Virgil Virgil - The Aeneid

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon . Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner ; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress , making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

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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.

In Virgil’s poem, Aeneas and a few others who have survived the Trojan War are commanded by their gods to escape the region and set up home elsewhere. This begins their six-year voyage around the Mediterranean, looking for a suitable place to colonise.

The pre-eminent status of the Roman Empire really began with its victory over Carthage, in Tunisia, during the Punic Wars (264–146 BCE). Virgil tied this into the tale by the inclusion of an affair between Aeneas and Dido, queen of Carthage, which began lovingly but ended acrimoniously, so that Carthage would subsequently become the traditional enemy of Rome in the centuries to come.

During Aeneas’ adventures, he carries with him statues of his house gods Lares and Penates, which symbolise his search for somewhere to settle his people, with the intention that the statues will ultimately be placed at the chosen location. The city Aeneas founded was Lavinium, situated about 50 kilometres south of Rome, on the western coast of Italy. Before he could establish Lavinium, he had to do battle with the Rutuli people, under the leadership of Turnus. Thus, Livinium became the epicentre of the embryonic Roman tribe, which would subsequently found Rome as the capital of the Roman Republic. When Aeneas eventually dies, he is deified to become the god Jupiter Indiges (Indigenous Jupiter), otherwise known as the Pater Indiges , which translates as Father of the Romans. The foundation myth of Rome itself surrounds the story of Romulus and Remus, who are fifteenth-generation descendants of Aeneas.

The Aeneid comprises just short of 10,000 lines in a metre known as dactylic hexameter, which copied Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey . It essentially means that each line is broken into six rhythmic components. The Aeneid is divided into twelve books – six relate the story of Aeneas’ travels, and the other six relate his efforts to colonise the Italian coast against considerable local resistance.

The reason why The Aeneid is classified as a poem and not prose is that poetry was considered the higher form of literature by the Romans, hence the term ‘prosaic’ taken from prose, which is often used to mean ‘commonplace’. Poetry was viewed as a high-art form, because it took great skill to shoehorn language in such a way that it obeyed the rules of the chosen metre. Virgil took this discipline very seriously and even used his line structures in an onomatopoeic way to imitate the actions he was describing, such as the galloping of horses. This was important, because poems were performed to an audience, rather than simply recited, so a well-written poem allowed for vocal and physical gesture as part of the show. This brought the story to life in the minds of the audience, so that they were more readily engaged by the events being described.