The Aeneid
Virgil was still working on his epic when in 19 B.C. he died. We are credibly told that at the last he asked his friends to burn his
unfinished poem. Antiquity did not share our romantic interest in fragmentary and suggestive works of art, and ancient writers,
like ancient artists, aimed to offer the public works as perfect as they could make them. An obvious mark of its unfinished state is
the presence, unevenly distributed through the poem, of metrically incomplete lines: lines, that is, to -which the poet intended to
return. Some of them are very effective, and romantic readers have been tempted to think that Virgil would have left them; but that
is an idea which would not have occurred to him, any more than it occurred to any of his imitators in antiquity to include
incomplete lines in their poems. He did not, however, intend to carry the story further forward than the point it reaches at the end
of Book 12.
Maecenas tried to induce each of the poets to produce an epic on Augustus: none of them complied. That fact alone shows that the
pressure was civilized. We are not in the world of Stalin and the Writers' Union. Virgil was unlike Horace and Propertius in that
from the beginning he did talk in terms of writing a martial epic 'one day' (Eclogues 4.54; 8.6-10), whereas they always made it
clear that they could not, or would not. In the introduction to the third book of the Georgics he seemed to undertake that he would
write it 'soon'. But in the event he produced something quite different: a mythical epic on the ultimate origins of Rome. Augustus,
we know, followed its progress with impatience, begging to be shown portions of it. He accepted, that is, that the Aeneid really
was the fulfilment of his own wish; and he was right.
Virgil had come to see that it was not possible to write an epic of which Augustus should be the central figure, and which should
satisfy the highest artistic demands. The framework of an epic must be the Homeric poems, and that entailed both the constant
presence of the gods as characters, and also hand-to-hand fighting among heroic warriors. But to intrude divine councils and
interventions into very recent history would be a jarring fault of taste, constantly risking bathos and absurdity; so, too, would the
representation of Augustus mowing down thousands with his own strong right arm. Again, the plain fact was that the battle of
Actium was unsatisfactory as a theme for verse. Not only did Augustan propaganda insist that it be represented not as a civil war
but as a war with the Queen of Egypt, which was universally known to be untrue; there also apparently was hardly any fighting,
some contingents changing sides at the last moment, and Cleopatra suddenly sailing away in flight. Nor, finally, could Virgil have
found a central role for his great talent for pathos. If Augustus were the hero, there could be little sympathy for the defeated, and
no ambiguity about his triumph. Cleopatra could not be treated as sympathetically as Dido. And Virgil was to succeed in making a
natural flair for the pathos of loss and defeat into a central feature, not only of the decoration of the Aeneid, but also of its
interpretation of imperialism and of history.
The chief difficulty about the creation of the Aeneid was that of writing a poem which at one level should be a mythical epic about
the distant past, yet which should also be about the present and the future. The difficulty was so great that Virgil said in a letter that
he must have been mad to attempt it. The poem was to be all-embracing, drawing upon both Iliad and Odyssey, Attic tragedy,
Hellenistic poetry, and Latin predecessors, especially Naevius and Ennius; it was to be permeated by philosophical ideas from the
Greek thinkers; it must be strongly marked by Roman history and characteristically Roman values; and Virgil was anxious also to
include not only Rome but also Italy, with its geography, its peoples, and its virtues. Roman history must be presented as a
crescendo leading up to Augustus, a thousand years in the future. Finally, the whole poem must be written in a style grand yet
flexible, showing its author's familiarity with all preceding literature.
Romans believed that their city was founded in the eighth century B.C., Romulus being the actual founder, but some places in
Latium had for centuries believed that their origins went back to Troy: after the sack of the city, fleeing Trojans came to the West.
Such beliefs were indeed widespread all over the Mediterranean, as non-Greek peoples became sophisticated enough to wish to
attach themselves somehow to the great cycles of Greek legend. (In the Middle Ages this continued to be true: Britons descended
from the Trojan Brut, for example.) Some aristocratic families at Rome claimed to have migrated there from other Latin cities, and
to trace their ancestry back to Troy, among them the Julii. Now, the story of Romulus was not very suitable for an epic, and it had
no direct link with Augustus. Aeneas, who actually is a character in the Iliad, was a much better hero; and through the Julii he was
Augustus' ancestor. A great drawback, however, was that Aeneas could not found Rome, as scholars put the fall of Troy 400 years
earlier, in the twelfth century B.C. Aeneas can only found Lavinium, from which in time Rome will derive. Virgil turns this
difficulty to account brilliantly in Book 8, when Aeneas is entertained by an ally on the very site which will be that of Rome. The
hero is shown the Capitol and all the places which will become opulent and celebrated, now green hills and trees. The touching
scene is programmatic: Aeneas must live for a future he will not live to see.