Virgil Virgil - The Aeneid

When Virgil died, in 19 BCE, he was still in the process of editing his masterpiece and wanted the manuscript to be destroyed. However, Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire, ordered that the manuscript should be published and that it should be as true to Virgil’s final edit as possible. As a result, literary scholars consider a few of the lines to be work in progress, because they do not obey the dactylic hexameter. It seems that Virgil worked by first drafting his poetry in rough form, just to flesh out the story, and then painstakingly honed his words until they dropped into his chosen poetic template.

Virgil apparently took around ten years to complete The Aeneid . Although Virgil was not content with its form upon his death, Emperor Augustus saw enormous propaganda value in the work. It became part of the branding package that enabled the Romans to expand their empire and to continue governing it over such a vast expanse of territory. The Aeneid reminded Romans, both distant and near, to be proud of their heritage and to maintain their allegiance to the emperor, because they, like he, were descended from greatness.

The same legend told in prose would not have had the same impact as Virgil’s poetic work, because it needed to be both entertaining and informative. Saving Virgil’s work and sharing it widely meant that public performances could be held across the empire, where communities came together to share the experience. That way there could be no excuse for new generations, who might have never been anywhere near Rome, to think of themselves as anything but Roman. It was a cultural meme that served to keep everyone in the same meme pool – young and old, male and female, rich and poor. The message was that one didn’t need to live or have been raised in Rome to be Roman. All that mattered was that allegiance to Rome was perpetuated via exposure to education about the Roman legend. It was a cultural franchise that continued to work extremely well for a few hundred years after the lives of Virgil and Augustus.

Contents

Title Page THE AENEID Virgil

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Life & Times Life & Times Virgil as Propagandist The Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BCE) lived and died during the period of transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire. It was a time when Romans saw the potential in expanding their territory to gain access to material resources and to enslave other peoples for manpower. The success of the burgeoning Roman Empire relied in part on a sort of branding, and this is where Virgil’s work had its greatest significance. The Aeneid is an epic poem, telling the legendary story of the genesis of the Roman Republic several hundred years before the birth of the empire. It was the perfect tool to provide the empire with administrative cohesion, so that personnel in increasingly far-flung regions would still have the stamp of Roman identity. Had the Roman government not maintained its hold on the expanding empire by promoting and perpetuating the Roman brand, the empire would surely have fragmented far sooner than it eventually did, some 350 years on, in BC 330. Just as the Christians would soon have Adam as their progenitor, so Virgil gave the Romans their progenitor in the shape of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled from Troy, in present-day Turkey, to Italy. The character Aeneas was already known to the Romans from the story of the The Iliad , written by the ancient Greek poet Homer. In The Iliad , Aeneas is the heroic son of prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite (Venus). Following the destruction of Troy by the Greeks, Aeneas finds himself with no fixed abode, which is the catalyst for his wanderings. Virgil took the thread of this minor subplot within The Iliad and expanded upon it to create the legend of Aeneas becoming the ancestor of all Romans. During Virgil’s upbringing, many myths and legends mentioning Aeneas circulated among the story-tellers and scholars of Rome. A century before Virgil, Cato the Elder had written an account of the origins of the Romans, titled Origines , which began the process of providing Rome with its historical branding. So, Virgil was nurtured in a social environment with a keen appetite for tales of Roman pedigree. It made perfect sense to transform the hero Aeneas into the man from whom all Romans could claim descent. Of course, there may also have been some truth to the legend, as it may be that a number of displaced Trojans did indeed find their way to the Italian peninsula.

Book I

Book II

Book III

Book IV

Book V

Book VI

Book VII

Book VIII

Book IX

Book X

Book XI

Book XII

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary

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Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate,

And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,

Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore.

Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore,

And in the doubtful war, before he won

The Latian realm, and built the destin’d town;