[REVIEW] The Aeneid by Virgil
"Why waste time with talk when the wind is rising?" (3.565)
Along with about 20 other books in between, I read The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid in under three months. Why the fuck did I do that. Because of this unnecessary hubris, I will admit that, by the time I eventually got to Virgil, I was quite worn out from reading Graeco-Roman epics. Thus, I’m highly aware that I didn’t start this poem with the most ideal circumstances, nor did I really prepare myself adequately to tackle it for my first try like I did with Homer’s two poems. I know pretty much everyone does this -- prioritize Homer over Virgil, who is branded as “the worse” between the two -- but at least I’m aware of the fact that how I went about reading them is more a reflection of my literary biases and preferences, rather than an indicator of the so-called infallible Western canonical hierarchy that doesn’t even exist.
Someday I hope I can revisit The Aeneid with a more well-informed perspective and knowledge basis, but for now my poor memories of my four years of high school Latin are the best tools I have for this endeavour. I know the basics of ancient Roman mythology and some of its history -- the Punic Wars, crossing the Rubicon, horny Mark Antony with Cleopatra, MVP Caesar Augustus, Hannibal and his elephants, mad Caligula with his horse whom he tried to appoint to state power, Constantine accepting Christianity but never really converting, and whatnot. Et cetera, as the Romans would say. I’d also read Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s The Divine Comedy (all three parts) beforehand, so it wasn’t like I was midway upon the journey of life and found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. (Heh).
I received my copies of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid in a boxed triplet Deluxe Edition set by Penguin Classics, which ironically attests to how often Virgil gets compared to Homer. Chronologically and historically, Homer’s epics come first in the grand tale that begins with Troy and is capped in The Aeneid, suggesting not just their seniority, but superiority. After having read all three (in order), I’m not original in my findings and do agree that Homer’s two poems were more enjoyable. I liked Virgil (and Aeneas) the least compared to Hector and Odysseus, but I know it’s because I was constantly making unfair comparisons while reading that, though leaning on the prejudiced side, were still influenced by a heavy longstanding tradition of doing just that: Pitting Homer versus Virgil, with an obvious (and perhaps inevitable) winner. (I’m also just not a big fan of Rome and the Roman Empire. Conjugating verbs in Latin and trying to differentiate between the nominative, genitive, accusative, and dative leaves you with many a lasting scar that sort of sours your view on the Romans).
I saw a lot of reviews slandering The Aeneid for being “Homer fanfiction,” which is already insulting in and of itself (to some degree, most -- if not all -- literature is “fanfiction”), but I was shocked to see that, on top of it being a commonly cited and validated grievance, many have also deliberately chosen to take this fact as evidence of the poem’s actual literary merit, which is crazy. The Aeneid and its poet have stood the test of millenia for a reason, and to constantly measure its worth according to its predecessors (and even contemporaries!) is plain boring. While reading, I knew I couldn’t avoid my own personal unconscious biases and comparisons to Ovid, Dante, and Homer, but I made a notable effort to take The Aeneid as it was without basing my overall opinion on it solely on intertextuality.
History records that Virgil wrote The Aeneid for two main purposes: One is to restore the faith among fellow Romans in the "greatness of Rome" during a time of great political strain and upheaval; the second reason is to legitimize the Caesar bloodline (as represented by Augustus) to the Roman throne by establishing a solid, uncontested mythical history that can be traced back to Aeneas, and by extent Dardanus, the founder of Troy. To achieve these patriotic goals, Virgil picks up the Trojan hero-turned-refugee Aeneas, who is a character in The Iliad, and weaves a tale of how he became the founding father of future Roman rulers. Constructed as a sequel to The Iliad (and kind of a spin-off from The Odyssey, since events from that poem are also alluded to), Aeneas and his family’s story tells of a quest to find a new home for themselves after surviving the savage destruction of Troy by the Greeks: "My comrades, hardly strangers to pain before now, / we all have weathered worse. Some god will grant us / an end to this as well. . . . / . . . Call up your courage again. Dismiss your grief and fear. / A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this. / . . . Bear up. / Save your strength for better times to come" (1.232-244).
After many denotatively classic adventures that directly parallel Odysseus’ trials and tribulations (with some twists like making Neptune/Poseidon be the solution to Aeneas’ difficulties navigating the tricky waters of the Mediterranean, rather than its source like in Homer), the exiled Trojans seek out the country where “fate” tells them to find a new empire: “Even here. Merit will have its true reward … / even here, the world is a world of tears / and the burdens of mortality touch the heart” (1.557-559). They turn from aimless migrants to dominating usurpers of power and fight a bloody (Trojan-like) war to finally declare themselves victors over the area which will become known as Rome, or Italy. Aeneas’ son Iulius/Iulus (named after Ilium), becomes Julius Caesar’s ancestor, thereby authenticating Augustus Caesar’s reign because, through Aeneas, he becomes a descendant of not just Romulus and Remus (the original founders of Rome), but the one who set the very foundations for Latium in the first place.
Having drawn his hero from Homer, Virgil also predictably draws his influence from Homer. As Robert Fagles states in his translator’s postscript:
“For Virgil’s performance in Latin is a reperformance of the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek, a ‘Homerization’ of the legendary past of Rome . . . Virgil presents an Odyssey of wandering in the first half of the Aeneid and an Iliad of warfare in the second. And as others have continued the analogy . . . the Odyssean half of Virgil’s epic has many Iliadic elements: Aeneas’ narrative of the fall of Troy, and the funeral games for Anchises, and the return of many Trojan figures, some still alive, like Andromache and Helenus, and several more as ghosts. Similarly, the second, Iliadic half of the Aeneid has many Odyssean elements, chief among them perhaps the objective of the warfare waged: not to destroy an enemy capital but to found one’s own, or as a later idiom would have it, to ‘win home’ to the promised city, Rome.”
Fagles emphasizes this idea of (re)claiming and winning a “home” through Aeneas’ arrival in Italy, as it has many similarities to the Odyssean concept of nostos, or returning to a homeland.
The Aeneid in all sense is a structural mixture of Homer’s two epics, and Virgil is not only all too aware of where his inspirations come from; he also outwardly flaunts it. Out of the twelve books in the poem, the first six tell the story of Aeneas’ desperate wanderings and the many Herculean trials he faces in his voyage to Italy. To me, the overlap was the most staggering in the first half, since characters like Polyphemus, Scylla, and Charybdis from The Odyssey made grand, almost unserious reappearances. Andromache, Hector’s wife, also makes a cameo, as well as Helen of Sparta and even Achilles in the Underworld section (the pre-Dantean Inferno). (There are even some more comic parts that echo Homer’s sense of humor and ridiculousness, like the random killing of Palinurus, who is used as a sacrifice in exchange for Aeneas and his crew’s safe passage into the Kingdom of the Dead. His fate was particularly funny because of how brutally unfair it was: The gods, seemingly without any sort of rationale aside from the fact that they’re chaotic haters, force him to pass out, so he can’t even fight back when the sleep god violently hurls him off the ship and he dies. Bruh).
The next six books, reminiscent of The Iliad, portray intense warfare: The fight between the now-exiled Trojans and the Rutulians for the throne of Italy and the royal bride Lavinia (it’s literally Trojan War II). The second half in Italy is more human-oriented, and I was impressed with the visual quality of Virgil's composition. Like in The Iliad, you could envision the numberless hordes of men savagely fighting as they poured in from all sides of the peninsula: “[D]o the gods light this fire in our hearts / or does each man’s mad desire become his god?” (9.219-220). Heads and limbs are viciously chopped off; stomachs are pierced, dislodged, and quartered; groins and other erogenous zones are stabbed clean through; there are unforeseen eruptions of vomit and other nasty bodily fluids, horses’ guts spraying on the ground, and, last but not least, murder of the innocent. Lovely, lovely carnage complete with a cast of demigod and divinely-related characters to show off themes of heroism and honor because “[n]o gods force us on — / we’re mortals, harried by mortal enemies. / They have as many hands and lives as we” (10.441-444). Yadda, yadda. (The more austere atmosphere in the second half didn’t totally lack in humor though; the second-to-last book with Carmilla, an Amazonian warrior favored by Artemis herself, was highly entertaining. Doomed yuri on MY Trojan battlefield?! I didn’t have that in Homer!)
All of these obvious allusions to The Iliad and The Odyssey, as well as many changes and additions made to the current text, were deliberate narrative tactics Virgil used to serve his own ends. Many critics have condemned The Aeneid for being state propaganda, but that attributes guilt to a crime Virgil didn’t even think he was committing. Yes, The Aeneid is state propaganda. Duh. As one reviewer put it, “Openly, proudly so! Many others have condemned it for connecting strongly to other epic poems of the Ancient world . . . Of course it does. Openly, proudly so!”
Let’s be real: Roman culture is essentially a direct copy and paste of earlier Greek achievements. Their version of Olympus is mostly identical, just renamed, so it’s strange that people expected Rome’s greatest poet to be any different. Another reviewer says, “The [preceding] Greek culture has been widely exploited to establish a tradition of unbroken rule and lawful power in Europe, and the Aeneid is an early example of fiction supporting the dynastic claims of a whole people. Whenever empires rise and are in need of legitimacy, they make sure to incorporate literature, art, and other cultural achievements of suppressed or defeated powers, thus creating a fictitious historical connection that justifies their claims to greatness and world dominance.” Virgil was one of the first writers to capitalize on antiquarian legends to justify the idea of a state, making him the forefather of our modern nations and the narratives we’ve built around them. Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and even modern-day America constantly appropriated Greek and Roman mythologies to uphold their own regimes; Virgil just got the ball rolling. The Aeneid is a perfect example of a dramatic shift of imperial power and education from one great dynasty to another. You can really see the points at which the Graeco-Roman spheres blend and diverge in the places Virgil adapts and reimagines Homer’s epics. (All roads lead to Rome, eh?)
Yet, while imitating Homer, Aeneas is meant to emulate his poems’ best features whilst also surpassing them in passion and artistic expression -- not to mention historymaking (Bernard Knox’s section “History” in his Introduction delves into this notion very well, claiming Virgil’s “constant reference to history, in particular to Roman history,” is what sets The Aeneid apart from Homer’s two epics, so I highly recommend checking it out). It’s also commonly accepted that Aeneas is portrayed more like a sympathetic human than the superheroes Hector, Achilles, and Odysseus. (That doesn’t make him the more interesting alternative though. I personally found him to be a yawn fest). Virgil specifically highlighted Aeneas’ inner dilemmas, flaws, and sadboy angst to display a humanistic connection to him and Augustus, implying that Rome did indeed come from legendary beginnings, but now that it’s a bit more developed and grown up we can have these complex things called feelings and philosophical inquiries to universal meaning. By displaying Aeneas as “in the round, not as the distillation but the sum of all his parts,” as Fagles puts it, Virgil shows that Roman civilization and culture, which is (allegedly) rooted in rationality, ethics, and brotherhood, directly resulted and has since improved from these events. Unlike Achilles and Odysseus, Aeneas has a bit more compassion and worldliness about him that fleshes out his character beyond the prototypical ideal of a Greek warrior: "Be kind, whoever you are, relieve our troubled hearts. / Under what skies and onto what coasts of the world / have we been driven?" (1.401-403). He even says, "Schooled in suffering, now I learn to comfort / those who suffer too" (1.751-752) and “I know in my soul I don’t deserve to suffer” (2.183). (Do you, though?) In many ways, Aeneas was kind of the first Byronic hero. His peculiarities and moralistic depth give him a novel flavour that would’ve made Virgil’s readers feel both at home and familiar while also proud of how far they, as Romans, had come from their Greek/Trojan origins.
The entire poem is a very impressive use of political mythmaking and not, as many say, mere fanfiction or a cheap imitation of Homer. Fagles cites scholar Grandsen: “Rome became in due time the new Troy, risen like the phoenix from the ashes of the destroyed city of Priam; indeed in the perspective of history the fall of Troy could be seen as the necessary precursor of the rise of Rome, and the whole mighty sequence as part of a divine plan, the working out of fate.” Knox adds, “The death agonies of Troy are the birthpangs of Rome.” Virgil thus constructs an elegant (and violent) chain reaction that binds together The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid together. He didn’t simply copy Homer; he put himself on the shelf right next to him and he profited off of it! Absolute madlad. Unprecedented levels of audacity. Extreme political savviness in having the balls to just make shit up and have Caesar Augustus pay you to do it. (Granted, The Aeneid has many problems and inconsistencies because Virgil died before he could finish the poem; he requested his manuscript be destroyed afterwards but Augustus said fuck respecting your wishes and honestly thank goodness he did because otherwise we wouldn’t have preserved such an important piece of literary history). I think everyone who undersells The Aeneid as second-rate fanfiction or simplistic propaganda is just jealous of what Virgil’s achieved.
True, the Roman poem may not hold as unbeatable a reputation as Homer’s two epics (nothing else really holds a candle to them anyway), but the making of classics is not a competition: “Each man has his day, and the time of life / is brief for all, and never comes again. / But to lengthen out one’s fame with action, / that’s the work of courage” (10.553-556). Virgil knew he was composing his and Rome’s legacy, and that kind of simultaneously defiant fortitude against oblivion as well as humble consignment to history demands respect -- not to mention a wide, ongoing readership that spans both space and time, and shall most definitely continue to do so.
Briefly, I want to discuss Dido, because, out of everything else, what Virgil truly mirrored from Homer was his misogyny. (Patriarchy is timeless). Many have pointed out how Dido’s a textbook example of an objectified and eroticized feminine ideal written to narratively uplift her male counterparts and the story’s male protagonist at the cost of her own autonomy: When Aeneas meets Dido, Virgil asks, "What good are prayers and shrines to a person mad with love?" (4.83), which tries to portray the double-edged sword of duty and self-interest because Aeneas is eventually “forced” to abandon her to find Latium. Like when Odysseus leaves Calypso, we’re supposed to feel bad that their love story was aborted by destiny and fate, which I completely understand in a thematic sense, but Virgil did not have to make Dido suffer that much. Her death was almost horror-movie levels of gory torture pornography. Even Homer didn’t agonizingly kill off Calypso, Andromache, Briseis, Helen, or Penelope, but Virgil really wanted to get in his disturbingly graphic manic pixie dream girl suicide subplot.
Sure, Aeneas didn’t really have much choice, but the entire episode had such an exaggeratedly sexist tone to it that I ceased to root for Aeneas after it happened. There’s a difference between being helpless to fate and just being irresponsible and sloppy. Many men follow this same line of logic and use the same excuses to dodge accountability. Aeneas didn’t even try to be different; he knew he’d get his glory eventually, he just wanted some Carthaginian pussy to-go that he could toss away once he’d jizzed his load. Really, the entire business with Dido was just annoying. She’s the widowed queen of her people and has been through hell and back, only to be reduced to Aeneas’ literal tragic sidepiece: A wailing and self-mutilating hysteric wreck who, yes, sprinkles in a spicy little curse on the Roman people before she dies (thus explaining why Rome and Carthage have historically not been besties), but her death really was so awful. It’s also crazy how Aeneas just gets to sail away while she’s killing herself, thinking, “What could light such a conflagration A mystery --” (5.6). (Hm! I wonder what those ominous immolating fires could possibly mean! Oh, so he’s stupid). Then, to add salt to the wound, we just start playing Olympic games the second we find land (not for Dido, but for Aeneas’ dad, who died earlier) because fuck women amirite. Man, I read that part and wondered how I was supposed to still like Aeneas. My opinion of him never recovered. When he saw Dido again reunited with her first husband in the Underworld and she snubbed him, I was cheering very loud. I wish she got to claw Aeneas’ eyes out, but I take my wins where I get them.
The ending, of course, demands a few comments from me. It’s a conclusion that many find problematic, subversive, and outright bizarre. One reviewer said,
“Even if Aeneas had granted Turnus mercy, the book ending [without] a coda would have felt abrupt, but the sudden heat for vengeance for Pallas (reminiscent of Achilles and Hector) jarred me. Pallas doesn't feel important enough a character to warrant this kind of ending . . . but it felt authentic to Aeneas. Sometimes in writing, when things are going well, the character moves organically. They do something they're not supposed to. I know that this turn is set-up earlier in The Aeneid, but it still felt like an extremely organic moment. We've been questioning Aeneas's character throughout the book . . . Again, here, at the end, he is back in Troy. A legacy of war and pain.”
Yes, the ending seems to privilege fate above all else, like a tautology: Like Hector and the suitors, Turnus has to die, so Aeneas has to kill him; and even if Turnus begs for mercy like Priam asked Achilles to surrender Hector’s body, it won't matter, because fate is privileged above god and man. Troy must fall. Turnus has to die for Aeneas’ story to end; the second he dies, we fade to postmodernist black. (Maybe Virgil was ahead of his time). In that sense, I believe the ending is quite fitting, but I also understand people’s many misgivings with it. The poem is cut off quite abruptly, as if Virgil was trying to reverse in medias res the ending just like how he put us in the middle of things at the start. But this narrative awkwardness is easily explained by the fact that the poet suddenly died in the middle of writing, hence why so much of The Aeneid feels open-ended and unedited.
Even so, we can still take this ending at face value like Fagles does:
“[I]n his climactic action — killing Turnus — Aeneas resembles, at one and the same moment, an Achilles avenging the death of a cherished comrade, a Hector defending his homeland successfully, and an Odysseus winning his rightful bride by killing her suitor, reclaiming his kingdom, and laying the groundwork for its future. And Aeneas’ range of Homeric roles within the Aeneid reflects his possible roles in later history as well. For he prefigures, in his tenuous way, Romulus the founder and Augustus the first emperor of Rome, and as some may see the ancient hero, a modern hero in the making.”
More than Knox’s introduction, Fagles’ postscript in my edition summarized my feelings with this ending very aptly. He goes on to say, “[Aeneas] is both deprived and empowered, a lost and a latent hero, too late to impersonate Achilles or Odysseus fully, too early to live within Augustus’ promised reign. Aeneas will live, in fact, only three years after his marriage to Lavinia, and so he will die 330 years before the founding of Rome. Cut short as he is, however, it seems a hopeful sign that his arrival at the site should fall one calendar day before Augustus’ triumph a thousand years thereafter . . . Even at the end of the poem, the hero remains a work in progress, and for Virgil to pretend otherwise would be too comforting, too pat and absolute.” Quite honestly, I read The Aeneid at a particularly hopeless time in my life. I do not know how long this despondency will last, or if it even has an expiration date, but I found a quiet solace in Aeneas’ story, “for it concerns a future still unfolding, even now,” as Fagles says. Just as Virgil illustrated a reprieve for lost and confused souls caught up in the scattered moral debris before the Fall of the Colossus that was the Roman Empire, he also managed to give me in 2026 a sense of reassurance in existential continuity. Even the end is never the end, and that’s both the cruellest truth and also the most beautiful thing -- certainly to someone in my pathetic position. If anything, finally getting to read this famous poem, as well as its two Homeric predecessors, Ovid, and Dante, gives me an undeniable sense of literary camaraderie, which diminishes the cosmic loneliness, even just a little.
