A Greater Work: Vergil’s Aeneid 7-12 

 A Greater Work 

“A greater work” is Vergil’s own description of what he’s doing in the Aeneid. He writes:

 Maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo; /maius opus moveo. (Aeneid VII 45-46)

A greater order of affairs is born for me; I move a greater work.

Here’s the interesting thing. Notice that this proclamation doesn’t come at the beginning of the epic. We find it instead at the beginning of Book VII. That’s the midway point of the twelve book narrative. In other words, the implication is that the “greater” work is starting now. It’s referring to the last half. We would do well to pay more attention to that.

Now, the idea of the Aeneid falling into two distinct parts is nothing new. Anyone who knows anything about Vergil’s epic knows that he modeled the first six books of his great epic on Homer’s Odyssey, and the last six on the Iliad.

Greater Than the Iliad 

The complicating factor here is that for the last century or so, we’ve paid much more attention to the first half. Most Latin students never venture past Book VI. The Vergil portion of the AP Latin curriculum has always drawn heavily, and at times exclusively (as it does now) on the first six books. Even Clyde Pharr’s magnificent reading edition of the Aeneid includes only Books I-VI. Books VII-XII have become an afterthought.

And yet Vergil thought otherwise. So did his contemporaries. As Vergil’s great work was nearing completion, his friend and fellow-poet Propertius said,

Nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade.

Something greater than the Iliad is being born.  

At the time, and for centuries afterward, the story of the anger of Achilles carried the reputation of being the greatest literary work. The adventures of Odysseus was entertaining, but of a lower order. For that reason alone it’s clear that Vergil intended the Iliadic portion of the Aeneid to be greater. But there’s much more to it than that.

Working to Rebuild 

Let’s back up a bit and take a look at where the Aeneid is coming from. When Vergil set out to write an epic poem in 29 BC the Roman world was just emerging from a cataclysmic century. For the past hundred years political violence, rioting, and civil war had ravaged Rome. One strongman after another (Marius, Sulla, Caesar, and so on) had marched into the city at the head of an army and made himself dictator. But now the civil strife had ended, and peace had returned.

The Roman Republic, however, lay in ruins. One man was left in control of all the major institutions, most significantly the military. That was Julius Caesar’s great nephew and adopted heir, Gaius Octavianus, i.e., Octavian. The Roman Senate had not yet voted him the (supposedly) honorific title, Augustus, “revered.” That would come two years later. But Octavian was already working to rebuild the Roman world.

A Roman Epic 

Octavian believed that a sense of shared nationhood, of shared destiny, would bring the citizens of the empire together. To this end, he had his wealthy friend Maecenas gather the most illustrious poets and writers of his time into his entourage. He had actually begun doing this well before his defeat of Marc Antony and the Egyptian queen Cleopatra to end the last civil war in 32 BC.

Vergil was among this group of artists. Homer’s epics the Iliad and the Odyssey gave the Greek speaking world a sense of cultural cohesion. Vergil set out to write a Latin epic to do the same for the Romans. The point here was not just cultural cohesion, but a sense of belonging to the great project that was Rome. And so he proposed to write about the achievements of Octavian.

The Founder 

Octavian, showing both more political sense and, at least in this case, more artistic sense than the poet himself, had a better suggestion. Vergil should write about Aeneas. Aeneas was the mythical refugee prince from the fallen city of Troy who united the remnants of the Trojans with the local tribes of central Italy to create the Roman People.

And Aeneas fit the bill perfectly. In Greek Mythology he is the son of the goddess Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans). In Homer’s Iliad the gods rescue him from death on more than one occasion since he is destined to rule the Trojans after the fall of their city. The Romans had long claimed that the gods had saved him to found the New Troy, Rome.

Not the city itself, of course, that was the work of Aeneas’s descendants Romulus and Remus. It was Roman tradition, however, that he was the founder of the Roman people.

A Template 

There was also a certain Patrician family that claimed descent from Aeneas himself, through his son Ascanius, who was also known as Iulus. That was the Julian family. And so the story of Aeneas gave Vergil the material to celebrate the creation of the first Roman state. Also, plenty of opportunities to suggest that state’s restoration at the hands of the hero’s present-day descendant, none other than Octavian Caesar himself.

As noted, Vergil hoped to do for the Romans what Homer had done for the Greeks. And in fact Homer’s epics provided a template. As we saw, the first six books, the first half, of the Aeneid are modeled on the Odyssey. Here Vergil details the wanderings of Aeneas after the fall of Troy. The final six books correspond loosely to the Iliad. These depict the Trojans’ fight to establish themselves in central Italy.

Pius Aeneas 

On one level, obviously, Aeneas is a stand-in for Augustus. But there’s a lot more going on in the Aeneid. It would be a mistake to dismiss it as no more than Augustan propaganda. Some commentators in recent years have even gone to the opposite extreme and suggested that Vergil is slyly criticizing Augustus in his epic. Both of those views miss the point. Throughout the Aeneid Vergil reminds his readers that Aeneas is the tool of destiny. His favorite epithet for the hero is pius. The virtue of pietas was faithfulness, fidelity to family, nation, gods, and destiny. When Aeneas acts in accordance with his calling, things go well. When he strays, well, things get messy.

This brings us back to the two halves of the Aeneid. The key event of the first half comes when Aeneas loses sight of his mission. He knows that Carthage is not his fated destination. He knows that Dido is not his destined queen. And yet he allows himself to be drawn into a quasi-marriage with her. The results are distressing for Aeneas, disastrous for Dido.

Even worse, the bitterness arising from their mythical parting sets the stage for the historic Punic wars between Rome and Carthage. The 3rd Punic war ended in 146 BC, less than eighty years before Vergil’s birth. The Carthaginian general Hannibal’s invasion of Italy in the 2nd Punic War was still a traumatic memory for the Romans.

Want vs. Duty 

And here lies the warning for Augustus. The Aeneid is not simply about Aeneas. It’s about the pietas of Aeneas. Time and again we see him having to choose between what he wants to do, and what he knows he has to do. He chooses wrongly at Carthage. He’s faced with another choice in the closing lines of the epic. He has his enemy, the Rutulian leader Turnus, on the ground. Aeneas pauses, on the verge of sparing the life of his foe. Then he notices Turnus wearing the baldric he had taken when he killed Pallas. Pallas had been a young prince, and an ally of Aeneas. At this reminder of his duty, Aeneas sets aside any thought of clemency and immediately dispatches Turnus.

Some modern readers ascribe Aeneas’ final act to unbridled emotion, to rage. It’s really the opposite. He wanted to be generous and spare his adversary. His duty, however, was to avenge the death of a young man under his tutelage. More than that, he had an even greater duty to eliminate the man who was the greatest threat to the fulfillment of his mission.

Tantae molis erat 

And that mission is the overarching theme of the Aeneid. Vergil starts off the poem with a sort of prologue. This introductory section ends with the line:

Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem! (Aeneid I 33)

It was so great an undertaking to found the Roman nation!

Aeneas is important because the gods have given him the primary responsibility for making that happen. Likewise, Augustus is important  because he has received the power to re-found that state. The Aeneid reminds him that the man Octavian is only great to the degree that he surrenders himself to that high destiny.

To return to where we began. The first six books lay the groundwork, but they’re just the introduction. The heart and fulfillment of Vergil’s epic lies Books VII-XII.  You can’t really understand Aeneas’s romance with Dido, or anything else that happens in the first six books, without the context of the last six.

Plenty of Good Material 

You may ask what happens in the second half to match the excitement of the story of the Trojan horse in Book II, or the interest of the ill-fated romance in Book IV. I admit those examples are hard to beat. And Books VII-XII do have an awful lot of fighting. But there’s plenty of good material even for those who don’t care for accounts of duels and combat. I’ll address that in my next post.  I’ll also review the novel Lavinia by Ursula LeGuin, which is based on Aeneid VII-XII.

Until then, cura ut valeas!

Featured image top of page: Aeneas Defeats Turnus, by Luca Giordano, 1688