The Aeneid (2 page)

The poems that set the benchmark for all future epics were Homer’s
Iliad
, the story of Achilles at the siege of Troy, and his
Odyssey
, the story of Odysseus’ wanderings and homecoming from Troy to his native Ithaca. The first words of the
Aeneid
are ‘I sing of arms and of the man…’ (
arma virumque cano
). Since the
Iliad
is the epic of war, and the first word in the
Odyssey
is ‘man’, Virgil has begun by announcing that he is writing an epic in the Homeric style. The ‘man’ is Aeneas, the legendary first founder of Rome, who escaped from the sack of Troy and wandered the seas for six years looking for a place to found a new city. The ‘arms’ are the battles he fought at the fall of Troy as described in the second book of the
Aeneid
and also, in the last four books, the war he fought against the Latin peoples as he tried to establish his city in Italy.

Aeneas was victorious. He founded his city of Lavinium and ruled it for three years. After thirty years his son Ascanius
Iulus
, moved from Lavinium to Alba Longa, where the Alban kings ruled for three hundred years, until the birth of Romulus and Remus. It was Romulus, son of the priestess
Ilia
and Mars, who founded the city of Rome and gave it its name in 753
BC
, according to the traditional dating. When Virgil was writing the
Aeneid
in the twenties
BC
, Rome was ruled by Augustus, the adopted son of
Julius
Caesar. The
Julian
family, therefore, still
ruled Rome, and in describing how Aeneas, father of the
Julians
, suffered in founding his city, Virgil is paying tribute to the contemporary Julian in his palace on the Palatine Hill in Rome.

For six years Aeneas and the remnants of his people were driven across the Mediterranean by the anger of the goddess Juno, and yet as early as the tenth line of the poem we learn that Aeneas had done no wrong, but on the contrary was famous for his piety. This introduces the divine machinery which so enriches the poem. At a lowly level it unfolds the comedy of manners of the divine family. But more seriously, it raises insoluble problems about the relationship between man and god, between Juno, queen of the gods, and Jupiter their king, and between ineluctable Fate and the will of omnipotent Jupiter; and, crucially, about the function of the will of human beings whom the gods seem to control and, when they wish, destroy. ‘Can there be so much anger in the hearts of the heavenly gods?’ asks Virgil in the eleventh line of the
Aeneid
, and the poem is, among other things, a meditation on that problem, which, in one formulation or another, is still with us.

When the narrative begins after a short preamble, the Trojan ships are caught in a storm and driven ashore on the Syrtes. These were sandbanks on the north coast of Africa, east of the new city of Carthage, just founded by Phoenicians who had come from Sidon on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Venus sees this and with tears flooding her eyes pleads with her father, Jupiter, to put an end to her son’s suffering and to honour his promise that Aeneas would live to found the Roman race. Jupiter smiles at his daughter and assures her that his will has not changed. Romulus, son of Ilia (and therefore a Julian), will indeed found the city of Rome and give his name to his people, on whom will be imposed no limits of time or space. And in time to come another Julian will conquer the world and give it peace. Praise of Augustus thus appears in a prophecy of the king of the gods, uttered a millennium before Augustus was born.

Venus descends in disguise, teases her son, wraps him in a mist of invisibility and guides him to Carthage. There he gazes at the new temple of Juno with its representations of the Trojan War including a depiction of himself in the confusion of battle, and weeps to see that all men knew what Troy had suffered. ‘Here too,’ he says, ‘there are tears for suffering and men’s hearts are touched by what man has to bear’ (462) (
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt
). Dido then arrives and Aeneas sees the comrades whom he had assumed to be drowned coming to ask her assistance. When she responds graciously, Venus dissolves the cloud in which she has concealed Aeneas, and Dido and Aeneas meet.

The book ends with a description of the banquet which Dido gives in honour of her Trojan guests. But Venus suspects that Juno, the goddess of Carthage, may do her son some mischief while he is in the city. To protect him she decides to make Dido love him, and effects this by sending her rascally young son Cupid to drive her insane with love. As the men drink their wine, the doomed queen begs Aeneas to tell the story of the fall and sack of his city.

The
Aeneid
tells the tale of a legendary hero, but it also casts a long shadow over a thousand years of Roman history. Rome’s greatest danger had been the three Punic Wars fought against Carthage from 264 to 146
BC
, in the second of which Hannibal had destroyed Roman armies and overrun the Italian peninsula. The end came in 146
BC
when Carthage was razed to the ground and ploughed with salt. The first and fourth books of the
Aeneid
contain pre-echoes of that traumatic conflict. We sense the dramatic irony as Aeneas describes in such detail the building of Carthage – ‘
Their
walls are already rising!’ he says enviously (437). We know that his Romans were to destroy them. When Aeneas offers Dido his heartfelt gratitude and promises that she will be praised for all time in every land to which he is called,
we know that his descendants will destroy, not praise, her descendants. When she prays that her people should always remember the day of the banquet, we know how they will remember it, and as she invokes kindly Juno, the goddess of marriage and of Carthage, we know that the goddess of Carthage will use a false marriage to destroy its queen.

This book takes the form of a flashback, as Aeneas tells the banqueters the story of the fall of Troy. The Greeks had erected a huge wooden horse and persuaded the Trojans to drag it into the city. In the dead of night Greek soldiers pour from the horse and open the gates to their comrades. The Trojans put up a fierce but hopeless resistance, and Aeneas escapes from the city with his father and his son.

After ten years of hard fighting around Troy, the Greeks act as though they are giving up the siege. They build a huge wooden horse outside the walls, fill it with their best soldiers and sail away, pretending that it is an offering for their safe return to Greece. But they go only as far as the offshore island of Tenedos and leave Sinon behind to persuade the Trojans to take the horse into the city. Laocoon, the priest of Neptune, warns the Trojans not to trust the Greeks. ‘I am afraid of Greeks,’ he says, ‘even when they bear gifts’ (49). But Sinon appears and the Trojans are persuaded. This speech of Sinon’s is at once an exposé of the decadence of contemporary Greeks in Roman eyes, and a satire on the corruption of ancient rhetoric, a satire sharpened by several interjections by a naive and gullible audience. (The nearest thing in English is Antony’s funeral oration in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
with the inane interjections of the crowd.) Once again Laocoon protests, but the gods are against the Trojans. Two serpents come out of the sea and kill the priest of Neptune and his two sons. The Trojans breach their walls and drag in the horse.

In all of this book Virgil has a difficulty. His hero is the leading Trojan warrior and he has survived the sack of his city. Since Aeneas himself is speaking, he cannot blatantly advertise his own courage, but at every point in his speech Virgil is careful to give him words which leave no possibility that he could be thought guilty of cowardice or even of misjudgement. The first example of this is that Aeneas is not said to be one of the Trojans who ignored the warnings of Laocoon or were duped by Sinon. He does not enter the stage until a third of the way through the book, when Hector, appearing to him as he sleeps, tells him that Troy is doomed and orders him, as only Hector could, to abandon Troy and carry its gods to a new city across the sea. Ignoring these orders, Aeneas plunges into a hopeless battle where the only safety for the defeated is to hope for none. A few Trojans gather around him and they try the stratagem of carrying Greek shields emblazoned with Greek insignia. But although this wins them their only moment of success, the leader in this dubious tactic is not Aeneas, not even a Trojan, but Coroebus, who had arrived in Troy only a few days before. Inevitably their ruse is detected and they are overwhelmed. Aeneas is swept by the tide of battle to the palace of King Priam, the last centre of resistance. Here he joins the few surviving Trojans on the roof in levering down a tower, and rolling beams and gilded ceilings down on the heads of the Greeks. From there he sees Priam’s wounded son, Polites, come rushing into the palace pursued by Pyrrhus and die at his father’s feet. Aged as he is, Priam challenges Pyrrhus and is killed. Here we might have asked why Aeneas saw this and lived to tell the tale. We might have asked why Aeneas did not come down off the roof and try to avenge his king. Virgil has forestalled that thinking by the very next words of Aeneas: ‘There came into my mind the image of my own dear father, as I looked at the king who was his equal in age breathing out his life with that cruel wound. There came into my mind also my wife Creusa…and the fate of young Iulus’ (560–63). His divine mother now strips the
mortal mist from his eyes and shows him a fearful vision of the Olympian gods tearing his city apart. Resistance now would be absurd. Venus escorts him to his home and he asks his father to leave Troy with him. Anchises refuses. In despair, Aeneas puts on his armour again and is rushing out to die in battle when fire is suddenly seen playing around Iulus’ head. As
paterfamilias
, father and priest of the family, Anchises prays to the gods for confirmation of the portent, and they see a star falling from the sky and ploughing its fiery path on Mount Ida. Anchises accepts the will of the gods and agrees to leave the city.

At this moment, the beginning of the history of Rome, Aeneas lifts his father up on his shoulders, takes his son in his left hand and his sword in his right, and with Creusa walking behind he passes through the burning city, starting at every breath of wind. When they gather with a few other fugitives outside the walls there comes what for Aeneas was the cruellest thing he saw in all the sack of the city. Creusa is lost. He girds on his armour and rushes back into the captured city calling out her name at the top of his voice. Creusa appears to him and assures him that it is not the will of the gods that she should stay with him. She has no part to play in the great future that lies before him. Aeneas is to go with her blessing and never fail in his love for their son.

Aeneas has done all that a man could do. He goes back to the tattered remains of the people of Troy, hoists his father on to his shoulders and leads the way into the mountains.

The flashback continues as Aeneas now gives an account of the wanderings of the Trojans after the fall of their city. After six years of hardship and failure, guided and misguided by prophecies and dreams, they arrive at Epirus in north-west Greece and are welcomed by another group of Trojan refugees, the priest-king Helenus and his wife, Andromache, once the wife of Hector. They had built a small-scale replica of Troy, but that was never going to be the solution for Aeneas, whose
destiny was to found a great new city. Aeneas and his little fleet set sail again, and as they approach Sicily they follow the directions of Helenus and veer away south to circumnavigate it rather than go through the strait guarded by Scylla and Charybdis. At last they put in at Drepanum on the north-west tip of the island, where Anchises dies. So, at the banquet given by Dido, Aeneas ends his story of the fall of Troy.

Dido now loves Aeneas and Juno arranges a kind of marriage in order to keep him with Dido and prevent him from founding the city which was fated to destroy her beloved Carthage. Jupiter reminds Aeneas of his destiny and orders him to leave Dido. She senses that he is going to abandon her and builds a great pyre, ostensibly to cure herself of love by burning the relics of Aeneas’ stay. She curses Aeneas, calls upon her Carthaginians to wage eternal war against his people and dies in the flames.

This book has gripped the imagination of readers for two millennia as a love story and as such it needs little comment. Part of its power may come from the eternal questions it raises and does not answer: the suffering of the innocent and the deceived, the conflict between love and duty, and the relationship between free will and irresistible fate.

The case against Dido could not be put more harshly than she puts it herself in her first speech and at line 552. When her husband died, she swore an oath that she would never love another man, and broke it to love Aeneas. Against that self-condemnation a substantial defence could be erected. Would it not be inhuman to hold a wife to such an oath taken in the moment of bereavement? It would certainly be harsh to condemn her to death for breaking it. Would any widow be condemned for marrying again? Certainly not in Virgil’s Rome. This case can be supported by the personal and political arguments in favour of marriage put so persuasively by Dido’s own sister.

But the clinching consideration is probably the unscrupulous cynicism of the two goddesses who engineer Dido’s destruction for their own ends. To protect her son Aeneas, Venus has already driven Dido into madness. Now, to block his destiny to found a city, Juno proposes that Aeneas should settle in Carthage as Dido’s husband. Venus, the daughter of Jupiter, has already been told by Jupiter himself that all this is totally contrary to his will, but she dissembles and urges Juno, the wife of Jupiter, to go and put this proposal to her husband. The two shrews play out their charade, each pursuing her own ends. Juno sets up a false marriage with herself as matron of honour, nymphs howling the wedding hymn and the fires of heaven’s lightning instead of marriage torches. The powerless human being is crushed between two goddesses.