Who She Is
Amata is the queen of Latium, wife of King Latinus and mother of Lavinia. She wants her daughter to marry Turnus, king of the Rutulians, and rejects the foreigner Aeneas as a son-in-law, calling him an exile who will carry the girl off in a ship. She is the most vocal defender of the engagement that the oracle undoes, and the poem shows her in three states: the queen who argues with her husband, the woman seized by the poison of the Fury Alecto, and the mother who prefers death to seeing a Trojan son-in-law. Her role in the Aeneid is to give the war in Latium a domestic voice: what drives the people is the wish to keep the daughter and the kingdom with the suitor already chosen, and it is her death that pushes Turnus to the final step.
Trajectory
In Book VII, Amata hurries the wedding of Turnus with extraordinary love, while prodigies stall the marriage. When the Trojans arrive, the queen was already burning, consumed by cares and rages. Juno, who cannot prevent Lavinia's marriage to Aeneas, sends the Fury Alecto to cast a serpent upon Amata, which slips between her garments and her breast and breathes into her a viper's soul.
Ille inter vestes et levia pectora lapsus / Volvitur attactu nullo, fallitque furentem, / Vipeream inspirans animam, slipping between her garments and her smooth breast, it coils without any touch, eluding her, already frenzied, and breathing into her a viper's soul.
Before the poison takes hold of her, Amata tries to persuade her husband with words. She asks whether he will give his daughter to exiles, to a foreigner who will carry her off in a ship, and reminds him that Turnus himself descends from people of Mycenae and so is also from abroad. Latinus does not give in, and then the poison takes her: she runs through the city and flees to the mountains with her daughter, on the pretext of a rite of Bacchus, and the Latin women follow her.
Ceu quondam torto volitans sub verbere turbo, / Quem pueri magno in gyro vacua atria circum / Intenti ludo exercent; ille actus habena / Curvatis fertur spatiis: stupet inscia juxta / Impubesque manus, mirata volubile buxum: / Dant animos plagae, as a top sometimes spins under the twisted whip, which boys absorbed in their game make turn in a great circle around the empty courtyard; driven by the cord, it runs in curves, and the unformed group standing near gazes without understanding, amazed at the spinning boxwood: the blows give it spirit.
In Book XI, when news of the Trojan advance interrupts the council, Amata goes up with the women of Laurentum to the temple of Pallas to ask the goddess to break the invader's spear. Lavinia accompanies her, eyes lowered, and the poem calls her the cause of so many evils.
In Book XII, when Turnus demands that the pact of the duel be sealed, Amata weeps and holds him back: she says he is her only hope, the rest of her old age, and that if he dies in combat she will die with him and will not live to see Aeneas as son-in-law. The end comes from a misunderstanding: seeing fire on the rooftops and no army of Turnus, she concludes he is dead, cries out that she is the cause, the guilt, and the origin of the evils, and hangs herself from a beam.
Infelix pugnae juvenem in certamine credit / Exstinctum, et subito mentem turbata dolore, / Se causam clamat crimenque caputque malorum, the unhappy woman believes the young man has died in the contest and, suddenly disturbed in her mind by grief, cries out that she is the cause, the guilt, and the origin of the evils.
Her death reaches Turnus on the field and is one of the reasons that makes him leave the chariot and his sister. Lavinia tears her hair and cheeks, and Latinus tears his clothes.
Themes Embodied
Amata embodies Passion in the sense of frenzy: the poem shows Alecto's poison kindling in her what already burned, and leaves open where one thing ends and another begins. She embodies War through the women and the home side, who want war to protect the daughter and the given word, and who are the first to pay for it. She embodies Fate and Free Will because she is the one who tries, with her own strength and that of a goddess, to prevent what the oracle and the fates have already decided. And she embodies Empire and Colonialism from the side of whoever rejects the foreigner: her opposition to Aeneas is the resistance of a land to someone arriving to change who governs it.
The serpent's poison does not create Amata's hatred. The narrator says earlier that she was already burning, and the text shows her first trying to convince Latinus with words, and only after he resists does the poison overpower her. Even in madness there is calculation: she flees with Lavinia to the woods under the pretext of a rite, which takes the daughter away from the Trojans. The serpent amplifies what she already felt, and the poem does not decide how far what was hers went. The ending confirms this reading: the hanging springs from an error, the belief that Turnus is dead, and from a guilt the text does not explain, which may be that of having fed the war and the engagement, or may be only pain speaking.
Relationships
- Latinus: the husband, whom she fails to persuade with arguments and whom her tears later make give way.
- Turnus: the son-in-law she wants, and for whom she vows to die.
- Lavinia: the daughter, who accompanies her to the temple and mourns her death.
- Aeneas: the stranger she refuses to accept as son-in-law.
- Juno: the goddess who, through Alecto, kindles her fury.