FIELDS THAT MOURN: PERSONIFIED CAMPI IN AENEID 6.

In Aeneid 6.872-873 (quantos ille virum magnam Mavortis ad urbem / Campus aget gemitus), Anchises's prediction of the funeral of Marcellus functions not only as the climax of the Pageant of Heroes, but, in his personification of the Field of Mars, provides the ultimate focus of a series of personified campi in book 6, anticipated at 441 by the Lugentes Campi that shelter Dido along with the shades of others who died because of love, and at 706-709 by an ambiguously vocal campus, abuzz with beelike souls waiting to be reborn. Anchises projects the Mourning Fields of the underworld straight into the heart of Augustan Rome and refigures the Field of Mars in the image of the Elysian plain where he is expounding Roman destiny to Aeneas. Personification entails a projection of viewership and involves these fields that mourn in the Aeneid's contested world of interpreters. It remains for readers to ask how the new, Roman situation rethinks the earlier campi's burden of mourning and desire. Anchises's discourse redirects those themes toward a triumphal image of Roman progress in spite of the human loss, but we are free to unwind his tropes and reposition the Campus's grief within the questions that the poem as a whole poses about life, death, and national foundation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]