The Aeneid for Seekers

Dear reader — that's half right, and it's exactly the half Virgil wants you to notice. The Aeneid is a Latin epic in twelve books, written in the last decade of Virgil's life, about the Trojan prince Aeneas. Troy has fallen. Aeneas leads the survivors across the Mediterranean to Italy, where after a war their descendants will found Rome. It tells the founding of a civilization as a journey of loss. And it's a poem that celebrates an empire and keeps showing you the bill.

The Guy And The Homer Thing

Publius Vergilius Maro was born in 70 BCE near Mantua, in northern Italy, and died in 19 BCE at Brundisium on his way home from Greece. He grew up through the civil wars that destroyed the Roman Republic, and the Aeneid was written once Augustus had won them. The poem celebrates what Augustus built, and at the same time keeps asking what it cost.

Two halves, and each answers one of Homer's poems. Books I to VI are a wandering story like the Odyssey: a hero lost at sea, a storm, a stay with a queen, a descent to the underworld. Books VII to XII are a war story like the Iliad: a camp, a catalogue, a death that changes everything, and a final duel. The opening line says what you're getting: "I sing of arms and the man who of old from the coasts of Troy came, an exile of fate, to Italy."

The Setup

Aeneas is a Trojan prince, son of the mortal Anchises and the goddess Venus. In Homer's Iliad he's a secondary figure, a good fighter the gods save more than once because he's fated to survive. When Troy falls, he escapes with his father, his son Ascanius, and a band of refugees.

Juno hates the Trojans. She was slighted in the judgment of Paris, resents the abduction of Ganymede, and fought on the Greek side at Troy. She's also heard that Trojan descendants will one day destroy her favorite city, Carthage. So she harries Aeneas across the sea. The poem's first question is why a goddess would go after a man "so excellent in goodness." And the answer is the line at the end of the opening: "Such work was it to found the Roman people."

Aeneas's defining quality is pietas, translated "piety" or "duty." It means the right relation to the gods, to family and to country, and being ready to put those ahead of your own wishes. He's not the strongest or the cleverest man in the poem. He's the one who keeps faith.

Books I To III: Storm, Carthage, And The Fall Of Troy

Juno's storm drives the Trojan fleet onto the African coast. Neptune calms the sea. Venus appeals to Jupiter, who reassures her with a prophecy of what's coming: the war in Italy, Romulus and Rome, a Caesar who'll bring peace. "I appoint to these neither period nor boundary of empire: I have given them dominion without end."

Aeneas and his friend Achates walk into Carthage, still being built, and find a temple whose walls are painted with scenes from the Trojan War. He sees his own city's story there, and weeps. Then Dido, the queen, enters and welcomes the Trojans, saying she knows what it is to suffer: "Not ignorant of ill do I learn to succour the afflicted."

At her banquet Aeneas tells the fall of Troy. The Greeks left a huge wooden horse on the beach and sailed away. The priest Laocoon warns the Trojans: "Ah, wretched citizens, what height of madness is this? Believe you the foe is gone?" A captured Greek named Sinon invents a story and persuades them to take the horse in. That night the Greeks come out.

Aeneas dreams of Hector, who appears wounded and dragged as Achilles left him. Hector tells him Troy is lost and entrusts him with the city's gods: "Troy commends to thee her holy things and household gods; take them to accompany thy fate; seek for them a city." Aeneas wakes to the sound of battle, and his first impulse is to fight to the death: "Fury and wrath drive me headlong, and I think how noble is death in arms."

Anchises refuses to leave until a flame plays harmlessly around the head of his grandson Ascanius and a star falls in answer to his prayer. Then Aeneas lifts his father on his shoulders and goes out of the burning city with the boy, with his wife Creusa behind them. In the dark, Creusa is lost. He goes back to find her and meets only her ghost. "Thrice there was I fain to lay mine arms round her neck; thrice the vision I vainly clasped fled out of my hands, even as the light breezes, or most like to fluttering sleep."

Book III is the seven years' wandering: a failed settlement in Thrace, where the roots of a bush bleed and a voice cries out that it's Polydorus, murdered for his gold ("Woe's me, why rendest thou me, Aeneas?"); a false start on Crete; the Harpies; Trojan exiles playing at being a Troy in miniature.

Book IV: Dido

The poem's most famous and most painful book. Dido, a widowed queen who swore faith to her dead husband, is struck with love for Aeneas, helped along by Venus and Juno, who both have reasons to arrange it. "The Queen, long ere now pierced with sore distress, feeds the wound with her life-blood, and catches the fire unseen." The two meet in a cave during a storm on a hunt, and Dido calls it a marriage.

Jupiter sends Mercury to remind Aeneas of his task. Aeneas starts preparing the fleet in secret, but Dido finds out. She confronts him, and he gives a careful, honest, and inadequate speech: he didn't promise marriage, the gods command him, Italy is his destiny. She answers with fury: "No goddess was thy mother, nor Dardanus founder of thy line, traitor! but rough Caucasus bore thee on his iron crags, and Hyrcanian tigresses gave thee suck."

As the ships leave, she builds a great pyre on the pretext of a rite and makes her last speech. She invokes the Furies and calls for enmity between Carthage and the Trojan descendants forever, and for an avenger to rise from her ashes. Then she falls on Aeneas's sword; her sister arrives too late. The poem says plainly that she didn't earn it: she died "woefully before her day, and fired by sudden madness." The curse echoes through Roman history.

Book VI: The Underworld

The poem's center. Aeneas lands at Cumae and asks the Sibyl, Apollo's priestess, to guide him to the underworld to see his father. She tells him going down is easy and coming back is the task: "easy is the descent into hell; all night and day the gate of dark Dis stands open; but to recall thy steps and issue to upper air, this is the task and burden." He needs a golden bough to give the queen of the dead. After burying his drowned companion Misenus, he finds the bough.

Among those who died of love, in the Wailing Fields, he sees Dido, fresh from her wound. He speaks to her with tears and swears he left unwillingly. She won't look at him: "She turned away with looks fixed fast on the ground, stirred no more in countenance by the speech he essays than if she stood in iron flint or Marpesian stone." She goes to her first husband, Sychaeus. Aeneas follows her far with tears.

In the Elysian Fields he finds his father, who explains the afterlife and leads him to a line of souls waiting to be born, the future heroes of Rome, from the kings to Julius Caesar and Augustus. Then Anchises states the Roman mission: "be thy charge, O Roman, to rule the nations in thine empire; this shall be thine art, to lay down the law of peace, to be merciful to the conquered and beat the haughty down." Remember that line. It matters at the end.

The parade ends with a young man with a dark brow, Marcellus, Augustus's nephew and heir, who died at twenty. Anchises breaks into grief and asks for flowers to scatter on his descendant's soul. Then he sends Aeneas and the Sibyl out through the ivory gate, the gate of false dreams. "There are twin portals of Sleep, whereof the one is fabled of horn, and by it real shadows are given easy outlet; the other shining white of polished ivory, but false visions issue upward from the ghostly world." The book ends there.

Books VII To XII: The War

Seeking allies, Aeneas visits Evander, an Arcadian king who rules the small hill town where Rome will stand. Venus brings her son arms made by Vulcan, with a shield on which the whole future of Rome, down to the battle of Actium, is pictured. "Rejoicing in the portraiture of unknown history, lifts on his shoulder the destined glories of his children."

While Aeneas is away, Turnus attacks the Trojan camp. Two young soldiers, the older Nisus and the beautiful boy Euryalus, volunteer to slip through the enemy lines and carry word to Aeneas. They kill many in a sleeping camp and Euryalus stops to take spoils. In the woods they're separated, and Euryalus is caught.

Evander's young son Pallas, whom Aeneas has promised to protect, fights with the Trojans and kills many before meeting Turnus. Turnus kills him and strips the sword-belt from the body, decorated with a scene of murdered bridegrooms. The poet stops to warn that Turnus will someday wish he'd never taken it: "Ah spirit of man, ignorant of fate and the allotted future, or to keep bounds when elate with prosperity!"

The Last Scene

In the final duel, Aeneas wounds Turnus, who falls and asks for his life, or for his body to be returned to his father: "I have deserved it, nor do I ask for mercy; use thy fortune." Aeneas stands wrathful, and "the speech began to bend him to waver." Then he sees on Turnus's shoulder the belt of Pallas. He cries that Pallas himself exacts the vengeance, and drives his sword into Turnus's chest. "His limbs grow slack and chill, and the life with a moan flies indignantly into the dark." End of poem. No celebration. No Rome.

Back in Book VI, Anchises told him to be merciful to the conquered. At the end, Aeneas has a conquered enemy at his feet, begging, and doesn't. The poem gives him a reason, the belt. It doesn't say whether it's a good enough one. That gap between the charge and the act is the poem's last and hardest question.

Pick Your Reading

The imperial reading takes the poem as a celebration of Rome and Augustus, its restorer. The prophecies lead to a Caesar and a golden age, the shield ends at Actium, the sorrows are the cost of a worthy end. In the 1960s American scholars, the "Harvard School," argued the poem speaks with two voices: a public one that praises Rome and a private one that mourns what it destroyed, and the ending is the clearest case. Many readers feel more for Turnus than for Aeneas. Dido gets more sympathy from Virgil than any other character, and plenty of readers think she's the center.

The medieval Virgil was read as a near-Christian prophet, partly because of a line in his Fourth Eclogue about a child who'd begin a new age, and also thought a magician. Dante picks him as guide through Hell and Purgatory, the voice of human reason and Roman civilization.

To read it: the passages quoted here are J. W. Mackail's 1885 prose translation, free and accurate and a little Victorian. Because it's prose it doesn't give the sound of the Latin verse, and most people prefer a verse translation. Twelve books, about twelve to fifteen hours in a modern verse translation, a book a day is a good pace. If time is short, the essential books are I, II, IV, VI, and XII.