Notes on the Aeneid

The question of art with an agenda

“The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

By 29 BC, Rome was just beginning to emerge from decades of strife and civil war. As the last remaining member of the Second Triumvirate, Octavian Caesar wanted to offer people a hopeful image of his regime, one that demonstrated its continuity with Rome’s long history and would allow the nation to relax under his rule.¹

So the budding princeps enlisted one of Rome’s best poets, Publius Virgilius Maro (aka Virgil), to write a national epic. Up until then, Virgil’s main works had been the Georgics and the Eclogues, two magnificent bucolic poems on agricultural life in rural Italy.

In contrast to the scope of these works, however, the epic poem he ended up writing would elevate the history of Rome’s founding into the same poetic universe as the legendary Homeric poems of ancient Greece, stories that would have been intimately familiar to almost everyone living at the time.²

And if you look past the wearying travels, tragic love affair, and vivid battles, the Aeneid—named after its main character—is fundamentally a nostalgic poem. Not least because Virgil’s agrarian poetry makes furrowed plains out of chopped seas, or describes war in terms of sprouting arrows and harvested lives. I mean literally: nostalgia refers to the “pain of returning home”.

In the first half of the tale, Aeneas—a side character from Troy’s nobility in the Iliad—sails through various trials to the distant origin of the Trojan people, Italy. The story of the traveling Trojans is one of battered refugees, a people who’ve lost one home and are fighting for another, their passage alternately troubled and eased by the gods. Throughout this journey, Aeneas’ sense of piety is ultimately shown to be one of his greatest virtues, perhaps even the underlying virtue of the epic. It may be fair to call Aeneas a martial version of Job from the Bible; faced with calamity, he remains faithful to his kin and gods, an unwaveringness which continually earns him the epithet “pious Aeneas”.

His decidedly unromantic relationships may provide a sense of this—when Aeneas loses his city to Greek invaders he misplaces his beloved wife in the haste to escape; his second “unofficial” (but most famous) queen wife tragically ends her life after the gods order Aeneas to leave her; and the last half of the book is spent waging war for a fate-promised princess of Italy he hasn’t even met. In addition to all this, Aeneas and his people are continually beset by obstacles reminiscent of the travails of Odysseus, from storms at sea to homicidal harpies. Yet through it all, Aeneas stays steadfast to his divinely ordained mission (except for his famous ‘lapse of love’), driven along his course by the interference of numerous gods.

So what’s the moral of the story? “Do what you’re told, sacrifice enough quadri-peds, and everything will turn out okay?” Can the Aeneid be seen as state-endorsed media aiming to provide an example of appropriate conduct for a good citizen of Rome, exhorting every citizen to view Rome as a martially excellent, devout government that even when committing acts that appear unsavory, it does so for good reasons? Perhaps. But this perspective on the book ignores what makes the story sing.

I spent some time thinking about the difference between art and propaganda after reading this epic, because despite knowing how and why it was written, I rather enjoyed it. I sympathized more than I expected to with Aeneas, and at times even found him astonishingly admirable.

Aeneas may experience the sorts of personal challenges we do (conflicts between love and duty, and so on); but he reacts to them as only a hero would. This means that on some levels his story is relatable, and on others it’s not. But as Aristotle opined in the Poetics, the point of an epic isn’t to be relatable. Epics aren’t about people who share our weaknesses—they’re about larger-than-life characters superior in virtue to the average person. And Aeneas is certainly portrayed this way.

Contrary to the singular virtues of fearsome Achilles and honorable Hector in the Iliad, however, Aeneas’ glory is indistinct from the loyalty he shows his people. Starting from them, his circle of obligation expands from those he immediately loves to those who aren’t even alive yet, his promised people who will live in the promised land he conquers. This makes Aeneas perhaps an ancient example of a long-termist; he fights for something—the glory of Rome—that won’t shine for generations to come.

Which brings us back to the Aeneid’s place as a canonical work of art. The strength of the best art seems to be that it’s timeless, speaking to something universal in human experience. And the biggest failing of propaganda, compared to art, seems its excessive timeliness, that it’s made in the service of a near-term, often political goal.

And art with an overt agenda seems inseparable from its objective; this mutual reliance means the failure of the objective can reflect rather poorly on the art. Perhaps this why so much early Soviet art appears sort of vulgar today: it belongs so completely to 1917, the aesthetics made even more gauche because its utopic aspirations were followed by terrible human suffering. If the time after the Aeneid had been similarly horrendous, and not the Pax Romana, maybe we wouldn’t regard it so highly.³

Especially during such a transitional period as 29 BC was for Rome, it’s possible to see an Aeneid-shaped hole in a society waiting for a Virgil to voice its values. It’s often a hallmark of the best art that it’s epoch making, that it defines the ethos of a culture and assembles present passions into a vision of the future. Some timeliness does seems necessary; after all, an artist’s audience isn’t entirely in the future, and the people who will carry it there live in the present. As strange as it is to say, maybe it just so happened that the value needed at the time was staunch patriotism, a force to unite the country after decades of infighting.

Still, if the Aeneid does meet a need, it’s unclear whether that need is more Octavian’s or Rome’s. In the Aeneid, mythology and history intentionally blur, a common feature of imperialist propaganda. Aeneas is the son of Venus, and his son Iulus is the progenitor of the Julian dynasty spearheaded first by Caesar and then Augustus. Seems so sickeningly transparent, right?

But let’s not ignore that a nation’s beginning is often rich substrate for later myth. Our very own founding is mythologized, and in the US our buildings of state can be seen as national temples honoring the Founding Fathers. The urge to aggrandize great individuals is an old one in Western culture, most obviously in the hero cults of ancient Greece, not to mention the many other ancient civilizations that participated in ancestor worship. So-and-so discovered electricity? Their mother must have secretly been Minerva. A famous general? Sired by Mars. And this aggrandizing urge also appears to hold for states, which are born, then live, then die with similar uncertainty as the mortals which make them up. Great states need great stories, and no great story seems complete without divine involvement. (And if aggrandizement aids commemoration, why not use it if you can?)

It could be true that while Augustus intended Virgil’s epic to support his immediate political ends, Virgil still managed to craft a creative masterpiece for all time, his genius shining through the leaden chains imposed by the needs of state. Through his poetic virtuosity, we recognize that the Aeneid can, in fact, stand on its own as a work of art. It’s that great of a poem, offering a more abstract image of Roman might than the one so aggressively displayed by its bristling legions. Instead of the purely economic and military links that connected (and divided) citizens, Virgil emphasized imagined ties to others in the present and the future. In doing so, the poet depicts a Rome that has a chance at being universal—Rome as “an eternal thought in the mind of God”.⁴ It isn’t hard to picture, having read the Aeneid, how much this could have charged the Roman spirit. It might do just the same for the reader of today.⁵

1. Some of the historical context for this piece was gleaned from the Doug Metzger’s Literature and History series on the Aeneid, which I highly recommend even if you haven’t read the book. The rest of the context is me being a Rome nerd (i.e. wikipedia, Mary Beard’s SPQR, Tom Holland’s Rubicon, various other nonfiction and fiction, etc.)

2. But with one crucial difference—the poem had to be in line with the morality with which Augustus wanted to characterize his reign. There were other great poets likely up to the epic task, but Augustus had already exiled Ovid from Rome for writing rather risque PUA manuals.

3. Maybe there’s something to this. It could be that even the most imperialist propaganda is considered good art if the nation ends up doing well, in which case the quality of the art is somehow verified, spoken for by the success of the nation.

4. A wonderful line from Kubrick’s film Spartacus. The exchange is between Caesar and Crassus. Caesar asserts: “Rome is the mob!”, to which Crassus replies with the aforementioned quote.

5. I highly recommend the Robert Fagles Penguin translation, which is what I read to write this ‘Note’.