The Aeneid: Virgil’s Answer to Homer

Virgil began the Aeneid on a commission and died wanting it burned. Both facts matter, and the second is the more honest gloss on the first. Augustus had won his civil wars and needed a poem that would make the new order look less like a seizure of power and more like the working-out of fate; Virgil gave him one, and spent eleven years discovering that the story he had been asked to tell could not be told without grief. The result is the strangest of the great national epics: a founding myth shadowed at every turn by the cost of founding, a hymn to Rome that keeps stopping to mourn the people Rome had to walk over. To read it as propaganda is to miss half of it. To read it as a secret protest is to miss the other half. The truth is that Virgil meant both the glory and the mourning, and held them together with a steadiness no poet has matched since.

What it means to answer Homer

The architecture announces the ambition. Virgil split his twelve books down the middle and gave each half a Homeric model: the first six, the wanderings of Aeneas from fallen Troy to Italy, answer the Odyssey; the last six, the war in Latium, answer the Iliad. He inverted the order on purpose. Homer’s audience read the war first and the homecoming second; Virgil makes you earn the war, makes you arrive at the killing only after you have followed his hero across the whole exhausted Mediterranean. The reversal is a thesis in itself. For Homer, the fighting at Troy is the given condition of the world, the thing that simply is; for Virgil, war is what waits at the end of the journey, the price of the promised land, something a reasonable man would avoid if fate allowed it. It never does.

This is what it means to answer rather than imitate. Virgil knew Homer cold, line by line, and he wanted you to know that he knew, so that every borrowing would register as a deliberate revision. When Aeneas descends to the underworld in Book VI, you are meant to remember Odysseus doing the same in Odyssey XI — and to notice that Odysseus went down to learn how to get home, while Aeneas goes down to be shown the unborn souls of the Romans who do not yet exist, the long parade of a future that will cost him everything he loves. Homer’s hero looks back into the past of the dead. Virgil’s hero is marched forward into the future of an empire. The poem that grew out of Reading Homer: The Iliad and the First Epic of War is here transformed from an epic of a single ruinous quarrel into an epic of historical destiny, and the transformation carries a tax.

Pietas, or the unbearable virtue

Homer’s heroes are driven by kleos — glory, the name that outlives the body, the thing Achilles chooses over a long quiet life. Aeneas is driven by something Virgil’s Romans called pietas, and the difference is the whole difference between the two civilizations. Pietas is duty: to the gods, to the dead, to the family, to the unborn city. It is not glamorous. It carries no thrill of self-assertion. The poem’s standing epithet for its hero is pius Aeneas — “dutiful Aeneas” — and the word is repeated so often, in moments so unpromising, that some readers find the hero a prig or a cipher. They have it backwards. Pietas is the heaviest burden in classical literature precisely because it requires a man to surrender every personal desire to an obligation he did not choose. Aeneas does not want to found Rome. He wants his city back, his wife alive, his father not dead in his arms. He carries the duty the way he carries the old man out of burning Troy: on his back, because no one else will, because the alternative is to let everything be lost.

Achilles in his tent is sulking over an insult to his honor. Aeneas, when we meet him, is wishing aloud that he had died at Troy with the lucky ones. The Homeric hero asserts himself against fate; the Virgilian hero submits to it and is hollowed out by the submission. This is Virgil’s deepest answer to Homer, and it is an answer with a cost written into it: the man who carries the future cannot keep the present. Every act of pietas is also an act of renunciation.

Dido, and the woman the future runs over

The clearest proof that Virgil meant the cost to wound is Dido. The queen of Carthage takes the shipwrecked Trojans in, falls catastrophically in love with Aeneas, and gives the poem its one great interval of happiness — and Virgil writes her with such tenderness and such terrible insight that for the length of Book IV the imperial project simply stops mattering. When Mercury arrives to remind Aeneas of his destiny and order him back to his ships, the reader is on Dido’s side, and Virgil knows it, and does nothing to talk us out of it. Aeneas leaves because pietas demands it. Dido builds her own pyre and falls on his sword, and her dying curse — that Carthage and Rome shall war forever — reaches across centuries to Hannibal and the burning of her city. The personal tragedy becomes the seed of historical catastrophe.

What makes the episode unbearable is that Virgil refuses to make Aeneas a villain or Dido a fool. Both are caught. The fault, if there is one, lies with the order of things itself, with a destiny that requires a good man to break a good woman’s heart and a city’s future to be founded on an abandonment. When Aeneas later meets Dido’s shade in the underworld and tries to explain, she turns away from him in absolute silence and walks back into the shadows toward her first husband — the single most devastating moment in the poem, and a flat refusal of the consolations epic usually offers. Homer’s dead at least speak. Virgil’s most wronged woman will not give her betrayer the dignity of a reply. This is the melancholy that runs under the imperial commission like groundwater: the suspicion that Rome’s glory and Rome’s guilt are the same act seen from two sides. Among the long shadow this poem casts over later retellings of the Trojan War, from the golden apple to the horse, none is heavier than the human price Virgil insists we keep counting.

The melancholy of empire

There is a phrase in Book I — sunt lacrimae rerum, “there are tears in things” — that has become the motto of everyone who reads the Aeneid as a sad poem rather than a triumphant one. Aeneas speaks it before a mural in Carthage depicting the Trojan War, moved that even here, among strangers, the suffering of his people has been thought worth painting. The line is untranslatable and inexhaustible, but its drift is clear: the world is shot through with mortal sorrow, and the great deeds men do are made of it. Virgil never lets the celebration of Rome float free of this undertow. Anchises, showing his son the future in the underworld, delivers the famous credo — let others sculpt and reason and orate; the Roman art is to rule, to spare the conquered and crush the proud — and even this proud manifesto is delivered among the unborn dead, in a place of shades, with the cost of the conquering already implied.

The ending seals it. The poem does not close on Rome founded or the lovers reunited or peace declared. It closes, abruptly, on a killing: Aeneas, on the point of sparing his defeated enemy Turnus, sees the belt of his dead young friend Pallas on Turnus’s shoulder, and in a flare of rage drives his sword home. The last word is the protest of Turnus’s soul fleeing “with a groan” into the dark. Virgil ends his national epic not with glory but with a furious, half-justified, deeply troubling act of vengeance — and then he stops, mid-stride, leaving us to wonder whether the founder of Rome has just betrayed the very mercy his father told him was Rome’s whole purpose. No poet ever paid a more honest tax on a commission.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to have read Homer first?

It helps enormously, but it is not required. The Aeneid stands on its own as a story — the fall of Troy, the wandering, the love affair, the war. But Virgil wrote it as a sustained reply to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the more of Homer you carry in your head, the more of Virgil’s revisions you will catch. If you have read even one of the Homeric poems, you will feel the Aeneid arguing back. A good annotated edition will flag the echoes you might otherwise miss.

Why did Virgil want the poem burned?

He died in 19 BCE with the Aeneid unfinished — a number of lines remain metrically incomplete — and reportedly asked that the manuscript be destroyed. Augustus overruled the request. Scholars debate the motive: perfectionism, or a deeper unease with what the poem had become. The text we have was edited into shape by his literary executors, which is part of why those half-lines survive: they left the seams showing.

Is it pro-Roman or anti-Roman?

Neither, or both, and the refusal to settle the question is the point. The “Augustan” reading takes the prophecies of Roman greatness at face value; the “pessimistic” reading hears the grief under them and concludes Virgil was quietly subverting his patron. The mature view is that Virgil meant the glory and the cost at once, and that the poem’s greatness lies in holding both without resolving them.

Virgil rewards the reader who can hear two notes at once, and that is exactly the reader an annotated edition is built to make. Our Erato Press volume gives you a clean, dignified text of the epic with the Homeric echoes flagged where they fall, the Roman history glossed where Virgil assumes it, and the untranslatable phrases — pietas, sunt lacrimae rerum — opened up rather than smoothed over, so that the melancholy under the triumph stays audible.

Read the Erato Press edition →

and follow Aeneas from the burning of Troy to the founding that cost him everything.