 |
| Illustrated by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
Preface
Virgil’s Aeneid has long occupied a paradoxical position in Western literature. It stands simultaneously as Rome’s national epic and as one of the most quietly subversive poems ever written in the service of political power. For over two millennia it has been read as the story of origins: how a Trojan refugee named Aeneas, guided by fate and the gods, journeyed from the ruins of Troy, through many obstacles, to the soil of Italy and became the ancestor of the Roman people. It is, in this sense, a poem about national beginnings.
Yet to read the Aeneid only as an origin story is to miss its deeper ambition. Beneath the architecture of legend lies a sustained inquiry into the moral psychology of founding itself. Virgil is less interested in explaining how Rome began than in asking what kind of inner world must exist for such a beginning to be possible.
The poem emerges from a moment of acute historical tension. Rome in the late first century BCE had been torn apart by decades of civil war. The old republican order lay in ruins. Augustus, victor over Antony and Cleopatra and heir to Julius Caesar’s legacy, presented himself as the restorer of peace, tradition, and moral stability. Yet this restoration depended upon a radical concentration of power unprecedented in Roman history.
Augustus needed more than armies and laws. He needed meaning. He needed a story vast enough to render the present not as a rupture, but as fulfillment.
Virgil’s task, therefore, was not merely literary. It was civilizational.
He was asked to craft a poem that would do for Rome what Homer had done for Greece: provide a shared imaginative homeland, a moral grammar, and a vision of collective destiny. The Aeneid was to be beautiful, authoritative, and persuasive. It was to sanctify Rome’s past and stabilize Rome’s future.
And yet, according to ancient tradition, Virgil approached his own creation with profound unease. On his deathbed he is said to have requested that the poem be destroyed, as it was unfinished and unpolished in his eyes. Whether or not the story is historically exact, its symbolic force is unmistakable. The Aeneid bears the marks of a poem that knows it is walking a perilous line between celebration and confession.
What makes the Aeneid enduring is not that it tells Rome what it wants to hear. It is that Virgil finds a way - through narrative, character, and tragic structure - to tell Rome what it cannot afford to forget.
This essay explores the Aeneid as a work suspended between legend and lament, between imperial aspiration and human cost. It argues that Virgil constructs not a simple hymn to empire, but a tragic epic in which civilization itself becomes a morally ambiguous achievement: magnificent, necessary, and deeply wounded.
I. The Aeneid as Epic Form and Cultural Technology
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey did not simply recount heroic exploits. They encoded Greek values - honor, excellence, hospitality, cunning, endurance - into narrative form. To learn Homer was to learn what it meant to inhabit the Greek world.
Augustus understood this dynamic intuitively. A restored Rome without a restored story would remain fragile. Laws could compel behavior; armies could enforce order. But only a shared imaginative vision could cultivate loyalty, meaning, and long-term coherence.
The Aeneid was therefore conceived as more than a literary masterpiece. It was intended as Rome’s moral archive and national inspiration.
Virgil adopts Homeric architecture deliberately. The poem’s first half follows a wandering hero displaced from home, echoing Odysseus. The second half narrates a brutal war over territory and destiny, echoing Achilles. Through this structural mirroring, Rome is inserted into the deepest layer of Mediterranean mythic memory. Rome does not merely come after Greece. Rome is woven into the same primordial fabric.
Yet imitation is not equivalence.
Virgil transforms the epic form even as he inherits it. Homeric epics revolve around heroes pursuing personal honor within a competitive aristocratic world. Virgil’s epic revolves around a hero who repeatedly suppresses personal desire in service of a future he will never see. The gravitational center of the genre shifts from glory to obligation.
This shift reflects Rome’s own mythic self-understanding. The Roman ideal is not the dazzling individual warrior, but the citizen who subordinates himself to the collective project. Discipline, endurance, and submission to national identity replaced Homeric flamboyance.
And yet, Virgil refuses to present this transformation as uncomplicated moral progress.
The epic form allows him to hold two visions in tension at once:
-
On the surface, Rome emerges as history’s destined culmination.
-
Beneath the surface, the poem continually stages scenes in which that destiny wounds those who must enact it.
In this sense, the Aeneid does not simply function as cultural technology. It becomes a meta-technology: a device that exposes the costs hidden within cultural technologies themselves.
Virgil shows how civilizations require stories that smooth over rupture, disguise contingency, and transmute violence into necessity. But he also shows - quietly, persistently - that such smoothing never fully succeeds.
As a mythic Epic, in Virgil’s hands, becomes a form capable of containing contradiction.
The poem teaches Romans how to see themselves as heirs to Troy, chosen by fate, and entrusted with world-rule. Simultaneously, it teaches attentive readers how fragile such narratives are, and how much suffering they depend upon.
This dual function explains the strange emotional texture of the Aeneid. The poem is solemn rather than exuberant. Its beauty is weighted, its grandeur haunted. Even its victories feel heavy.
Unlike Homer, who often delights in the kinetic energy of battle and the immediacy of heroic presence, Virgil writes with retrospective gravity. His epic sounds as though it already knows that empires rise and fall, that glory erodes, that monuments eventually become ruins.
Thus, while Augustus sought a poem that would anchor Rome’s future, Virgil produced a poem saturated with historical consciousness.
The Aeneid does not simply project forward. It looks outward, backward, and inward at once.
It looks backward toward Troy, outward toward Rome’s imperial horizon, and inward toward the human psyche struggling to survive inside vast historical machinery.
This is why the Aeneid continues to feel modern.
It is not content to tell us who wins.
It asks what winning does. Why it may not be important. And the enduring burden that winning brings.
II. Virgil and the Artist Under Power
Virgil did not write the Aeneid from a position of political freedom. He wrote under patronage, under expectation, and under the quiet but unmistakable pressure of an emerging autocracy. Augustus did not merely admire Virgil’s talent; he depended upon it.
This dependence fundamentally shapes the poem’s character.
Unlike poets who compose in overt opposition to power, Virgil occupies a far more precarious space: the artist whose work is desired by power. Such a position offers protection, resources, and prestige - but it also creates an ethical trap and personal risk. When authority wishes to be praised, silence can be dangerous, and direct critique can be fatal.
Virgil’s genius lies in recognizing that resistance need not be noisy to be real.
Rather than writing against Augustus, he writes around him. He constructs a poem that satisfies the formal requirements of imperial ideology while embedding within it layers of emotional and moral disturbance that prevent any fully triumphalist reading.
This mode of writing belongs to a long tradition of what might be called interior dissent: art that fulfills its public function while quietly complicating the values it appears to endorse.
Virgil’s earlier poetic career makes this stance intelligible. His pastoral poems dwell in small-scale worlds - shepherds, fields, love, and loss. His Georgics, while ostensibly a manual on agriculture, already function as a meditation on labor, suffering, and the dignity of sustained effort. Even there, the Roman ideal of work is portrayed as necessary-but-exhausting, ennobling-but-relentless.
The Aeneid intensifies this trajectory.
Where the Eclogues explore fragile beauty, and the Georgics explore disciplined endurance, the Aeneid explores what happens when endurance becomes a permanent condition rather than a temporary trial.
Virgil is not a revolutionary. He does not imagine a Rome without empire. But neither does he imagine an empire without moral cost.
His relationship to Augustus is therefore neither simple loyalty nor covert rebellion. It is tragic complicity.
Virgil knows that Rome’s historical momentum cannot be stopped. He also knows that art can still shape how that momentum is understood.
The poem does not shout: Empire is evil.
It whispers something more devastating:
Empire may be necessary.Empire may even be magnificent.But empire is never clean.
This is why the Aeneid feels saturated with grief even when it is celebrating destiny. Virgil writes as a man who understands that historical success and human flourishing are not synonymous.
In doing so, he transforms the role of the court poet.
Rather than functioning solely as an amplifier of power, Virgil becomes a surreptitious recorder of what power leaves behind.
He catalogs the abandoned, the displaced, the silenced, and the inwardly broken - not in the language of political protest, but in the language of tragedy.
This distinction matters.
- Political critique seeks to persuade.
- Tragic art seeks to reveal.
Virgil’s aim is not to overthrow Augustus’ narrative. It is to make that narrative heavy with self-awareness.
- If Rome must tell itself that it is chosen, Virgil ensures that chosenness feels burdensome.
- If Rome must imagine its origins as glorious, Virgil ensures that those origins are soaked in tears.
The rumored desire to burn the poem thus becomes symbolically fitting. The Aeneid reads like a work that never wanted to become an official monument. It wanted to remain a question.
And perhaps this is Virgil’s final act of fidelity - not to Augustus, not even to Rome, but to humanity itself.
He gives the empire its epic.
He also gives posterity its conscience.
III. Aeneas: The Anti-Homeric Hero and the Psychology of Subtraction
Epic heroes traditionally embody a culture’s highest aspirations. Achilles embodies heroic excellence and incandescent individuality. Odysseus embodies cunning intelligence and resilient selfhood. Both figures are intensely self-aware. They know who they are, what they desire, and what they are willing to risk.
Aeneas is a different kind of hero.
Virgil’s central innovation is to construct a protagonist whose greatness consists not in the expansion of self, but in its gradual erosion.
Aeneas is introduced as pius Aeneas - the pious one, the dutiful one, the bearer of obligation. From the opening lines, his defining trait is not charisma or brilliance, but burden. He carries the gods, the future, the ashes of Troy, and the expectations of an unborn civilization.
Yet what is striking is not simply that Aeneas bears these weights, but that he never fully understands them.
Unlike heroes who receive clear instructions and confidently execute them, Aeneas moves through a fog of partial revelation. He knows he must go somewhere. He knows he must found something. But the contours of that destiny remain indistinct. The gods communicate through riddles, dreams, fragments, and delayed disclosures.
This narrative choice is critical.
Virgil could have written a hero who marches forward with certainty. Instead, he writes a hero who advances through uncertainty.
Aeneas’ psychological posture is therefore not triumphal but anxious. He is frequently described as trembling, grieving, hesitant, and exhausted. His internal landscape is dominated less by ambition than by endurance.
Over time, this endurance produces a particular form of damage.
Aeneas becomes increasingly capable of suppressing his own interior life. He learns how to override desire, mute grief, and subordinate love to necessity. This is not portrayed as moral failure. It is portrayed as training.
But training exacts a price.
Virgil quietly stages what might be called a psychology of subtraction: with each act of obedience, something human is pared away.
He becomes reliable.He becomes effective.He becomes colder.
This trajectory culminates in the second half of the poem, where Aeneas increasingly resembles a machine of fate rather than a fully integrated person. He conducts killing campaigns with grim efficiency. He exhibits less hesitation, but not more joy. The cost of certainty is emotional narrowing.
The hero does not become whole.
He becomes usable.
This is perhaps Virgil’s most unsettling suggestion: that civilizations may require founders who are, in a profound sense, incomplete.
Not wicked.Not monstrous.But hollowed out.
Aeneas’ virtue is real. His sacrifices are genuine. Yet Virgil refuses to romanticize the interior consequences of a life lived entirely for posterity.
Aeneas will become the ancestor of Rome.
He will never become himself.
In this sense, Aeneas is not simply Rome’s founding father. He is Rome’s first casualty.
His interior diminishment prefigures the ethical structure of the civilization he enables: disciplined, formidable, outwardly magnificent, and yet... inwardly costly.
Virgil thus redefines heroism.
Heroism is no longer the flourishing of the individual within a meaningful cosmos.
Heroism becomes the willingness to disappear into history.
This redefinition is not presented as noble simplicity.
It is presented as tragic necessity.
And tragedy, for Virgil, is not spectacle.
It is recognition.
IV. Dido: Love, Alternative Civilization, and the World That Might Have Been
If Aeneas embodies the civilization that must be, Dido embodies a civilization that could have been.
Virgil does not introduce Dido merely as a romantic obstacle. He introduces her as a ruler, a founder, and a visionary. She has fled tyranny, gathered refugees, organized a city, established laws, and cultivated prosperity. Carthage, as Virgil presents it, is not a barbaric outpost. It is ordered, vibrant, industrious, and humane.
In other words, Dido has already accomplished what Aeneas has not yet achieved.
This narrative choice is radical.
Virgil allows the hero to encounter a functioning civilization that is not sanctioned by Roman destiny.
This alone destabilizes any simple notion that Rome represents the only viable path toward human flourishing.
Dido’s Carthage operates through cooperation rather than conquest. It arises from mutual protection rather than prophetic inevitability. It is built through shared vulnerability rather than cosmic mandate.
When Aeneas arrives, he does not enter chaos... he enters possibility.
Their relationship, therefore, is not merely erotic. It is philosophical.
Together they imagine a joint future: a shared rule, a merged people, a city formed not through annihilation of the other but through relational synthesis. Virgil carefully presents this not as fantasy but as a plausible alternative history.
This is what gives the episode its devastating force.
Dido does not represent temptation alone.
She represents an alternative model of civilization.
One grounded in presence rather than postponement.One grounded in mutual recognition rather than deferred destiny.One grounded in love rather than abstraction.
When Aeneas leaves Dido, he is not simply abandoning a lover.
He is abandoning an altogether new world - one that never was and never could be under Roman rule.
Virgil intensifies this tragedy by granting Dido a full interior life. She speaks extensively. She reflects, argues, remembers, hopes, despairs. Her voice fills the poem with psychological density unmatched by any other character in the Aeneid.
This imbalance is deliberate.
Lavinia, the Italian woman Aeneas is destined to marry, never speaks.
Yet Dido speaks hundreds of lines.
The woman associated with political necessity is silent.
The woman associated with human intimacy is eloquent.
Virgil thereby exposes the poem’s moral fault line: history privileges outcomes over experiences, but poetry refuses to do so.
Dido’s suffering is not presented as hysterical excess. It is presented as coherent, intelligible, and devastatingly human. She believes herself married to Aeneus. She believes herself chosen. She believes herself building a shared future.
From her perspective, Aeneas’ departure is not obedience to fate - It is betrayal.
Virgil does not correct her. - he allows the reader to inhabit her devastation without offering theological consolation.
Even Aeneas’ defense - that he must follow destiny - sounds thin against the wreckage it produces.
When Dido kills herself, the poem does not frame the act as moral failure - It frames it as consequence to stoic loyalty to a cause and not to her.
A world in which destiny overrides love becomes a world in which certain people become unviable... even unlivable.
This is not a side note.
It is the emotional core of the epic.
Dido’s death plants a permanent question inside Rome’s origin story:
What kind of civilization requires the sacrifice of such a woman?
Virgil never answers this question.
But he ensures that it cannot be forgotten.
V. The Underworld, the Two Gates, and the Fracture of Historical Certainty
Midway through the Aeneid (c. 29-19 BCE), Virgil brings Aeneas to the underworld. Structurally, this moment mirrors Odysseus’ descent in the Odyssey (c. 750-700 BCE) and anticipates Dante’s later journey centuries later in the Divine Comedy. (c.1308-1320 CE) But Virgil’s underworld serves a distinct purpose.
It is not primarily a place of moral judgment - It is a place of historical revelation.
Here, Aeneas encounters the shade of his father, Anchises, who unveils the future: a grand procession of Roman heroes yet to be born, culminating in Augustus and his destined heirs.
This vision supplies the poem with its most explicit articulation of Rome’s cosmic mission. Rome is not merely powerful. Rome is (divinely) chosen or fated to become. Its dominion is presented as both vast and endless.
On the surface, this scene appears to fulfill the epic’s ideological function.
The hero sees the meaning of his suffering.The future justifies the present.(Mythic) destiny becomes (imaginatively) visible.
Yet Virgil introduces a detail so strange, so disquieting, that it destabilizes the entire vision:
Aeneas does not exit the underworld through the gate associated with true dreams.He exits through the gate of false dreams.
The ancient tradition behind the two gates distinguishes between visions that correspond to reality and visions that deceive. By directing Aeneas through the gate of false dreams, Virgil introduces interpretive instability at the very moment when certainty should be maximal.
This is not an accidental flourish - It is a philosophical incision.
The implication is not necessarily that Rome’s future will not occur. Historically, from Virgil’s vantage point, it already has occurred. The implication is more disturbing:
The grandeur may be real.The victories may be real.The moral interpretation of those realities may be illusory.
Virgil thus suggests that civilizations are capable of generating accurate outcomes and inaccurate meanings simultaneously.
Empires happen - But. the stories empires tell about themselves are curated.
This fracture between event and interpretation is one of the poem’s most modern insights. It anticipates later critiques of ideology, propaganda, and myth-making without employing any of that vocabulary.
By having Aeneas forget the vision after leaving the underworld, Virgil compounds the instability. The hero does not march forward illuminated by certainty. He returns to the world burdened by obscurity.
The future has been shown - It has not been integrated.
Aeneas continues not because he understands, but because he must.
This distinction matters.
It suggests that Rome’s founding is not driven by transparent moral clarity, but by momentum, pressure, and obedience to inherited narratives.
The underworld episode thus becomes a mirror of Virgil’s own historical position.
Augustus claims that Rome has entered an age of restoration, peace, and moral renewal.
Virgil allows that claim to stand.
But he embeds within the poem a quiet warning:
A future proclaimed as radiant may still be constructed atop accumulated suffering.
Destiny, in the Aeneid, is not false.
But it is not innocent.
The two gates remind us that history’s self-understanding is always vulnerable to distortion.
And poetry, at its best, is the art that leaves that vulnerability visible.
VI. The Ending: Mercy Withheld, Justice Questioned, Empire Founded in Fury
From the beginning of the Aeneid, the reader knows how the story must end.
Aeneas will prevail.The Trojans will secure a homeland.Rome will be birthed.
There is no narrative suspense about outcome. The only suspense that remains is moral. Virgil reserves that suspense for the final moments:
Aeneas and Turnus, champion of the Italian resistance, meet in single combat. Turnus is defeated. He falls. He is disarmed. He is helpless. The war has effectively ended.
At this point, epic convention would normally grant the hero a moment of magnanimity. The victorious founder, standing at the threshold of history, would demonstrate the virtue that legitimizes his rule.
Virgil deliberately stages such a moment.
Turnus speaks.
He does not rage.He does not curse.He pleads for his life.
He acknowledges defeat. He accepts that Aeneas has won Lavinia and the future (of Rome). He asks only that his life be spared, or at minimum that his body be returned to his father.
Crucially, Virgil tells us that Aeneas hesitates. He wavers. He begins to incline toward mercy.
This hesitation is not incidental. It is one of Augustus’ most publicized virtues: clementia - mercy, restraint, the capacity to spare the defeated. Augustus cultivated an image of himself as a ruler who, unlike the warlords of the civil wars, knew when not to kill.
Aeneas stands poised to embody this same ideal.
Then Virgil reverses the scene.
Aeneas sees Turnus wearing the belt of Pallas, the young warrior entrusted to Aeneus' personal care who had been slain earlier in the war by Turnus. The sight triggers an eruption of rage. Aeneas no longer speaks as a political founder. He speaks as an avenger of Pallas, his symbolic son, ward, and protege.
He viciously kills Turnus. Aeneus is merciless.
Not as a calculated necessity.
Not as an act of judicial closure.
But in violent, blood fury.
Virgil’s language is explicit. Aeneas is seized by madness, by burning anger, by a surge of personal passion. The killing is emotionally intelligible.
It is not morally clean.
The poem dramatically ends at this very moment.
There is no celebration.
There is no reconciliation.
There is no vision of peace.
The final word describes Turnus’ soul descending to the underworld indignant - wronged, feeling undeservedly treated, deprived of justice.
With this ending, Virgil performs a devastating maneuver.
He allows Rome to be founded - But he refuses to let Rome be founded innocently. The city comes into existence not through an act of mercy, but through an act of rage.
This does not mean Aeneas is a villain. It means Aeneas is human. And this humanity is precisely what unsettles the epic.
If Rome’s first decisive act is morally compromised, then moral compromise is not an aberration in Roman history. It is structural.
Virgil does not say that empire is illegitimate. He suggests something more difficult: Empire is tragic.
Not tragic in the sense of melodrama. Tragic in the classical sense: a collision between a fated destiny that cannot be harmonized.
Aeneas owes loyalty to the dead.
Aeneas owes mercy to the living.
He cannot fully satisfy both.
Whatever he chooses, something sacred is violated.
The founding of Rome thus occurs in a moral remainder. Something unresolved. Something that cannot be redeemed by later greatness.
The poem’s final silence is therefore not emptiness. It is accusation. Not against Aeneas alone. Not against Augustus alone. But against the very logic that insists history must always justify itself.
Virgil leaves us not with triumph - He leaves us with responsibility.
VII. Virgil’s Legacy: From Roman Epic to Christian Conscience
Virgil did not live to see what his poem would become. Within decades of his death, the Aeneid entered Roman education as a foundational text. Children learned Latin through its lines. Statesmen quoted it. Philosophers glossed it. It became not merely a great poem, but a cultural organ.
Yet the most remarkable dimension of Virgil’s legacy is not Roman.
It is Christian.
As Christianity spread through the late antique world, early Christian thinkers found themselves inheriting a literary tradition saturated with pagan epic. Rather than discard Virgil, they reinterpreted him. They sensed in the Aeneid not theological correctness, but moral seriousness.
Virgil did not know Christ. But he knew tragedy. And tragedy proved to be an existential bridge to meaning. To identity. To virtue and value.
Christian readers recognized in Virgil a poet who understood that history is broken, that power wounds, that innocence is rare, and that human greatness is always compromised. These intuitions resonated deeply with a religious worldview centered on fallenness, suffering, and the longing for redemption.
This reception reaches its most famous expression in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Here, Dante literarily chooses Virgil as his guide through Hell and Purgatory. This choice is not ornamental.
Virgil had come to represent natural reason at its highest reach. He embodied what the human mind might grasp about justice, suffering, virtue, and moral order without divine revelation. He can diagnose evil. He can recognize tragedy. He can lead the pilgrim through the landscapes of moral consequence.
But Virgil cannot enter Paradise.
This limitation is symbolic. It is not a condemnation of Virgil. It is an acknowledgment of the boundary of tragic wisdom.... Virgil can show that the world is broken. He cannot show how to heal it.
In this sense, the Aeneid becomes, retroactively, a pre-Christian witness to humanity’s unresolved condition.
It knows that history cannot save itself.
It knows that empire cannot redeem its own violence.
It knows that duty alone cannot generate wholeness.
These are precisely the questions Christianity claims to answer.
Yet even here, Virgil’s relevance does not evaporate. Modern readers, whether religious or not, continue to encounter in the Aeneid a profound realism about power. The poem resists both naive glorification and simplistic condemnation. It occupies the harder space between.
Virgil teaches that civilizations are neither purely evil nor purely good.
They are tragic achievements.
They arise from genuine human longings for order, meaning, and continuity.
They also arise through exclusion, coercion, and cruel sacrifice.
This double vision remains indispensable. In an age still shaped by nations, empires, and global systems, the Aeneid offers no easy comfort. It offers something rarer:
- Moral depth without moral illusion.
- Virgil’s legacy, therefore, is not that he gave Rome its greatest story.
- It is that he gave the West one of its earliest sustained examinations of what it means to need such stories in the first place. .
VIII. Conclusion: Founding, Suffering, and the Unfinished Human Question
The Aeneid endures because it refuses to simplify what it means to begin.
Rome’s origin story, as Virgil tells it, is not a tale of pristine emergence. It is a tale of flight, loss, compromise, and morally ambiguous necessity. Troy must burn. Dido must die. Pallas must fall. Turnus must be killed. Only then can Rome exist.
Virgil does not hide these costs.
He arranges them into the very architecture of the poem.
This is his quiet defiance.
The epic form had long been used to elevate nations, glorify heroes, and stabilize collective identity. Virgil uses the same form to introduce moral friction into those processes. He gives Rome its legend while ensuring that the legend remains ethically heavy.
The result is not cynicism - It is tragic clarity. Tragedy, in the classical sense, does not declare that life is meaningless. It declares that meaning is expensive.
Virgil understands that civilizations arise from real human desires: the desire for order rather than chaos, continuity rather than erasure, remembrance rather than oblivion. These desires are not contemptible. They are deeply human.
But he also understands that when such desires are organized into vast historical projects, they begin to demand sacrifices no single individual can fully consent to make.
Aeneas becomes the embodiment of this dilemma.
He is neither monster nor saint.
He is the man willing to become smaller so that something larger can exist.
In doing so, he reveals the tragic logic of empire itself.
Rome, as Virgil imagines it, is not evil. But neither is it innocent. It is a civilization born beneath the shadow of what it had to destroy. This shadow does not disappear when the city rises. It lengthens. It stretches across centuries. It follows Rome into its imperial height. It follows Rome into its decline.
And through Virgil’s poem, it follows us.
The Aeneid therefore speaks not only about ancient Rome.
It speaks about every society that tells itself a story of destiny.
Every nation that frames its power as providential.
Every culture that narrates its rise as necessary and its victims as unfortunate but unavoidable.
Virgil does not offer a solution to these patterns. He offers something more enduring. He offers recognition. He teaches us to look at founding without enchantment and without despair. To see both the greatness and the grief. To hold achievement and atrocity in the same gaze.
Perhaps this is why the poem has survived so long. Not because it flatters power. But because it tells the truth about power in a language power cannot easily silence. Virgil gives Rome its epic. He gives humanity its mirror. And the mirror does not lie.
nor with unbroken hearts
from what someone loved
and then lost.
As stone remembers,
and ash remembers,
so the ground keeps
a darker archive.
We call success destiny -
but we do not say
who paid for that claim.
We call victory glory -
the killed, the silent.
And yet we build -
we walk -
Never finished.
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved
Primary Texts
- Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage Classics, 1990.
- Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
- Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics, 1998.
- Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. New York: W.W. Norton, 2018.
- Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1995.
- Conte, Gian Biagio. Latin Literature: A History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
- Hardie, Philip. Virgil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
- Johnson, W.R. Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
- Putnam, Michael C.J. The Poetry of the Aeneid: Four Studies in Imaginative Unity and Design. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965.
- Quinn, Kenneth. Virgil’s Aeneid: A Critical Description. London: Routledge, 1968.
- Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970.
- Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1955.
- Weil, Simone. The Iliad, or the Poem of Force. In Waiting for God. New York: Harper Perennial, 1973.
- Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
- Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.
- Augustine. The City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.
- Singleton, Charles S. Journey to Beatrice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.
