Virgil Lives!

Every schoolboy once knew a fuller story. Born in 70 B.C., Publius Vergilius Maro had a long and close history with the future emperor–in some legends, going all the way back to Virgil’s youth, in which he is supposed, as a farm boy from the northern Italian city of Mantua, to have cured some of Augustus’ horses. His literary talents surfaced early. The “Eclogues,” ten pastoral poems, were so obviously superb that Cicero called him Rome’s second greatest hope (reserving first place to himself). And the fourth “Eclogue” had a curious career: Written in the last few decades before Christ, it predicted the birth of a miraculous boy who would restore the mythical Golden Age. Later Christian readers applied this to Jesus and regarded Virgil as a prophet and magician. His four books of the “Georgics”–a seven-year effort on agricultural subjects–won him further praise.

But the twelve books of the “Aeneid,” on which Virgil spent his last decade, were quickly judged a masterpiece of Latin literature. We owe the poem’s survival to Augustus. Virgil fell ill on his way to Greece, where he intended to spend three years polishing his poem, and died in 19 B.C. in the eastern Italian port city known today as Brindisi. A perfectionist, on his deathbed he asked friends to burn the manuscript. Fortunately, Augustus overruled this dying wish and had a pair of literary scholars bring out the text summatim emendata, with only slight editing.

Part of the explanation for Virgil’s modern decline is classicists’ general preference for Greek sources over Latin–which began slowly in the Renaissance and gathered irresistible momentum through the sheer power of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German scholarship. The catastrophic decline of reading knowledge in Latin among the generally educated in twentieth-century England and America also contributed to the shrinking of Virgil’s natural audience.

BUT SOMETHING POLITICAL seems to be at work in the dismissal of Virgil, as well. His closeness to Augustus (and the emperor’s well-known desire to maintain a façade of classical tradition while covertly recasting it in Roman imperial form) has deeply shaped approaches to the epic, for good and later for bad, over the centuries. The first half of the “Aeneid,” in this reading, is Virgil’s “Odyssey”; it tells of a Trojan warrior named Aeneas, who wanders the Mediterranean after the fall of Troy and eventually founds the city of Rome. Similarly, the second half of the “Aeneid” is Virgil’s “Iliad,” recounting battles in Italy and connecting Roman history with the heroic age of the Trojan War.

After World War II, T.S. Eliot tried to resuscitate the Latin poet, declaring that, “Our classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil.” Translations of the “Aeneid” continue to appear. Between the imperial reading of Virgil and the general anti-imperial feeling of the twentieth century, however, the “Aeneid”‘s high place in the Western literary canon was doomed. A few recent scholars, partly reflecting contemporary sensibilities, have detected ambiguities in the poem that raise the question of whether Virgil was, in his heart of hearts, a true believer in empire. The damage, however, was done: Except for this mop-up operation on a few critical questions, Virgil’s position in literature seemed fixed–at a moderate height–forever.

EVE ADLER, a classicist at Middlebury College in Vermont, may have just changed all that with her new book, “Vergil’s Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid.” (The traditional English spelling of the poet’s name is “Virgil.” Adler follows the trend in some recent classical studies of spelling the name “Vergil,” more closely reflecting the Latin.) After this analysis, it will be difficult to think of Virgil merely as a gifted imitator of Homer. If Adler is right, Virgil had ambitions at least as grand as his Greek predecessor–and with good reason.

“Vergil’s Empire” draws heavily on Leo Strauss for the political analysis of the “Aeneid.” Something of a secret teaching may be glimpsed behind the imperial screen, she argues, which emerges most clearly near the center of the text, where Aeneas’ descent into the underworld signals the shift from wandering to battles. But her sensitive and penetrating reading of many passages in the “Aeneid” does not reduce Virgil to a Procrustean bed of Straussian proportions. This book is stunningly original. Indeed, Adler’s account of Virgil’s views on universal empire has urgency not only for literary studies but for our reflections on empire in the current global situation.

Adler believes that Virgil is powerfully grappling not only with Homer, but with Lucretius, his Latin predecessor in the first century B.C. The first great poet after Rome’s clear emergence as the classical superpower, Lucretius presents a problem–what we might call the anxiety of influence–for all the Augustan Golden Age poets: Horace, Virgil, Sextus Propertius, Ovid. But Virgil, in Adler’s reading, is much more of a philosopher than he is often thought, and Lucretius offered a particular challenge for Virgil–because of the Epicurean philosophy Lucretius laid out in his book-length poem “De Rerum Natura” (On the Nature of Things).

The followers of Epicurus were materialists who denied the existence of the gods and sought as tranquil a life as this world can offer in private enjoyments and material comforts. Politics, in particular, was strictly avoided as leading to pointless troubles. Thus, Lucretius begins the second book of “De Rerum Natura”:

Pleasant it is, when over the great sea the winds shake the waters,
To gaze down from shore on the trials of others;
Not because seeing other people struggle is sweet to us,
But because the fact that we ourselves are free from such ills strikes us as pleasant.
Pleasant it is also to behold great armies battling on a plain,
When we ourselves have no part in their peril.
But nothing is sweeter than to occupy a lofty sanctuary of the mind,
Well fortified with the teachings of the wise,
Where we may look down on others as they stumble along,
Vainly searching for the true path of life.

There are many signs that the young Virgil was an Epicurean and that he never wholly repudiated that philosophy in adulthood. But Adler believes Virgil detected a fatal flaw in the Epicurean system, which he presents most memorably in the contrast between Aeneas and Queen Dido, and between Rome and Carthage. It may be true that the radically rational philosopher is freed from fear of both the gods and death–while limiting himself to rationally moderate pleasures. But such philosophers are so rare as to be of almost no social effect. Almost always, those who free themselves from traditional religion find themselves, like poor Dido, subject to furor: anger and lust. Epicurus was far too optimistic about our ability to tame these demons, and in his desire to spread this philosophy to the entire populace, Lucretius threatens the civic order. Indeed, he invites his own destruction, for the retired life of the Epicurean philosopher depends upon the existence of a peaceful city, which the passions unleashed by disbelief in the gods will not produce.

If Virgil had been a Straussian avant la lettre, he might have contented himself with suggesting that for the sake of private tranquillity the philosopher should connive at public religiosity, even though false, as a means of restraining and educating the masses. That would enable the philosopher to achieve his proper happiness–and the masses to enjoy as much good fortune as they are capable of.

But in Adler’s reading, Virgil goes a step further; he has been affected by Epicurean materialism, but is not wholly certain of the ultimate truth about nature. The shortcomings of Epicureanism, however, convince him beyond all doubt that arms and religion are needed to remedy evil tendencies in human nature.

VIRGIL’S POWERFUL MIND actually leads him to recast almost all the usual elements of this debate. For example, the arms he sings are not simply a continuation of the old heroic ethos of Homer. That, “Vergil’s Empire” notes, is certainly one way to confront the fear of death, but it is ultimately as rare as the way of the Epicurean philosophy. Nor does the turn to domestic pleasures satisfy Virgil. In Homer, Odysseus refuses Circe’s offer of immortality because of his loyalty to Penelope and Ithaca. But that too is only a half-measure against death. In Virgil, Aeneas both braves death in battle and seeks a new city for the Trojan gods. His main virtue is piety–something without precedent in the Greek stories of Achilles and Odysseus.

Thus, Adler argues, Virgil is consciously seeking to surpass Homer as well as Lucretius. So new and radical was this shift in the ancient world, Adler claims, that it raised the question of whether Virgilian piety–a mixture of duty, religiosity, and loyalty–is compatible with manliness (the root meaning of the Latin word “virtue”), as the ancients understood it. Epicureans could claim heroic virtue in rejecting the consolations of religion, even if they lived relatively unstrenuous lives. But if we also reject the Homeric combination of martial valor and human domesticity–a combination traditionally embraced by the Romans–what’s left?

Not much of the dominant classical systems, but part of Virgil’s genius is to have discovered another ethos, one that acknowledges something like divine providence in history, especially in the fated nature of Rome. Aeneas and his men will suffer along the way (lacrimae rerum, or the sorrows attending all human affairs, is another Virgilian idea that used to be a cultural commonplace). But Jupiter, Rome’s greatest god, promises early in the poem (in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation):

Young Romulus
Will take the leadership, build walls of Mars,
And call by his own name his people Romans.
For these I set no limits, world or time,
But make the gift of empire without end.

This was already an unusual claim within the classical understanding of the world and of time. Aeneas’ visit to the underworld in Book Six of the “Aeneid” even led people to believe that Virgil was a “naturally Christian soul,” anima naturaliter christiana, in the Middle Ages. His new vision of piety and Aeneas’ fateful journey have echoes (which Adler does not mention) of Abraham setting out for the Promised Land at the divine command, another point of contact with the Biblical tradition. But Aeneas returns from the underworld to our life through the gates of ivory, which Virgil goes out of his way to explain is the portal of false dreams and prophecies. As daring and inventive as Virgil was, he knows that pure reason comes up against a limit–although a human limit that Virgil was occasionally tempted to cross.

One reason for his hesitation was his worry about what the city he envisioned, even if it was a kind of holy city, might lead to. It would not be enough for Aeneas to found another city like Troy; that city would be subject to perpetual danger from neighbors, as were all the squabbling city-states of classical Greece. The city that Aeneas had to found would be universal, as Jupiter promised, without limit in space or time. That was the only way it could fulfill its divine mission. As Aeneas’ dead father tells him in Hades:

Others will cast more tenderly in bronze
Their breathing figures, I can well believe,
And bring more lifelike portraits out of marble;
Argue more eloquently, use the pointer
To trace the paths of heaven accurately
And accurately foretell the rising stars.
Roman, remember by your strength to rule
Earth’s peoples–for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.

In this, perhaps the most famous passage in the poem, the classical arts and sciences are not rejected, but are left to other peoples, subordinated in Virgil’s vision to the god’s specific demands of the sacred city. Anything less would be radically deficient in establishing a stable peace, given the nature of the world and human nature.

YET VIRGIL does not stop even here. Contrast this, as “Vergil’s Empire” does, with Dante. Trying to solve the problem of clashing city-states in his own time, Dante argues in his essay on monarchy, implausibly, that possession of universal empire would quell the emperor’s temptations to tyranny. Nonetheless, Dante’s vision of the Christian God does provide “a term to men’s desire or love in a fully adequate object,” says Adler. Virgil, still linked in many ways to the old pagan mythology, lacks any such notion of absolute love. Even though he announces in the first few lines of the “Aeneid” that Aeneas has to bring gods into Italy, force and religion run up against a limit in the classical cosmos because the neediness of all living beings finds no final remedy among men or gods: “It would be folly,” Adler writes, “to hope for the disarming of the erotic passions by reason in any but the rarest philosopher, and certainly in any ruler: Dido in spite of her philosophic tutor, certainly pious Aeneas, and ultimately even Jupiter himself are subject to the furor of these passions.” In a world where even the highest god is characterized as committing rapes and abductions, what hope is there for a perpetual peace under a human emperor?

It is one measure of Adler’s achievement in “Vergil’s Empire” that even though she–along with Virgil–cannot answer that question, she is worth reading very carefully, not only for what we can learn about a step in the development of the West, but what we can learn about our time as well. It is no accident that the modern equivalent of Epicureans–materialistic, disdainful of religion–tend to be overly optimistic about human nature and to resist the idea that we need war or other forms of coercion to restrain vice. It is equally no accident that the modern equivalent of Virgilians–with a religious vision about the need for the right kind of piety in the human city–are more likely to view both arms and religion as essential to the good of the United States and the restraint of evil in the world.

An empire, even a benevolent one, may overreach, of course. And Virgil hints that there are, humanly speaking, perhaps even seeds of self-dissolution in the most providential and perfect of empires. And so we oscillate between force and restraint, unmindful of their deeper meaning–still caught in the dynamic perceived by Virgil and brilliantly revived for us by Eve Adler in “Vergil’s Empire.” The time has come to restore Virgil’s epic poem to its place at the center of Western literature–both for its poetic qualities and because we have not surpassed the “Aeneid” or the world it portrays. In many ways, we are still living in it.

President of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., Robert Royal is the author of “Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy, Divine Spirituality.”