The Aeneid
by Virgil · Aeneis
Assigned by 9 of the 9 reading lists
- Written
- 29-19 BCE
- Era
- Roman Empire
- Form
- Epic poetry
- Language
- Latin
- Length
- Long · 400 pp300 to 700 pages
- Difficulty
- Demanding3 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendThe Aeneid, translated by Robert FaglesPenguin Classics, 2008Vigorous and clear, with Bernard Knox's introduction; Fitzgerald and Ruden are the other common choices.
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Rome's national epic, in twelve books, left unfinished at Virgil's death. Aeneas escapes burning Troy carrying his father and leading his son, and is driven by storm to Carthage, where he tells Queen Dido his story and becomes her lover before the gods order him on. She kills herself as he sails. He buries his father, visits the dead, and is shown the Roman centuries still to come. Landing in Italy, he is drawn into a war against the Latins and their champion Turnus, who has been promised the bride Aeneas is fated to marry. The poem stops on the killing blow.
Why it's on the list
The Aeneid is the poem an empire wrote about the price of its own founding. Virgil took Homer's machinery and retuned it for a state that had just ended a century of civil war, and the result is stranger and sadder than propaganda. Its hero is defined by duty rather than glory, and the poem keeps showing us what duty costs other people: a queen on a pyre, a boy speared in his first battle, a suppliant killed at the end of the last line. For fifteen hundred years it was the book educated Europeans knew best. Augustine wept over Dido, Dante made Virgil his guide, and readers in the colonised world have used the poem to ask whose founding gets to be called destiny. Programs assign it because it is the first great work about being on the winning side and not being able to enjoy it.
Key themes
- Fate and freedom
- Fate here is not a prophecy Aeneas can fight but a job he has been given. The drama is in how much of himself he has to put down to carry it.
- Home and exile
- Every place Aeneas lands he tries to make into Troy again, and every time the gods move him on. The city he founds is one he will not live to see.
- War
- The Italian books make the enemy sympathetic and mostly young. Virgil spends more grief on Pallas, Lausus and Camilla than on any Trojan victory.
- Love and desire
- Dido's love is treated as a wound and a legitimate claim at once. The poem never says she was wrong, only that Aeneas could not stay.
- Heroism and honour
- Aeneas is called pius, dutiful, long before he is called brave. The final page asks whether a dutiful man can also be a killer in cold anger.
Overview
Virgil wrote the Aeneid in the last eleven years of his life, under the new regime of Augustus, and he asked on his deathbed that it be burned. It was not. What survives is twelve books of Latin hexameter, deliberately half the length of the two Homeric poems put together, and deliberately built out of them: books 1 to 6 are a voyage, like the Odyssey, and books 7 to 12 are a war, like the Iliad.
The hero is a minor Trojan from Homer who leaves the burning city with his household gods, his father on his back and his small son at his side. That image is the whole poem in miniature. Aeneas carries the past and leads the future, and the present is mostly something that happens to him. His standing epithet is pius, which means dutiful toward gods, father and people rather than holy. He is the first hero in Western literature who is admired for what he gives up.
Read it knowing that Virgil’s first audience knew how the story ended, not in Italy but in Rome, in an empire that had just finished killing its own citizens. Augustus is named in the poem, twice, as the point all this was heading toward. Whether that makes the Aeneid a monument or an argument with a monument is the question readers have been fighting about since the nineteenth century.
What happens
Book 1: a storm raised by Juno throws the Trojan fleet onto the African coast. Venus complains to Jupiter, who recites the future. Aeneas reaches Carthage, a city being built by the widowed queen Dido, and she welcomes him.
Book 2: Aeneas tells her the fall of Troy. The wooden horse, the death of Priam at his own altar, the ghost of Hector, his wife Creusa lost in the confusion.
Book 3: the wanderings. Harpies, the Cyclops’ shore, the prophet Helenus, and the death of his father Anchises in Sicily.
Book 4: Dido and Aeneas, driven together in a cave during a hunt. Jupiter sends Mercury to remind Aeneas of his mission. Dido curses him, builds a pyre and kills herself with his sword, and the smoke is visible from his ships.
Books 5 and 6: funeral games in Sicily for Anchises, then the descent to the underworld at Cumae with the Sibyl. Aeneas meets Dido, who will not speak to him, and Anchises, who shows him the souls of unborn Romans.
Books 7 and 8: landfall in Latium. King Latinus is willing to give Aeneas his daughter Lavinia, but the Fury Allecto maddens Queen Amata and the Rutulian prince Turnus, who was promised her. War begins. Vulcan makes Aeneas a shield engraved with Roman history he cannot read.
Books 9 to 11: the fighting. Nisus and Euryalus die on a night raid. Turnus kills the boy Pallas and strips his sword belt. Aeneas kills Mezentius and his son Lausus. The warrior maiden Camilla is shot from ambush.
Book 12: a treaty is arranged and broken. Aeneas and Turnus meet at last. Turnus, wounded and beaten, asks to be sent back to his father or at least sent home dead. Aeneas hesitates, sees Pallas’ belt on his shoulder, and kills him. The poem ends on the flight of Turnus’ soul.
How to read it
Books 1, 2, 4 and 6 are the ones everyone reads, and if you only have a week, read those plus book 12. But the second half is where the poem’s conscience is, and skipping it leaves you with a love story and a tour of the afterlife rather than a poem about conquest.
Track the word pietas and track anger. Both belong to Aeneas by the end, and the poem does not tell you how to weigh them. Track Juno too. She loses the argument in book 1 and gets everything she wants in book 12: the Trojans will be absorbed, their name will disappear, and Rome will be Italian.
Translations differ in temperature more than in accuracy. Fagles is quick and loud, Fitzgerald is quieter and more shapely, Sarah Ruden is line for line and spare. Dryden’s rhymed version is magnificent and is its own poem. Read the Latin first lines aloud in any edition that prints them.
Two common misreadings to avoid. First, that Aeneas is a bloodless functionary: he is furious, grief-stricken and often paralysed, and the poem shows him weeping more than fighting. Second, that the ending is a triumph. Virgil chose to stop on a killing rather than a wedding or a founding, and no reader since antiquity has found that comfortable.
Questions it raises
- Is Aeneas right to leave Carthage? What exactly does he owe Dido, and what would staying have cost?
- Anchises tells Romans to spare the conquered. Does Aeneas obey his father in the final scene?
- Why does Virgil give the enemy the best deaths and the youngest casualties?
- The shield shows Aeneas a history he does not understand. What is the poem saying about how much of our purpose we can see?
- Does the poem endorse Augustus, flatter him, or quietly indict the cost of what he built?
- Turnus was promised Lavinia first. Is there any sense in which he is the wronged party?
Highlights
I sing of arms and of the man who first came, a fugitive by fate, from the coasts of Troy to Italy and the Lavinian shores.
Arma virumque cano. The poem announces two subjects, war and one man, and spends twelve books on the friction between them.
Can there be such anger in the minds of the gods?
Tantaene animis caelestibus irae? Asked of Juno in the first hundred lines, and still unanswered when Aeneas kills Turnus in anger at the end.
There are tears in things, and mortal affairs touch the heart.
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. Aeneas, in Carthage, sees the Trojan war painted on a temple wall and finds his own grief already turned into decoration.
Roman, remember to rule the peoples with your power. These shall be your arts: to spare the conquered and beat down the proud.
Anchises in the underworld gives his son the imperial mission. Book 12 will test the promise about sparing the conquered.
Aeneas' knees gave way beneath him, and cold ran through him.
Paraphrase. The wording of Turnus' collapse in the final duel is close to this, but check your text before quoting it in seminar.
