Amata

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In the mythical early Roman history, Amata was the wife of the Latin king Latinus and the mother of Lavinia , who later became the wife of Aeneas . She opposed her husband's plans to marry Lavinia off to Aeneas. Instead, she favored her nephew, the Rutuler king Turnus , and encouraged him to go to war against Aeneas and the Trojans . Since her sons supported Aeneas, she blinded them or even killed them. When she mistakenly thought Turnus had fallen after a battle, she took her own life by hanging or refusing to eat.

Although Virgil offers the most detailed account of the saga about Amata in his Aeneid , it can be seen that he dealt with the subject very freely and changed the tradition in some cases significantly in order to adapt it to the literary needs of his own work. He clearly characterizes Amata, who has a decisive influence on the events in the second half of the work, as a counterpart to Dido , the opponent of Aeneas in the first half of the Aeneid .

In addition, the Virgilian figure of Amata is strongly influenced by various female figures from Greek tragedies. This is probably also the reason why the Virgilian Amata, unlike the older tradition, does not die by refusing to eat, but by hanging, since this type of suicide occurs much more frequently in Greek literature than in Roman literature.

The question of whether the name Amata can be interpreted as a participle of the Latin amare (German 'to love') in the sense of 'the beloved' is unclear and controversial in research . The question of a possible relationship between the name and the cult name Amata , with which the pontifex maximus addresses a newly appointed vestal virgin, is also unresolved . Perhaps it was Virgil who first coined the name Amata or established it as a canonical form of the name, since Dionysius of Halicarnassus , who refers to older traditions, calls the figure Amita .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dionysius of Halicarnassus , Antiquitates Romanae 1, 64, 2; Virgil , Aeneis 7, 56ff.
  2. ↑ Servius mentions various traditions , Commentary on Aeneid 7.51.
  3. ↑ So Virgil, Aeneid 12595-603
  4. ↑ So Quintus Fabius Pictor , Fragment 1 ed. Peter = Servius, Commentary on the Aeneid 12.603.
  5. ↑ ZW Zarker: Virgil's other tragic queen. In: Vergilius 15, 1969, pp. 2-24
  6. ^ Dionysios of Halicarnassus, Antiquitates Romanae 1, 64, 2.
  7. ↑ ROAM Lyne: Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid. Oxford 1987. pp. 13-27.