| المستخلص: |
In the passage of the Aeneid , the name of Osiris is surprising. Why does the name of an Egyptian" god intrude into a primeval scene of Roman origins? The slaying of Osiris by Thymbraeus can be shown to emblematize both the whole mission of Aeneas, cured of the wound on his thigh, arms himself and, with some final words of instruction to his son, goes into battle seeking Turnus. We begin to discern the ideological program completed by the name of Osiris. He was the Nile. If we permit this identification to operate in 12.458, we should recall that the Nile has twice been mentioned in the Aeneid as metonymic for Egypt as enemy of Octavian’s Rome: at 6.800, where Anchises predicts that already the Nils, along, with other regions, trembles at the approach of Augustus Caesar; and at 8.711, where the grieving river receives the defeated Egyptian army into his bosom after Actium. Virgil the poet is playing the same game of linked metaphors as Octavian and Antony the politicians did. Beneath the name of Thymbraeus and Osiris, pitted against each other in the last battle of the Aeneid, two lists of opposing terms unroll, each pair representing a thematic level of the poem on which the same battle is being played out, with Roman supremacy the ultimate prize: Rome versus Egypt, Tiber versu Nile, Apollo versus Bacchus, Octavian versus Antony. On several levels, then, the antithesis between Thymbraeus and Osiris allegorizes the triumph of Aeneas and the future Roman nation. Yet as with so much of the pro-Augustan content of the Aeneid, the battle between Thymbraeus and Osiris, on all levels a seemingly straightforward triumph of both Aeneas and Augustus, is out without ambivalence.
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