It took me around a year to get through Virgil’s timeless classic The Aeneid, not because of its length or difficulty, but rather because of the manner in which it was read. A hard copy lay beside my bed throughout this period, as one of my habits is to read a physical book—not a kindle or other electronic device—before going to sleep. And given that by the time I lay down in bed in the evening I am very tired, there are limits to how much I can read under those circumstances. Often, in fact, I am too tired to read at all and upon laying down immediately fall asleep, leaving the text untouched for days. The main reason is that during the day I am very busy with other activities, and when I am not working, I take the opportunity to study Chinese, which is quite time consuming. For that reason, this past year I have had little time for pleasure reading or for writing blogposts.
This way of reading a book—slowly and over a lengthy period of time—will perhaps limit the depth of appraisal, as identifying connections between its different parts—usually necessary to capture the book’s overarching message or impact—becomes tenuous or difficult as memories of earlier passages fade even while reading progresses. Nonetheless, I was able to absorb enough to develop a lasting impression which will be the focus of this blogpost. The key elements worth noting are the aesthetic quality of the text, which is emotionally intense and musical, and the content of the story which is reminder of the wide civilizational gap which separates us from the ancients. To demonstrate the latter, it would be useful to compare the worldview presented in The Aeneid with contemporary Western sensibilities which have been strongly influenced by Christianity; this religion, in the history of Western civilization, represented a major rupture in terms of how the cosmos, humans’ place in it, and the society of our fellows, were understood. The Aeneid is a stark reminder of that fact.
The version I read tells the story in verse, and each line is structured to give a rhythmic quality to the text. Often, a paragraph begins with a line composed of one word which appears not at the beginning, or left side of the paragraph, but at the right-end (see below for examples), forcing the reader to read one word then pause before proceeding. The effect is that of anticipation of an impending movement or motion which transports or nudges the reader to the subsequent scenes. Unlike in Dante’s Divine Comedy—a text which was strongly influenced by Virgil’s masterpiece—the lines in The Aeneid do not rhyme, but this does not detract from their musical like quality. After the first and usually very brief sentence, each line of each paragraph has a similar length, producing symmetrical pauses as the reading proceeds, contributing to the text’s musicality. Unlike us moderns, the ancients read out loud, and I did the same for large sections of the book, and discovered that this greatly adds to the sense that The Aeneid is a song as much as a poem.
At the same time, one’s voice when reading aloud is influenced by the emotionally intense language, and this too enriches the experience. The emotional intensity of some parts of the story convey hope and despair, triumph and loss, or pleasure and suffering. Scenes depicting war and those depicting romance, not surprisingly, leave the most lasting impression in this regard. In the second chapter, the final hours of Troy, we read about the death of Priam, king of Troy and father of Aeneas, at the hands of Neoptolemus son of Achilles, who
straight to the alter, quaking, slithering on through
slicks of his son’s blood, and twisting Priam’s hair
a flash of steel—he buries it hilt-deep in the king’s flank
Such was the fate of Priam…
with Troy blazing before his eyes
the monarch who once had ruled in all his glory
the many lands of Asia, Asia’s many tribes
The head wrenched from the shoulders.
A corpse without a name.
The final chapter, “The Sword Decides All,” recounts the battles which occurred after the Trojans landed on Italian soil and were resisted by the local Latins. These encounters would determine the fate of Aeneas’s enterprise and the subsequent history of the peninsula. Here the reader also encounters gripping scenes of fighting between the Trojans and the natives of Italian soil:
charging them come Agyllines and Trojans streaming up
with Arcadian ranks decked out in blazoned gear and
one lust drives them all: to let the sword decide.
“War lust” appears frequently in the text, highlighting how the ancients entangled sexual drives with violence and face to face combat. Both are a form of intimacy in that the parties,’ often sweaty, bodies clash and contract, pounding and penetrating, with a power dynamic akin to a contest of wills which will leave only one with achieving their objective, or that makes one the supplicant and the other with the power to refuse or walk away. The Italian language has preserved this close connection between lust and violence, as the word “conquistare,” or conquer, is synonymous with successful seduction, and is still used to convey that meaning in everyday conversation.
The same chapter culminates with the final battle between Aeneas and Turnus, the latter a leader of Latins, which would determine the Trojans’ founding of the settlement—Rome—which eventually would become the Roman empire. The fighting lasts for several pages, and Turnus is gravely injured and losing his strength:
when the nightly spell of sleep falls heavy on our eyes
and we seem entranced by longing to keep on racing on
no use, in the midst of one last burst of speed
we sink down, consumed, our tongue won’t work
and tried and true, the power that filled our body
fails—we strain but the voice and words won’t follow.
So with Turnus.
Turnus is prostrate on the ground but not yet completely defeated. While facing his opponent Aeneas, he says:
Seize your moment now…
Aeneas seems reluctant to strike the final blow, but fate had other ideas. Aeneas’s comrade, the young Pallas, who had been injured by Turnus earlier in the battle, appears and reminds Aeneas of the terrible losses and sacrifices incurred during combat with the Latins. He plants:
Turnus’ limbs went limp in the chill of death.
His life breath fled with a groan of outrage
down to the shades below.
Perhaps the most gripping part of the text recounts the love affair between Aeneas and Dido, Queen of Carthage, in the chapter “The Tragic Queen of Carthage.” In the previous chapter readers see their budding love developing during a banquet she made for the Trojans, whom, as fate would have it, while sailing from Troy to Italy, had shipwrecked on North African soil. The opening verses of the chapter set the stage for the drama which was about to come:
consumed by the fire buried in her heart.
The man’s courage, the sheer pride of his line
they all come pressing home to her, over and over.
His looks, his words, they pierce her heart and cling—
no peace, no rest for her body, love will give her none.
Their love is consummated only because of the gods’ machinations, especially Juno who of course unbeknownst to the poor Dido, have more venal motives, namely to prevent Aeneas from fulfilling his destiny to found the Roman empire. If Aeneas developed a romantic attachment, thought Juno, he would remain in Carthage with his lover. One day, Aeneas and Dido are out hunting, and the Juno triggers a thunderstorm that forces them to find shelter in a cave, where alone and in close quarters, the natural next step could occur:
and the storm breaking next, a cloudburst pelting hail…
primordial Earth and Juno, Queen of marriage
give the signal and lightening torches flair
and the high sky bears witness to the wedding
nymphs on the mountaintops wail out the wedding hymn.
This was the first day of her death, the first of her grief.
Aeneas is genuinely in love with Dido, but he was destined against his will to sail to Italy and found the new colony which would become Rome, meaning he could not remain in Carthage. Dido, of course, enflamed by her love, could not accept this course of action, and is maddened by her grief:
from the light of day, sweeping out of his sight
leaving him numb with doubt, with much to fear…
To what extremes won’t you compel our hearts?
Again she resorts to tears, driven to move the man
or try, with prayers—a suppliant kneeling, humbling
her pride to passion.
At this point in the text hope is not completely lost, as Aeneas is deeply torn by destiny and love pulling him apart. Although readers know the outcome, Virgil gives readers the impression that Aeneas may change his mind, as he wrestles with the dilemma, but in the end he must sacrifice pleasure and desire for the greater good of self-sacrifice and glory, a recurring motif in Roman history and mythology, which would be reproduced in a different form with Aeneas’s descendants, and first kings of Rome, the twin brothers Romulus and Remo; the former murdered the latter because of a sacrilegious violation of the new city’s religious traditions which threatened to undermine the entire project.
When Dido finally realizes her appeals are to no avail, she is outraged and wants vengeance. Virgil presents readers with what perhaps is the most memorable section of The Aeneid, in the verse which foretells the Punic wars, the existential conflict between Carthage and Rome which lasted 146 years and which almost relegated the Roman experiment to the dustbin of history:
with my own lifeblood. And you, my Tyrians
harry with hatred all his line, his race to come:
make that offering to my ashes, send it down below.
No love between our peoples, ever, no pacts of peace!
Come rising up from my bones, you avenger still unknown,
to stalk those Trojan settlers, hunt with fire and iron
now or in time to come, whenever the power is yours.
Shore clash with shore, sea against sea and sword
against sword—this is my curse—war between all
Civilizational divide
The Aeneid is also a window into how the ancients thought about their place in the cosmos. It is worth remembering that the text was not considered, as it is today, simply a novel or poem to be approached as an abstract work of art. Rather, it was popularly read by masses and elites, and as recounted by the historian Mary Beard, it was a cultural reference point among the different classes of the empire, and perceived as an accurate account of Rome’s founding. In that sense, its status was closer to the Bible or the Koran rather than a simple piece of literature. The gods’ machinations in the lives of protagonists were not, as might be understood today, entirely a product Virgil’s expansive imagination. Rather, it reflected how people believed the gods actually behaved and interfered in human affairs. And from this starting point we can assess the wide civilizational gap which separates the ancients from their descendants in the medieval, modern, and post-modern periods.
The first thing to note is that Aeneas was the son the goddess Venus and the Trojan prince Anchises, in the sense of being conceived via carnal, physical intercourse between a goddess and a mortal. The gods, thus, sired warlike offspring, strong and dominating alpha males who conquer entire countries, slaughtering and looting in their quests for glory, all of course, with the favour and assistance of divine forbearers. Aeneas, of course, is not unique in this regard; different gods produce different offspring, but they almost always form the ruling class, the nobility, who can count on the gods’ favourable interference in their attempts to conquer, kill, enslave, rule.
Compare this with the Christian understanding of the relationship between God and man. First is that Mary is impregnated, not by an act of coitus, but rather by the Holy Spirit, that mysterious substance which is part of the trinity and therefore God; this perhaps helped to preserve her purity as a woman married to Joseph. Second is that the offspring is not a conqueror or a dominant and attractive alpha male, but rather an ordinary looking, perhaps even emaciated, humble and non-violent peacemaker. Third is that he is born among a subject peoples, as the Jews were under the Roman empire, and teaches that doing God’s will on earth entails helping the lowly—sick, poor, weak.
The Christian understanding of God and man would have sounded bizarre to the ancients for the simple reason that this conception of the divine was utterly alien to them. And their different understandings of the divine helps account for their different norms, morals, legal systems, and how society was organized. Among the ancients, the divine favours strong, the beautiful, and brave warriors, and it logically follows that the gods, too, had these attributes. If so, and if they were the highest possible authority, earthly relations had to be organized around these same principles. In contrast, a son of God who is born among subject peoples, and teaches humility, charity, and service rather than glory and domination, implies that this divine would favour the weak not the strong. If so, society could not for long be organized in the manner of ancient times; rules, norms, and laws would eventually reflect the new belief system to the extent that it was believed by legislators and lawmakers. And for this reason there arose belief systems which raised the status of the lowly, such as human equality and human rights, which would have been inconceivable among the ancient Romans precisely because it was incommensurable with their metaphysical beliefs.
During antiquity, there was no single religious truth or holy text. Different peoples had different gods, and connected to them via sacred objects and shrines. A common practice in ancient Rome was to discern the will of gods by examining the flights of birds, or the entrails of slaughtered animals, and one of the functions of priests was to accurately interpret these. In contrast, in the Christian era, priests were learned scholars who studied the classics of ancient Greece and Rome and who attempted to discern God’s will via a philosophical exegesis of texts, or what would later be called theology. This move away from studying God’s will in nature towards doing the same in texts, and the need for a specialized scholarly class to accomplish such an endeavour, led to the establishment of the first universities in Europe which would later become the secular institutions that they are today.
The will of the gods was omnipresent in nature and The Aeneid reveals this in how the ancients anthropomorphized the heavens, seasons, and weather, which were often capitalized to convey willfulness or agency:
dank Night had nearly reached her turning-point in the sky
and stretched on the hard thwarts beneath their oars
the crews gave way to a deep, quiet rest, when down
from the starts the God of Sleep came gliding gently
cleaving the dark mists and scattering shadows.
For Christians, in contrast, God was and is a supreme lawgiver who created a mechanistic universe which operates according to lawlike regularity. This gives the sense that for the ancients, nature or natural forces were enchanting and magical, while Christians believe that God may intervene but in the form of miracles or rare events which are in a sense unnatural (hence the term supernatural). The ancients lacked this conceptual separation between the divine and nature, and this too was reflected in their institutions. The emperor, for example, also had the title of pontifex, which translates to bridge, meant here as a function which connects the people and the divine. And in fact some emperors were considered in the literal sense to have divine ancestry and therefore worthy of being worshipped as gods. In the Christian era, of course, these roles were completely institutionally separate; the pope was God’s representative on earth, while the prince, king, or emperor was a lawmaker, and both were mere mortals. It is this institutional separation which made possible the secular societies which would subsequently emerge and which characterize the modern period.
