A Relook at Virgil's Aeneid

In the New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn writes about the reverence for Virgil's "very real achievement represented by one poem in particular: the Aeneid, a heroic epic in twelve chapters (or “books”) about the mythic founding of Rome." An excerpt from "Is the Aeneid a Celebration of Empire—or a Critique?":

Virgil had published other, shorter works before the Aeneid, but it’s no accident that the epic was a magnet for the fingers of the great and powerful who played the sortes vergilianae. Its central themes are leadership, empire, history, and war. In it, an upstanding Trojan prince named Aeneas, son of Venus, the goddess of love, flees Troy after its destruction by the Greeks, and, along with his father, his son, and a band of fellow-survivors, sets out to establish a new realm across the sea, in Italy, the homeland that’s been promised to him by divine prophecy. Into that traditional story Virgil cannily inserted a number of showstopping glimpses into Rome’s future military and political triumphs, complete with cameo appearances by Augustus himself—the implication being that the real-life empire arose from a god-kissed mythic past. The Emperor and his people alike were hooked: within a century of its author’s death, in 19 B.C., citizens of Pompeii were scrawling lines from the epic on the walls of shops and houses.

People haven’t stopped quoting it since. From the moment it appeared, the Aeneid was the paradigmatic classic in Western art and education; as one scholar has put it, Virgil “occupied the central place in the literary canon for the whole of Europe for longer than any other writer.” (After the Western Roman Empire fell, in the late fifth century A.D., knowledge of Greek—and, hence, intimacy with Homer’s epics—virtually disappeared from Western Europe for a thousand years.) Virgil’s poetry has been indispensable to everyone from his irreverent younger contemporary Ovid, whose parodies of the older poet’s gravitas can’t disguise a genuine admiration, to St. Augustine, who, in his “Confessions,” recalls weeping over the Aeneid, his favorite book before he discovered the Bible; from Dante, who chooses Virgil, l’altissimo poeta, “the highest poet,” as his guide through Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy, to T. S. Eliot...

Read it all here.