1102 Virgil
hero’s armor? Is Augustus’s Roman empire really
the new golden age or just another repetition of the
endless violence of the past?
Perhaps what Virgil, writing under Augustus’s
patronage, wished to say is that the greatest of the
new heroes, those who fight for the future, can never
truly know whether their own passions serve some-
thing beyond themselves, or whether, in putting
these passions in the service of the future, they do
not just end up reproducing past evils. The heroes of
the future cannot know whether the new world that
they are creating is a heaven or a hell.
Anthony Adler
reSponSIbILIty in The Aeneid
In The Aeneid, the force of emotions is overwhelm-
ing. Whereas reason holds little sway over human
action, Virgil likens the extreme passions that take
hold of Dido and Turnus to a madness brought on
through the direct intervention of the gods. Nor is
Aeneas immune: Even his piety and sense of duty
are themselves rooted more in emotion than in
reason. Unlike Homer’s Odysseus, who constantly
holds himself back from his first impulses and
reflects on his situation, Aeneas simply moves from
one passion to another. When, during the fall of
Troy, his mother, Venus, restrains him from killing
Helen in the midst of his fury, she does not urge
moderation or restraint as such but turns his atten-
tion toward his family.
But in a world where reason is such a weak
force, how could anyone really be responsible for
his or her actions? The concept of responsibility
seems to imply that one possesses free will and can
be made to answer for what one does. It is, indeed,
a very different sense of responsibility that mat-
ters in The Aeneid: To be responsible means to be
capable of responding to the call or summons that
comes from the outside, and above all from the
gods. This responsiveness is also rooted in passion,
but of a fundamentally different kind: Whereas
Dido and Turnus’s rage involves selfish desires that
have been provoked to a dangerous intensity—a
state in which the soul, nurturing its own suffer-
ing, grows deaf to the cares of others—Aeneas’s
responsible passion makes him answerable to
something far beyond himself and his own desires.
Indeed, what he becomes responsible for above all
is the future.
These summonses appear throughout The
Aeneid. Hector appears to Aeneas in a dream, telling
him that he is now responsible for the Trojan gods of
house and hearth, and that he must find a new home
for them. Venus intervenes as he is about to kill
Helen and leads him back to his family. The ghost of
his wife, recently perished, appears to him and gives
him more detail of his mission and of the long years
of hardship at sea and the future kingdom that await
him. Thus, Aeneas, rather than giving in to his own
fury and dying a heroic death in the burning Troy,
flees from his homeland, becoming responsible for
finding a new home, not only for Troy and its gods
but for the many other Trojan refugees, young and
old, male and female, who are traveling together
with him. But the most important summons comes
to him at Carthage. When Aeneas, having arrived at
Carthage and fallen in love with Queen Dido, seems
finally to have found happiness, Jupiter himself,
through his messenger Mercury, reminds Aeneas
of his responsibility for the future—a responsibil-
ity, indeed, that will bring him great suffering. It is,
however, when Aeneas journeys into the underworld
and speaks with his father, Anchises, that he realizes
the full scope of his responsibility. There he sees the
souls of the future generations of Roman leaders
awaiting return to earth, and he learns of the future
greatness of the Roman Empire under Augustus, the
founder of a second golden age.
Heavenly passion—a piety and sense of divine
obligation—goes hand in hand with more earthly
passions. In Book 6, Right before the souls, purged
of their sins and of all memory of the past, return to
the world, they look toward the heavens, and only
then conceive the wish to reenter into their bodies,
the dark prisons of passion and suffering. The more
that Aeneas answers to the call of heaven, the more
responsible he becomes for his companions and fol-
lowers, and the more deeply he is drawn into the
cares and anxieties that come with this responsibil-
ity. But in just this way, it is impossible to keep apart
the two kinds of passions—the destructive, selfish
passion for the past and the constructive, pious, self-
less, passion for the future. When Turnus kills the
young Pallas, who has been trusted to Aeneas’s care