Virgil’s War and Peace

“Two millennia later, we are still warring over the meaning of Virgil’s Aeneid.”

Arma virumque cano (Of arms and the man I sing). So opens Virgil’s Aeneid, Rome’s grandiose epic of a Trojan exile fated by the gods to sojourn across the Mediterranean, sow the seeds of Rome’s rivalry with Carthage, and begin the conquest of the Italian Peninsula and plant the spear that would forge the eternal city. For much of Western history, Virgil’s Aeneid was the epic; in fact, T.S. Eliot called it “our classic.” The classics, of course, have fallen on hard times, especially Virgil. Is it an epic of unadulterated propaganda to the Augustan regime? Or is it something subtler, even noble, intoxicating, and alluring? Two millennia later, we are still warring over the meaning of Virgil’s Aeneid.

It is often said that history is written by the victors. Only people who do not know history assert this. Demosthenes was a loser; he organized the Athenian and Theban alliance against Philip II of Macedon and lost, but his speeches have been preserved by posterity, and he remains the indispensable voice of late fourth century ancient Greece. We can even go as far as to say that Plato was a loser, and he wrote the most enduring corpus of Greek literature we have; Plato was no friend of Athenian democracy, and his teacher, Socrates, was condemned to death (yet we remember Socrates and not the men who sentenced him to death). Plato, moreover, was a failed political advisor, yet we still read him as an authoritative voice in political philosophy.

Virgil was the undisputed poet laureate of Rome. Four hundred years after his death, a young Saint Augustine informed his readers in the Confessions that he was, as a young student, educated in the poetry of Virgil and wept for Dido while oblivious to the cries of his own soul as a lusty teenager. While Virgil is the most famous of the Augustan poets, another poet named Horace had served as an officer in the armies of Brutus and Cassius that were defeated at Philippi. Horace, of course, wrote a lot too, even though he was on the losing side. The greatest source of the republic’s declination is the greatest loser of them all: Cicero.