Virgil's Aeneid: Creation, Content, Context

Aven recommends the following translations of the Aeneid:

Scott McGill and Susannah Wright - available here in the UK and here in the US

Sarah Ruden - available here in the UK and here in the US

Shadi Bartsch - available here in the UK

Robert Fagles - available here in the UK and here in the US

Allen Mandelbaum - available here in the US

(the podcast receives a commission from every purchase made via these links, as well as supporting independent bookshops.)

Episode transcript:

So let's get straight into our episode today with our guest expert. Would you please like to introduce yourself?

Hi, my name is Aven McMaster. I have a background as a PhD in Classics and I was a professor of ancient studies for 15 years at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. And my field of interest was Latin poetry and over time, partly because of my teaching, developed an interest as well in sex and gender in the ancient world and in reception, culture, in particular, sci-fi and speculative fiction. I am no longer teaching, so now I'm a government employee, which is not particularly relevant to this conversation, except insofar that I don't get to geek out about this kind of stuff as much as I used to anymore. And so it's very exciting to be here to be able to talk about it. And I also have for quite a long time been co-hosted up in my own podcast with my partner and we also work on YouTube videos on the history of language. So my podcast, I should say that, my podcast is the Endless Knot Podcast and our YouTube video channel is Alliterative and Endless Knot. We have terrible, terrible time branding anything so all the names are all mixed up. And now I live in Ottawa in Canada. I think that's everything you need to know.

We will be linking your podcast below because everyone should be listening to that as well. And it sounds like you're the perfect expert for today's topic. Would you like to tell everyone what we will be talking about today?

Well today I have the immense pleasure of talking to you about the Aeneid, which is of course the epic poem written by Virgil Virgilius to give him his full name. He finished writing it or more to the point did not finish writing it but died, which was as good as in 19 BCE. And the Aeneid is an epic poem about the foundation of Rome, though we will get into how incorrect that is as a topic ⁓ line in a bit.

Yeah I am excited about this one because as a previous student of classics I came up across a meme quite often which I'm sure you're aware of that the Aeneid is a cheap knockoff of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey just before we get started into the real nitty-gritty. Do you think that that meme is a fair and accurate response to this poem?

No, I do not. I think it's funny, though I have- it has lost its humor over the years, as with every piece of humorous version of Rome copying Greece's textbook. There's a lot of different versions of that. The reason I would say no, and I will get into this in much more detail, but it is- whatever it is, it isn't cheap. The Aeneid is a hard, very complicated response to Homer. So it is absolutely and certainly working in the tradition of Homer, working with Homeric material, consciously and self-consciously modeling itself on Homer. But what it isn't is an easy copying the homework and just making it look like somebody else did it. ⁓ It is a painstaking piece of literature.

In that sense, it definitely isn't that. What is its relation to Homer? I do want to talk about that, like that's one of the themes I certainly want to talk about, but I think that's basically saying... it's basically like saying that any fantasy that's ever been written since Tolkien is just cheap knockoff Tolkien. No matter what the quality of it is. It's just because Tolkien did that first, so anyone who does it afterwards is just knocking him up.

Yeah, it's a lazy kind of joke to make, right?

Yeah, it's reductive. I mean, I make silly jokes all the time. I have no problem with the joke. But if you ask me if it's true, no, it's not true.

So what does the Aeneid have in common with the Iliad and the Odyssey that people have made this lazy joke about it?

It has lots. Basically, first of all, it is in the epic tradition, the epic tradition for our purposes, that is the purposes of people who study the ancient world and the literature derived from it. The epic tradition starts with Homer. doesn't, Homer's not the first epic recorded in human history, but for today that'll do. The epic tradition starts with Homer, and certainly for Virgil, the epic tradition started with Homer, so it's a fair...starting point. And that is as a genre. So the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Aeneid are all written in the same meter. And for the ancient world, is how you just the primary distinguishing mark for genre is what meter is it in. That's the first important thing. So they're all written in something called the dactylic hexameter. You don't need to know the details of that if you're not studying in the original language, but think of it as somewhat similar to iambic pentameter, which is the Shakespearean ⁓ meter. It's not the same, but it has, in a sense, the same place in our head in that it's the fancy kind of grown-up style, right? So it's the, you put it in that and everybody automatically thinks you're being slightly archaic and high style. So in that sense, yeah, sophisticated.

And also archaizing. Now, not everything in Dactylic hexameter is archaic, but it had that touch of the old about it to Virgil's audience and even to Homer's audience, probably by the time it was written down. Let's not get into written down Homer, but yeah.

And can we assume then that Virgil is writing in this old-fashioned style on purpose for a specific reason?

Absolutely. Yeah. And when I say old-fashioned, I don't mean that it's out of style now. I mean more that it's elevated and it's telling everyone like this is something that is connected to the past and it's important. So if somebody might write in that iambic pentameter now, it would seem very old-fashioned. It's probably a little bit not quite correct for the mode, you know. But now if somebody writes metered, rhythmic poetry that rhymes, that isn't... It isn't a limerick. I would say that most people now would sort of think that was kind of consciously old-fashioned in the sense that they were being high-style and I think that's what we should think of with Virgil. So yes, so first of all he's being consciously, he's following the pattern of the Iliad and the Odyssey. ⁓ Now he's not just using the same meter, he's using a whole bunch of other stylistic elements, some of which we might talk about.

They're things like epithets. So, you know, the traditional ones that people know from the homeric past is swift-footed Achilles, ⁓ rosy-fingered Dawn, Odysseus of many tricks, or something like that. And those are these formulaic epithets, and there's a whole bunch more than that that

In Homer, we used as a means of constructing a narrative ⁓ in a spoken oral set up where they helped you remember and you compose on the fly, but also helped your audience follow. Virgil doesn't have that same constraint because he's not ⁓ composing orally the same way. He's definitely composing in writing, but he doesn't know that's why Homer did it. So to him, epic style includes these formulaic epithets.

So he uses formulaic epithets. So he uses the same kinds of language. He uses other things like Homeric similes or these developed similes where you compare something that's happening in the poem to a piece of everyday life or nature in this particular kind of developed way. He uses those. And then there's a number of others that addresses to the muses. There's like all these little stylistic things that mark something as Homeric epic and Virgil uses those very deliberately, very intentionally. And then the other big way in which it's obviously connected to Homer is that the Iliad and the Odyssey are stories of the fall of Troy and the people who fought at Troy. There are stories about the Trojan War and about the mythical figures connected to the Trojan War, Odysseus. The Aeneid is also about the Trojan War and mythical figures connected to the Trojan War.

S0 we call it the Aeneid because it's named after its main character, right, Aeneas. Is that someone that Virgil has made up or has he taken it from the older poems about the Trojan War?

Yes, absolutely.

So Aeneas is in the Iliad and he has in fact a little what's called an eresteia which is a moment where you show off your excellence on the battlefield so a moment where the poem spends a little time talking about how well this person is fighting so like all the major heroes in the Iliad get their eresteia ⁓ and Aeneas gets a smallish one. He's not a hugely important character but he's talked about, he's mentioned, he fights, he interacts with the other main characters and there is a line in the Iliad about how he has fated to survive the end of the city.

Right, okay. So in other words, yeah, Virgil has taken that as his opportunity to create what is essentially a sequel.

So that sort of sets it up for Virgil. Yes, exactly. And it's not just him, Aeneas as the sort of forefather of Rome is a story that is not made up by Virgil, though he definitely elaborates on it and involves other people in it and, you know, makes it into a bigger story. But it's there in Rome's mythological catalogue already. People have already picked up on what's in the Iliad, exactly how that story gets developed and turned into ⁓ the story of Aeneas is beyond our capacity to trace completely, though there are people, there are scholars who certainly have worked on the prehistory of Aeneas, that is the pre-Virginian history of Aeneas. But for our purposes, what's enough to know is, yes, he has an appearance in the Iliad, so that kind of sanctifies him as a member of the Homeric catalog of heroes.

gives him that pedigree. And there was a mythological tradition that he had something to do with starting the line of people who became Romans. So Virgil is working with those pieces when HE

starts.

So he's working with a narrative that exists already, but he's weaving it into something specific. Can we say something about why he chooses this particular story at this particular time in Rome's history? What is he trying to do with the story of Aeneas?

So the first thing to think about is the historical context of the poem. I said it ends, or his composition ends in 19 BC because he dies. ⁓ At the time, two people, two of his friends, are given the task of editing it and making it, polishing it up for publication. It was very close to done. There is a vast body of discussion about how close it was to done and what Virgil would have done had he survived, which I will not subject you to. ⁓ The basic consensus is that it was pretty close, but we've got some half lines here and there, for instance, like where the meter ends before the end of the line, the sense and the grammar are full and complete, but it's not a full metrical line. There was so much discussion about whether that was intentional or whether he was going to fix that later. Anyway, the point being it was very close to done, but it wasn't.

But it's 19 BCE. Well, what's happening in 19 BCE? Well, more to the point, what has been happening, if you know the basics of Roman history, you will know that the Roman Republic has been ending in a violent and self-destructive and internally terrible way for the last half century to century, depending what you mark it as. But certainly we had, 49 BC, had the beginning of the Civil War with the Civil War. That's not good enough. There too many Civil Wars for that to be a good enough description. Specifically, the Pompey- Julius Caesar Civil War, 49 B.C. BCE, and then we have Julius Caesar's death in 44 B.C.E., which then triggers, after complication things we don't need to talk about, ⁓ triggers another Civil War ⁓ between his murderers and his heirs, which is then resolved ifske-ish for a while. And then we have another civil war between the people who had won the previous civil war. we between the Octavian, who later on takes the title of Augustus, and Mark Antony, had been ⁓ Caesar's second in command at one point. They fight as a big, very destructive civil war, and eventually

Octavian/Augustus wins in 30 BCE. Okay, so 30 BCE Effectively pretty much is the end of the Civil Wars by that point Depending what you call a Civil War and how you judge it You could legitimately say there has been civil wars on and off in Rome for a hundred years You certainly say that it's been 50 years because there's been civil war. A system of government which had lasted for, as far as the Romans were concerned, 400 years, they thought it started in 510 BC under the Republic. It obviously didn't actually spring fully formed, but that doesn't matter. For the Romans, they felt like a system of government that had lasted for almost 400 years had crumbled, fallen apart, and what had been left for a while was just violence. know, even the pretense of following the rules kind of fell away for a while. And then ⁓ Octavian wins and between 30 and 20 BCE he becomes sole ruler of the Roman world. He institutes a bunch of changes and the most important thing is, like him or hate him and that, ⁓ boy, there are people who have a lot of views about Augustus. ⁓

What he certainly did, indisputably, is he stopped, there were no more civil wars for a century, more than a century, right? Nothing meaningful until really the wars at the end of the Julio-Claudian Empire with Nero. So he put an end to civil wars, he stabilized the systems, he got them working again, he reinstituted, and here's where the Aeneid is really, this is a place that the Aeneid is sitting very importantly in. He reinstituted the system of government, or at least in name he did. Like he said, was, we've gone back, we've gone back to our past. I've reinstituted the continuity from the beginning of the Republic has been restored. And he did a whole bunch of things symbolic and otherwise to set himself up as having, as a continuer of the past.

At the same time, however, the system he set up, which is he's the first emperor, is a completely different system, is a real break from the past. So there's this strong break that we had all these civil wars and then something that no one can look at it and say it's not different. He's very clearly the only ruler. There's just no question about it. But at the same time, he's also going back to restoring the sort of trappings of the previous system and really stressing the continuity of the past. So that is the political situation between 30 BCE and 20 BCE is when Virgil is writing this poem. And he has lived through, he was born into civil war. He lived through civil wars. His family's estates were harmed by, affected by, exactly how we're not totally certain, various of the civil wars. He had friends die, he had family die, you know, he had lived through this really traumatic period. And now he's had 10 years of reestablished peace and reestablish and then, you know, return of prosperity, the return of stability. At the same time, there has been a bit, there's been a number of things that the Romans prided themselves on, certain kinds of what they call liberty, what they called sort of ⁓ autonomy that has also been stripped away.

Right, okay. So for Virgil then, he's finally experiencing some peace, but I think it's fair to say under somewhat authoritarian kind of vibes.

Yes, yes. I don't want to go too far down the road of characterizing Augustus's rule. It's a really complicated question. It is authoritarian in the sense that it is not a republican system with with elections. know, so like, yes, obviously in our world today we would say that so it is not authoritarian in the sense that we tend to think of it of now as meaning like tightly controlled absolute rule where

the Emperor's word is law and anyone who does anything else gets killed sort of thing. I don't want to characterize it that way. There is certainly much more power centralized in Augustus and people have to be more careful than they have been in the past about that. But Augustus does not manage to do everything he wants to do. There are laws he wants passed that get repealed or don't get passed. There are things he wants to have happen that don't happen. He is not, he doesn't have a secret police. He doesn't have sort of the trappings of that kind of authoritarian rule. So yes, it is more restrictive. Yes, ⁓ it's more, it's not so much about the authoritarianness of it as the fact that everybody can fit themselves into a hierarchy and that's pretty much like the old hierarchy, except now there's a guy on top where there wasn't a guy on top. And that does make a real difference to the way the Romans feel about themselves and about their sort of, especially, and that's gotta be said especially the elite of the Romans. For everybody else it made very little difference, realistically. And most of the time they probably were just happy that nobody was calling them up to fight in a civil war. So, for the elite, they had their chance to be the top dog taken away. And that, they felt that quite strongly and that mattered to them.

So we've got Virgil living through this period and then he writes a poem about the deep past of Rome. And I think it's really important to see the fact that in this period, Rome is doing this thing of both breaking away and becoming something new and forcibly establishing continuity with its past. That's what's going on in the political system and the social system right now.

So here we have a poem that is set in the deep past about Rome's very past, but by virtue of the way it's being written, ⁓ makes a ton of connections between the present moment and the past. So it is drawing those lines of continuity between right now, because there are passages in it that directly speak about Augustus, for instance, that like talk about, there's a, we have a prophecy about a man who's going to come and, you know, bring peace and order to Rome and it's going to make everything great and then he's going to become a god. There's stuff like that. And then there's stuff about Aeneas. we've got this, there's a kind time travel element to the Aeneid, I always like to say, because there's a number of prophecies, there's a scene in the underworld where they see the Romans who are going to be born over the next few hundred years. but the reader of the Aeneid is in the present looking back at the past and then seeing prophecies about his own past, more recent past. You know, there's this fun playing with time. And so I think that's one of the things I really want to hammer home is that for Virgil, he's writing a poem that's about the past of Rome and the present of Rome and how they're connected.

Okay, and is he doing this of his own volition because he just is paying attention to what's happening around him? Or is there someone who is kind of trying to get him to produce something for a further purpose? Has he got a patron?

The short answer is he definitely has a patron. He has a patron. He does not speak about him directly in this poem because the generic constraints of the epic do not allow you to address your patron in it. But his patron is Mycenes. Mycenes is often called second in command to Augustus. That doesn't reflect an actual political position, but he's a close friend of Augustus who does things, for instance, like he puts him in charge of the city when Augustus goes away. He'll like...

leave him as the one with power in the city. But he's also ⁓ not ⁓ a military man, not, he never actually takes, he refuses to become a senator, so he doesn't actually have sort of official ⁓ political power. So Mycenas has also been described as a minister of culture that's way too formalized and, you know, that's not correct for the ancient world.

But what is true is Mycenaeus is a patriot of the arts. He has a number of some of the most famous poets of the ancient world, Horace, Virgil, are his protegees. He, we don't know, does he give them, he gives them things and he supports them. What that looks like materially is a little bit hard to tell sometimes.

I mean, Horace says that he's been given a villa. Virgil probably was also, you know, supported with money and things. But they weren't paid a salary. That's a whole complicated patronage situation going on. But they are supported by, and also their poetry, you know, one of the main ways that they support them is that they become the platform for sharing. Mycenas holds literary salons and he helps them publish their work and he makes sure people read it. So his patron is Mycenas. Through Mycenas, he is therefore sort of obliquely being supported by Augustus. Mycenas is a close friend of Augustus. You don't write something for Mycenas that Augustus isn't gonna like because Mycenas won't like it.

The question you asked, is he writing this because he wants to or because he's been asked to, is one of the sort of central questions of Virgilian studies. You know, the Homeric question is, how was it composed? Was there a Homer? When did it get written down and how? Virgilian question is, what is the relationship between Virgil and Augustus and what is the relationship between the Aeneid in particular and Augustus? So we'll never answer for sure, is my basic view.

I think your two poles are, and the way that this is usually, is often framed. The two poles are, this is a poem that was requested, basically commissioned by Augustus, he had absolute sort of final say over what was in it, Virgil was writing it to, if not to order, at least to please him, and absolutely everything in it is positive about Augustus. So that's one end of the argumentation

and it's been argued. Or each of those pieces has certainly been argued. The other end is Virgil had no, doing it entirely on his own, had no concern about what Augustus wrote, or if he cared what Augustus thought, he put in some of the lip service to Augustus. But actually the poem is an attack on Augustus. It is a way of revealing all of his failures as a leader. And it is about the VFdestruction that empire brings and it is intensely critical of both Rome and Augustus.

Wow, okay, so that's two really opposing opinions about the same poem.

I would say that that first one or some version of the first one somewhere along the spectrum, maybe not like he ordered it or had final say, like Augustus is the main character of the Aeneid in a sense and is like it is a basically just praise of a good is the one that in our history of scholarship has had much the longest pedigree like has been around for the longest and has in terms of number of people have written on on that side of it, much more support. The pessimistic view of the Aeneid is more recent, 20th century, mid 20th century. ⁓ It has a lot of supporters, again, not maybe in that extreme of view, but in some elements of it. It has a lot of supporters in modern scholarship for sure, but it is much more recent. And that's perhaps not surprising. mean, the way that we read texts has changed a lot.

So in the Renaissance, if you'd said to somebody like, there's stuff in the Aeneid that's critical of Augustus, I think most people would have looked at you like you were talking nonsense. So I want to acknowledge that. Where I stand, and every single Virgilian scholar or person who's read Virgil probably is going to have a different answer to this, where I stand is, as I mostly do, somewhere in the middle. I'm very annoying that way. I tend to be like, well, there's arguments of what's up. I personally do believe that Virgil did care about Please and Augustus because I don't think you could be a poet in that period who thought it was irrelevant.

And there are definitely obvious, clear passages in the poem where Augustus is mentioned by name in a positive and flattering way. And I don't think, and there are other elements that undercut it and I can talk about those later, but I don't think anything undercuts it enough for you to be able to say there is no praise of Augustus in it, in my view. And I look at what Virgil has lived through and now this is just psychology and therefore it doesn't count as scholarship, but.

I look at what Virgil has lived through and I put myself in his shoes and I think, yeah, like obviously you're gonna have some issues with what Augustus has done, but on balance, the world is so much better with him in charge than it was without him in charge. And how do you not feel that? Like how do you not feel, thank goodness we're not going through what we were with him without him?

Because we can't divorce the authors' lived experiences from what they produce...

Mm-hmm. No, absolutely.

So that's, you know, my view. Now, at the same time, I also think, I think one, a very important, and I'll talk more about the themes of the poem as I see them, but I think a really important thing to say about the Aeneid, in my view, is that it is a pro-Rome poem. And I know that seems like a strange thing to have to say, but given what I just said about the different views, I think it is a pro-Rome poem, and I think it is a pro-Augustus poem. I also think it is a poem that not only acknowledges, but wants to genuinely, deeply dive into all the bad things that come along with imperialism and war and autocratic leadership or single leadership that is vested in only one person. And I think that it also wants to talk about or show you some of the sacrifices that leaders have to make. not just that means not just Augustus, but anyone who's going to take on the position of like working on behalf of the state and taking on a real leadership role in it, that there are sacrifices they make, there are things they cannot do that a normal person would be able to. So, you know, the bad side of these things. I think it's there. I think, and I think what the pessimistic view is seeing is that it's not all rosy. ⁓ There's tons of stuff in the Aeneid where like bad things happen to perfectly innocent people or people do things that aren't great.

And the 'it's just all praise of Augustus in Rome' school doesn't really have room for that. It either has to say, it's not actually so bad, or that's just us reading it because we don't like war but Virgil thinks it's fine. And that I don't believe. I don't believe that Virgil's like, war is great, it's wonderful, look at all these dead people, let me describe them in great detail now in some sorrow for a long time. But that doesn't mean there's anything bad about it, it's great. Like so that's the sort of in between position that I tend to fall down on and therefore I would say I think Virgil wanted to write this poem. I think the shape it ends up in does owe something to who his patron is and the position of Augustus. I think it would have been a different poem had he not had to live in this system of patronage that not just poets by the way, everybody had, right? It's not poets uniquely who are sort of beholden to their

their patrons, it is in fact everybody in Rome in this period. So yes, I think it would have been different had he not been in that position, but I don't think it was commissioned by Augustus or anything like it. I don't think so. We have no particular evidence that it was.

So would it be fair to say then that because of Virgil's personal experiences and the system in which he's writing, he is capable of nuance and that allows for us to have completely diverse readings of it as readers?

Yes, absolutely. And I would argue that, you know, there are nuanced readings of Homer as well. so if there can be no nuanced readings of Homer, why can't there be? And one of the things that you get in the sort of reductive comparison between Virgil and Homer is people saying, well, Homer is better because it didn't have a patron and it wasn't written to order. And it's not just praise. It's not just sycophancy. Well, first of all, the poets who wrote The Iliad and the Inuit absolutely had patrons. Let's not... They still worked in a system that was very much the same, but it's beyond our historical context. We can't see who they were, so to us they feel like they come out of a vacu... It just appears one day. It absolutely did not. They composed poetry in a system of relationships. We just can't see them anymore, so we don't have to know about it. So first of all that. And second...

I think the fact that it is written within this really complicated political context that we have the privilege of knowing about is one of the things that makes the Aeneid, to me personally, I'm about to say something very controversial here, more interesting than Homer to study and analyze because, not better, it's not what I said, I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to the person who just got mad and threw something across the room, not better than Homer.

What's more interesting to me as a piece of literature to analyze because I am able to see the connections between it and the political context. Homer's work also had connections to its political context but beyond some very broad strokes about like Iron Age Greece and its political structure, we can't see them anymore. So I can't study them. Doesn't mean it wasn't interesting in its own context but I don't have that context anymore and I can't study it.

Whereas I can look at line by line of the Aeneid and know a whole bunch of things about Mycenaeus and Augustus and other, and Julius Caesar and Pompey and all these other people who are being kind of woven into the text. And I can pick it apart in ways that are at least close to what his audience might have been able to do. And I love that. Like that's, that's what gets me all tingly to be able to do that.

So for people that are kind of new or not as ⁓ well practiced in approaching ancient literature, I think it's fair to say that the Aeneid is a kind of poor cousin compared to the Iliad and Odyssey. If we look at adaptations and the amount of translations that are available on bookshelves, the Aeneid is always kind of the odd one out, left out in the cold...

now, these days, in the modern world, yes...

I think if we can do anything with this particular episode is to convince people to take a fresh look at it, read it again, or read it for the first time. And for those who don't know and haven't read The Aeneid before, can you take us through just a brief kind of synopsis of the main story points? When is it set? Who are the main characters?

The Aeneid is, as I said, the story of Aeneas. So Aeneid just means story about Aeneas. Like Iliad means story about Troy, Ilium. And Odyssey means story about Odysseus. The Aeneid starts in Media Res, that's one of the things that makes it like Homer. It starts in the middle of the action. It doesn't start at the beginning and go to the end. starts... ⁓ Book one begins with a shipwreck. Aeneas and his followers, who have fled Troy, though we almost don't know that yet, if it weren't that we already know the story, are going through a terrible storm at sea. There's a shipwreck off the coast of North Africa. And eventually Aeneas meets Queen Dido, is a ⁓ refugee from Phoenicia who is establishing a city in Carthage. She's building Carthage. That's book one. Book two, I'm just gonna do this by books, not all the way through, but it's easier. There are 12 books. ⁓ Book two is a flashback told in the, it starts with him at a dinner feast held by Dido and she's like, tell me your story. And he says, well, Queen. I'm gonna make you weep, listen to my story. And he tells the story. So the book, too, is a flashback to the fall of Troy. So it is, it's the last night of Troy. It starts with the horse with, you know, the chick, right? The Greeks have been driven away and they left a big horse outside and the Trojans think they've won and they break down the gates and they bring in the horse. So it starts with that, tells the story of the horse and the story of the fall of Troy, the night that Troy fell...

and Aeneas in the course of this night has a dream telling him he has to leave and take the refugees from Troy and found a new city in their ancestral homeland. And that is very vague and it takes him long time to figure out what that means. Turns out it means Italy. There's a lot of false turns along the way. So book two is the fall of Troy in great detail.

Book three is the wandering after the fall. So book two ends with Nielsen and followers escaping out of the city. And book three is wandering around trying to figure out what the gods mean by like my ancestral homeland, that several attempts to found cities that go wrong because he didn't understand his prophecies correctly. And then book three ends with the shipwreck that began book one. Right. So we've come full circle. Book four then is set in Carthage. And all of this is happening, therefore we can say like a year after the fall of Troy. You know, that's the timeline approximately. And I'm not going to try to tell you what year that was in history because that's a whole other podcast. But their book four then is a very famous book. If people have read or heard of the Aeneid, this is usually the part of the story that they have heard of. It is the romance with Dido.

Dido falls in love with Aeneas and Aeneas to all appearances also falls in love with her. They have a marriage in a cave during a thunderstorm. ⁓ He starts helping her build the city, all is lovely. And then the gods look down and say, what the heck? This isn't where you're supposed to be. What are you doing? Send them a messenger to say, come on, get going. You're supposed to be founding another city, go. And he leaves. Dido gets real mad and curses him and then kills herself. That's book four. ⁓ It is very, it's an exciting book. Lots has happened. It's very emotional. There's a lot that goes on. If you read only one book, read that book, but I don't know. I think it's hard to fully appreciate if you don't read the rest, but I would say that, wouldn't I? ⁓ Book five then is basically funeral games. They go to, they end up in Sicily, which back in Sicily where in Book 3, ⁓ Aeneas's father had died while they were in Sicily. So they end up back in Sicily on the anniversary of his death and they hold funeral games. Some other things happen, but basically the reason they hold funeral games, just to explain that, is because the Iliad holds funeral games. So you gotta get funeral games in, that's a thing you put in epics. so, yeah, yeah, that's big. There's all sorts of comparisons you can make, but we won't. Book 6 then, so we're in the end of the first half, right? So the middle of book six is the first is the middle of the poem. Well, in book six, they arrive in Italy finally, and they arrive not at not where they're going to end up, but they arrive right at the foot of Italy. And because following a prophecy and that he was given, he goes and consults the Sybil, ⁓ an oracle of Apollo, who takes him to the underworld. So Aeneas goes to the underworld. And this is also an epic and heroic trope, visit to the underworld, the katabasis, the going down. ⁓ We have a scene like that in the Iliad, it's not quite the same, but there's a dream sequence where the ghosts come out, and then the Odyssey, Odysseus goes to the underworld, right? So, Aeneas has to do it too. So he goes to the underworld, in the underworld he sees his father, who has died, Anchises, who tells him, takes him around and tells him all sorts of stuff about what Rome will be, like, here's what you're founding, you're not founding Rome, but here's the line that you're starting, is going to look at all these people, lining up, they're ready to be reborn, so there's a whole philosophical thing there about reincarnation and, various Greek philosophical views about the underworld, there's a big long line of people about to be born, let me list off some of the notable figures, so we get this whole sort of discussion of notable Republican and history of, and even before that history of Rome, and it culminates in like there's Augustus, you know, right? And then we even, and then we get a really important couple of lines where Kaisy's like turns to them and sort of addresses them, but addresses the camera, because he says, hey, Romans, this is going to be you who you are and what you do. You're not gonna be good at art and you're not gonna be good at soothsaying.

But you're going to be really good at establishing laws, keeping the peace and conquering nations. And that is going to be your exceptional ability. And he's addressing the people in front of him. But he says, Roman, you, this is who you are. So the reader is being addressed directly. So there's like, if you talk about themes of the Aeneid, I'll come back to that,

a really important moment for the theme of the Aeneid, think. Like, it's really explicit there.Virgil actually does break the fourth wall a couple of times, directly addressing his own characters as the poet, which Homer also does, and that's one of the reasons Virgil does it. But in this point, it's technically not breaking the fourth wall, but he's 100 % doing so. So that's book six, and then he comes out at the end of that book, and right at the end of that book they land on the Tiber. They get which is the river that Rome is on. Book seven, I'm almost done, promise. Book seven is that landing. There's an attempt, they're in the area of Latium, which is where the Latins are. You may recognize that name. And there's a King Latinas, the King of the Latins.

There's an attempt at diplomacy, by the end of the book, they're at war. And now it's, it's a war, but it's a civil war in a way, even though they aren't because the prophecies have also, they're coming back to their homeland that they're descended from somebody who left this area a long, long time ago. But also as we're told over and over and over and over again, eventually Aeneas' Trojans and the Latins are going to merge into one people and become the Romans. So here, when they're fighting, can't technically call it a civil war yet, but it is, right? Because it's the two family members, it's the two halves of the family fighting. And I think given what we've talked about, about Virgil's background, mean, it's very obviously a civil war and it's very obvious that that's why it's so bad. So book eight,

Book eight, Aeneas goes off to try to find allies and in doing so he happens to visit the future site of Rome. So we get him wandering around and the poet saying, that's where the capital is going to be and that's where the Palatine hill is going to be and that's where this temple is going to be and that's where this temple is going to be. And we get a little tour. But right now there's cows and right now there's there's a, you know, a forest there and stuff. So I mention that just because it's another piece of this like time travel kind of thing. Connecting past and future.

And then books 9 to 12 are the battles, the duels, the real meat of the Iliadic portion of the Aeneid, in that it's a lot of stuff that's replicating very directly, stuff that goes on in the Iliad. And it ends with the killing of Turnus, who is the champion of the Latins, by Aeneas in a duel. when I say it ends with that, I mean four lines before the end of the poem. He plunges the sword into Turnus.

Turnus has one last sort of word and that's the end of the poem. There is no outro, there is no nothing. It just ends with him.

And is that because Virgil died? I mean Homer wrote his books with 24 sections each right and this one only has 12. Do we think that he meant to finish there or do we think that he was going to go the full 24?

24 chapters, yeah, or books. You bring up all the questions that I can't answer. ⁓ I don't think anyone, I think everyone thinks he was only going to do 12 books. I think that's pretty clear. I think like you can, like that little bit that I said where in Keise's, Aeneas's father addresses the Romans, it's almost perfectly mathematically the center of the 12 books. And I don't think that's a coincidence, you know? Like, and in its 12 books, the other thing that is books one through six are the wanderings. It's the Odyssey. Book seven through 12 are the battles. That's the Iliad. So breaks down into two perfect halves, right? We have the Odyssey and then the Iliadic, kind of a reverse temporarily of the Homeric story, but very neat. So I don't think anyone thinks it was gonna go past 12. There is discussion about whether there were gonna be more lines in book 12, whether there was gonna be. So the Iliad ends with a funeral.

It doesn't end with a duel, there's lots more after the duel, after the death of Hector, but it ends with a funeral for Hector. One might think that this might have ended with a funeral for Ternus where sort of things are patched up. So there are people who think there's gonna be more. The book isn't substantially short though. So there's no like strong argument for saying there was gonna be more.

You know, the Odyssey ends within a much more rounded off way, but there's also an argument that the last few books of the Odyssey were tacked on later and that it was supposed to end with the slaughter, with the reconciliation of Penelope and Odysseus now. It's controversial interpretation too, so I don't want to lean on that. But ⁓ personally, think just from elements of the composition, I don't think he was going to write more.

That's, but I can't say for sure. I don't think he was gonna write more. I think he was very much in the polishing stage. That's what I, I love the ending and I love the way it ends. I think it does a lot to sort of underline all of the themes of the But We don't know for sure. He told his executors to burn the poem because it wasn't done.

And Augustus stepped in and said, don't you dare. This is a great poem. We are publishing this poem. You polish it up. Take out lines you think don't need to be there, but add nothing, and we're publishing it.

So let's just for a moment imagine that there were another 12 books because if it finishes there, how do we get from Aeneas to the founding of Rome?

So let's give a very brief, it's much more complicated than it should be. He keeps being talked about and like he's talked about as founding Rome, even in the poem. He does not found Rome. He doesn't in fact in the poem do anything. Now that in some ways is similar to the Iliad, which is the poem about the Trojan War, but it doesn't have either the beginning or the end of the Trojan War in it. Right? The Iliad is just like three weeks in the middle of the war. In episode. So the Iliad ends with this killing of Turnus. However, the

We know because of the treaty and stuff like that. We know what's going to happen after that is Aeneas is going to marry Lavinia, the daughter of King Latinus. He's going to found a city. He's going to found a city called Alba Longa. Eventually, well, he's going to found a city called Lavinium is actually what he's going to found. Then his son will found a city called Alba Longa, which is these are cities nearby. Eventually, his son's descendant.

Ilia, she's got other names, but we'll go with Ilia. The Vestal Virgin, she is the Vestal Virgin who gets seduced, raped, by the god Mars and who then gives birth to Romulus and Remus. So Romulus and Remus are descendants eventually, like 300 years later, 300, 400 years later.

They are descendants of Aeneas. And so Romulus and Remus then eventually... There was definitely no way he was gonna... Like, he was not interested in writing that story. The way he talks about it always is he kind of elides... Like, mentions Romulus and Remus. They're in there and stuff. Like, it's not like he hides that. But he's just not interested in that part of the history. This is the story of Aeneas, who is the prototype of Rome.

Okay so we would need a lot more than 12 books then to get from A to B!!

Yeah.

And there's some stuff, and then there's Romulus and Remus. And then Romulus, of course, actually found the city.

Okay, but that's, that will be another episode. But that's how we get, that's how we get from A to B and then his chat in the underworld about this is what will be is how we get from B to C, which C being Augustus. ⁓

Yeah, that would be another, that's a whole other story. The founding of Rome proper to the history of Rome, he points out like people who are in heroic episodes from the period of the kings. And then he points out people who have the heroes of the early Republic and then the late Republic. And then he like cries over like he sees Pompey and Caesar and he's like, Oh, why, why brother, son in law and father, father in law, why did you ever fight? How could you do this? You know, sees those things. And then we move our way to it.

Okay, so if we agree that it's not written for Augustus but with him definitely in mind. Virgil's obviously unfortunately dead. He doesn't get to see the poem being published but is there any evidence about what Augustus thought about the poem beyond, you know, saying we must publish? What did he think about it? Did he approve? Did he spot any of those criticisms?

Absolutely. Yes. Well, no, not as far as we can tell he didn't spot any criticisms, which is of course an argument for an argument either for Augustus being stupid or narcissistic, which is an argument people certainly make, not stupid so much as a bad literary critic, not a good reader, or it's an argument for it wasn't meant as a criticism, Virgil didn't expect it to be a criticism, because how could Augustus have missed it?

And I think those, I think I lean more towards, don't think Augustus was stupid and I don't think he was a bad, I'm not saying he was like the finest literary critic who ever existed, but I don't think he was a bad reader. I also think, however, that he was willing to see a certain amount of criticism of himself without overreacting. He did, we know that he did get mad at certain kinds of poetry and certain kinds of things that were written about him, but they were like open, virulent attacks.

He did restrict what... he did censor people from time to time but we have we have other things that make it clear like we have poetry from people who are critical of Augustus for instance that survive so you know later emperors who guard like Nero or who are so telegular who are so touchy that you say anything even slightly wrong you might get your you know get killed that's not who Augustus was

So do we have evidence of how he reacted? Yeah, because one of the things that I should mention, this poem was written, and I mean that very literally, like was composed in writing, and it was meant to be read. That is, he did expect people to be able to read it on scrolls. However, it was also very much meant to be read aloud and recited, and it was recited multiple times during his lifetime. So Virgil did recitations of portions of this poem while he was writing it. And he recited it for Augustus, he's recited it for other members of the imperial family. There's a very famous anecdote, because one of the things that happens in the underworld is he sees Marcellus, is Augustus' nephew, who died early, who was gonna be his heir and who died early, and he recites the part in which, and Kaisy says, and there's Marcellus, sweet boy, you were going to die too young, if only you had lived you would be greater even than Augustus. And at that moment, Julia, Marcellus' mother, fainted in grief, apparently, and had to be carried out. So that's an anecdote, whether it happened, who knows, but the point being he definitely was reading these things to people. ⁓ They were reacting to it. Augustus had every opportunity to see at least big portions of it and have a reaction. He thought it was good. He asked for it to be published. It almost immediately became a school text and it became one of the primary ways in which in the same way that Homer had been a school text and until Virgil, another previous epic poet named Enneas and that is really confusing and annoying, but it's E-N-N-I-U-S not A-E-N-E-A-S. Very irritating.

Aeneas, who had also written an epic about the history of Rome that went all the way that had stuff about Aeneas. How annoying is that? Aeneas wrote about Aeneas. ⁓ But he had stuff about Aeneas, but also about Romulus and Remus and also, but like he basically wrote a sort of epic that went all the way from the fall of Troy all the way up to its own day. That had been the school text. And pretty much as soon as the Aeneid came out, it replaced Aeneas. So completely that we only have fragments of Aeneas left.

Even though it was the most important poem and piece of literature up to that point, it was the epic. was the one. We're sure that Virgil is reacting to Ennius in all sorts of places. We're certain of it. And we have enough fragments that we can see. But I'm sure that it's everywhere. But we don't have the poem anymore.

So he's writing his own version, which only takes a small part of the narrative, but it's completely obliterating the previous literary standard. So that's a huge significant kind of... Wow.

Yeah, absolutely. And there's a couple of reasons. It's much more politically relevant, but also it's much more stylistically, I don't want to say better, but it is in vogue. And I mean, I do think the Aeneas is beautifully written. Aeneas, though, had written it 200 years earlier. It was, you know, it's an equivalent sort of, of replacing Chaucer with Shakespeare. Right? Like, we can kind of see like

it's not now we didn't completely but you know people don't learn charlister in school in the same way they would in grade nine the same way they do shakespeare it would be the equivalent of replacing shakespeare with um i don't know woodsworth so you know that kind of period generation where like yeah you can still appreciate the older thing but the newer thing is so much more in your kind of idiom and and and the kind of style that is currently appreciated

I certainly remember at least one piece of graffiti from Pompeii that was a quote of the opening line of the poem, I sing of arms and and a man. Are we seeing evidence of people, normal people, engaging with the poem across the empire? ⁓

Yes, ⁓ in bits and pieces like graffiti, we also see it making its way into, I mean, normal people, what level of normal people, but we see it making its way into art, like very clearly specific to the Aeneid versions of Dido or Aeneas or the ships or, you know, all sorts of things, making its way into mosaics and other kinds of art that are definitely from that poem specifically. the other place we see it is in literature.

it becomes foundational to all the literature that comes after. it becomes, people use it as like shorthand tanks, much the way in the same way that Shakespeare made its way into our everyday language as just idioms and things. So yes, we definitely see that. And I think it's fair to say that the other way that it got distributed, disseminated, even if you didn't sit down and read the poem, because the poem was

hard to, you know, it was a high style, was difficult, it was not for everybody. ⁓ They also did versions of it that were sort of, ⁓ they were recitations, but they were also, I'm gonna use the word mime, and it's not gonna mean what anybody thinks it means, but ⁓ mimes in ancient Roman world were spoken, not mined, and danced. They were danced, they were pieces of text

set to music and performed in a sort of interpretive dance kind of way, sort of.

Okay, so a bit like a ballet.

A bit like a ballet, yeah, but often with only one person doing it, right? Like so, and who sang as well as danced. ⁓ Yeah, we're seeing the story of Dido and others, you know, sort of being taken out, little episodes being taken out and put on, and that would have been much more available to the population as a whole -

It's going to have lines from the Aeneid in it, it's going to have the story, but it's not going to have, it's not going be the whole poem.

So is it fair to say then that nearly every Roman would know the gist of the story, its main points, its main themes?

Yeah. Within a generation, I think that that would be not an unreasonable thing to say. Certainly any, you know, maybe not new Romans, but certainly people who've grown up in the Roman education system and who were sort of, you know, reasonably aware. Yeah.

So as a foundation myth, Virgil managed to supplant Ennius. Did any foundation myth about Rome come after Virgil that kind of overshadowed him, or did he remain the bar?

No, he basically stayed ⁓ the, I would say, you can trace a direct line, Homer, Virgil, the rest of European literature. I would make the argument that you can't really, Virgil, the Aeneid in particular, in some way influenced pretty much every piece of the Western canon after that. Now, obviously not directly, not every author is reading Virgil and writing on it but he was so influential to the late antiquity and the middle ages that everything that comes out with me the only other author I would say that has the same importance in the western canon is Ovid honestly the metamorphoses and I would not say Homer except as filtered through Virgil because remember in western Europe they lost Greek and and they basically so basically nobody was reading Homer...

Please don't come at me... All the people who know the ways in which that statement is not true! But realistically, most people were not engaging with Homer except in synopses for the next thousand years after the late antiquity in Western Europe, obviously. Totally different story elsewhere. And so the story of Troy is Virgil and Ovid. That's it.

So that's what everybody knew about Troy until the Renaissance.

So for something that's been, you know, the meme, the cheap knockoff, we actually have Virgil to kind of thank for everything. Yeah.

for anybody caring about Homer, honestly.

If you'd said something like that to anybody pre, what the Renaissance did was say, ew, Latin, yay, Greek. Not quite, but there was a sort of, ooh, we're discovering this, and there was a devaluation, not immediate by any means, of those classics, a ⁓ raising up

of this newly discovered sort of wealth of amazing literature that we haven't noticed and paid attention to for a while. And that kind of knocked Virgil off his pedestal. But yeah, mean, Virgil was the reason Virgil leads Dante through the underworld. Right? Virgil is not Homer. Virgil is the figure that Dante models himself off of, that to him is the wellspring of all literature.

So yeah, we do absolutely, the reason they cared about Troy enough to go to like that Homer, and of course, the ancient world thought Homer was amazing. Virgil is not trying in any way to supplant Homer. I would argue that he is possibly trying to surpass him, but he is not trying to supplant him. And the fact that he does so to a certain extent is a bit, is an accident of history rather than intentional.

So we really need to be giving Virgil and the Iliad their flowers and kind of, you know, push them back into the limelight where they belong as at least an equal to the Iliad and Odyssey.

mm-hmm. I think so. Mm-hmm.

I certainly think so, and I think so both for the quality of the poem and for its influence. I think those are obviously related, but I think there is no question about that from the perspective of influence. To understand, if you are interested in understanding later Western literature, to not know the Aeneid is to put yourself on the back foot.

It's like trying to read anything post-Shakespeare without knowing Shakespeare. Like it just makes it hard. It makes it hard to know you miss so much. You're not engaging with a bunch of stuff that's there.

So if we're all going to, after this episode, read The Aeneid, whether or not we're coming to it for the first time or whether we're brushing up on our knowledge before writing a assignment at school or uni, what are the main themes of the poem that we should be looking out for so that we can identify them as we see them?

So, the definite themes are what is it to be Roman? We might use the Latin word Romanitas, Romaneness. What makes a Roman Roman? And when we talk about what makes a Roman Roman, we meant what virtues make a Roman Roman? Because while he does engage with some of the drawbacks or problems of Romaneness,

⁓ Mostly he's like, are the virtues that are uniquely or specifically or emblematically Roman? What are the things that make a Roman Roman? And very closely connected to that is leadership, virtue, heroism. What makes a good leader? What are the qualities? What are the hardships that a leader undergoes? What do they do? And then bad leaders too. What do bad leaders do?

And how do you learn and instill virtue and how do you become a virtuous person? And man, let's not mince words here. How do you become a virtuous man? There is, there's stuff about the virtue of women in there too, but mostly in the don't be like her and also not like her and also not like her and don't be like her. it's a whole other story about the women, a whole other discussion to be had about the women in the Aeneid and maybe, you know, maybe we can have that conversation at some point. I have not talked about them hardly at all.

That's because they're there, but let's be honest, Virgil cares about, if we're talking about taking it on its own terms, Virgil cares about men. Yeah. He's writing for men. He is a man. Like, I'm not defending it, but it's not surprising either. And then tied to both of that, the history and destiny of Where did Rome come from? Where is it going? And not only Rome, but the leading families of Rome. So there's lots and lots of like, names pop up in early in the battles and stuff and you're like why is that name there and it's like because that's an influential family in the late republic right so and that's not just to make people feel good because their their ancestors turn up though definitely in some of that but also it's that continuity how was rome connected to its earliest days like the people who are important now were important back then even if that's completely ahistorical there's a solidness and a stability and a like comfort to that idea. And so that's there too. So I think that's your main themes. Rome, Romaness and virtue and leadership.

And then the flip side of that that is there, and I would argue is important, also what are the harms that Rome has done? Or if not the harms so much, what bad things had to happen for the thing that is Rome to exist? Let's acknowledge, Virgil, Rome is a good thing. It's a net good in the world. But

that doesn't mean things weren't lost on the way to that. And we see that very effectively in the Dido story. Dido is like the fact that Dido dies and is necessary for Rome to be founded because Aeneas can't end up in Carthage, then Rome's biggest enemy in the entire history of Rome will take over Rome. That's terrible and awful. And we wouldn't want that to happen, us Romans. But at the same time, her death is tragic. The existence of Rome is predicated on tragedies, loss, sorrows, violence. Aeneas has to give up his woman that he seems to love because it's not right and so he has to let her die in order to go on. We might have some views about the morality of that but that's an acknowledgement so I think that's the other part of it. It's the glory that is Rome but also what had to happen, what had to be lost for Rome to happen.

When we talk about Augustus and the history of Rome and how we're getting to the point where the Aeneid is being written, the Grand New Dawn, the Pax Romana, is it fair to say that there were some...

interesting omissions in Rome's history in the Aeneid. For instance, are there some people who should have been mentioned in the underworld who are going to come but were strangely not named that we should be looking at and thinking why aren't they there?

Yes and no. mean, yes, obviously there are people who aren't named. is interesting that like Pompey and Caesar are both named even though they're on different sides, right? And we do have, there's one, there's a whole little inset piece on Catiline. And if you know the story of Catiline and the Catilinarian conspiracy. ⁓

Which is an interesting inclusion because he's obviously not a hero and and Kaizu is like, ⁓ you terrible man, you tried to overthrow the Rome and it's like, Cicero has been dead for a long time and he's the guy who cares the most about his... It's just like, it's interesting that he's in there. The obvious person is Mark Antony.

However, I would argue, well, so first of all, he does appear, not in the underworld, but he appears, there's another scene, is another, like there's multiple prophecies about Rome. And one of them is at one point, Aeneas is given armor by his mother, by Venus. did I not mention that? Aeneas is the son of Aphrodite, of Venus. I should mention that. That's true in the Iliad.

Aphrodite is the mother of in the Iliad and so Venus is his mother and so that comes up multiple times and she helps out and stuff. have the gods being active participants in the epic just like in Homer. And one of the scenes is she comes and gives him his armor, like Achilles getting armor from his mother Thetis, right? So there's your parallel.

And on his shield, like Achilles' shield had all of the sort of the city at peace and the city at war and all this, Aeneas has a shield which has a history of Rome on it. And so it's described in various little episodes and battles and stuff. And one of the scenes on it is the Battle of Actium, which is the final battle in the battle between Octavian and Antony, the ship battle that Cleopatra was at. And Cleopatra is mentioned and Antony, but not by name.

It's clearly him, the general. there's no, it's not being, you know, it's not being hidden. But he's not given a name in it. And I do think that's deliberate. But he's there. ⁓ And he's there with Cleopatra. So I think that's one piece of it.

The other thing I will say about Antony is he's deeply embedded in the text without being named as a counter option of what a leader could be like. And specifically, and I could go very deep into this, but I won't go too far.

One thing that's really important about the Aeneid and one of the things that people say, oh, it's a knockoff of Homer, is because Aeneas as a person and as a character is not all that interesting. And I will say that one of the things I really need to warn people about, here I am praising this poem, I need to warn you that as a basic plot and character, like you don't read this poem for the plot and the character. And that's one of the reasons it's not turned into movies a lot. Because like it doesn't have the fantastical episodes with the cyclops and it doesn't have like, it does, it has some, but not that many. A lot of it's, you know, pretty standard and then there's some battles and stuff. Not a lot of real amazing mythological things. And the main characters are, in Aeneas in particular is kind of blank. he's dutiful, used of him a lot, and he's kind of stoic.

Those are his main characters. Though he does cry quite a few times too. But for a Roman that did not stop you from being stoic. Now, I would argue that Achilles is a bit of a dick and so the fact that Ineos is not your most sympathetic character doesn't need to mean that much. It's the Iliad as a whole that matters, but the characters in the Iliad and definitely the Odyssey are more interesting. I'm not gonna even try to pretend that's not true.

And the plot of both of them is probably a bit more interesting. the Iliad, you can't really argue that the plot of the Iliad is particularly impressive. ⁓ Some people fight over a girl, then they fight, then they stop fighting, and then they fight some more, and then one guy dies, and then it's done. I mean, that's the plot, right? It has a fit, So, the Odyssey, though, again, has a pretty good plot. So, that said...

I think it's one of the strengths or one of the intentional things about the Aeneid is that Aeneas and also few other characters, but in particular Aeneas, what he is is he's an amalgam of all the Homeric and several other epics we're not going to talk about, but there are other obviously other epics after Homer, but before Virgil, he's an amalgam of characters from a lot of other epics. And it's not so much that he's an amalgam as in it's almost like he's trying on their personas. So like at one moment he's like Achilles, at another he's like Hector, at another he's like Odysseus, at another he's like Jason from the Jason and the Argonauts epics. Those are all heroes, right? They're all models of heroism, they're all types of leaders, they're all important characters. Which one fits Rome? Which one is the right one to be? Is it one of those? Is it some bits of all of them? He starts as a Trojan. He ends up as a Roman. The Trojans are Easterners. They're like, they're not Romans, right? The Romans have fought wars with people who live where Troy is now.

And so then, so he's a Trojan. He's also coming out of the Homeric poems, which yes, they have all these literary, like the Romans thought that Greek poetry was wonderful and they were literally much ahead of them. But at the same time, the Greeks, socially, culturally and politically were not well thought of by the Romans. They were liars. They were cowards. They spent too much time on poetry and not enough. You know, they had a whole bunch of prejudices and stereotypes about them. So here's the founder of Rome, sort of, coming out of this background. Well, how does he become Roman? How does he become all the virtues? And the great things that Rome is, if he's coming from this frankly kind of suspect background, well, what you could say the Aeneid is, is a story of how he makes that change.

And one of the ways he makes that change is by trying on, explicitly, not intentionally, but like kind of being in various places, different ones of these various different epic heroes. Until by the end, he's pulled the right pieces out of the right ones and he is now the Roman who is going to be the model for all of the rest of the generations.

And so the place where you really, one of the places you really see this, you see this a lot in the battle towards the end where he's like Achilles raging across the battlefield, but that's kind of like he's not under control enough and it's not great. And then elsewhere he's Hector in front of the walls of the Trojan camp, and he's, you know, the good father and the good city man. And you know, like, so he is these different people, good and bad. But in the Dido episode,

I told you I was coming back and it was a tangent. Dido episode, one of the people he is is Mark Antony, because Dido is also Cleopatra. She's Eastern, remember she's from Phoenicia, she's an Eastern queen leading her people who has a Roman man, he's not Roman yet but ignore that, fall in love with her and almost derails the whole Roman enterprise to another place.

Okay. And of course, because Mark Antony was accused of becoming Greekified.

Greekified and and fornified and there was even Augustus said that he was planning to move the Senate ⁓ to Egypt and know, mean Propaganda all of you know, perhaps all of this but yes we see there's a scene in particular where Virgil shows Aeneas wearing purple and gold cloaks wrote woven by Dido for him and setting up her city under her command...

you know, yes, Antony isn't mentioned by name there, but boy, boy, is he there. And he's there as like, this is the road we almost went down, dear Lord, how terrible that would have been. You know, and instead he backs off in time, he gets chided by Mercury and Jupiter and told to stop being so uxorious, stop being so wifely, stop being such a a wife guy. ⁓ very literally almost. And so he wakes up in time, remembers that he owes it to his son to give him his inheritance and leaves. And Dido kills herself. And of course, did Cleopatra do? He's also, like can make an argument, he's also like Jason with Medea and Dido is portrayed as witchy at one point, so there's like a Medea.

Like, they're more than one. It's not that these are perfect analogs. And that's... I honestly think that would be quite boring if you could just do one-for-one, you sub-outs. But I think it's moments like that that's one of the things that gives rise to the cheap knock-off of Homer. Because yes, there are moments when Aeneas is just like Achilles on the battlefield. But there's crucially moments where he's just like Hector. And there's other moments where he's like Hercules. And there's moments, you know, so...

I think maybe easier possible to see that and think, it's just a pastiche. has no originality. He's just pulling pieces from other epics, slapping them together, and now he's got a poem. That's the cheap knockoff approach. But my argument would be that no, yes, he's taken them from these things in a really conscious and deliberate manner because this is part of winnowing of what do we take out of the previous culture? And in a way, that's a microcosm of what Rome is going through. What do we take from our past? What is good from our past? And what do we need that's new? You know, that's the refounding moment that Rome is going through right now. Continuity, taking the heroism of the past, but also... discarding the things that don't work and figuring out who we are in this new world and under this news in this new circumstance and so I think that like Aeneas is going through that Rome itself is going through that and that can look like ⁓ It's just a jigsaw puzzle made up of previous literary works But I think that's a misreading or I think that's missing a really Interesting thing that is being done by Virgil

Yeah, because if he's able to make that many references both to literature and historical events, that shows that he's got a really deep understanding and a broad breadth of knowledge about both topics and he's able to synthesize those together into a poem that, as you've said, becomes the standard for centuries.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And I will just say one last thing about that, which is that, well, first of all, he also expected that to some degree of his reader, which is he expected a lot of his reader. Now, I think you can read it on multi- don't need to know every single piece in order to appreciate it, but he expected a lot of his readers. And that is sometimes, I think, what can make it a hard poem to approach, because you can sometimes feel like if you don't have all of these pieces, how can you possibly understand all of it? I mean, you can understand it on its surface, but then it's very surface.

So whereas Homer is much easier to approach without a whole lot of context and still get something really good out of it, that doesn't mean there isn't deeper you can go into Homer by any means, but I think it's harder to approach the Aeneid sort of just as a thing I'm going to pick up and read and really enjoy it. You know, that's a place where it does not stack up as well to Homer. And then the other piece I will say is like, I don't want to lose track of the fact that it's also a really good poem. And that's not as easy to find through translation. There are wonderful translations of it, but like one of the things it is, and sometimes one just has to know that this is true even if you can't like access it because you can't read the Latin, I just also just want to flag it's beautiful. Like the language and the poetry and the imagery and the just the sounds.

It is also beautiful. I feel like I would be doing a disservice to it if I didn't just mention that in passing. It is also important because it has set a standard for language use. It set a standard for how Latin was written. It set a standard for how poetry was written for a very long time too. So I think that's like we should we should know that about it too.

So before we wrap up, just quickly, is there anything that you think that enthusiasts, students, experts need to know about this poem before they can truly have a big understanding about what it's trying to do?

I think we've touched on most of the things I'd want to make sure you knew. I think you need to know the historical context, at least to the level we've talked about it today. I think you need to understand that he is deliberately engaging with past literature, specifically and most importantly Homer, and that it's not a matter of he's just copying. think connected to that, the one other thing I think would be very important to understand is the place of originality in ancient...

literature and literary criticism, which is originality the way we tend to think of originality, like it's an original plot. It's an original story. That's no one's ever done that before. Was not particularly valued. It's not that it was awful. when you measured the quality of something that was not a thought you had a lot. They cared about originality in that is this a new way of doing this thing, you know, telling this story but the idea of like an original plot.

Like there are parts of like the Dido story, the way he tells it is probably not the way it had ever been told before. So there are original things in it, but one of the knocks is it's not original. But I think that like, if you think he was trying to be original in the sense that we tend to mean it, you're just missing the point. So I just think, you know, have that as a judgment. Maybe think a little bit more. And I don't want to push this connection too much, but like,

fanfiction or romance now or whatever, you know the tropes like everybody you go into a book now in certain genres and they like label it by enemies lovers or it's gonna be whatever they're gonna label those tropes and Nobody's gonna be excited if you say it's this trope and then it's not because you were original They're not there for originality now. They're great way for they're there for an original take on it a new way of telling the same basic story that you haven't seen before. But nobody's there to have the, ooh, this is the romance where it doesn't end happily. No, because that's wrong. It's not original, it's wrong. So I just, think that like, having that in the back of your mind a little bit helps head off some of the sort of grumpiness sometimes people have.

is it fair to say that if an ancient writer comes out and says, here is my epic poem in the tradition, the audience will have, before they hear a word, a set of expectations about what it will include, what kind of things that it will have. He's putting them in there, not just because Homer put them in there, but because that's what the audience want, that's what they like. Right.

Sure, maybe you won't put every single one of them or you might change a few of them, ⁓ but there will be a certain, like, if you don't put them in, people will notice that you didn't. Why didn't you have that? Now, obviously people do go on later sometimes to write, like, Lucan writes an epic that doesn't have the gods in it, for instance. Like, you know, he messes, he does do something original in some ways, in some ways, but in other ways, you know, he just changes it. You can also think of it as

like a virtuoso doing a classical piece. If you have somebody, an amazing violinist does an amazing, Mozart piece, you don't go in expecting to hear that he's written new notes, right? Like if he plays things Mozart didn't write, I know this is not the same, I know it's not the same as writing a new piece of literature.

Yeah, it's not a jazz concert, right?

But yeah, well exactly, like jazz you're gonna value some originality, you're gonna value hearing something you've never heard before. Whereas an amazing rendition of a classical piece, and it's not the same, know, Virgil is not rewriting Homer, but in a sense there's like, you understand what the frame is gonna be, there are maybe different kinds of trills you can put in there, some pieces you can, and you can change the dynamics a bit and do it in your own interpretation, but everyone knows what they're going in, but nobody thinks, that was boring, because I've heard that song before.

You're going in because you know this is something you like. You like epic. So you want to hear epic. So you would be confused by not having the things that you would expect in epic. But you want to hear like, how did Virgil do it? What is his take on it? How does he approach it? So if you take its relation, even if you don't go into all the nuances of like what he's doing politically with every reference to Homer, if you just go into it thinking, all right, Homer is where he started. What has he done with Homer? Let me see! - then that's the right attitude to go in with. Whereas, let me find all the places where he did the same thing as Homer and just mark them as a big X because that was copying. It's not gonna, do it if you want, I don't care, but, I do care, but do it if you want, but it won't be very satisfying. And I would argue that you're missing most of the joy.

Well good, because I think our listeners, I think a lot of them are coming to this completely fresh. And this is the kind of thing that will make reading it for the first time such a more experience, knowing that you're not getting a knockoff and that you understand why he's writing it the way that he's writing it. So I really, really hope that everyone listening is going to pick up a copy, even if it's in translation, because translations are good as well.

Absolutely, in fact, start in translation. Even if you read Latin, start with the translation and then go to the Latin. It's not like there's plot twists you need to, like, keep as a surprise. I've told you all the plot. You're good. Get a sense of what's going on and then maybe, if you have enough Latin to pick up pieces, go read little parts of it ⁓ and see the beauty of the language;

there's lots of translations they're very good read those it's not a subpar experience you know it's a good it's a good way to engage with the text

Yes, we will list recommended translations in the episode description for you. And yes, go and read The Aeneid. Thank you so much, Avon. That was the perfect discussion about The Aeneid. It really did cover everything that think anybody needs to know about approaching this particular poem.

It's a good starting point. There's now now if you get really interested in it, there's about seven million other things you can read and listen to about the Indian When it's that big how does that bigger place in the literature? There's also an awful lot of people who said an awful lot of things about it And I have by no means covered all of the different approaches and thoughts, but thank you I really enjoyed speaking about it. It was it's as you can tell I love it. I love it. Love it. Love it. I just think it's wonderful and I love talking and thinking about it.

I have loved listening about it! hope everyone else has too. Yeah, go pick up a copy. I know I will be rereading it this week. Thank you very much.

Very welcome, thank you for having me on!