Virgil: The Poet Who Forged Roman Identity in the Aeneid

[00:00:00]I think it’s fair to say the Romans are not best  known for their Literature, and while that is frankly a shame, I can very much understand why.  When an unstoppable train of legionaries comes battering down your door in their imperialistic  quest to confiscate the entire Mediterranean Sea, you are unlikely to be focusing on the stylistic  choices in their poetry. No amount of artistic alliteration would alleviate the absolute  atrocities suffered by the people and kingdoms who found themselves the new beneficiaries of  the Roman Peace. And even during the subsequent Pax Romana when life was at least nominally  chill, most Romans engaged with their culture through the physical art and architecture that  dominated civic spaces all throughout the empire.

[00:00:36]Very little Latin is necessary to understand  that Marcus Agrippa made this bigass temple, as public megaworks have a conspicuous habit of  speaking for themselves. BUT, if Rome wanted to become more than a land of soldiers and engineers  and ascribe some sense of purpose to its world conquering-ness, it needed to start writing stuff. Now by the time of the first emperor Augustus, Greece had been hard at work for nearly a  millennium, and their immense catalogue of epics, poems, plays, and philosophies had become  a core pillar of Roman culture. However, seeing as those were all written in Greek, the  citizens were hungry for more literature in the Latin language. That’s not to say Romans didn’t  have a strong start in the 200s BC, as they came out the gate with the invention of the sitcom  by comedy playwrights like Plautus. For context, most of Shakespeare’s comedies are adaptations of  Plautus, and for further context, Roman comedy is absolutely hilarious. This seemingly contrasts  with the straight-laced, stuff-upper-lip that we observe in Cicero’s formal letters on politics  and philosophy, or in the utterly emotionless war commentaries by Caesar – but as soon as we  expand our sample size beyond politicians, we observe, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the  Romans were really quite expressive writers.. Take the first-century BC poet Catullus,  whose verses painstakingly chronicled the emotional rollercoaster of his affair with an  aristocratic woman; the poor lovebird probably felt more ecstasy and heartbreak in his 30 year  lifespan than most people get in a century, and some of his poems would make even Sappho blush. So the Romans clearly had poetry, and expressive poetry at that – defying the stereotype of  the cold, unfeeling statesman – but there is one attribute that binds early roman literature  together and distinguishes it from the Greek: it’s all concerned with what is. Family  dynamics, politics, war, love affairs: all varied topics, but all part of the everyday  world and deeply familiar to the Roman audience.

[00:02:20]And so enters Virgil, a poet perfectly timed  to meet the new Roman world, or perhaps, the empire of Augustus was lucky to have dawned  during Virgil’s lifetime. It’s hard to convey how transformative Virgil’s poetry was for Roman  culture, but it’s harder to imagine what Rome would have been like without him. With just three  works in his lifetime, one of them unfinished, Virgil built on the foundations of Greek  literature, stepped beyond the familiar world, and created, in beautiful Latin, a comprehensive  cultural identity for the Roman people. So, to see how this humble poet marks the high point  of Latin Literature and hard-carried the entire ethos of the empire, Let’s do some History. Publius Vergilius Maro was born in 70 BC just outside the northern Italian city of Mantua and  would have grown up in a republic that only knew chaos. Coming off of a decade of civil wars with  several more on the way once Caesar crosses the Rubicon in 49 BC, the prevailing attitudes in the  mid first century would have ranged from Glum to outright Doom. And Virgil, who all his life  was terribly shy and frequently sick, wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. In his youth  he studied law, but once he got to Rome he spoke in court exactly once and immediately decided to  leave. This choice may have also been influenced by the General Caesar recently being stabbed  to death 23 times by the Senate. Either way, good to leave, so Virgil hopped down to Naples to  study stoic philosophy, met the young poet Horace while he was there, and at that time began working  on his first poetry collection, The Eclogues.

[00:03:45]Inspired by some earlier Greek work, this is a  set of 10 poems praising life in the countryside, where farmers talk about their land, young  men bemoan unrequited love, singers compete with each other, and life is good. Well, at  least it’s supposed to be, as the poems are loosely set in the Greek wilderness of Arcadia,  but there are some curiously modern inclusions, as those farmers in poem 1 are actually talking  about how their lands just got confiscated. See, though Virgil got out of Rome, politics  marched on, sometimes literally, as Caesar’s allies Octavian and Marcus Antonius waged a war  against the Assassins, and after their victory at the battle of Philippi, Octavian paid off his  armies with farmlands seized from towns in Italy, of which Virgil’s hometown was one. So the  Eclogues are establishing what will become a running theme of the natural world under threat  from disaster and political chaos. But all is not lost, as Eclogue 4 promises a golden age  dawning with the arrival of a young boy, and depending on how you read that metaphor it could  be anybody from the child of Antony and Octavia, a metaphor for Virgil’s poetry, or… as later  Romans believed: Baby Jesus. Taken all together, the Eclogues see Virgil refashioning Arcadia from  a distant mythological land into contemporary Italy; beauty, crisis and all. He also took the  leap of using the old Greek Dactylic Hexameter, the metrical structure of Homer’s Iliad and  Odyssey, but in Latin. He was not the first to do this, but he was the best, and the Eclogues  catapulted Virgil into literary stardom. A year after their publication in 38 BC, Virgil made  friends with Gaius Maecenas, patron of the arts and close associate of Caesar Octavian, now de  facto ruler of the western Mediterranean. In the following decades, Maecenas would become the  primary driver of Roman literature under the Augustan Program, which is a flashy way to say  minister of propaganda. But we’re not there yet, because it’s still 37 BC, and Virgil was just  gifted a house on the Esquiline hill in Rome, but he once again immediately left for  the countryside. Absolute boss move.

[00:05:38]In the 30s BC, Virgil’s private life of writing  poetry out in the country once again ran parallel with a Roman civil war, as Octavian vied with  his former friend Antony for control of the Mediterranean world, culminating in the battle  of Actium in 32 BC. So two years later, Virgil presented Maecenas and the triumphant Octavian  with a poem about… farms. Specifically, it’s an instruction manual for farming, growing trees,  animal husbandry, and beekeeping, all written in meter, full of poetic flourishes and mythological  allusions, and somehow actually really good?

[00:06:11]How does he keep getting away with this? This  collection, called the Georgics, echoed his early work’s presentation of an ideal pastoral  world threatened by natural and man-made crises, as disasters, storms, wars, and corruption all  come to cause a ruckus at various points in the poem. Like the Eclogues, this work weaves ancient  mythology in alongside very contemporary ideas and fears, but it also marks Virgil’s first  contribution to the Augustan program: bees.

[00:06:37]Let me explain – Bees are adorable, and they make  delicious honey, but they are also an excellent model for organizing society. So Virgil’s  observations on beekeeping double as a guide for bringing Roman civilization back from the  disorder of all those civil wars. You will note, kind viewer, that bees are recognized not only for  their efficient teamwork, but also for the curious fact that bees operate under a monarchy, not as  a tyrant, but in a reciprocal relationship as the patron guardian of the whole colony. This will  become a very Augustan idea, and there’s frankly a whole hive’s-worth of philosophically-nuanced  Bee ContentTM in book 4 of the Georgics. My ability to say that sentence with a straight face  should be a testament to this man’s insane skills.

[00:07:18]Because it’s comparatively easy to make a good  poem out of action and drama, but to make high art out of a gardening textbook is some real  talent… Now with that said, for his next poem, Virgil did take on a tale of action and drama, and  it. is. spectacular. So in the years after Actium, Octavian became Augustus, Rome became an Empire,  and Maecenas’ circle of poets became the voice of Roman culture. To mark his achievement,  Augustus went absolutely nuts on public works, but also wanted to portray his reign as the start  of a new golden age, and to do that, Virgil looked backwards: to the earliest foundations  of Roman history and of Greek literature, and those 2 threads converged on The Trojan War.  Specifically, legend went that the Trojan prince Aeneas, son of the goddess Venus, escaped the  burning city and somehow made it over to Italy, where his distant descendants Romulus and Remus  would later found the city of Rome. And seeing as Augustus claimed descent from Aeneas, Virgil could  praise the emperor indirectly without writing him in as a Marius Sue. Keep in mind this also gives  Virgil cover to criticize the great Princeps, because Aeneas represents Rome’s best and worst  attributes. He’s written to be pious, dedicated, cold, stubborn, and rageful all at once. In  practice, he’s the full inversion of the cunning and charming Odysseus. That comparison is handy,  because, on paper, the Aeneid is a Romanized retread of the Iliad and Odyssey, but remember  the Georgics was a farming manual, so there’s a lot more going on here than just Homer II.0. To summarize the over-plot, Aeneas washes up on the shores of Carthage, has a brief affair with  Queen Dido until he’s gently reminded about his cosmic destiny to find Italy and establish an  empire. So he leaves, she died mad about it, and Aeneas makes it to Italy, but has to fight a  war about it with Prince Turnus of the Rutuli to cement his claim to Latium and also win the hand  of Lavinia in marriage, which evidence suggests he sees exclusively as a business commitment. The  plot in itself isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s the details and the style that elevate it into one  of the best pieces of poetry in the world. For instance, as Aeneas is crossing the Aegean sea,  the one thing he brings with him are the Penates, which become the household gods specific  to Roman religion, and when mourning the death of his father Anchises he holds the very  first Parentalia, a traditional Roman funerary festival. Aeneas leaving Troy and journeying  toward Italy parallels his slow progression of becoming more Roman over the course of the epic,  establishing a continuity between the ancient past and the new Augustan golden age. He’s not just  going to a place, he’s creating a new identity, just as Virgil is creating a new identity for Rome  by composing a distinctly Roman mythology. Aeneas of course serves as a vehicle for Augustan  glory, specifically in the scenes where he goes into the underworld and sees Augustus  at the head of a metaphorical roman triumph, and later receives a shield forged by Vulcan with  Augustus’ victory at Actium front and center, but his characterization and structural  role make him into a singular symbol of Rome. His destiny is to found a civilization  he’ll never live to enjoy, but he does it anyway because selflessness is the currency of  Roman heroism, and that all begins in Aeneas.

[00:10:21]Now just as the poem begins In Media Res, with  Aeneas caught in a storm at sea wishing he had died at Troy, mood, it also ends in the middle  of the action, closing literally three lines after Aeneas kills his rival Turnus. Thing  is, the Aeneid is unfinished: several lines have incomplete meter, as Virgil died of a  fever in 19 BC while traveling from Greece, and he wanted three more years to polish the  poem, but all evidence indicates this abrupt climax was the intended ending, which is frankly  a baller move on Virgil’s part. Less cash money of him was his request that the unfinished poem  be burned – maybe as a cover for his criticisms of Augustus, maybe because he was that much  of a perfectionist – but literally everyone up to and including the emperor stepped in to  ensure the poem was published. With scenes like the retelling of the sack of Troy, Aeneas and  Dido’s let’s call it “wedding” in the cave, Dido’s silence in the underworld, and Aeneas  grieving over the death of his battle companion, the epic far transcends any mere asset-flip  of Homeric material. In fact, Virgil’s deliberately-composed poetry is far more robust  than the rigid and formulaic Greek that was passed down through ancient oral traditions. Virgil’s  Latin is varied and ornate and dynamic and it makes me want to learn Latin again, which is by  far the best compliment I can give him. There are, rightly, mountains of scholarship on Virgil,  because he’s such an essential presence in Roman culture, Augustus doesn’t work without  Virgil in his corner, and I dare say there is no empire without the Aeneid. Now Go Read It. Thank you so much for watching. I could have easily made this video triple the length,  because Virgil slaps harder than a roman legion armed with padleboards, but I, like  Aeneas, am demonstrating selfless heroism.

[00:12:06]And Vanity. Anyhow, Virgil is best boy and you  should all for-real read the Aeneid, I’ve linked the David Ferry translation in the description  below, and I will see you in the next video.