Discordia
[9] Virgil, in the Aeneid (first century BC), has "maddening Strife (Discordia demens), her snaky locks entwined with bloody ribbons" as one of the many terrible evils who reside at the entrance to his Underworld.
In the middle of the fray storms Mavors, embossed in steel, with the grim Furies from on high; and in rent robe Discord [Discordia] strides exultant, while Bellona follows her with bloody scourge.Discordia, under the influence of Virgil, appears in the works of the four later first-century AD Roman epic poets Lucan, Silius Italicus, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus.
The word discordia (whether personified or not) appears seven times in Lucan's Pharsalia, his epic poem about the decisive battle in Caesar's civil war.
[13] Silius, in his epic Punica about the Second Punic War, begins his Battle of Cannae with Virgil's "maddening strife" (Discordia demens) invading heaven and forcing "the gods to fight".
[14] Statius involves Discordia (in the company of other personifications) in his Thebaid concerning the fraternal war, for the kingship of Thebes, between the two sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices.
[15] The Argonautica, Valerius' epic poem about Jason's search for the Golden Fleece, where the theme of civil discord is pervasive,[16] also mentions the goddess.
In Book 2, Discordia, among other personifications, hurries to assist Venus ("the Martian consort") to incite the women of Lemnos to make (civil) war on their husbands:[17] Straightway Fear and insensate Strife [Discordia] from her Getic lair, dark-browed Anger with pale cheeks, Treachery, Frenzy and towering above the rest Death, her cruel hands bared, come hastening up at the first sound of the Martian consort's pealing voice that gave the signal.Later in Book 6, Valerius, describing the crashing chariots of the warring Colchian brothers Aeetes and Perses, has: "the curved blades doth discord [discordia] entangle and lacerate the panic-stricken cars", then goes on to liken the battle between the two brothers to Roman civil war.
She makes an appearance in a civil war parody in Petronius's Satyricon (late first century AD), where she is described as follows:[20] Discord [Discordia] with disheveled hair raised her Stygian head up toward the gods of heaven.
On her face blood had clotted, tears ran from her bruised eyes, her teeth covered in rusty scales were eaten away, her tongue was dripping with decaying matter, her face beset with snakes, beneath her torn clothes her breasts writhed, and in her bloody hand she waved a quivering torch.Urging all to war—in particular several notable figures in Caesar's civil war: Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, Marcellus, Curio, Lentulus—Discordia: spewed forth these words from her maddened breast: ‘All nations, take up arms now and fill your hearts with fire, take up arms, and hurl torches into the hearts of cities.
Whoever hides from the fray will be lost; let no woman delay, no child, no man wasted by old age; let the earth itself quake and the shattered houses join the fight.
It follows that if she was perhaps offended because she of all the gods had obtained no temple in the city, and was therefore already upsetting the state with such great tumults, she may well have been far more fiercely aroused when she saw erected a temple to her adversary on the spot where that slaughter—the spot where her handiwork, that is—had taken place!The opposition of Concordia and Discordia is particularly explicit in the Christian poet Prudentius's early fifth-century allegory Psychomachia ("Battle of the Soul"), in which armies of personified Virtues and Vices do battle.
Her torn mantle and her whip of many snakes were left lying far behind amid the heaps of dead on the field of battle, while she herself, displaying her hair wreathed with leafy olive, answered cheerfully the joyous revellers.
The God I have is variable, now lesser, now greater, now double, now single; when I please, he is unsubstantial, a mere apparition, or again the soul within us, when I choose to make a mock of his divinity.
My teacher is Belial, my home and country the world.At which point Faith, the Virtues' queen, unwilling to hear any more of their "outrageous prisoner’s blasphemies", stopped Discordia's speech by driving a javelin through her tongue,[28] and: Countless hands tear the deadly beast in pieces, each seizing bits to scatter to the breezes, or throw to the dogs, or proffer to the devouring carrion crows, or thrust into the foul, stinking sewers, or give to the sea-monsters for their own.
