The Aeneid 1101When Turnus kills Pallas, a young warrior
entrusted to Aeneas’s care, Aeneas, already a sec-
ond Paris, becomes a second Achilles, consumed
by an unyielding desire for vengeance. The Aeneid
ends with Aeneas thrusting his sword into Turnus,
who, defeated and at Aeneas’s mercy, is pleading
for his life. Aeneas has come full circle, it seems:
The cruelty that he recognized within himself and
tried to escape has penetrated deep within him. Yet
he remains pious, fulfilling the will of Jupiter and
fighting for the new “Golden Age” of Rome’s com-
ing empire. Perhaps even crueler than the cruelty of
Juno is the cruelty of Jove.
Anthony Adler
HeroISm in The Aeneid
Since Virgil, in writing The Aeneid, drew so heavily
on Greek mythology and Homeric epic, it is not sur-
prising that he gives Aeneas many of the attributes
of a typical Greek epic hero. When, for example,
Aeneas voyages to the realm of the dead, he follows
in the footsteps of Theseus, Hercules, Orpheus, and
Odysseus. And indeed, the underworld that he first
encounters resembles Homer’s Hades. Yet beyond
this gloomy shadow realm’s outermost fields, where
the shades of the great war heroes throng together in
a hollow imitation of past conflicts, Aeneas discov-
ers a very different sort of afterlife: a Tartarus where
the wicked are punished and an Elysium where the
blessed live in perpetual joy.
Whereas the great war heroes were exemplary
warriors possessing an exceptional, even godlike
fighting ability rooted in strong passions, Virgil’s
Elysium belongs to patriots, priests, poets, inventors,
and benefactors of humankind. This suggests a new
sort of heroism, involving a very different sort of
greatness. The new heroes may be quite ordinary in
both their natural strength and passions. The impor-
tant thing is that they serve something beyond their
narrow sphere of self-interest.
It is above all Aeneas, the pious founding father
of a future empire, who exemplifies this new type of
hero. Indeed, recounting the fall of Troy, he describes
his own conversion from the old kind of heroism to
the new. After the Greeks breach the walls of Troy,
Aeneas and his Trojan comrades continue to fight.
Yet, knowing their cause is lost, they become more
and more like their enemies, delighting in destruc-
tion for its own sake. Aeneas has almost succumbed
completely to his fury when his mother, Venus, the
goddess of love, intervenes, turning him away from
the burning Troy and toward the new destiny that
awaits him.
Whereas the heroes of the Trojan War are con-
demned in death to repeat in shadowy imitation
their past battles, Virgil’s imitation of Homer’s epic
suggests the possibility of a very different future,
born from the ability of the new sort of heroes to
devote their lives to a cause greater than themselves.
These new heroes are heroes of the future in both
senses: They not only serve the future, they also
belong to a future time. Thus, in Elysium, Aeneas
finds his father reviewing a glorious progression of
the spirits of the future heroes of Rome as they await
their return to life.
This last scene, in particular, suggests a trium-
phant celebration of Roman imperialism. Signifi-
cantly, the last of these heroes is Augustus, Virgil’s
own patron, who, Aeneas learns, is destined to
restore the golden age, achieving greater things even
than Hercules.
Yet perhaps things are not so simple. Before
Aeneas can found a new Troy in Italy, he must
endure a second Trojan War. As this war progresses
in the second half of The Aeneid, Aeneas becomes
ever more like Homer’s Achilles, the greatest exem-
plification of the Greek heroic type. When Pallas,
who has been charged to his care, is killed by Tur-
nus, Aeneas becomes consumed with a thirst for
vengeance.
Virgil’s epic ends with Aeneas thrusting his
sword into Turnus. For all its promise of a differ-
ent kind of future, The Aeneid ultimately seems to
collapse into the bleakest moments of Homer’s The
Iliad, with Aeneas returning to the very vengeance
he first turned away from. The new hero, it seems,
needs the passions of the old to fight wars all too
like the wars of the past. In Troy’s last hours, Aeneas
donned the armor of a fallen Greek warrior. Now,
in this new conflagration of a new Troy, he must
assume the passions of Achilles. Can Aeneas con-
trol these passions, or will they control him? Does
Aeneas stand a better chance of escaping Achilles’
tragic fate than Hector, who died wearing the Greek