Virgil 70-19 B.C.

 

I. The Development of the Roman Empire

• The Roman Kingdom 753-509 B.C.E.
• The Roman Republic 509 B.C.E.-110 B.C.E
• Civil War/Fall of Republic 110 B.C.E-44 B.C.E
• The Roman Empire – Augustus 30 B.C.E-14 A.D

 

II. The Reality of the Roman Empire

• By the end of the first century B.C.E., Rome was the capital of an empire that stretched from the Straits of Gibraltar to the frontiers of Palestine. 

 

• This empire gave peace and orderly government to the Mediterranean area for the next two centuries, and for two centuries after that it maintained a desperate but losing battle against the invading tribes moving in from the north and the east.

• When it finally went down, the empire left behind it the ideal of the world state, an ideal that was to be taken over by the medieval Church, which ruled from the same center, Rome and which claimed a spiritual authority as great as the secular authority it replaced. 

 

III. The achievements of Rome

• Due in large part to their talent for practical affairs- great administrators, builders of roads, bridges, civilisations. 
• One of their greatest contributions to western civilisation is the great body of Roman law.
• The Romans were culturally extremely conservative.  The quality Romans most admired was gravitas, seriousness of attitude and purpose, and their highest words of commendation were "manliness" "industry" and "discipline"

 

IV. Virgil and Empire 70-19 B.C.

• When Virgil was born in 70 B.C. the Roman Republic, which had conquered and now governed the Mediterranean world, had barely recovered from one civil war and was drifting inexorably toward another. 
• Civil conflict that had disrupted the Republic for more than a hundred years ended finally in the establishment of a powerful executive:  the emperor. 
• Although the Senate, which had been the controlling body of the Republic, retained an impressive share of the power, the new arrangement developed inevitably toward autocracy, the rule of the executive, the emperor as he was called once the system was stabilized. 
• The first of the long line of Roman emperors who gave stable government to the Roman world during the first two centuries A.D. was Octavius, known generally by his title, Augustus (30 B.C.-14 A.D.) 
• Augustan Period – Golden Age of Roman Literature.  However, this was a period of imperial censorship;  literary patronage was given to writers who employed their talents in support of the empire.  The principal themes of Augustan literature were the glories of Rome’s historical past, the imperial mission of rome and italy, praise of Augustus and stress on the old Roman virtues of devotion to the state, military courage, religious devotion, purity in morals.

• Augustus requested Virgil to write a national epic about the founding of the roman Empire.  Virgil spent eleven years writing The Aeneid, ordered it to be destroyed in his will, but was published in its unfinished state at the direction of the emperor Augustus. The Aeneid glorifies, exalts the idea of Rome; describes divine approval and direction in the founding of Rome;  celebrates a hero whose moral greatness is achieved by sacrificing individual desires for the good of a future empire

 

IV. The Odyssey Compared to The Aeneid

• Both Homer and Virgil take the theme of the Trojan war and the fall of Troy.  The Aeneid:  The story of Aeneas, the Trojan prince who Virgil describes as coming to Italy after the fall of Troy and whose descendants founded Rome
• Virgil borrows Homeric turns of phrase, similes, sentiments, and whole incidents.
• Like Odysseus, Aeneas descends alive to the world of the dead;  unlike Odysseus, he does not find a home and peace.
• The personal objectives of Odysseus is replaced by a mission, imposed on him by the gods to found a city, from which will spring the Roman state.
• Aeneas is the prototype of the ideal Roman ruler;  his qualities are the devotion to duty and the seriousness of purpose that were to give the Mediterranean world two centuries of ordered government after Augustus. 
• Aeneas’ mission begins in disorder in the burning city of Troy but he leaves it, carrying his father on his shoulders and leading his little son by the hand.  This famous picture emphasizes the fact that he is securely set in a continuity of generations. 
• Odysseus has a father, wife, and son, and his heroic efforts are directed toward reestablishing himself in his proper context, that home in which he will no longer be a man in a world of magic and terror but a man in an organized and continuous community.  But he fights for himself.
• Aeneas on the other hand, suffers and fights, not for himself but for the future;  his own life is unhappy and his death miserable.  Yet he can console himself with the glory of his sons to come, the pageant of Roman achievement that he is shown by his father in the world below.
• Aeneas' future is Virgil's present;  the consolidation of the Roman peace under Augustus is the reward of Aneas' unhappy life of effort and suffering.

 

V. Critics on The Aeneid

 

• Virgil's complicated Roman society emphasized not the brilliant individual heroism of an Achilles or an Odysseus but social qualities - those responsibilities and obligations that required the individual to submit personal desires to the good of the community:  the family, country, gods. In a word, Vergil's heroes had to have pietas (duty, responsibility)

• Unlike Achilles and Hector, Aeneas does not have the luxury to die brilliantly on the battlefield and thereby win eternal glory in the songs of the epic poets.  Rather his heroic challenge is to survive and forgo personal satisfaction and glory for public service;  in this epic, as in Roman political and social philosophy in general, the interests of the state surpass those of the individual.  Subjugation of the self is the form of heroism that Aneas must learn in his odyssey.  Only in this way can he become the best of the Romans

 

• The differences between Odysseus’ and Aeneas’s Underworld experience reflect the difference in the lessons to be learned from the dead.  Odysseus discovers what he must do to get home safely and appease Poseidon’s anger;  more significant, he discovers what death means.  He sees in the condition of his mother and the statements of Achilles that death is a depressingly grim state, and yet he forgoes Calypso’s offer of immortality.  His choice is truly heroic yet personal in that it involves only himself and his family and it is freely made.  Aeneas enters a different kind of hell.  Vergil’s vision of the Underworld focuses on the public and not the personal task that the hero undertakes.  When Aeneas goes to Elysium and meets his father he sees not only the souls of his Greek and Trojan past but also, more important, those of the Roman future.  Instead of discovering what he must do to save his life (as Odysseus did) Aeneas learns of his part in the future destiny of Rome and hears Anchises message of social responsibility and manifest destiny. 

• Aeneas’experiences in the epic suggest that Aeneas achieves his defining heroic status when he succeeds in annihilating who he is, an honorable and humane prince of Troy, and becomes the personification of a concept, the concept that Romans throughout their history founds so admirable and so inspiring in the working out of their manifest destiny:  dedication to the family, to the gods and most of all to the state. 

 

• Virgil’s contribution to the ethical discourse on duty and responsibility constitutes the creation of a hero who is driven to relinquish his most intimate possession, his personal uniqueness, in the service of Rome;  a choice as tragic for the individual as it is beneficial to the state.