Here, as elsewhere, Virgil's main reason for constructing parallels to Homer, which he was no doubt certain his readers would identify and relish, was to add luster to the Aeneid as a latter-day epic appearing in another language more than seven centuries after his immensely prestigious, literary forebear. Virgil gives Homer's original incidents an import for the development of his own epic that is absent from the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Never far from his mind is his purpose of making the Aeneid a national epic discussed in the next essay , which neither of Homer's works were. Once we understand how Virgil adapted his borrowings from Homer for his own ends, we see how far he was from being a mere imitator of the great poet who preceded him. In the centuries that immediately followed the time of Homer, a number of epics of little quality were written that supplemented the information in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
These poems, known as the Cyclic Epics , describe the events of the Trojan War before and after the period covered by the Iliad and recount the additional adventures of other heroes besides Odysseus. Only fragments of these minor epics survive today, but scholars have a fairly good idea of their entire contents.
The Cyclic Epics provided Virgil with a wealth of mythological material, which he incorporated into the Aeneid in order to enrich his poem. The most important portions of the Aeneid to be drawn from these minor poems are the stories of the wooden horse and the sack of Troy, which are dramatically retold in Book II. For Greek tragedians who wrote in the fifth and fourth centuries B. Many playwrights dealt with incidents drawn from Homer or the Cyclic poets, and Virgil, being a scholar as well as an artist, was thoroughly acquainted with these dramatists, including Sophocles and Aeschylus.
The plays of the Greek dramatist Euripides especially influenced him, for Virgil possesses the same humanistic outlook and horror of war that Euripides was renowned for. Euripides's Trojan Women and Hecuba , which question one of the most pathetic situations of any war — the fate of noncombatants who, through no fault of their own, must suffer bitter hardships and endure the loss of home, family, pride, and country — must have been on Virgil's mind when he wrote about the fate of the Trojans in Book II.
By the third century B. Here, a school of poetry developed that is noted for its love of learning, literary decoration, and stylistic polish. Virgil and many of his Roman compatriots were deeply and permanently influenced by this school's methods. One of the most important poets of this period was Apollonius of Rhodes, who composed the Argonautica , an epic in four books that concerns the quest for the Golden Fleece.
A comparison of the romance of Jason and Medea in the Argonautica to that of Aeneas and Dido in the Aeneid , and the treatment of the gods in both poems clearly indicate Virgil's debt to Apollonius. Like most Romans, Virgil was subject to the sway of Greek culture and Greek philosophy.
For example, Plato, whose imaginative speculations concern the nature of the soul and its fate after death, influenced the Aeneid 's Book VI, in which Aeneas visits his father in the underworld. After meals, the bards are brought in to recite in poetic form the exploits of some hero, providing what we would call after-dinner entertainment.
It is especially interesting that Demodokos is blind, since Homer if such a person existed was reputed to be blind. In fact, bards in oral cultures tend not to be blind, but literate cultures assume that only blind people would be able to memorize so much poetry. Of course, as I explained in the chapter on The Iliad , we are not really talking about memorization but oral composition. Another thing that is important about the bards concerns Odysseus directly. While he is with the hospitable Phaiakians, in disguise, Demodokos tells a story about Odysseus.
That is, Odysseus has become a hero, the subject of heroic poetry, in his own lifetime. Odysseus, who has been cut off from society for so many years, is shocked to realize that he has become the stuff of legend.
So moved is he that he weeps again. What Homer has done here is to create a fascinating mirror effect, a meta-narrative: within a poem about Odysseus, we see the creation of a poem about Odysseus. Odysseus becomes the audience to his own story, just as we become the audience to this story, which, as it relates to human identity, to the vicissitudes of human existence, is also our story.
Finally, we see the honor that is paid to the bards. Poets love to write about the importance of poetry, naturally, and the poet might well be exaggerating the role of the bards, but it is clear that Demodokos is a respected member of the court who receives all sorts of special considerations.
And Phemios, who is accused of collusion with the suitors back in Ithaka, is given the benefit of the doubt and spared. Perhaps the poet is simply glorifying poets, but more likely what we see is how important poets were to the society that produced these poems.
I have tried to make this discussion of The Odyssey shorter and less detailed than the discussion of The Iliad , partly because reading The Iliad is itself a preparation for reading The Odyssey and partly because The Odyssey presents fewer problems for modern readers, who tend to be more familiar with romance than with epic. It still has cosmic overtones, but not to the same extent as The Iliad. He just wants to get home, to be with his wife and son and the loyal members of his household.
He, like Achilleus, is aware of the dark side of human life, and he knows after his visit to the Underworld that he is fated to go wandering yet again, but we all know that human happiness is fleeting. What The Odyssey confirms for us is that human happiness is a possibility that can be found in the mundane. Incidentally, for readers who really like The Odyssey , there are two modern works based on it that may be of interest. That last sentence can be a bit misleading, however.
It is easy for us to think of these three poems dating from antiquity as being almost contemporaneous, but we must remember that the Aeneid was written, that is, it was composed with pen and ink, between seven and eight hundred years after the other two were finally written down.
Eight hundred years is a relatively long time. Imagine if someone today wrote a series of laws to accompany the Magna Carta, which was written in So many things about our world have changed that it would seem silly to do so. Greece was no longer a major power though it was still a major influence , but Rome was in the process of becoming an empire.
Greek ideals had been transformed into Roman ideals. Oral culture had largely been replaced by written culture in many areas.
Ideas about heroism had changed. Even ideas about Troy had changed, since the Romans considered themselves descendants of Trojan warriors and could hardly be expected to feel sympathy for the Greeks, whom they were still in the process of displacing. So The Aeneid is a very different poem from its two most famous predecessors, even though in so many ways it is based on those earlier poems. Before we get to The Aeneid itself, a bit of history is in order.
In the third century BCE, a struggle began for control of the Mediterranean. The city that won this struggle would have the opportunity to develop great wealth and power. The contestants were Rome, a city that had developed prominence and power in Italy, and Carthage, a city in that part of North Africa that is now Tunisia.
In the three Punic Wars which took place over a span of one hundred twenty years Rome soundly defeated Carthage and was launched on its way toward become the empire that we know. But the road toward empire was not smooth, and the history of Rome in the first century BCE is the history of external conquests and internal power struggles.
After Brutus was defeated, there was further war between Antony and Octavian, until finally Octavian was victorious and established himself as Augustus, the sole ruler over what had become a vast empire. Under Augustus, relative peace broke out, order was restored to everyday life, and the arts flourished. Among the poets who wrote during the reign of Augustus were Horace, Ovid who was eventually exiled from Rome for having somehow offended the emperor , and, perhaps the greatest of all, Virgil.
These shepherds are eloquent, philosophical, and deeply concerned with issues that were vital to the developing empire. Actually, Virgil was using isolated country settings to confront important issues that concerned him throughout his life. The same is true, though even less directly, about his next work, The Georgics. But his greatest achievement was The Aeneid , on which he was still working when he died.
In fact, on his deathbed he is reputed to have asked that the manuscript be destroyed, though no one is quite sure why. One theory is that the poem was not finished—we can tell that it is unfinished because there are a number of lines that are metrically incorrect and it is likely that Virgil would have corrected them had he lived. Some readers also think that the poem stops without a conclusion, that it seems to end in the middle of an episode. Supposedly Virgil would have supplied a more appropriate conclusion had he lived.
As I will show, I agree with those who think that the poem ends exactly as it is supposed to end. Yet another possibility is that Virgil realized that the poem is not the unalloyed praise of the new empire that Augustus and other Romans expected. Certainly the poem does praise Rome and its emperor, but it also contains pointed warnings about what the empire could become. Virgil could see clearly enough that in the greatness of Rome lay the seeds of its destruction, and he tried to warn his contemporaries so that they could emphasize the good and guard against the flaws that were inherent in Rome.
Perhaps on his deathbed he worried about how that approach would be viewed. We simply do not know what he was thinking. We can only be thankful that his wishes were not carried out and the poem survived. Until relatively recently, when Latin ceased to be a required language for virtually anyone who claimed to be educated, The Aeneid was one of the most extensively read and influential poems in history.
Even if students did not love it, they read it. The Latin is relatively easy and the story is good. At times it was even a custom that when a person had a problem or an important decision to make, he it was usually a he would open The Aeneid at random and point to a line at random and then interpret that line as an answer to the problem.
Virgil continued to influence authors of epics or mock epics or near epics well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Why has this poem exercised such power for so long? As I already mentioned, it tells a good story, full of romance, adventure, and memorable scenes and characters.
Virgil may have used The Iliad and The Odyssey , but he gave them his own stamp. Thus Virgil has combined these two great poems to create his own masterpiece, but he has done so in order to explore in his own terms what it means to be a Roman, what it means to be Aeneas, what it means to be a human being.
The Aeneid , like The Odyssey , begins in the middle of the action, tells a bit of the story, and then goes back to the beginning of the story and continues to the end. After a brief introduction, we see Aeneas and his men caught in a storm at sea and shipwrecked at Carthage, where Aeneas meets Dido, tells her his story, falls in love with her, and then leaves a point to which we will return.
He visits the Underworld and then proceeds to Italy, where he becomes involved in a war to establish his right to stay there. That is the story. We have now to see what Virgil did with it.
From the very beginning, the narrator tells us that Aeneas is a remarkably good man who is being tormented by Juno. Throughout the poem, Juno, queen of the gods and goddess of marriage, stands for the irrational, the illogical, those aspects of the world that disrupt life without seeming to make any kind of sense.
Her husband Jove or Jupiter is her opposite, but, even though he is all-powerful, he often lets her have her own way. The other important deity in the poem is Venus, goddess of love, mother of Aeneas, and of special importance to Rome.
Roma, the Latin name of Rome, spelled backwards is Amor, the Latin for love! Unfortunately for Aeneas, Venus and Juno are deadly enemies, to the extent that goddesses can be deadly enemies. At any rate, they do not like each other. This enmity between the goddess of marriage and the goddess of love does tell us something about how the ancients regarded love and marriage: as we see in the poem, love and marriage are in no way connected.
Exactly why does Juno hate Aeneas? As we learn at the beginning of the poem, Juno feels a special affection for Carthage, and she knows that Aeneas is destined to establish Rome, which will overcome and displace Carthage. From a Roman point of view, her irrationality appears in two ways here: she irrationally favors Carthage over Rome and she irrationally believes that she can counter fate.
Thus The Aeneid , though it is about the triumph of Aeneas and of Rome, is ultimately a very sad work. As he moves toward his military triumph, Aeneas is forced to abandon everything that is important to him—love, family, friends, repose.
He becomes increasingly isolated and tied to his sense of duty, and he becomes less rounded, more one-dimensional. As the story progresses, Aeneas realizes that he has duties to carry out and those duties are more important than his own happiness. Those duties are presented most poignantly in two separate episodes. Having been surprised by the ruse of the Trojan horse, the Trojans are being routed by the Greek forces.
In the chaos created by the fire, fighting, and panic, Aeneas, who knows that the battle has been lost, becomes separated from his wife Creusa. When he tries to find her, he finds only her ghost, who briefly predicts his future and disappears. And when Aeneas finally does escape from Troy, he does so leading his young son by the hand and carrying his aged father on his back. In this sequence, we see first the beginning of the process by which Aeneas is gradually cut off from Troy and from family affection.
There is little from his past in Troy that he can take with him into this future. This point is emphasized by the image of him with his father and his son. He bears his father, symbol of the past, on his back, and leads his son, symbol of the future, by the hand. In a sense, he offers simply a connection between the past, Troy, and the future, Rome, and in that role he must continually become depersonalized, especially after the death of his father, when he himself becomes the symbol of both the past and the present.
Furthermore, his love for his wife, whom he seeks frantically in the falling city, shows him to be a passionate man who cares deeply for those around him, and his sorrow at losing her is quite moving.
We can see this point being carried further in the most famous episode of the poem, the story of Dido and Aeneas in Book IV. At first glance, Dido and Aeneas would seem to be a nearly perfect couple.
Both are powerful leaders, both have been exiled from their native lands, both have been widowed. Moreover, they like each other.
Unfortunately, there are a number of obstacles in their way, primarily fate—Dido is fated to found Carthage and Aeneas to found Rome. Juno and Venus, patron goddesses of those cities, try to outmaneuver each other in defense of their cities, and Dido and Aeneas are their victims.
These two tragic figures are allowed to fall in love because Juno hopes to keep Aeneas in Carthage, away from Rome, but the status of their love is highly ambiguous. When they go out hunting, they are trapped in a cave during a thunderstorm.
Archaeological evidence suggests that the myth of Aeneas was often depicted in art on the Italian mainland as early as the sixth century B. The settlement of Aeneas and the Trojans in Italy and their connection with the foundation of Rome entered the written tradition centuries after Homer, at the end of the third century B. After eleven years of composition, the meticulous Virgil did not consider the Aeneid fit for publication.
He planned to spend three years editing it, but fell ill returning from a trip to Greece. Just before his death on September 21, 19 B. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, his fame only grew.
In what became a Christian culture, Virgil was viewed as a pagan prophet because several lines in his works were interpreted as predictions of the coming of Christ. Among writers of the Renaissance, Virgil was appreciated for the fluidity of his rigorously structured poetry and his vivid portrayals of human emotion. Modern critics, on the other hand, have been less kind. The Aeneid shares with the Iliad and the Odyssey a tone of ironic tragedy, as characters act against their own wishes, submit their lives to fate, and often meet dark ends.
Most scholars agree that Virgil distinguished himself within the epic tradition of antiquity by representing the broad spectrum of human emotion in his characters as they are subsumed in the historical tides of dislocation and war.
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