Virgil's Aeneid: A Hero Driven On by Fate
Written to Praise Augustus, Aeneas Finds Little to Champion in Rome
Dec 6, 2008
Caesar Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, commissioned Virgil to produce a poem that celebrated Roman history and his own lineage. In response, Virgil developed a mythical heritage for the Romans that rivaled Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and discussed the complexity of the relationship between public and private life.
Roman History in the Aeneid: 'An Exile Driven on by Fate'
There is no mistaking the poems agenda; in the first line of his Aeneid, Virgil situates the poem within a providential framework: “Wars and a man I sing – an exile driven on by fate” (1. 1). Indeed, it is the will of the gods – or the will of a spiritual fate – that drives Aeneas to his goal, and it is set down by them; the foundation of Rome, establishing the line of Roman heroes.
In essence the Aeneid looks from those opening lines to test the worthiness of its hero, and it is a tale of domination and war, a seeming triumph for the mythical forefathers of Augustus. Jupiter, once again:
...On them [the Roman race] I set no limits, space or time:
I have granted them power, empire without end. (1. 312-334)
The message is clear enough, and it is this declaration that forms the backbone of the poem.
Personal Sentiment in the Aeneid – ‘I Left Your Shores Against My Will’
But when the poem first encounters its hero Aeneas, his glorious destiny is second in his thoughts to the very real and impending doom of Juno’s thunderbolt:
Three, four times blest, my comrades
lucky to die beneath the soaring walls of Troy –
before their parents’ eyes! If only I’d gone down
under your right hand – Diomedes strongest Greek afield –
and poured out my life on the battlegrounds of Troy! (1.113-117)
For the hero of an epic, his first words may come as surprising, and it is hardly the declaration of a man who has the will of Jupiter behind him.
Can these two points be reconciled? Is it possible to feel happily reassured by fate – the epic celebration of Roman history - in the face of such heart wrenching protest from the poem’s hero?
Open Endings -- The Ambivalent Climax of the Aeneid
The poem refuses to answer that question, and the close of the Aeneid is characteristically ambiguous:
Blazing with wrath he plants
his iron sword hilt-deep in his enemy’s heart.
Turnus’ limbs went limp in the chill of death.
His life breath fled with a groan of outrage
down to the shades below. (12. 1109-1113)
This is the act that ends Italy’s civil war; the defeat of Turnus signifies the end of Latium’s rebellion against Jupiter’s decree. So Roman history begins with the murder of Turnus, Aeneas blazing with rage as he places the sword in his enemy’s chest.
Is this the celebration that Augustus had in mind? That the final act of a poem that has worked in paradigmatic shifts between public duty and personal conviction is resolutely drive by wrath and revenge seems to strike rather discordantly indeed with Augustus’ original wishes.
In answering that question, perhaps the final word should go to the narrator, questioning the Muse at the very beginning of the poem: “Can such rage inflame the immortals’ hearts?” (1. 13).
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