Some Reactions to the Aeneid

Aeneid Book XII

Depiction of Enemies

Throughout the Aeneid, Virgil refuses to demonize the human enemies of Aeneas. Some of them, such as Mezentius, actually are painted as bad, but it is not being an enemy of Aeneas that makes him bad. In fact, over and over his enemies are characterized as good people, often heroic, although quite often confused or actually bewitched by divine beings.

I’ve looked at some commentary that claims Virgil is anti-war, but it just looks like me that he doesn’t gloss over the ugliness of war. And that he clearly thinks it’s virtuous to avoid it if you can. I haven’t read the Illiad. Does that make war look cleaner or more desirable than the Aeneid?

I’ve never quite understood how realism in depicting war is supposed to negate the reasons people have to fight them sometimes. Or negate that fighting in a war can be heroic and virtuous.

Woodcut illustration from the “Strasbourg Vergil,” edited by Sebastian Brant: Publii Virgilii Maronis Opera cum quinque vulgatis commentariis expolitissimisque figuris atque imaginibus nuper per Sebastianum Brant superadditis (Strasbourg: Johannis Grieninger, 1502), fol. 408v, executed by an anonymous engraver under the direction of Brant.

Influence of the Immortals

Juno disobeys Jupiter’s commands to leave the Trojans alone out of anger and pride. Over and over and over again. And she doesn’t just hurt the Trojans: she also destroys her so-called favorites. Amata kills herself. Turnus dies in battle. As far as I can tell, the gods may play favorites with some humans, but in general, they (Juno is by far the worst in the Aeneid, but she is by no means the only immortal who acts like this) don’t seem to care about human beings at all.

And in the end, Juno wins.

Jupiter says:

Sister of Jupiter
Indeed you are, and Saturn’s other child,
To feel such anger, stormy in your breast.
But come, no need; put down this fit of rage.
I grant your request.
 -- Translated by Robert Fitzgerald

Troy is dead, the Trojan language is dead. The only thing she can’t do is to actually destroy the bloodline of Aeneas and all his Trojans. But Jupiter never had the power to allow that anyway. That was always a matter of the fates.

Finally, all the way through, Aeneas never failed to sacrifice to Juno at the appropriate times. And Jupiter points out how devout the Romans will be at giving her honor and worship. Which appears to be true. The Archaic Triad of Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus, by the time of Augustus, has been replaced by the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.

Left Unfinished

One of the main things that Virgil had to solve was how to connect the Trojans to Rome while at the same time explaining why the Trojans didn’t actually establish a new Troy, but were absorbed completely into the Latins. And he wanted to do this without using the obvious explanation: the Trojans were conquered by the Latins.

In the end, the explanation is that the gods forced them to. And since the Trojans were pious and obeyed the gods, they accepted it. And that’s where Virgil broke off the story.

Aeneas has killed Turnus. We seem to need to see how the Trojans became Latin, when Virgil has made crystal clear that the Trojans won, they won fairly and at great cost, despite having the divine scales weighted against them. Aeneas has proposed, from the very beginning, treating the Latins as equals. But according to the conversation between Jupiter and Juno, somehow he’s going to accept giving up the Trojan name and customs; i.e. being less than equals. How does that work?

My First Century Soldiers

Aeneas is pious enough to do that, but it still really rankles. And I can see it affecting my first century AD soldiers under Augustus that way as well.

I also makes me think of the cis-Alpine Gauls, who Julius Caesar completely wiped out, culturally if not genetically. Is Virgil somehow painting the Trojans as a prototype for what happened to the Gauls?