The Aeneid by Vergil

The Aeneid tells the story of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who flees Troy after it is won and sacked by the Greeks. He is on a mission from the gods to establish a homeland for the remaining Trojans which is prophesied to one day become a great empire, understood to be Rome. He sails from Troy, faces stormy seas and the wills of various gods, and stops in many locations across the Mediterranean. This includes Carthage, where he engages in a relationship with Queen Dido, eventually abandoning her and refusing her offer to merge their kingdoms, leading her to commit suicide.  Upon landing in Italy, Aeneas visits the underworld where he talks with the ghosts of Dido, soldiers killed in the war, and his father. Upon his return, the Trojans sail up the coast of Italy and land in the kingdom of Latium, home to the native Latins. Though initially, the relationship between the Trojans and the Latins is promising, eventually it falls to war. In the end, the two sides compromise, allowing the Trojans to remain in Latium on the agreement that they will adopt the language and culture of the Latins. Aeneas slays the leader of the Latin army, thereby sealing what has been told in the prophecies given throughout the poem: this place that the Trojans found will become Rome.

The Aeneid was originally composed in Latin in the 1st Century CE. Vergil had not completed the poem when he died in 19 BCE and had been working on it since about 30 BCE.  Vergil had lived through the Roman civil war which saw the end of the Republic and the rise of the Empire, led first by Augusts, nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar. After defeating Antony and Cleopatra in the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, Augustus strived to establish an era of peace and stability and worked to reinvigorate Roman virtue and national pride. Vergil’s epic poem, a story of Rome’s founding, reflects this context.

In his goal to write a Roman epic, Vergil pulled heavily from the themes, plot points, traditions, and structures of The Odyssey and The Iliad. A key difference between these Greek epics and Vergil’s Aeneid is that Vergil constructs his Roman epic from the annals of Roman history, including within the fabric of his narrative key events in Roman history and myth, particularly other foundation myths. Vergil was deeply immersed in both Greek and Latin literature, Additionally, he crafted the Aeneid at a time of great change in Rome and thus is indubitably influenced by the shifting society around him. 

Empire - an extensive group of states under one supreme authority

Nationcraft - how a nation is constructed and legitimized

Identity - who a person/nation is

Manifest Destiny - a divinely ordained right to explore and settle

Duty - what a person is obligated to do

• What gives a group of people the right to overtake another? 
• What constitutes merit? How do we decide as a culture what ‘merit’ is? 
• What does it mean to have a duty? To your parents? To your God? To your country? 
• How do our understanding of history and the myths of history shape our understanding of our present circumstances? 
• Is it possible to be both the underdog and the victor? What is appealing about each of these qualities and how do they work together? 

The Aeneid is a work that is primarily concerned with the construction of a nation. Though Aeneas meets many different types of people in his travels through the Mediterranean, The Aeneid is not especially concerned with documenting, classifying, or even subjugating these different groups. Rather, the dynamics of power that exist in the Aeneid have to do with nationcraft – the power, influence, and narrative required to construct the foundation myth of what will be one of the most influential civilizations in human history. Even though the text is not engaging directly with ‘race’ as we might conceptualize it today, we can view it in conversation with Rebecca Futo Kennedy’s definition of race:

"Race is a technology or doctrine of population management that institutionalizes prejudices, oppression, and inequality based on imaginary and changeable signifiers for human cultural and/or physical difference, signifiers that manifest differently in different times and places (i.e. it is historically contingent and fluid)”

Aeneas can create the state because he has divine ordinance from the Gods to do so. Vergil gives Aeneas authority, and in doing so gives him and the Trojans legitimacy as founders of Rome in a land that is not their native home. Aeneas additionally has genealogical legitimacy through his mother, the goddess Venus. It is Aeneas’s destiny that gives him power.

Aeneas is duty-bound, bearing the epithet Pius. He ultimately succeeds in creating the beginnings of a great nation because he defies his desires, for example his love for Dido, and achieves merits as they are defined by the gods. Vergil defines merit by the centering of Aeneas’s piety - to the gods, to fathers, and to his homeland – painting a clear picture of the importance of adhering to hierarchy and patriarchy. 

Aeneas and the other Trojans have lost their homeland. They rely on the kindness of Carthage through Juno and the Latins through Latinus to have material security in the story. Rather than material wealth or land, the Trojan identity is preserved by memory. Aeneas is frequently defined as a foreigner, he is not native to the soil of Italy, unlike Turnus whom he competes with for the hand of Lavinia. Yet Aeneas’s foreignness works in tandem with his destiny. Since he is divinely ordained the future founder of the race of Romans, his underdog status is not total as fate favors him.

Book 1: Lines 12 - 22 Juno's love for the Carthaginians and hatred for the Trojans

Book 1: Lines 273-280 Jupiter’s Prophecy about the eventual founding of Rome under Romulus and Remus

Book 12: Lines 181 - 194 Aeneas makes a promise for how the Trojans will rule the Italians if he wins his fight against Turnus

Book 12: Lines 833 - 840 Jupiter And Juno Decide the Future for Troy and Italy

As Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey came to be regarded as the pinnacle of Greek literature, so too Vergil’s Aeneid became regarded as the height of Latin literature. It was frequently studied and memorized by students of Latin well after the fall of the Roman Empire. As such, The Aeneid had a profound impact on the development of European literature. The Aeneid has since been retold in operas, films, and books.

"The bloodstream of European literature is Latin and Greek – not as two systems of circulation, but one, for it is through Rome that our parentage in Greece must be traced... No modern language could aspire to the universality of Latin, even though it came to be spoken by millions more than ever spoke Latin, and even though it came to be the universal means of communication between people of all tongues and cultures. No modern language can hope to produce a classic, in the sense in which I have called Virgil a classic. Our classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil."