Lost and Founder

One of the most influential works in Western civilization, the Aeneid is modeled on, and pays homage to, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Aeneas, the hero after whom Virgil’s poem is named, is a secondary character in the Iliad. As the child of a Trojan father and the goddess Venus, he is on the losing side of the war. Through Virgil’s artistry, Aeneas gets a spinoff—becoming the star of his own saga.

Prophecy has revealed to Aeneas that his destiny is to found a new city in Italy. As the epic begins, Aeneas and his storm-tossed group of Trojan refugees land in Northern Africa, where they are welcomed by Dido, the queen of Carthage. The goddesses Juno and Venus conspire to make the pair fall in love. Although Aeneas is content to help build Carthage, he obeys Jupiter’s command to set sail for Italy. The devastated queen commits suicide and curses Aeneas—foreshadowing the enmity between Carthage and Rome. Aeneas finally arrives on the coast of Italy, where he must descend to the underworld to learn what is fated for the future of Rome.

The second half of the Aeneid is the “Iliadic” section, concerned with the battles that Aeneas fights to establish a foothold in Italy. His chief foe and rival for the hand of the princess Lavinia is the fiery warrior Turnus. In the final encounter between the two warriors, Aeneas gains the upper hand. Despite Turnus’ pleas, he refuses to spare him, taking revenge for the killing of Aeneas’ young protégé, Pallas:

The poem concludes here. This shocking and abrupt ending has led to much debate about whether the poem was complete when Virgil died and, more importantly, what Virgil intended us to think about his hero and the empire his descendants were to found.

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One tends to imagine Virgil (70-19 B.C.) as an Augustan poet—a toga-clad aesthete declaiming poetry before an admiring imperial audience. But the bulk of his life took place during the tremendous national upheaval marking the end of the Roman Republic. This was an era of shifting alliances, conspiracies, demagogic rhetoric, agricultural evictions, military battles, and murders. Only after Antony and Cleopatra were defeated by Octavian (later to be named Augustus) at the battle of Actium did a period of relative tranquility under one-man rule begin. No one could have foreseen that this new form of government would last for centuries.

Writing about the founding of a new political order and the national characteristics and personal sacrifice that made this possible, Virgil creates a new type of hero. Aeneas’ first appearance in the epic occurs during a storm at sea, his limbs “weak and chill to the bone.” His first words are a lament that he did not die a heroic death in Troy. Virgil thus asserts from the start his own artistic rivalry with Homer. His hero is no Achilles who dies a glorious death in battle, no Odysseus whose quest is to return home. Instead, Virgil emphasizes his hero’s filial respect, piety, endurance, and selflessness as well as his courage. These virtues will equip him to build an empire—but they will not necessarily make him happy. (Nor, alas, will these virtues endear him to most modern readers.)

In place of the troubled past, the gods promise a glorious and peaceful Roman future—a welcome image for Virgil’s audience after years of civil strife:

The political nature of Virgil’s epic distinguishes it from those of his Greek and Latin predecessors. Virgil is in part writing a response to his older contemporary Lucretius, whose On the Nature of Things elucidates the teachings of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. There are two main responses to life’s challenges—to embrace and confront them or to distance oneself from the fray. The Epicurean mode is withdrawal. Viewing a storm-tossed ship from afar is pleasant, as Lucretius writes, because “to perceive from what ills you are free yourself is pleasant.” When contemplating death, according to Lucretius, one should be comforted by the thought that humans are just atoms that will dissipate.

By introducing his hero in the throes of a (perhaps Lucretian) storm at sea and by leading him to the underworld to speak with the shades of the dead, Virgil directly confronts Lucretius. At Dido’s banquet in Book One, her bard sings a Lucretian-style song about the cosmos. Aeneas, in turn, tells the tale of the fall of Troy. In place of withdrawal or abstract scientific contemplation, Virgil’s epic engages with the world of history and politics.

Aeneas is not yet a Roman at the beginning of the poem. When he becomes Dido’s lover, his jealous rival alludes to his Asian origins with these unflattering words (note the alliteration, which appears in the Latin and is reproduced by Ferry):

This taunt reflects the complicated view that the Romans of Virgil’s time held of the civilized, wealthy lands to their east. They craved sophistication and luxury and the benefits of international commerce while professing a desire to return to an imagined frugality of an earlier, simpler Italy. (Sound familiar?)

In the course of the epic, Aeneas will be figuratively reborn—but not, perhaps, for the better. He descends to Hades, bearing the golden bough, past the rivers Styx and Lethe, Charon the “dreadful boatman,” and Cerberus the three-headed dog, past the realms of punishment and the Elysian fields—he gets “the full underworld experience,” as a professor friend likes to say. Finally, the shade of Aeneas’ dead father shows him a procession of “all those who are going to be / Your Roman people.” Aeneas’ attachment to his Trojan past and lost loves will be replaced by a dogged resolve to look ahead. But at what personal cost? And why, when the hero departs from Hades, is he escorted through the ivory gate, “through which false dreams go up from the world below”? Is Rome in some way a false dream?

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Winston Churchill famously described the essential nature of the Latin language: “The sentence fits together like a piece of polished machinery. Every phrase can be tensely charged with meaning.” A challenge faces every translator of the Aeneid, to balance accuracy and art while maintaining Virgil’s muscular energy. Ferry discussed his approach in a 2011 interview with the Poetry Foundation:

Ferry’s diction is mostly colloquial and conversational. He writes in a quiet, measured voice that is easy to read, line after line, mixing high and low. This technique may also be seen in his own poetry. A good example is the beginning of his haunting poem “The White Skunk”:

At times Ferry’s colloquialisms may be grating. In Book Eleven of the Aeneid, for instance, an Etruscan king berates his men as follows: “you so-called soldiers, / You no-good, hang-back, half-ass Etruscans,” whose only care is “what the menu is tonight.” This may not be to everyone’s taste. But the opposite approach can seem overly Shakespearean: Robert Fitzgerald uses the word “poltroons” in translating this passage.

Ferry’s book lacks some standard features, such as a glossary of names, that could help a reader understand the epic. And unlike most modern translations, this edition gives no indication of the standard line numbering of the original text. For example, Dido stabs herself at line 937 of Book Four in this edition. A reader would have no way of knowing that this corresponds to line 664 in the original. Looking up a well-known passage, comparing other translations, or finding the Latin passage that is being translated are thus unnecessarily difficult.

In a work of this length, a critic may find many places to quibble over a missed metaphor or nuance. Less understandable are the places in which Ferry takes excessive license with the text. At the culmination of Aeneas’ visit to Hades, the shade of his father describes the Romans’ unique mission, one of the epic’s best-known passages. Here is Ferry’s rendering:

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento. Robert Fagles translates this line faithfully: “rule with all your power / the peoples of the earth.” By contrast, Ferry’s less powerful “be the governor of the world” sounds like he is describing a plum post at the United Nations. The words “Serenely maintained with order and with justice” and “to bring an end to war” are his own additions, which likewise make the Romans’ reign sound more appealing. Finally, the Latin has “You [singular], Roman [singular], remember [singular].” One feels the finger of Aeneas’s father jabbing at his chest. Why does Ferry change this to the plural “Romans”? Why change “remember” to “never forget”?

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Ferry writes in the preface about his love of Virgil, “his voice as I hear it in all these poems, telling how it is with all created beings, the very leaves on the trees, the very rooted plants .  .  . the soldiers doing their work of killing and dying, the falling cities, and the kings and fathers, and their sons. .  .  . Virgil’s voice telling it as it is, in his truth-telling pitying voice.” The claim that war is just another kind of human “work” and the insight that Virgil’s “pitying” voice is unified across his three great works of poetry are rather different from the usual interpretations of the epic.

Ferry elaborates on this point in a beautiful commentary on a passage in Book Eleven, a section that he sees as emblematic of the entire poem. It is the start of a day of funeral pyres for fallen warriors. Dawn with her “pitying light” brings back the suffering of “sad mortality,” a phrase Ferry tells us he has borrowed from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65. “Relentless toil and sufferings,” Ferry writes, “are definitive of the condition of being mortal.”

Is the pervasive, inevitable suffering of humanity the chief message of the poem? One’s initial reaction is to disagree. The Aeneid, after all, is about the founding of a specific people, the Romans, who did succeed in ruling much of their world for centuries.

But Ferry’s interpretation cannot be entirely dismissed. Darkness hovers over the epic. Book One, for instance, presents the harmonious scene of the building of Carthage, which the poet compares to the work of bees in the field: “The community is glowing as it works; / The honey is fragrant with the scent of thyme.” The reader, while enjoying the simile, knows full well that the ultimate fate of Carthage is to be utterly destroyed by Rome.

Aeneas, the ultimate “winner” of the story, pays a price for the mission he must fulfill. The refugee who was pleased to help build Dido’s civilized city becomes a savage warrior who orders the sacrifice of captives over the funeral pyre of Pallas. The Trojan hero who began the epic beseeching heaven, with quaking limbs, is seen at the end as a man consumed with wrath, destroying the quaking limbs of his defeated foe. We never actually see the hero founding a city or marrying his promised Italian bride. The poem that began with the “savage implacable rage” of the goddess Juno ends with the “terrible savage rage” of the man Aeneas.

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“Never forget,” says the shade of Aeneas’ father. Memory can be destructive, as in the goddess Juno’s refusal to forget old slights to her honor. But memory is also the way we preserve ancient wisdom and honor heroes from the past. As Aeneas says in his farewell message to his son, thinking he may be about to die: “Learn, my son, from me, / What courage, and the true labor of courage, is. .  .  . Remember what I have said to you.”

Remembering the past and taking an interest in the suffering of others are marks of a civilized culture. Thus when Aeneas sees his own history, the fall of Troy, depicted on the walls of a Carthaginian temple, he is grateful to have arrived at a city that displays respect and compassion for others’ trials. He expresses his amazement in 7 words, a sentence that is one of the most famous in the epic (expanded to 27 words in Ferry’s rather prolix version)—Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt:

Several years ago, in an article entitled “Do the Classics Have a Future?” the British classicist Mary Beard talked about “a due sense of wonderment” that so many books survive from classical antiquity, offering “the possibility of a most wondrous shared voyage of exploration.” The importance of the classics, she goes on to say, is not just in the impressiveness of the books themselves but also in the conversations they allow us to have across the centuries with other important thinkers. Virgil conversing with Homer, Hesiod, and Lucretius; Augustine, Dante, and Milton conversing with Virgil—it’s hard to think of any conversations more worth trying to eavesdrop on.

Once we cut this cultural chain or refuse to regard it with the wonder it should inspire, we are left adrift without guides from the past, in a self-important, self-defining world. Inventing meaning for ourselves, acting as though no one had ever suffered dislocation or loss or defeat or triumph in the past—that would be a lonely world, one in which I hope we won’t choose to live.

Susan Kristol has a doctorate in classical philology.