A British student sitting next to me is reading the epic. All I knew about Virgil before reading the critique here, was the meaning I used to describe to tourists of the famous mosaic housed in the Musée de Bardo in Tunis, Tunisia.
Here is what Daniel Mendelsohn writes about the Aeneid on The New Yorker:
[T]he Aeneid—notoriously—can be hard to love. In part, this has to do with its aesthetics. In place of the raw archaic potency of Homer’s epics, which seems to dissolve the millennia between his heroes and us, Virgil’s densely allusive poem offers an elaborately self-conscious “literary” suavity. (The critic and Columbia professor Mark Van Doren remarked that “Homer is a world; Virgil, a style.”) Then, there’s Aeneas himself—“in some ways,” as even the Great Courses Web site felt compelled to acknowledge, “the dullest character in epic literature.” In the Aeneid’s opening lines, Virgil announces that the hero is famed above all for his pietas, his “sense of duty”: hardly the sexiest attribute for a protagonist. If Aeneas was meant to be a model proto-Roman, he has long struck many readers as a cold fish; he and his comrades, the philosopher György Lukács once observed, live “the cool and limited existence of shadows.” Particularly in comparison with his Homeric predecessors, Aeneas comes up short, lacking the cruel glamour of Achilles, or Odysseus’s beguiling smarts.
But the biggest problem by far for modern audiences is the poem’s subject matter. Today, the themes that made the epic required reading for generations of emperors and generals, and for the clerics and teachers who groomed them—the inevitability of imperial dominance, the responsibilities of authoritarian rule, the importance of duty and self-abnegation in the service of the state—are proving to be an embarrassment. If readers of an earlier era saw the Aeneid as an inspiring advertisement for the onward march of Rome’s many descendants, from the Holy Roman Empire to the British one, scholars now see in it a tale of nationalistic arrogance whose plot is an all too familiar handbook for repressive violence: once Aeneas and his fellow-Trojans arrive on the coast of Italy, they find that they must fight a series of wars with an indigenous population that, eventually, they brutally subjugate.
The result is that readers today can have a very strange relationship to this classic: it’s a work we feel we should embrace but often keep at arm’s length. Take that quote in the 9/11 Museum: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.” Whoever came up with the idea of using it was clearly ignorant of the context: these high-minded words are addressed to a pair of nighttime marauders whose bloody ambush of a group of unsuspecting targets suggests that they have far more in common with the 9/11 terrorists than with their victims. A century ago, many a college undergrad could have caught the gaffe; today, it was enough to have an impressive-sounding quote from an acknowledged classic.
Another way of saying all this is that, while our forebears looked confidently to the text of the Aeneid for answers, today it raises troubling questions. Who exactly is Aeneas, and why should we admire him? What is the epic’s political stance? Can we ignore the parts we dislike and cherish the rest? Should great poetry serve an authoritarian regime—and just whose side was Virgil on? Two thousand years after its appearance, we still can’t decide if his masterpiece is a regressive celebration of power as a means of political domination or a craftily coded critique of imperial ideology—a work that still has something useful to tell us.
As recently as the early twentieth century, the Aeneid was embraced as a justification of the Roman—and, by extension, any—empire: “a classic vindication of the European world-order,” as one scholar put it. (This position is known among classicists as the “optimistic” interpretation.) The marmoreal perfections of its verse seemed to reflect the grand façades of the Roman state itself: Augustus boasted that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.
But in the second half of the last century more and more scholars came to see some of the epic’s most wrenching episodes as attempts to draw attention to the toll that the exercise of imperium inevitably takes. This “pessimistic” approach to the text and its relation to imperial ideology has found its greatest support in the account of Aeneas’s treatment of Dido. That passionate, tender, and grandly tragic woman is by far the epic’s greatest character—and, indeed, the only one to have had a lasting impact on Western culture past the Middle Ages, memorably appearing in works by artists ranging from Purcell to Berlioz to Mark Morris.
After the gods order Aeneas to abandon Dido and leave Carthage—he mustn’t, after all, end up like Antony, the love slave of an African queen—he prepares to sneak away. But Dido finds him out and, in a furious tirade, lambastes the man she considers to be her husband for his craven evasion of a kind of responsibility—emotional, ethical—quite unlike the political dutifulness that has driven him from the start:
In uttering these words, Dido becomes the Aeneid’s most eloquent voice of moral outrage at the promises that always get broken by men with a mission; in killing herself, she becomes a heartbreaking symbol of the collateral damage that “empire” leaves in its wake.
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