Aeneid

The Aeneid is built in two halves that answer the two Homeric poems. Books one to six are a wandering, an Odyssey: the storm that drives Aeneas to Carthage, his account of Troy's last night and the flight carrying his father and leading his son, the years of false landfalls, the affair with Dido and her suicide when he sails, the funeral games for Anchises, and the descent to the underworld. Books seven to twelve are an Iliad: arrival in Latium, a marriage dispute deliberately inflamed, and a war against Turnus ending in single combat.

Book six carries most of the theological weight. Guided by the Sibyl at Cumae, Aeneas crosses into the land of the dead and passes through its regions, infants and suicides, the fields of mourning where Dido turns away from him without a word, Tartarus, and the blessed groves, to meet his father, who explains a scheme in which souls are purged and returned to bodies, and then shows him the line of Romans waiting to be born, down to Augustus. Aeneas leaves through the gate of false dreams, a detail that has provoked argument for two thousand years.

The poem's governing virtue is pietas, a word covering obligation to gods, father, son and destiny at once. Aeneas is defined by it and diminished by it: he abandons Dido because he is instructed to, and the poem gives her the better speeches. That tension is why readers still argue about whether the Aeneid endorses the empire it celebrates.

The ending sharpens it. Aeneas has Turnus at his mercy and is moved to spare him, then sees on his shoulder the belt stripped from a boy he had killed, and kills him in anger. The poem stops there, with no settlement, no marriage and no founding, on a line describing the resentful flight of a soul to the shades. Whether Virgil intended to write further is not knowable, but the twelve-book architecture is complete, and the abruptness reads as deliberate.

Virgil began the Aeneid around 29 BCE, after the Eclogues and the Georgics, and worked on it for about ten years. The ancient life attributed to Suetonius and preserved by Donatus reports that he drafted the whole in prose first, then versified sections out of order as they attracted him, and read parts aloud to Augustus and his household, including book six, at which Octavia is said to have fainted at the lines on her dead son Marcellus.

In 19 BCE he travelled to Greece intending to spend three years revising. He met Augustus in Athens, turned back, fell ill, and died at Brundisium on 21 September. The ancient sources report that he had wanted the manuscript burned as unfinished, and that Augustus overrode this and instructed the literary executors Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca to publish with minimal editing and no additions. Whether the burning request is fact or a story grown around an unrevised masterpiece cannot now be determined; what is certain is that the poem as published contains around fifty-seven incomplete lines, half-verses that trail off, which no editor since has filled in.

The political programme is explicit. The Julian family claimed descent from Iulus, Aeneas' son, and so from Aeneas' mother Venus; the poem makes that lineage the hinge of world history and has Jupiter promise empire without limit. Augustus is named in prophecy twice, in book one and in the parade of souls in book six. This is court poetry in the sense that it serves a regime's account of itself, and it is also a poem full of doubt about what that account costs.

Adoption was immediate. Propertius announced before publication that something greater than the Iliad was being born, and within a generation the Aeneid was the standard Latin school text, a position it held for as long as Latin was taught in the ancient world. Graffiti at Pompeii quote its opening words. Commentaries accumulated, the fullest surviving being that of Servius in the late fourth century, which remains a major source for Roman religious antiquities because Servius explains cult details his readers no longer knew.

The poem also acquired an oracular function. The sortes Vergilianae was the practice of opening a copy at random and reading the line the finger fell on as a prediction; the Historia Augusta reports several emperors consulting it, and the custom survived into the medieval and early modern periods. The same treatment was given to the Bible and to Homer, and it says something about how a text with no religious authority could acquire religious use.

Christian readers kept Virgil in a way they did not keep most pagan poets, partly because the fourth Eclogue, with its prophecy of a child and a returning golden age, was read as foretelling Christ. He therefore passed intact through the Middle Ages, was credited in some traditions with magical powers, and reached Dante, who made him the guide through Hell and Purgatory and called him master and author. That is an unusual afterlife for an epic written to flatter a Roman emperor.

The manuscript tradition is correspondingly rich. Several late antique copies survive in whole or in part, among them the illustrated Vergilius Vaticanus and Vergilius Romanus of the fourth and fifth centuries, which is more than can be said for almost any other classical Latin author. Continuous copying meant the text never had to be recovered; unlike much of antiquity, Virgil was simply never lost.