The masterpiece of Rome's greatest poet, Virgil's Aeneid
has inspired generations of readers and holds a central
place in Western literature. The epic tells the story of a
group of refugees from the ruined city of Troy, whose
attempts to reach a promised land in the West are
continually frustrated by the hostile goddess Juno. Finally
reaching Italy, their leader Aeneas is forced to fight a
bitter war against the natives to establish the foundations
from which Rome is destined to rise. This magnificent poem,
in the modern translation by C. Day Lewis, is superbly read
by Paul Scofield with Jill Balcon, Toby Stephens and
cast.
Of Virgil's life we do not know much for certain. He
writes little about himself in his surviving poetry, and
contemporary records are scarce. We are told that he was
born in 70 BC in Andes, a village near Mantua in what is
now Northern Italy - but at the time of Virgil's birth this
area was called Gallia Cisalpina ('Gaul on this side of the
Alps'). He is said to have been educated in Cremona and
Mediolanum (Milan); but we have no sure information about
his life until the publication of his first collection of
poems, the pastoral Eclogues, in (probably) the early 30s
BC. Around this time he seems to have entered the circle of
Maecenas, the aristocratic literary patron close to
Octavian (the future emperor Augustus, who was the adopted
son and heir of Julius Caesar and at this point one of the
key figures on the Roman political scene). Of Virgil's
activities in the turbulent period of the 30s, we again
know very little - although a vignette survives in the
poetry of his contemporary and friend Horace (Satires 1.
5). He seems to have lived near modern Naples.
At least some of his time will have been spent in the
composition of his next poem, the four-book Georgics: this
masterpiece (for Dryden, simply 'the best poem by the best
poet') is ostensibly a work on agriculture and farming
couched in didactic terms, but the poem also offers
sustained reflection on contemporary history as well as on
timeless themes of love and sex, rural life and the
relationship between man and the earth. Dedicated to
Maecenas, and finally published in 29 BC, the Georgics
established Virgil as the foremost Latin poet of an
exceptional generation (his rough contemporaries included
Horace, Propertius, Tibullus, Varius Rufus and Gallus).
Exactly when Virgil made the decision to embark upon
what was to be his final work, the epic Aeneid, is not
known. The beginning of the third book of the Georgics
announces his plan to write an epic for Octavian, but the
Aeneid as published is very different from the poem there
imagined. At any rate, the poem must have taken up much of
his time during the 20s; eagerly anticipated during its
composition ('make way, Roman writers, make way, you
Greeks! - something greater than the Iliad is coming to
birth', said Propertius), the Aeneid confirmed Virgil's
reputation as Rome's greatest poet - and is said to have
made him a very rich man. The poem seems to have been
substantially complete when the poet died in 19 BC, but the
presence of incomplete lines clearly indicates that the
finishing touches had not yet been applied. Indeed, there
is a story that Virgil ordered the poem to be burned, but
that this was forbidden by the emperor Augustus - the poem
was instead handed over to Virgil's friends Varius Rufus
and Plotius Tucca to be edited for publication.
Virgil lived through one of the most tumultuous periods
of Roman and indeed world history, when the Republican
system which had seen the city rise from humble beginnings
in central Italy to a position of dominance in the
Mediterranean world finally collapsed amidst a series of
brutal civil wars. Hundreds of thousands died as Roman
armies fought each other from Spain to Asia, from Greece to
Egypt; furthermore, the cherished libertas (freedom) of the
old Republic was lost in the process, as firstly Julius
Caesar, and later his adopted son and heir Octavian,
established positions of dominance in the state. It was the
latter (who took the name Augustus in 27 BC) who encouraged
Virgil to compose the Aeneid.
The relationship of the poem to contemporary history and
to the Augustan regime is not straightforward. As we have
seen, Georgics III offers an 'advance notice' of an epic
praising Octavian's military exploits - but Virgil seems to
have reconsidered this idea (if it was ever seriously
entertained). His eventual choice of a distant mythical
past as the setting for his poem solved a number of
problems; firstly, it enabled him to avoid sustained direct
engagement with recent history (the dangers of which were
very real, being compared by Horace to walking upon ashes
beneath which the fire was still smouldering); and
secondly, it offered considerably greater prospects for
Virgil's literary ambitions. For although epic poems on
historical events or figures were not unknown in the
ancient world (indeed, some were very popular), they had
not gained the prestige which mythological epics held. By
setting his epic for Augustus in the mythical past, Virgil
was able to invite comparison with the great early Greek
epics, the Iliad and Odyssey attributed to Homer. These two
poems formed the cornerstone of Greek and Roman literary
culture. Although any attempt to rival them was therefore
fraught with danger - the danger of seeming derivative, or
merely a Homeric pastiche - it also represented the height
of literary ambition, the greatest achievement possible for
a poet. And Virgil announces his rivalry in the opening
words of the Aeneid; 'arma virumque cano', 'I tell about
war and the hero' (Dryden's famous 'Arms and the man I
sing'). 'Arms' looks back to the martial epic exemplified
in the Iliad; 'the man' alludes to the first word of the
Odyssey ('andra' in Greek, meaning 'man').
Virgil attempts to bring the two epics together in his
Aeneid, the first half of which is dominated by an
Odyssean-style wandering, the second half by an 'lliadic'
concentration on the war in Italy And his success in this
creative imitation is perhaps his most important
contribution to European literature - as one of the first
and quite possibly the greatest of all sustained creative
responses to earlier literary traditions, the Aeneid
inspired poets centuries later, from Dante to Milton to
Eliot.
The story of the Aeneid centres on the fortunes of
Aeneas, a refugee from the city of Troy sacked by the
Greeks after the famous ten-year siege. Having escaped from
Troy, Aeneas and the Trojans who have followed him wander
the Mediterranean in search of a new home. A series of
warnings and prophecies tell Aeneas to head for Italy in
the West, where he is destined to found a mighty empire.
But his attempts to reach Italy are continually frustrated,
not least by the goddess Juno, who engineers a particularly
lengthy delay in the city of Carthage on the North African
coast. When Aeneas finally reaches Italy he is forced to
fight against fierce native resistance in order to
establish a settlement - and only after a prolonged
struggle, concluded by his killing of the Italian leader
Turnus, is he able to fulfil his destiny.
These are the bare bones of the plot (a more detailed
book-by-book account follows this introduction) around
which Virgil builds his epic. To the Homeric themes of
wandering and fighting are added elements inspired by later
poetry - for example Aeneas' extended love affair with
Dido, the queen of Carthage, the presentation of which
draws on the tragic heroines of Greek theatre and of
Apollonius' Hellenistic epic on the Argonauts. Elsewhere,
Virgil expands the range of epic even further, above all in
the magnificent account of Aeneas' journey to the
underworld in Aeneid VI; this finds a superficial model in
Odyssey XI where Odysseus consults the shade of the seer
Teiresias at the entrance of Hades, but Virgil develops
this idea far beyond the Homeric conception, creating an
atmosphere profoundly different from anything in surviving
Greek heroic epic - a creation which was to inspire Dante's
The Divine Comedy and many lesser imitations.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the Aeneid is its
juxtaposition of mythical material with celebration of the
achievements of Augustus. For Virgil takes the claim of
Julius Caesar's family - the lulii - that they were
descended from lulus, the son of Aeneas, and is thus able
to establish a direct link between the mythical founder of
the Roman state and its current head Augustus. This
facilitates the inclusion of much encomiastic material
-particularly in Jupiter's reply to Venus after Aeneas'
shipwreck in Book I, and later in the parade of Roman
heroes in the underworld in Aeneid VI. But the Aeneid is
not only about Augustus: it is about Rome, and Roman
history. Aeneas is not only the ancestor of Augustus; as a
refugee, and then an imperialist conqueror, he is a
prototype of the Roman people themselves. In the most
famous lines of the poem, Aeneas is told by the shade of
his father Anchises:
'But, Romans, never forget that government is your
medium! Be this your art: to practise men in the habit of
peace. Generosity to the conquered, and firmness against
aggressors. ' (VI. 851-3)
The Roman imperial destiny with all its glory and all
its difficulties and dilemmas, looms into view in these
lines - and is subjected to a searching analysis as we
follow Aeneas' own (sometimes imperfect) attempts to follow
his father's advice throughout the second half of the poem.
In such ways as this, Virgil's great epic moves beyond its
immediate historical context to consider great human themes
- and takes its place in the pantheon of the world's great
classics.
