Virgil

"All the gods on whom this empire once depended have left their shrines and their altars. You are rushing to defend a burning city. Let us die. Let us rush into the thick of the fighting. The one safety for the defeated is to have no hope of safety." (pg. 40)

You've got to admire the Classical cojones on a man who, looking at the formidable glory of The Iliad and The Odyssey, the two works of Homer, decides to himself write a third volume continuing the story. The two epics were already show more ancient when Virgil, writing just a few decades before Christ, decided to pick up the story of the Trojan captain Aeneas, who flees the sack of Ilium and leads his band of martial refugees across the Mediterranean into Italy, where they begin the dynasty that will become "the beginning of the Latin race, the Alban fathers and the high walls of Rome" (pg. 3).

What's even more admirable is that Virgil achieves his task. He takes the best flavours from Homer – the voyage of Aeneas and his people across the Mediterranean mirrors Odysseus' wine-dark wanderings in The Odyssey, while the battles in Italy recall those outside the walls of Troy in The Iliad – and makes them his own. He skilfully appropriates the Greek stories into his new Roman culture – perhaps one of the most successful cross-pollinations in history – in a way that not only pays homage to the Homeric originals but adds a very creditable and satisfying third volume to the story.

It was a surprise to me when I first read The Iliad, nearly a decade ago now, that there was no mention of a wooden horse. That particular story ends with the fateful clash between Hector and Achilles, and furthermore the horse is only mentioned briefly as Odysseus' stratagem in The Odyssey. Rather, it is Virgil's Aeneid which delivers to us the full story of the Trojan Horse: the large wooden "gift" presented to Troy by the "fleeing" Greeks; the carnival atmosphere among the Trojans after it is brought within the walls of Ilium; the unheeded warnings of the priestess Cassandra. It is The Aeneid which gives us the famous line to "beware of Greeks bearing gifts" (pg. 30), and it shows us why we pay heed to the line in the chapters that follow: a frankly breath-taking depiction of the fall of Troy.

The sack of the city of Ilium, told in flashback by Aeneas, is one of the most evocative passages of writing I have ever read, and worth the price of admission alone. Laden with epic tragedy and pathos, it gores the reader with a relentless narrative drive. As the Greek soldiers pour out of the horse and storm the city, Virgil vividly depicts the confusion, fear, heartbreak and humiliation the Trojans feel. We see the old king Priam, noble and dignified, butchered like a pig (pg. 47). We see Aeneas part from his own agèd father who, with the walls of his city collapsing around him, stoically tells his son that "if the gods in heaven had wished me to go on living, they would have preserved this place for me" (pg. 50). Later, having led his band to safety, Aeneas discovers his wife is missing: "whether she stopped or lost her way or sat down exhausted, no one can tell. I never saw her again… I stormed and raged and blamed every god and man that ever was" (pg. 53). Fighting his way back into the fallen city, he meets her ghost – "Three times I tried to put my arms around her neck. Three times her phantom melted in my arms" (pg. 54) – who tells him not to weep, for now she will not be a slave to any Greek (pg. 54). She won't be a war-prize or concubine like Andromache, widow of Hector. When Aeneas tells Dido, Queen of Carthage, that "we are the remnants left by the Greeks. We have suffered every calamity that land and sea could inflict upon us" (pg. 22), it is the pen of Virgil, not the swords of the Achaeans, which has made us feel it.

But Virgil does more than just lean on the stories of Homer for his epic. When the fate of Ilium is behind them on the winds, and their ships bring them to Carthage, Virgil proves he can create an epic quality of his own. Aeneas' romance with Dido is unfortunately brief, but fits the Homeric framework Virgil has constructed like a glove. A subsequent chapter in which Aeneas travels into the underworld shows that, while he may have been inspired by Homer, he himself would inspire Dante.

Unfortunately, I found the story lost some of its momentum when Aeneas and his band finally land in Italy. The conflict between Aeneas and the native adversaries who already live on the land is never entirely clear, perhaps because Virgil, sensitive to the political implications of a mis-step on his part in the reign of Augustus, wanted to bring legendary Trojan blood into the founding of Rome – a land "pregnant with empire" (pg. 88) – without maligning the existing tribes of the region, who also contributed to that imperial rise. The final chapters of The Aeneid get stuck in a succession of games tournaments, battles and funeral processions, with much of the early promise forgotten. By this point, Aeneas is a powerful, unreflective champion destined to conquer the land, far removed from the pained, tragic underdog who left the bodies of his wife and father in Ilium and that of Dido across the sea. Considering Virgil was in conscious imitation of Homer, I don't think it's unfair to note that his final duel between Aeneas and the Italian champion Turnus lacks the narrative satisfaction that accompanies the duel between Hector and Achilles, and The Aeneid ends abruptly immediately after this final spear is plunged.

That said, this final battle does allow for one real moment of high tragedy, a late shimmer which recalls all those fantastic moments in the first half of Virgil's epic. The final fated duel threatens to be generic, until Turnus, who has been avoiding the confrontation with the indomitable Aeneas, looks around him at the burning city of his birth and decides to face him. "You will not see me put to shame again," he tells his weeping sister. "This is madness, but before I die, I beg of you, let me be mad" (pg. 324). This is supreme drama, not only in the quality of the line, but in the underlying juxtapositions. Aeneas, who fled a burning city, is now razing one himself. Turnus, the young captain, is facing the indomitable Trojan hero Aeneas to defend his home even though he knows he will die, just as the doomed Trojan captain Hector once faced the indomitable Achilles. The Aeneid ends too soon after this to really allow us to chew on what it means, but it speaks to the quality of Virgil's architecture that the juxtaposition can be made so astutely.

At this point it is also worth mentioning David West, who provided the excellent translation in my Penguin Classics edition of the book. West wisely decides on a prose translation of Virgil's epic poem, and consequently avoids all the pitfalls that come with trying to reconcile the story to modern English metre and rhyme. By sticking to prose, West retains all the narrative drive and lyricism of Virgil's Aeneid without it sounding alien or artificial to English ears. Some of the credit for the power of Virgil's lines and the narrative momentum of his scenes must go to West's delivery and decision-making, which has retained that power in translation when it could so easily have been spoiled.

All told, Virgil created in The Aeneid an epic that can stand alongside the august volumes of Homer without any shame or sense of inferiority. At its best – such as in the sack of Troy – there is scarcely anything better, and the epic is laced throughout with moments and ideas and lines of poetry that fascinate. It is interesting to see Odysseus presented as an outright villain – here, he is called Ulixes – for of course, the story is told from the perspective of the defeated Trojans who curse his name. It is even more interesting that the Greeks are shown to suffer from their victory: Diomedes rebuffs the Italian call for aid against Aeneas as he has fought enough Trojans, and "those of us whose swords violated the fields of Ilium… we are scattered over the round earth, paying unspeakable penalties and suffering all manner of punishment for our crimes. We are a band of men that even Priam might pity" (pg. 280). Odysseus is lost at sea. Agamemnon has been murdered by his wife in his bath. Even among the Greek rank-and-file there is a price to be paid: Aeneas and his crew encounter one of Odysseus' desolate crewmen still hiding on the hellish island of the Cyclopes, in dread fear of those cannibalistic giants (pg. 76). The epics of Homer and Virgil show that the glory of the heroes can often be hollow, their fates cruel; the nuance is a far cry from our common understanding of these 'noble', heroic epics, and it is fascinating to read.

There are sometimes questions raised over whether Homer was one man, a blind, bearded storyteller plucking at a lyre, or simply the name given to encompass all those storytellers who, so the argument goes, refined the stories of The Iliad and The Odyssey over centuries. Perhaps the finest compliment we can pay to Virgil – for we know that he at least was one man – is that his success in The Aeneid lends credence to the argument that Homer was an individual. Virgil showed that one man can indeed create an epic of such scope and quality. show less

Arma virumque cano ... to go much further than that would have been beyond my rusty Latin. Thank God for great translators like Robert Fitzgerald, a scholar immersed in the text who was himself a poet. Most of the time, I forgot I was reading a translation, it is simply great literature.
This epic is neatly divided into twelve books, and can be easily handled by reading one book a day. Of course, life sometimes gets in the way, so I had to spread one book over three mornings. Fittingly show more enough, it was Bk 6, when the hero in true Joseph Campbell fashion descends to the underworld.
The tale itself can be easily visualized by anyone who has seen the Lord of the Rings films.
As I was reading it, though, the theologian in me was also at work in the back of my mind. I was glad that no religion today claims this glorification of blood and gore as holy scripture, although it originated as a national epic at the time of Augustus Caesar's eminence in order to fabricate a claim that Rome's greatness was as ancient and as divinely-ordained as that of Greece. Much of what anti-religionists today deplore in the Christian Bible is here as well, in even greater quantities, and without the subversive hints embedded within the Old Testament that paved the way for a new religion to claim that Jesus, not Caesar, was Lord. Perhaps if we revised our assumptions of what scripture is, we could once again admit that the tale of David and Goliath is as thrilling in its own way as the confrontation of Aeneas and Turnus, without feeling somehow divinely authorized to wreak vengeance on anyone different from us. show less

In my opinion, the greatest of the Classical epics. The Aeneid does not merely praise the glory of Rome and Augustus by exhalting Aeneas; it conveys a melancholy for everything that Aeneas, the Trojans, and even their enemies underwent in order to bring about fate. Rome's enemy Carthage, and even Hannibal who lead the invading army, is here depicted as the eventual avengers of a woman abandoned by her lover not for any fault of her own, but merely because the gods required him to be show more elsewhere. The Italians are shown as glorious warriors, whose necessary deaths in battle may not be worth it. Finally there is the end, not with the joy of triumph, but with the death moan of the Italian leader. The translation by David West perfectly captures the tone of the original. show less

I liked The Aeneid. It wasn’t exactly a pleasure read, but I liked it in the way you like arduous things (and by arduous I mean reading all 300+ pages of epic prose in 3 days) once they’re over. If you’ve ever read Grapes of Wrath maybe you know what I’m talking about. There were a lot of slow parts, many of which involved an excess of names, but there were also plenty of gripping parts that had me actually forgetting to watch the page numbers tick by as slowly as the minutes. For show more example, the last four books are almost entirely devoted to one long, drawn out, dramatic, and incredibly visceral battle scene. I may have cringed at least once a page, but I certainly wasn’t bored!

Two Sentence Summary: After the sack of Troy, Aeneas escapes with a group of Trojan warriors and sets out for the shores of Italy, where he will found New Troy (aka Rome). He must first overcome the obstacles of a vindictive meddling goddess, and then conquer the land destined to become a great empire.

I’m guessing most of you have heard of The Aeneid. And maybe you’ve heard whisperings of comparisons to The Odyssey. Maybe some have you have even read it. If you a) haven’t and b) have read The Odyssey and didn’t loathe it, I recommend The Aeneid as a good companion read. It’s an excellent microcosmic example that for all the energy the Romans put into dissing the Greeks, they put at least as much or more into imitating (and in their minds, improving on) them. Naturally it’s chock full of meaty themes as well, like the conflict between duty and desire, the martyrdom of present happiness for future greatness, learning what to let go of and when, the ephemerality of human life and connection, the entanglement of place and identity... the list goes on. And Virgil wasn’t kidding around. He knew his way around a vivid description (see: incredibly visceral battle scene). I’ve never read such inventive – and numerous – descriptions of dawn. They put Homer’s lovely, if repetitive, “rosy-fingered dawn” to shame. And that’s pretty much Virgil’s goal in a nutshell: outdo Homer. Whether he succeeds or not is up to you. show less