In brief
A refugee from burning Troy, carrying his father and his gods, is pushed by fate across the Mediterranean to found the people who will become Rome. On the way he abandons the woman who took him in, and when he gets to Italy he wages a war against the people already living there. Virgil spent about the last eleven years of his life on these twelve books, 9,896 lines of Latin hexameter, wrote them under Augustus, and died in 19 BC asking for them to be burned.
The Aeneid is the official epic of the Roman Empire and it says so openly. It is also one of the saddest poems ever written about winning. How those facts fit together has been the main question about it for sixty years, and it closes on a merciless act with no comment.
The argument
The whole case is stated early, in a line of accounting: Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem, “Such work was it to found the Roman people” (Book 1). Jupiter promises the reward a few hundred lines later: “I appoint to these neither period nor boundary of empire: I have given them dominion without end.” The rest of the poem is the invoice, and the Romans rarely pay it. Dido pays, and Creusa, Palinurus, Pallas, Camilla, Turnus, and a list of boys on both sides of a war the Italians did not seek.
Aeneas’s central virtue is pietas, duty to gods, family and the future. He introduces himself with it, “I am Aeneas the good” (Book 1), which sounds smug and is meant as pain. Duty in this poem means that a man does not get to live his own life. Achilles chooses; Aeneas obeys. Looking at scenes of the Trojan War on a temple wall in Carthage, he says the poem’s most famous words, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. Mackail has “here mortal estate touches the soul to tears”; literally, there are tears of things.
My view is that Virgil believed in Rome and was not secretly against it. He had lived through civil wars that ended only under Augustus. He simply refused to pretend that the price was small or that those who paid it deserved to.
The shape of the poem
The design rewrites Homer in reverse order. The first six books are an Odyssey, a sea journey with a flashback told at dinner, and the last six are an Iliad, a war over a woman with a dead friend, a shield and a duel. Book 6 is the hinge, where Aeneas goes down among the dead and hears the future from his father. In Book 7 Juno calls up a Fury to start the war.
Odysseus goes back to a home; Aeneas goes on to a place he has never seen. Homer’s war is lost by the Trojans, and in Virgil’s the Trojans play the invaders, with Turnus as a new Achilles and, at the end, a new Hector. Virgil himself questions the war: “Was it well, O God, that nations destined to everlasting peace should clash in so vast a shock?” (Book 12). Juno gives way only on condition that the Trojan name vanishes: “Troy is fallen; let her and her name lie where they fell” (Book 12). The people Aeneas has suffered to preserve disappear into the people he has defeated.
The voice
Virgil’s Latin is among the most finely worked in the language, and much of it cannot cross into English. Unlike Homer’s narrator, Virgil’s is present and feeling. He breaks in over Turnus, “Ah spirit of man, ignorant of fate and the allotted future” (Book 10), and promises two dead boys their fame (Book 9).
The free text linked here is J. W. Mackail’s prose of 1885, complete in twelve books. It is close, and it marks the half-lines with dots. Its weakness shows in the first sentence: “I sing of arms and the man who of old from the coasts of Troy came, an exile of fate” (Book 1). This is Victorian biblical English, with thee, thou and “foison of the clod”. His preface begins, “There is something grotesque in the idea of a prose translation of a poet”, and he compared the result to a copy in Berlin wool. Quotations are his unless noted.
The people
Aeneas
Aeneas is hard to like, and that is partly the idea. He carries his father on his back from Troy (Book 2), loses his wife in the dark on the way, and at the end of Book 8 lifts a shield showing Roman history he cannot understand, “rejoicing in the portraiture of unknown history”. After Pallas dies, four sons of Sulmo and as many of Ufens are “taken by him alive to slaughter in sacrifice”, and he kills men who beg him not to (Book 10).
Dido
Dido is the poem’s great creation. She is a widow and a founder, who led her own people from Tyre: “a woman leads the work” (Book 1). Venus and Juno together make her fall in love, as an act of policy. After the storm and the cave, “she calls it marriage, and with this name veils her fall” (Book 4). Aeneas has made no such promise. Told by Mercury to go, he prepares to slip away, and when challenged he breaks off in a half-line: “Not of my will do I follow Italy…” Dying, she curses his descendants: “Arise out of our dust, O unnamed avenger”. A Roman reader heard Hannibal. In Book 6 he meets her among the dead and weeps, telling her “unwillingly, O queen, I left thy shore”. The line is adapted from Catullus, where a lock of hair says it to a queen. “She turned away with looks fixed fast on the ground”, and she goes back to her first husband. T. S. Eliot called it “the most telling snub in all poetry”.
Turnus
Turnus has been promised Lavinia and has every local right to resist a foreign claimant. A Fury inflames him, he kills the boy Pallas and vaunts over it, and by Book 12 he has lost his nerve and knows it.
Juno, Pallas and Lavinia
Juno, who drives the plot, gets the opening question: “Is anger so fierce in celestial spirits?” (Book 1). Pallas is the son of Aeneas’s Italian host, sent to learn war and killed in it. Lavinia, the woman over whom the Italian war is fought, never says a word: she blushes once in Book 12. Ursula K. Le Guin gave her a voice in Lavinia (2008).
Augustus
Augustus wanted this poem. According to Donatus’s Life, he wrote from campaign in Spain demanding to see a draft, and Virgil eventually read him Books 2, 4 and 6. When the reading reached the lines on the young Marcellus, Augustus’s nephew and heir, who died in 23 BC, his mother Octavia is said to have fainted: tu Marcellus eris, “thou shalt be Marcellus”. The story comes from a much later source. The poem itself names Augustus sparingly. Anchises points him out in the parade of Romans, “Caesar Augustus, a god’s son” (Book 6), and Vulcan puts him on the shield at Actium (Book 8).
At the centre of the praise Anchises tells the Roman to “lay down the law of peace, to be merciful to the conquered and beat the haughty down” (parcere subiectis et debellare superbos). Immediately after that come the dead Marcellus and an exit. There are two gates of Sleep, one of horn for true shades, the other of ivory by which “false visions issue upward”, and Anchises “dismisses them by the ivory gate” (Book 6). Why Virgil sends his hero out by the gate of false dreams, straight after the vision of Roman destiny, has never been settled.
The half-lines and the fire
The poem is not finished, and the marks show. Mynors’s Oxford text has 58 lines that stop short of a full hexameter. Some are striking: Hic cursus fuit, “Thither lay our course…” (Book 1), where the sense is complete; Italiam non sponte sequor, the excuse to Dido in Book 4, where a broken line seems perfect; and quem tibi iam Troia, “whom Troy’s…” (Book 3), which the ancient Life singles out as the one where the sentence itself breaks off. Readers are tempted to call them deliberate, and John Sparrow’s Half-Lines and Repetitions in Virgil (1931) is the standard study of the question. The Life says he propped some passages with temporary verse, joking that these held up the work “until the solid columns arrived”.
The same Life tells the end. In his last year he set off for Greece to spend three years revising, met Augustus at Athens, fell ill at Megara and died at Brindisi on 21 September 19 BC. He had asked Varius to burn the poem if anything happened to him, and Varius refused. Dying, he called for the scroll-cases to burn it himself, and nobody brought them. Varius and Tucca published it on Augustus’s authority, and the half-lines stayed as they were. The source is a fourth-century text drawing on a lost work by Suetonius, so none of this is certain. Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil (1945) makes it a crisis of faith in art.
The two voices
Older readers, from the imperial schoolroom to Richard Heinze and Viktor Pöschl, took the poem as an affirmation: order defeats fury, and suffering serves destiny. In 1963 Adam Parry published “The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid” in Arion, hearing a public voice of triumph and a private voice of regret. Wendell Clausen (1964), Michael Putnam’s The Poetry of the Aeneid (1965) and later W. R. Johnson’s Darkness Visible (1976) pushed the point further, in what came to be called the Harvard School, and R. O. A. M. Lyne’s Further Voices (1987) carried on. Their opponents, Karl Galinsky prominent among them, reply that this reads Vietnam-era unease into an Augustan text, and that Aeneas’s anger at the end would have looked just to a Roman.
The optimists are right that nothing in the poem suggests Rome should not have been founded. The pessimists are right that nearly every memorable passage is a lament. Both voices are Virgil’s. A poem that wanted simply to please the regime would not have ended the way this one does.
The ending
Turnus, wounded in the thigh, lifts his hand and yields in the last lines of Book 12. He does all that Anchises’ rule asks: “Thou art conqueror, and Ausonia hath seen me stretch conquered hands. Lavinia is thine in marriage; press not thy hatred farther” (ulterius ne tende odiis). And “Aeneas stood wrathful in arms, with rolling eyes, and lowered his hand”; the speech begins to work. Then he sees the belt of Pallas on Turnus’s shoulder. He “kindles to fury, and cries terrible in anger” (furiis accensus et ira), the vocabulary the poem has given to Juno and the Fury. “Pallas it is, Pallas who now strikes the sacrifice.” He drives the sword home, and the last line of the poem belongs to the dead: “the life with a moan flies indignantly into the dark” (vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras).
Virgil has used that exact Latin line once before, for Camilla in Book 11. Nothing follows it: no burial, no wedding, no city and no word from Aeneas. Compare the end of the Iliad, in which the killer gives back the body and two enemies eat together. Homer’s poem ends in pity, and the Roman one, with the law of mercy on record, ends with the founder doing what Achilles did to Hector. The killing may be justice for Pallas; it also fails what Anchises asked. That was intolerable enough that in 1428 Maffeo Vegio wrote a thirteenth book with the funeral and wedding, which was printed with Virgil’s text for generations.
Readers and afterlives
The Aeneid soon became the Latin schoolbook. Augustine confessed that as a boy he wept for Dido when he should have wept for himself. Dante made Virgil his guide through Hell and Purgatory and then lost him at the top. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas gave her the great lament, and Berlioz’s Les Troyens (composed 1856–58) turned Troy and Carthage into opera. Eliot’s “What Is a Classic?” (1944) called Virgil the classic of Europe. The poem can still be misused: the wall of the National September 11 Memorial Museum carries “No day shall erase you from the memory of time” in steel letters, from the passage in Book 9 where Virgil salutes Nisus and Euryalus, who had just killed sleeping enemies in a night raid. Mackail has “no length of days shall ever blot you from the memory of time”. Classicists objected.
Which translation
Project Gutenberg has several complete free versions. Dryden (1697) is the grand English one, but his rhymed couplets run to nearly 14,000 lines against Virgil’s 9,896, he fills the half-lines, and he inflates the end to “And the disdainful soul came rushing through the wound”. William Morris (1876) is mock-medieval and often hard to read. For a real reading:
- Robert Fagles (2006). Muscular and fast, with an introduction by Bernard Knox, and at times more excitable than Virgil.
- Robert Fitzgerald (1983). The most beautiful as an English poem, with the same grace as his Homer.
- Allen Mandelbaum (1971). Winner of a National Book Award, in blank verse.
- David Ferry (2017). Quiet iambic pentameter, made in his nineties and alert to the poem’s sorrow.
- Shadi Bartsch (2021). Close and clear, by a classicist.
- Also good. Sarah Ruden (2008), the first complete English version by a woman, keeps to the line count.
How to read it
Read next
- Homer, The Iliad (c. 750–650 BC). The model for the last six books and the measure of their ending.
- Homer, The Odyssey (c. 700 BC). The model for the first six, with a home to go back to.
- Dante, The Divine Comedy (c. 1320). The most devoted reader Virgil ever had.
- Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil (1945). His last hours and the question of the fire.
- Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia (2008). The silent bride tells the second half.