Rome

recognized long before it approached completion. “Stand aside, Roman writers; give way, Greeks!” wrote that entrancing love-poet Sextus Propertius, who had been broken financially by the proscriptions of Octavian and Antony. “Something greater than the Iliad is being born!”

Virgil freely admits that other peoples, such as the Greeks, are better at certain things than his Romans. “Let others make more lifelike, breathing images from bronze, which they will,” he writes. “Others can excel as orators, as astronomers. But, Romans, keep in mind that your art form is government. You must keep men practiced in the habit of peace, be generous to the conquered, and stand firm against the arrogant.” For the real Roman, the art of power was what counted.

To show what this means, Virgil will tell the story of Rome’s foundation by that man of destiny, the Trojan hero Aeneas, who, with his venerated father, Anchises, and little son Ascanius, escapes from the burning ruins of Troy and, pursued by the hostility of the goddess Juno, after many perilous wanderings by sea, founds the city of Rome, the second Troy, a city destined for an equally mythic greatness. “I sing of warfare and a man at war,” the epic begins, or in John Dryden’s translation:

??????Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by fate

??????And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,

??????Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore.

??????Long labors, both on land and sea, he bore.…

In part, the Aeneid is an imitation of Homer’s Odyssey. Aeneas was already a character in the Iliad. In some respects, the Aeneid is almost impenetrably complicated, but its story may be summarized, in a very simplified form. Setting sail from burning Troy (book 1), Aeneas reaches Carthage, which is not written about as an enemy to Rome, but as a luxurious refuge from the terrors of the sea; it is ruled by the beautiful Queen Dido, to whom he relates, in the manner of Odysseus, the fall of Troy and his voyaging (books 2 and 3). Dido and Aeneas fall in love (book 4), but the gods oblige him to take to the sea again, deserting her, breaking her heart, driving her to suicide, and, not incidentally, providing the substance of later operas. His venerated father dies; Aeneas holds funeral games for him (book 5), sails on, and makes landfall in Italy, where he finds the entrance to the Underworld near Cumae (book 6). There he meets the shade of Dido, who bitterly reproaches him with many curses. Aeneas can think of no justification for his conduct—there is none—and is forced to the lame excuse that he didn’t mean it: he left her because Jupiter told him to. There he also meets the shade of his father, who tells him about the destiny of the city he is about to found, Rome.

In book 7, Aeneas reaches Latium and seeks marriage to the Princess Lavinia, whose previous suitor, Turnus, grows furious and, incited by the ever-vengeful goddess Juno, makes war on Aeneas and the Trojans. In book 8, Aeneas acquires celestial armor, including a stupendously elaborate shield made by Vulcan. It is a prophetic object, showing a number of future events involving Rome, including Augustus’ victory over Antony at Actium.

After prolonged warfare (books 9–12), Turnus is killed and Aeneas’ hegemony over the new Rome is complete.

It is, on one level, a majestically patriotic poem, suffused with an epic sense of scale and destiny. It recounts as its basic theme the establishment of those moral obsessions of ancient Augustan Rome, peace (pax), civilization (mos), and law (ius). “Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem,” Virgil wrote: “So hard and massive a task it was to found the Roman race.” Much the same might be said about the composition of Virgil’s poem. Like Shakespeare, Virgil created an extraordinary number of phrases and images that so embedded themselves in the uses of his language that they seem always to have been there: cliches that continually refresh themselves. “Equo ne credite, Teucri. Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.” A real shudder of mystery in the presence of the Trojan horse: “Don’t feel safe with the horse, Trojans. Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks, especially when they bring gifts.” Or the warning about Hell:

??????The road down to that place of damnation is easy, but

??????Night and day the gates of Death’s dark kingdom lie open:

??????But to retrace your steps, to find your way back to daylight–

??????That is the task, the hard thing.

The Aeneid reverberates throughout with hints and prophecies of Rome’s destiny. Aeneas comforts and encourages his exhausted men (book 1, lines 205–10): “We hold our course for Latium, where the Fates/Hold out a settlement and rest for us. Troy’s kingdom there shall rise again. Be patient:/Save yourselves for more auspicious days.” Aeneas will found the city, and presently

??????Happy in the tawny pelt

??????His nurse, the she-wolf, wears, young Romulus

??????Will take the leadership, build walls of Mars,

??????And call by his own name, his people Romans.

??????For these I set no limits, world or time,

??????But make the gift of empire without end.

In the kingdom of the dead in book 6, Anchises prophesies that “Illustrious Rome will bound her power with earth,/Her spirit with Olympus. She’ll enclose/Her seven hills with one great city wall,/Fortunate in the men she breeds.” And he instructs his son Aeneas to

??????Turn your two eyes

??????This way and see this people, your own Romans.

??????Here is Caesar, and all the line of Iulus,

??????All who shall one day pass under the dome

Of the great sky; this is the man, this one,

??????Of whom so often you have heard the promise,

??????Caesar Augustus, son of the deified,