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Volume 13:

The Aeneid (full text) by Vergil

When I told my sister, who was a Classics major in college, that I had arrived at the Aeneid, she joked that the Iliad and the Odyssey was a lot of reading for one week. It has long been remarked that Vergil's great Latin epic combines the two Homeric epics in one. The poem's first half -- the first six of twelve books -- recount Aeneas' wanderings after the fall of Troy, culminating in his arrival in Italy. These travels correspond overtly with Odysseus' wanderings after the fall of Troy, culminating in his arrival in Ithaca. The Aeneid's second six books are an Iliad-like war poem.

At first glance, it seems natural that a Roman epic poet would take his lead from the great founding texts of the epic tradition, and yet the choice suggests a profound difference between ancient culture and our own. After all, Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, was on the losing side of the Trojan war. He was a peer of Hector, whose death at the hands of Achilles represents the climax of the Iliad. Odysseus left Troy to head home after victory. For Aeneas, Troy was home, and he left it as an exile. And so it's curious, I think, that Vergil would use the Homeric forms, the forms that the Greeks perfected to celebrate their great victory at Troy, in order to tell Aeneas' story. Keep in mind that Vergil, unlike Homer, is a fixed historical figure, about whom we know a fair amount. He lived in the early days of the Roman Empire -- the days about which I read last week in Plutarch -- and he was a friend to Augustus. He wrote the Aeneid, in part, to glorify Rome and justify the Julian line. The events he recounts happened -- to the extent that they happened at all -- 1000 - 1500 years before the work was written. What does it mean that Vergil chose to glorify Roman achievement by putting it into Greek terms?

I was thinking of this question when I read the following passage, from Book 7 (i.e., early in the "Iliad half" of the poem):

Then two twin brothers from fair Tibur came,
(Which from their brother Tiburs took the name,)
Fierce Coras and Catillus, void of fear:
Arm'd Argive horse they led, and in the front appear.
Like cloud-born Centaurs, from the mountain's height
With rapid course descending to the fight;
They rush along; the rattling woods give way;
The branches bend before their sweepy sway.
Nor was Praeneste's founder wanting there,
Whom fame reports the son of Mulciber:
Found in the fire, and foster'd in the plains,
A shepherd and a king at once he reigns,
And leads to Turnus' aid his country swains.

This is an unremarkable passage, except that Turnus is Aeneas' rival, and the men described are the ones who will do battle against Troy. One is reminded again of the Iliad, where the vanquished Hector is perhaps the noblest of all the characters. Bravery, a sense of duty: these are central components of nobility -- of the notion of "the good" -- in Greek and Roman ethics. If the very willingness to fight is one of the chief criteria for goodness, then the two opposing sides in a battle must almost by definition both be "good." (Sidebar: in this scheme -- which I've cribbed mostly from Nietzsche -- "good" is contrasted with "bad," i.e. cowardly or weak; in the later, Judeo-Christian scheme, "good" takes on characteristics almost indistinguishable from the Greco-Roman "bad," which has been displaced by the notion of "evil.") It is for this reason that one can celebrate one's enemies. For this same reason, one can use the poetic mode of the Greeks to celebrate the Trojans they vanquished.

So what? Here's what: with the view of life as a battle between fundamentally good opponents who are duty-bound to conflicting ends comes the tragic view that good must sometimes be defeated; with the view of life as a battle between good and evil opponents comes the necessity of demonizing the opposition, and also the belief that good is fated to win. With this last can also come an overambitious desire to spread one's goodness. In the Aeneid, and in its Homeric predecessors, battle is entered into with extreme reluctance. It is only in a world where the inevitable outcome of battle is the vanquishing of evil that one goes looking for a fight.

I'll stop here, in part because I've never been a fan of arguments for the contemporary "relevance" of classical literature. The greatest of these works are great because of what they tell us about humanity in general, not because of anything they might tell us about our current misadventures. But the Aeneid invites one to indulge in these anachronistic readings, because it is an act of anachronistic interpretation itself.


--CRB, April 7, 2007

POSTSCRIPT: I had considered naming the Aeneid my second "Ted-Should-Read-This" Pick. But the truth is I much prefer Robert Fitzgerald's translation to the Dryden translation featured here. So Ted will have to wait.

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