the top of the Scalae Caci 5 . Now, who lives on the Germalus in Aeneid 8? Evander himself, of course. Vergil does not actually give us explicit indications, but there is a whole nexus of hints and suggestions which allow us to locate Evander’s home with precision. At the end of the tour, which takes up lines 306–368, Aeneas and Evander probably go up the Palatine, where, of course, the Arcadian Sergio Casali Evander and the Invention of the Prehistory of Latium in Virgil’s Aeneid * * I wish to thank the organizers, especially Massimiliano Di Fazio and Manuela Wullschleger, for having invited me to the Oxford conference, and all the participants for their interesting questions and remarks, in particular Tim Cornell and Stephen Heyworth. Versions of this paper were read at the Scuola Normale of Pisa, Turin, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Harvard, the College of William and Mary, the University of Virginia, Potsdam, and Rostock, and I’d like to thank members of those audiences for their valuable comments. Thanks also to Luigi Galasso, Patricia Johnston, Diana Spencer, Krešimir Vuković, and Fabio Stok, for their careful reading of several versions of the paper and thoughtful comments. 1 Casali 2010, p. 37–40. On Evander’s ‘myth-making’ see also Secci 2013. On Evander in Virgil still fundamental are Musti 1984a and 1985; see also Cornell 1995, p. 58–59, 68–70; Mavrogiannis 2003, p. 85–141. Neither Delcourt 2001 nor Papaioannou 2003 are particularly useful from a Virgilian point of view. For recent briefer treatments see Hogg 2013; Hardie 2014. 2 So, literally, Dion. H., 1.31.1 and Paus., 8.43.2; Virgil is vaguer (Aen., 8.138–139 (Aeneas to Evander) uobis Mercurius pater est, | quem candida Maia Cyllenae gelido conceptum uertice fudit), but Mercury is in any case a direct ancestor of Evander. 3 Fordyce 1977, ad loc. 4 Casali 2010, p. 39. 5 See Pensabene 1999, p. 239–240; also Aronen 1993, p. 132–133. 1. Inventing Cacus Some years ago, as an introduction to a chapter on the ‘development of the Aeneas legend’, I wrote a couple of pages on Evander as a prototype of the Greek historian or erudite who teaches the Trojans/Romans about their own past, even that of the most remote periods 1 . He incorporates, magnifes, and explains from a Hellenocentric point of view. The story of Hercules and Cacus is instructive from this standpoint. Evander wants to dignify his own past in the eyes of his prestigious Trojan guest, and so he transforms a banal cattle- rustling episode into an extraordinary meeting between Good and Evil; the human shepherd Cacus of the pre-Virgilian tradition becomes a monster belching fames, who however also recalls the fgure of Hermes stealing Apollo’s cattle, a story Evander must be understood to Michel Aberson, Maria Cristina Biella, Massimiliano Di Fazio and Manuela Wullschleger - 9783034328890 Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/24/2020 03:23:36PM by sergio_casali@me.com via Sergio Casali