The Aeneid – the Cost FOR AN Empire

52 Books in a Year – Week 4

I want to tell you something before we get into the book itself, because it is the kind of detail that changes how you read every single page of it. You asked yourself a question before picking this up. I know because I asked myself the same one. Did someone pay Virgil to write this? Was the Aeneid a commission? Was it, to use a word that feels uncomfortably modern but fits perfectly, propaganda?

The answer is yes. And the full story of that yes is fascinating.

Virgil wrote the Aeneid when commissioned by the Roman emperor Augustus Caesar, who had come to power around 31 BCE following decades of destructive civil war that had torn the Roman republic apart. Northern Michigan University Augustus needed something. He needed Rome to believe in itself again, and more specifically he needed Rome to believe in him. Not everyone was convinced of Augustus's legitimacy, so he commissioned Virgil to write an epic poem that could rival the great Greek epics of Homer, affirm Rome's artistic credentials, and demonstrate the principles of loyalty, patriotism and peace that Augustus wanted to define his reign. Study.com

In other words, Augustus looked at what Homer had done for Greek culture with the Iliad and the Odyssey, and he wanted that. For Rome. With himself as the spiritual endpoint of the whole story.

Here is the part that makes it considerably more interesting though. After eleven years of composition, the meticulous Virgil did not consider the Aeneid fit for publication. He planned to spend three more years editing it, but fell ill returning from a trip to Greece. Just before his death in 19 BCE, he ordered the manuscript to be burned, because he still considered it unfinished. SparkNotes Augustus intervened, arranging for the poem to be published against Virgil's wishes. SparkNotes

So the most celebrated epic in Roman history was released posthumously by the emperor who commissioned it, over the explicit objections of the man who wrote it. Make of that what you will. I find it one of the most quietly extraordinary facts in the history of literature.

There is also a school of scholarly thought, and it is a convincing one, that Virgil was not simply writing what Augustus wanted. Some scholars argue that Virgil did not write the Aeneid for Augustus, even though Augustus commissioned it, and that the Aeneid was designed to check the impulse to violence rather than celebrate it, depicting war and conquest in a negative light as something that consumes people and unravels the ideals of society. Northern Michigan University The man commissioned to write imperial propaganda may have spent eleven years quietly undermining it. And then asked for the whole thing to be burned.

I came to all of this having just read the Iliad and the Odyssey. That ordering matters. It shaped everything.

Rome Wanted Its Homer

Coming off the Iliad and then the Odyssey and then arriving at the Aeneid, the intention is impossible to miss. You feel it immediately. The structure, the divine interference, the epic journey, the war in the second half. Virgil is absolutely in conversation with Homer and he knows you know it. The first six books follow Aeneas wandering the Mediterranean after the fall of Troy, mirroring the Odyssey. The second six follow a war in Italy that mirrors the Iliad. It is not subtle.

And that is not a criticism. It is a creative decision with a political dimension. Augustus wanted to give the Romans a glorious and ancient history full of Roman virtue and foreshadowing Rome's future glory, demonstrating that the Italians could write great epic poems rivaling those of the Greeks. Study.com Virgil delivers that. He delivers it with extraordinary craft and genuine poetic beauty. But reading it straight after Homer, you feel the seams in a way you might not otherwise. Homer feels like it emerged from somewhere ancient and instinctive. The Aeneid, magnificent as it is, occasionally feels like it was constructed. Because it was.

That is not a flaw exactly. It is just a different kind of achievement.

Aeneas and the Problem of the Perfect Hero

If you have been following this reading challenge from the beginning, you will know that I struggled with Rama in the Ramayana for similar reasons. The hero who is so devoted to duty, so unfailingly righteous, so consistently correct in his choices, that he becomes difficult to love.

Aeneas has that quality too, though in a different register. He is pius Aeneas throughout, dutiful Aeneas, the man who carries his father on his back out of burning Troy and his son by the hand and his household gods under his arm. He does what destiny requires. He goes where the gods send him. He does not deviate. He does not falter. He subordinates everything personal to the greater mission.

And yet, and this is where the Aeneid gets interesting and where I think Virgil's subversive intelligence shows through, Aeneas frequently reveals the less admirable aspects of pietas, like a cold, uncritical devotion to a misunderstood future he will never know. His charisma pales in comparison to more vivid and thrilling characters. Utexas

The most vivid and thrilling of those characters is Dido. And Dido is the reason I am giving this four stars rather than three.

Dido

I want to spend real time here because she deserves it and because she is, without question, the element of this book that stayed with me longest after I finished it.

Dido is the Queen of Carthage. She is a widow who has built a city from nothing, who rules with intelligence and genuine authority, who has sworn fidelity to her dead husband's memory. When Aeneas arrives in Carthage after a storm, she takes him in. She listens to his story. She falls in love with him, catastrophically and completely, with the help of the gods who have engineered the whole situation for their own purposes.

They have what you might call a relationship, though what it means to each of them is clearly different. Aeneas experiences it. Dido gives herself to it entirely. And then Mercury arrives with a message from Jupiter and Aeneas prepares to leave, quietly, without telling her, because duty calls and destiny waits and Rome must be founded.

Dido finds out. And what follows is one of the most devastating scenes in all of ancient literature.

She does not beg. That is the thing about Dido that makes her extraordinary. She is furious. She is betrayed and she knows it and she says so with a directness and a force that feels, reading it now, startlingly modern. She built a city. She offered him a kingdom. She gave him everything she had sworn she would not give again. And he is leaving because a god told him to, and he stands there telling her it is not personal, that he loves her but destiny requires this, that he hopes they can part as friends.

She tells him exactly what she thinks of that.

She kills herself after he sails away, on a pyre she has built from his belongings, with his sword. And as his fleet disappears over the horizon Aeneas sees the smoke rising from Carthage and understands what it means.

He keeps sailing.

That is the moment where Virgil, commissioned to write a celebration of Roman duty and Augustan virtue, shows you what Roman duty actually costs. Not in the abstract. In the body of a specific woman who loved the wrong man at the wrong time and paid for it with everything. Aeneas does the right thing by Rome and the terrible thing by Dido and Virgil presents both of those facts simultaneously without resolving the tension between them.

That is not propaganda. That is literature.

The Underworld

The sixth book, Aeneas descending into the underworld to speak with the shade of his dead father Anchises, is the philosophical heart of the entire poem and one of the most ambitious sequences in ancient literature.

Anchises shows Aeneas the souls waiting to be reborn, the future Romans who will build the empire that Aeneas is founding. He shows him generals and statesmen and, explicitly, Augustus Caesar himself, described as the man who will bring a new golden age. It is the most openly political moment in the book and the most nakedly propagandistic. You can feel the commission in it.

And then, and this is the detail the scholars who think Virgil was quietly subverting the whole enterprise love most, Aeneas exits the underworld through the ivory gate, through which false dreams are sent to the upper world. This implies that all of what Aeneas has been told in the underworld, including the greatness of Rome and the success of his descendants, may be nothing but a false dream. Northern Michigan University

Virgil puts the imperial propaganda in the underworld and then sends his hero out through the gate of false visions. Whether that was intentional subversion or structural accident, scholars have been arguing about it for two thousand years. I know which side I am on.

The War

The second half of the Aeneid covers the war in Italy, Aeneas fighting for the land where Rome will eventually be built, and I want to be honest with you. It is the weaker half of the book.

After Dido, after the underworld, the battles feel less urgent. Turnus, the Italian warrior who opposes Aeneas, is actually a more compelling figure than Aeneas in many of the scenes they share. He is passionate and proud and fighting for something he loves in the way Aeneas seems constitutionally unable to fight for anything. He loses because fate has decreed it.

The ending, with Aeneas killing Turnus in a moment of rage, sits uneasily with everything we have been told about his pius nature. It was deliberately troubling. It takes away a lot of his triumph. It feels like something has been lost in the winning of it. Which, again, is either Virgil the propagandist stumbling or Virgil the artist saying something true about what the “empire” actually requires.

I think it is the second one.

Rome Looking in the Mirror

What strikes me most about the Aeneid, after reading Homer, is how self-conscious it is. Homer did not appear to be thinking about his place in literary history. The Iliad and Odyssey feel like they simply exist, fully formed, the product of an oral tradition so long it has no single author in any meaningful sense.

The Aeneid knows exactly what it is doing. It is serving a political purpose. And within those constraints, which are considerable, some could say Virgil does something remarkable. He tells the truth.

He put it all in and then asked for the whole thing to be burned. Augustus said no.

Honestly? Augustus was right to. Even if the reasons were entirely wrong.

Final Verdict

★★★★☆ (4/5)

Four stars because the Iliad is still the standard and the Aeneid, for all its craft and genuine beauty, occasionally shows its scaffolding in a way Homer never does. Four stars because the second half does not sustain the heights of the first. Four stars because Aeneas himself remains, despite Virgil's best efforts, a man I respect more than I love.

But four very solid stars, because Dido alone is worth the read. Because the underworld sequence is one of the great set pieces in ancient literature. Because Virgil was commissioned to write imperial propaganda and produced something that has been troubling readers and scholars for two thousand years with its unresolved tensions and its quiet, devastating honesty.

A poet asked for his masterwork to be burned. The emperor who commissioned it refused. Two thousand years later we are still arguing about what it means.

That is not nothing. That is everything.

Next Up: The Mahabharata