Download Publius Vergilius Maro

Nancy Workman
Lit Hum, Spring Semester
Aeneid
Publius Vergilius Maro (a.k.a. Vergil or Virgil) wrote his epic The Aeneid between 29 and 19
B.C.E., when he died. The poem was not entirely complete when he died—e.g., certain
individual lines do not contain six metrical feet as the epic meter, dactylic hexameter as in
Homer, requires—but it was substantially complete, and it is clear, for example, that the ending
we have is not provisional or unfinished but a “real” ending. It appears that Vergil ordered the
poem to be destroyed, but the emperor Augustus countermanded his wishes and ordered it to be
published.
In the Aeneid, Vergil creates a narrative about the origins of Rome, a kind of mosaic that
incorporates characters and motifs from many sources—myths and legends, Greek epic poetry,
earlier Roman poetry, and his own imagination. In other words, the plot of the Aeneid was
created by Virgil himself; he was not merely versifying a pre-existing story that all Romans
would have known already. He may have been the first to imagine a love affair between Dido
and Aeneas, for example.
To understand the Aeneid, it is important to consider the state of affairs in Rome during Vergil’s
lifetime, because what Rome stands for and what its future might be are central concerns in the
poem. Vergil was born in 70 B.C.E., in the Italian town of Mantua, at a time in which the
Roman Republic had been suffering from internal division and civil conflict for about fifty years,
with mob violence and assassinations on the streets of Rome, harsh infighting in the Senate, and
the use of unorthodox political tactics in an attempt to wrest power and wealth from an unwilling
propertied class and distribute it to the have-nots. When he was 10, in 60 B.C.E., a previously
unheard-of, extralegal and, for a time, secret, arrangement for ruling Rome and its everincreasing territories, the First Triumvirate (“rule by three men”) came into being and Rome,
nominally a kind of democracy, was in fact ruled by three extremely powerful men: Crassus,
Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar. Crassus died in battle in 53 and the two remaining
triumvirs—always ambitious and jealous of each other—fell out of alliance and ended up
heading opposing factions when Caesar crossed the Rubicon River into Roman territory with a
private army in 49 B.C.E. to attack the city in pursuit of sole power. Caesar defeated Pompey at
Pharsalus in 48 B.C.E. and was eventually named “dictator in perpetuity” of Rome; “perpetuity”
lasted until Caesar’s assassination by a conspiracy of senators in 43 B.C.E.
But Rome did not return to the good old days of Republican rule simply because ambitious
Caesar was out of the picture; more bloody civil strife followed. First, there was a war between
the assassins Brutus and Cassius, on the one side, and the Second Triumvirate, a lopsided and
provisional—but formally constituted—alliance between two highly ambitious men, Mark
Antony and Caesar’s 19-year-old adopted son and heir Octavian, perhaps the wealthiest man in
Rome, and the comparatively weak Lepidus, on the other. During this period, the Triumvirate
reinstituted a long-unused practice, proscription, in which official lists of enemies of the state
were drawn up and displayed in the Forum; anyone appearing on the list was thereby deprived of
citizenship and property and effectively designated fair game for assassination, with a reward
going to his murderer. The forces of the Second Triumvirate defeated Brutus and Cassius in 42
(in the same year, Julius Caesar was formally deified, making Octavian effectively the son of a
god).
The defeat of the party of the assassins still didn’t put an end to civil strife; now yet another civil
war broke out between two of the triumvirs, the precociously savvy Octavian and Mark Antony,
who had taken up with Julius Caesar’s former mistress Cleopatra and was looking to dominate
Rome from a base in Egypt. Octavian’s forces defeated those of Antony and Cleopatra at the sea
battle of Actium in 31 B.C.E. (depicted in the center of the shield of Aeneas in the Aeneid),
leaving Octavian, who took the name Caesar Augustus, uncontested master of Rome and her
territories. Though he insisted on an official ceremony returning power to the Senate, as if Rome
were still a republic, and preferred the title princeps, “first [citizen],” historians refer to Augustus
as the first emperor of Rome, and to Rome from this point on as the Roman Empire rather than
the Roman Republic.
In addition to strengthening his own grip on power—which became essentially unassailable in
the year of Virgil’s death, 19 B.C.E.—Augustus made an indelible mark on Rome with a farreaching program of reforms of everything from the administration of the provinces and city
proper to the moral conduct of individual Roman citizens. He affected a temperate manner of
life devoid of imperial pomp, living not in a palace but in a (nice enough) house on the Palatine
Hill—Vergil’s approving treatment of the frugal rustic lifestyle of King Evander, who lives near
the future site of Rome, alludes to Augustus’ conspicuous avoidance of luxury.
Augustus’ reign succeeded in restoring peace to Rome itself after a full century of intermittent
but bloody and destructive civil conflict—though for some it was difficult to forget the
horrifying proscriptions and wars Augustus himself had used to get power in the first place.
Now that he had power, another question remained: who would rule after him? Several attempts
to marry his daughter Julia to powerful men and designate them or their children as heirs came to
nothing, and the question of succession had still not been resolved when Virgil died. How long
would it be before the new empire was destroyed by yet another power struggle?