At first the plan was to sing the battles of Octavian.15 But the supposed descent of his adoptive father from Venus and Aeneas led the poet—perhaps the Emperor—to conceive an epic on the founding of Rome. As the theme developed it came to include, by preview through prophecy, the expansion of Rome into the Augustan empire and peace. It would also show the role of Roman character in these achievements and seek to make the ancient virtues popular; it would picture its hero as reverent of the gods and guided by them, and would fall in with the Augustan reformation of morals and faith. Virgil retired to various lairs in Italy and spent the next ten years (29-19) on the Aeneid. He wrote slowly, with the devotion of a Flaubert, dictating a few lines in the fresh morning and rewriting them in the afternoon. Augustus waited impatiently for the poem’s completion, repeatedly inquired about its progress, and importuned Virgil to bring him any finished fragment. Virgil put him off as long as he could, but finally read to him the second, fourth, and sixth books. Octavia, Antony’s widow, fainted at the passage describing her son Marcellus, but lately dead.16 The epic was never completed, never finally revised. In 19 B.C.. Virgil visited Greece, met Augustus in Athens, was sunstruck in Megara, started home, and died soon after reaching Brundisium. On his deathbed he begged his friends to destroy the manuscript of his poem, saying that at least three years more would have been necessary to give it finished form. Augustus forbade them to carry out the request.
Every schoolboy knows the story of the Aeneid. As Troy burns, the ghost of the slain Hector appears to the leader of his Dardanian allies, the “pious Aeneas,” and bids him resume from the Greeks the “holy things and household gods” of Troy—above all, the Palladium, or image of Pallas Athene, on the retention of which the preservation of the Trojans was believed to depend. “Seek for these” sacred symbols, says Hector, “the city which, when you have wandered over the sea, you shall at last establish.”17 Aeneas escapes with his old father Anchises and his son Ascanius. They set sail and stop at divers places; but always the voices of the gods command them to go on. Winds drive them ashore near Carthage, where a Phoenician princess, Dido, is founding a city. (When Virgil wrote this, Augustus was carrying out Caesar’s plan for rebuilding Carthage.) Aeneas falls in love with her. A convenient storm enables them to take refuge in the same cave and to consummate what Dido considers their marriage. For a time Aeneas accepts her interpretation, and shares with her and his willing men the tasks of construction. But the relentless gods—who, in classic myth, never cared much for marriage—warn him to depart; this is not the capital that he must make. Aeneas obeys, and leaves the mourning queen with a theme song in his words:
I will never deny, O Queen, that thou hast deserved of me the utmost thou canst set forth in speech. … I never held out the bridegroom’s torch, nor took the marriage vow. . . . But now Apollo has bidden me sail. . . . Cease then to consume thyself and me with these complaints. Not of my own will do I seek Italy.18
Italiam non sponte sequor: this is the secret of the tale. We who, after eight centuries of sentimental literature, judge Virgil and his hero in its terms, attach far more significance to romantic love, and to extramarital relations, than did either Greece or Rome. Marriage was to the ancients a union of families rather than of bodies or souls; and the demands of religion or fatherland were placed above the rights or whim of the individual. Virgil treats Dido sympathetically, and rises to one of his finest passages in telling how she flings herself upon a funeral pyre and is burned alive; then he follows Aeneas to Italy.
Landing at Cumae, the Trojans march into Latium and are welcomed by its king, Latinus. His daughter Lavinia is betrothed to Turnus, the handsome chief of the neighboring Rutuli. Aeneas alienates her affection and her father; Turnus declares war upon him and Latium, and mighty battles ensue. To refresh and encourage Aeneas the Cumaean Sibyl takes him through the grotto of Lake Avernus into Tartarus. As Virgil writes an Odyssey of Aeneas’ wanderings and a short Iliad of his wars, so now he takes a lead from Odysseus’ tour of Hades, and becomes in turn an exemplar and guide for Dante. Facilis descensus Averni—“easy is the descent to Hell”—says Virgil;19 but his hero finds the way tortuous, and the lower world confusingly complex. There he meets Dido, who scorns his protestations of love; there he sees the varied torments with which earthly sin is punished and the prison house where suffer, Lucifer-like, rebellious demigods. Then the Sibyl takes him through mystic passages to the Blissful Groves where those who led good lives bask in green valleys and endless joys. His father Anchises, who has died en route, expounds to him here the Orphic doctrine of heaven, purgatory, and hell, and reveals to him in panoramic vision the future glory and heroes of Rome. In a later vision Venus shows him the battle of Actium and the triumphs of Augustus. His spirits revived, Aeneas returns to the living world, kills Turnus, and scatters death about him with epic hand. He marries the shadowy Lavinia, and when her father dies he inherits the throne of Latium. Soon afterward he falls in battle and is transported to the Elysian Fields. His son Ascanius or Iulus builds Alba Longa as the new capital of the Latin tribes, and thence his descendants Romulus and Remus go forth to establish Rome.
It seems unmannerly to criticize so gentle a soul as Virgil for all these grateful flatteries to his country and his Emperor, or to find flaws in a work that perhaps he had never wished to write and never lived to complete. Of course it imitates Greek models; so does practically all Roman literature except the satire and the essay. The battle scenes are weak echoes of the Iliad’s clanging frays, and Aurora rises as often as Homer’s rosy-fingered Dawn. Naevius, Ennius, and Lucretius lend the poet episodes and phrases, sometimes whole lines; and Apollonius of Rhodes, through his Argonautica, provides a model for Dido’s tragic love. Such borrowings were judged legitimate in Virgil’s as in Shakespeare’s days; all Mediterranean literature was viewed as the heritage and storehouse of every Mediterranean mind. The mythological background tires us, now that we are making our own; but these divine allusions and interpositions were familiar and pleasant even to skeptical readers of Roman poetry. We miss in the smooth epic of the ailing Virgil the torrential narrative of Homer, the life-and-blood reality that moves the giants of the Iliad or the homely folk of Ithaca. Virgil’s story often lags, and his characters are almost all anemic except those whom Aeneas abandons or destroys. Dido is a living woman, gracious, subtle, passionate; Turnus is a simple and honest warrior, betrayed by Latinus, and doomed to an unmerited death by ridiculous gods. After ten cantos of cant we resent the “piety” of Aeneas, which leaves him no will of his own, excuses his treachery, and brings him success only by supernatural intervention. We do not enjoy the windy speeches with which he kills good men, adding a rhetorical boredom to that competitive perforation which is humanity’s final test of truth.
To understand and appreciate the Aeneid we must at every turn remind ourselves that Virgil was writing not a romance, but a sacred scripture for Rome. Not that he offers any clear theology. The gods who pull the strings of his drama are as vicious as Homer’s and not as humorously human; indeed, all the mischief and suffering in the story are caused not by men and women but by deities. Probably Virgil conceived these divinities as poetical machinery, symbols of tyrannous circumstance and disruptive chance; in general he oscillates between Jove and an impersonal Fate as the ruler of all things. He likes the gods of the village and the field better than those of Olympus; he loses no opportunity to commemorate them and describe their rites; and he wishes that his fellow men could recapture the pietas—the reverence toward parents, fatherland, and gods—which was nourished by that primeval rural creed. Heu pietas! heu prisca fides! he mourns—“alas for the old piety and faith!” But he rejects the traditional conception of a Hades in which all the dead bear alike a gloomy fate; he plays with Orphic and Pythagorean ideas of reincarnation and a future life, and makes as vivid as he can the notion of a rewarding heaven, a cleansing purgatory, and a punishing hell.
The real religion of the Aeneid is patriotism, and its greatest god is Rome. The destiny of Rome moves the plot, and all the tribulations of the tale find meaning in “the heavy task of establishing the Roman race”—tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem. The poet is so proud of the Empire that he looks with no envy upon the superior culture of the Greeks. Let other peoples transform into living figures marble and bronze, and chart the courses of the stars:
But thou, O Roman, must the peoples rule.
Thine arts shall be to teach the ways of peace,
To spare the humbled, and throw down the proud.20
Nor does Virgil resent the death of the Republic; he knows that class war, not Caesar, killed it; at every stage of his poem he foreshadows the restorative rule of Augustus, hails it as Saturn’s reign returned, and promises him, as reward, admission to the company of the gods. No man ever fulfilled a literary commission more perfectly.
Why do we retain a warm affection for this pietistic, moralistic, chauvinistic, imperialistic propagandist? Partly because the gentleness of his spirit is on every page; because we feel that his sympathies have spread from his own fair Italy to all men, even to all life. He knows the sufferings of the lowly and the great, the obscene ghastliness of war, the brief mortality that stalks the noblest men, the griefs and pains, the lacrimae rerum, or “tears in things,” that mar and accentuate the sunshine of our days. He is not merely imitating Lucretius when he writes of “the nightingale mourning beneath the poplar’s shade the loss of her young ones, whom some hard plowman has seen and torn unfledged from their nest; all night long she cries, and perched on a spray, renews her pitiful song, filling the woods with her sad lament.”21 But what draws us back to Virgil again and again is the persistent loveliness of his speech. It is not in vain that he pored over every line, “licking it into shape as the she-bear does her cubs”;22 and only the reader who has tried to write can guess the toil that made this narrative so smooth and adorned it with so many passages of sonorous melody that every second page cries out for quotation, and tempts the tongue. Perhaps the poem is too uniformly beautiful; even beauty palls upon us if its eloquence is prolonged. There is a delicate feminine charm in Virgil, but seldom the masculine power and thought of Lucretius or the surging tide of that “many-billowed sea” called Homer. We begin to understand the melancholy ascribed to Virgil when we picture him preaching beliefs that he could never recapture, writing for ten years an epic whose every episode and line required the effort of artificial art, then dying with the haunting thought that he had failed, that no spark of spontaneity had set his imagination on fire or spurred his figures into life. But over his medium, if not over his subject, the poet won a complete victory. Artifice has seldom achieved a brighter miracle.
Two years after his death his executors gave the poem to the world. There were some detractors: one critic published an anthology of his defects, another listed his pilferings, another printed eight volumes of Resemblances between lines in Virgil and in earlier poetry.23 But Rome soon forgave this literary communism. Horace ranked Virgil fondly with Homer, and schools inaugurated nineteen hundred years of memorizing the Aeneid. Plebeian and aristocrat mouthed him; artisans and shopkeepers, tombstones and scribbled walls, quoted him; temple oracles gave responses through ambiguous verses of his epic; the custom began—and lasted till the Renaissance—of opening Virgil at random and finding some counsel or prophecy in the first passage that struck the eye. His fame grew until in the Middle Ages he was considered a magician and a saint. Had he not, in the Fourth Eclogue, predicted the coming of the Saviour and, in the Aeneid, described Rome as the Holy City, from which the power of religion would uplift the world? Had he not in that terrible Book VI pictured the Last Judgment, the sufferings of the wicked, the cleansing fire of purgatory, the happiness of the blessed in paradise? Virgil too, like Plato, was anima naturaliter Christiana, despite his pagan gods. Dante loved the elegance of his verse, and took him as guide not only through hell and purgatory, but also in the art of flowing narrative and beautiful speech. Milton thought of him when writing Paradise Lost and the pompous orations of devils and men. And Voltaire, of whom we should have expected a harsher judgment, ranked the Aeneid as the finest literary monument left us by antiquity.24