There’s a rich essay on Virgil’s Aeneid over at Modern Age, by University of Dallas professor Kevin Michael Saylor, which you should definitely check out if you’ve read the epic poem. Saylor ties together a number of contemporary and classic reflections on the work, including ones by David Quint, Harold Bloom, Eve Adler, T.S. Eliot, and those of another Dallas prof, John Alvis. Saylor focuses on the theme of empire:
Now that the ships have fulfilled their destiny of carrying Aeneas to Italy, Jupiter saves them from Turnus’s flames and they turn into immortal sea creatures. So, does Jupiter, or any god, have the power to make something “made by mortal hand” eternal? Can even Jupiter grant to a mortal empire an infinite duration? Can empire be divinized? These are questions Virgil raises and purposefully leaves unanswered. The ships are turned into sea goddesses; Aeneas and Julius Caesar will be apotheosized. But, at the very least, empire, like Aeneas, will remain subject to insecurity and danger. There will be need for continual vigilance. Perhaps this is also why the golden bough that Aeneas must pluck before entering the underworld as a sign of divine favor regrows each time it is picked…
Now if you haven’t given the Aeneid a try, what follows are a couple of suggestions for getting into its story.
As most are aware, it is a later Latin attempt to surpass the epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey. It gives us an Odyssey-like sea-faring story in its first part, and then an Iliad-like heroes-at-war story in its second, thus flipping Homer’s order, and combining his two epic modes into one package. It recounts the myth of Troy’s fall, and of Rome being founded in its stead by a group of refugee Trojans led by the hero Aeneas. Eliot’s discussion of it (in his On Poetry and Poets) presents it as a “mature” work, due to its being more distant in time and spirit from its mythical material than Homer’s poems had been, and as the very model of what is to be considered “classic.” The Romans of the Imperial Age agreed, which is why Augustine recalls in his Confessions that he was “forced to memorize the wanderings of Aeneas—whoever he was” and encouraged to weep over the fate of Queen Dido. Such a coerced frog-march is clearly not the way to go into the poem, although Augustine admits that the more vivid stories in it, such as that of the Trojan Horse, eventually captured his young imagination.
One method for getting into it is to read it in conjunction with the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno, all of which is heavily shaped, but especially the first eight Cantos, by book VI of the Aeneid. Yes, you can just plop down into that part of Virgil’s epic, the most vivid of all its parts, and make out what’s happening well-enough. It’s so amazing, so fascinating, that it might spur you to read the whole of it in order, which of course is the best way. Here’s a fun map comparing Aeneas’s journey in the underworld with Odysseus’s. (Dante’s afterlife world is quite reworked, and much more complex—it extends above ground to the Purgatorio and Paradiso, after all—so that no similarly comparative map would be possible.)
For those more musically than visually inclined, or more drawn to love and beauty than to underworld dread, another path into the epic might be Hector Berlioz’s opera, Les Troyens. Berlioz keeps to the first four books of the poem’s twelve, which includes the recounting of Troy’s fall, but he especially focuses on the love-story of Aeneas and Dido, which takes place in Carthage. His libretto is quite interesting, featuring in the Trojan Horse scenes philosophic reflections on the deceptions inherent to pagan religion, perhaps by his reckoning to all religion, and in its most famous romantic scene some liberal borrowing from Shakespeare’s prettiest passages in Merchant of Venice. It’s a distinct literary work, with a number of significant differences from Virgil’s story, but it does drive you to the original, and carries quite a bit of its magic with it. Some believe Berlioz never soared higher, and Les Troyens was certainly his grandest and most varied canvas.
Finally, allow me to report one way into the Aeneid that almost came to be, but alas, was killed in the cradle. After his success with Clash of the Titans, the master of pre-Star-Wars special effects, Ray Harryhausen, began ground-work for a similar movie to be called Force of the Trojans. From the description given it in Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, it sounds like it would have been a rather loose reworking of the Aeneid, with an emphasis on the sea-wandering part of the story, the better to allow Harryhausen to produce various monsters:
Among the key sequences were the fatal flight of Daedalus and Icarus, a colony of cyclops, Furies, jackal men, the Sphinx of Phrygia, the evil goddess Hecate (possessing three hideous faces…) and Scylla and Charybdis (‘a monstrous mutation of octopus, triton, and sea serpent’).
Boys of all ages weep for what might have been! Well, we’ll always have Jason and the Argonauts:
Harryhausen says Force of the Trojans “received some keen interest from MGM,” but that the studio eventually passed, due to the fact that
…audience tests [around ‘83] revealed that the public had turned to more violent subjects loaded with sex and muscles. Mythology simply could not be converted into this type of ‘entertainment’ and MGM lost interest.
Huhn. Lots of directors since then would have found ways to sex-up the Aeneid, which has male muscle-flexing opportunities galore, the warrior princess Camilla, and the luxurious Didon of Carthage! But one senses that Harryhausen was right about the core appeal of epic and myth.
So, Aeneid-lovers, enjoy the Saylor essay, and let me know what you think of his analysis in the comments. And to those of you who have not read the work, let either Dante or Hector draw you in…
I had the opportunity to co-teach the Aeneid for the first time this semester with Tom Harmon, and absolutely loved it. Our way of getting into the story, rather than by way of Homer or Dante or music (Purcell is good too) or movies, was through Plutarch. Plutarch's life of Antony contains the story of the battle of Actium, described in the underworld book VI, along with the defeat of Cleopatra's monstrous eastern gods.
In my own case, I came to appreciate Virgil the way Dana Gioia and Seamus Heaney did- as part of the process of trying to learn Latin. That's a lost way into it, of course:
"Today classical education is regarded as elitist—the province of professors, preppies, and public school boys. But Heaney’s example shows that there was, until recently, another more democratic tradition of working-class Catholic school kids and their mostly clerical teachers. Ten years after Heaney sweated over his Latin exercises outside Belfast, I sat in a Los Angeles classroom parsing my own 40 lines of “classics homework” from Virgil accompanied by millions of students in Melbourne, Montreal, Buenos Aires, and Munich. Latin was still—just barely—a living language, and wherever Latin went, Virgil presided. That world is now lost, but it bears remembering."
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/heaney-in-hades/
I guess about 40 years after that, I was sweating over my Latin homework in an air conditioning-free classroom at a Catholic boys school in Arkansas. It's good to be a backwater