The author of the Aeneid was born on this day, in 70 B.C. Even in his lifetime, Daniel Mendelsohn writes, Virgil was revered as the greatest poet of the age.
And not only Europe. Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin liked to quote Virgil in their speeches and letters. The poet’s idealized vision of honest farmers and shepherds working in rural simplicity was influential, some scholars believe, in shaping the Founders’ vision of the new republic as one in which an agricultural majority should hold power.
Another way of saying all this is that, while our forebears looked confidently to the text of the Aeneid for answers, today it raises troubling questions.
Because we like to imagine poets as being free in their political conscience, such fawning seems distasteful. But Virgil cannot have been alone among intelligent Romans in welcoming Augustus’s regime as, at the very least, a stable alternative to the decades of internecine horrors that had preceded it.
The very structure of the Aeneid is a wink at Homer. The epic is split between an “Odyssean” first half and an “Iliadic” second half . Virgil signals this appropriation of the two Greek classics in his work’s famous opening line, “Arms and a man I sing”: the Iliad is the great epic of war , while the Odyssey begins by announcing that its subject is “a man”—Odysseus.
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