PATIENT
The Aeneid
COMPOSED
29–19 BCE
FORM
A twelve-book epic poem
SETTING
Troy, Carthage, the underworld, Italy
CHIEF COMPLAINT
What does it cost to found something that lasts, and who pays?
HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS
A prince walks out of a burning city with his father on his back, and the gods tell him he will found another. The poem follows him across the sea, through a love that ends in a curse, down to the land of the dead, and into a war that ends on a question. It is Rome's founding epic, written by Virgil (70–19 BCE) in the age of Augustus, and it never stops counting what the founding cost.
REVIEW OF SYSTEMS
PIETAS
Duty to gods, family and country. The quality Aeneas is chosen for, and the one that costs him the most.
FATUM
Fate. A fixed promise the gods may delay but never cancel, and that the people it uses do not fully see.
IMPERIUM
Rule, command, empire. What Jupiter promises without end, and what Anchises says is Rome's art.
LACRIMAE RERUM
“The tears of things.” The poem's feeling that the world itself is shaped by loss.
DUTY AND DESIRE
What Aeneas must do against what he wants. He must leave Troy, Creusa, Dido and eventually the idea of a quiet life.
PHYSICAL EXAM — STYLE & STRUCTURE
- —Twelve books in two halves. Books I to VI answer the Odyssey, and Books VII to XII answer the Iliad.
- —Opens by calling on the Muse to ask why the queen of heaven drove so good a man through so many afflictions.
- —The descent in Book VI is the model for Dante's Inferno, and the parade of future Romans is the poem's view of the future.
- —Many readers hear two voices: a public one that praises Rome and a private one that mourns what it destroyed.
- —It ends abruptly, on a single act, with no resolution beyond it.
ASSESSMENT & PLAN
The Aeneid is the Roman reply to the Homer guides in this room, so reading Homer first lets you see what Virgil keeps, what he changes and what he adds. The Dante guides follow from it directly: Virgil is Dante's guide through Hell and Purgatory, and the descent in Book VI is the model for the Inferno. Good places to start are Book VI and the last scene in Book XII. For a first read, try Robert Fitzgerald (Vintage), Robert Fagles (Penguin) or Sarah Ruden (Yale); the full guide quotes J. W. Mackail's public-domain 1885 prose translation.