A2 Unit CC10 F390 - Virgil and the world of the hero
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Chloe Shao
‘The Aeneid is only a poem of its time’. How far do you agree with
this statement?
The Aeneid is a poem that certainly comes from a period unique in its history, a quintessentially
classical epic that cannot fully be separated from its time of writing. Virgil, its writer, was
certainly writing for the Empire he never saw as changing too drastically, nor could he have
imagined a society such as ours studying it thousands of years later in the way that we do, and so
the intention of its writing is certainly to be of the Romans. However, there are certain parts of
the Aeneid that are so applicable to modern life and the world now that they simply cannot be
ignored, and this, in essence, is where the Aeneid comes to have far more meaning in other times
in which it has been studied.
Firstly, we must talk about who Virgil wrote his poem for. While he would obviously have had a
much wider audience in the Roman people, since, if he hadn’t, his work would not have survived,
he was commissioned to write this Roman Epic by Maecenas, Augustus’ propaganda commissioner
who dealt with the contemporary poets and artists during Augustus’ reign. Virgil’s poem, in this
sense, is very much reliant on knowledge of the Augustan Principate, since, without that
knowledge, much of the finer detail cannot be understood – if one did not know about the Battle
of Actium and the heavy emphasis that Augustus placed upon it in his relations with the people,
the significance of this battle’s presence on Aeneas’ shield would be missed; similarly, the
intricate links to Augustus would be passed over, such as the presence of Marcellus the Younger
when Aeneas visits the Underworld in Book 6, or the opening of the Gates of War, perhaps harking
back to the closing of the same gates by Augustus, indicating the peace that he brought to the
Roman world. To some extent, as Richard Jenkyns suggests in Classical Epic, Aeneas is Augustus:
‘Aeneas is a figure of Augustus, implying not an identity, but rather that Aeneas is the type,
manifesting, however imperfectly, particular idealised, historically transcendent qualities, which
within this overtly providential account find later manifestation, their antitype, in Augustus.’
Personally, I agree with Jenkyns in the fact that we simply cannot separate Aeneas and Augustus
and look at them as two separate figures, because Virgil is almost consistently at pains to show
just how similar the two figures are. Even Aeneas’ bending to furor (uncontrollable anger) in Book
12, where he kills Turnus in a moment of passion purely because he sees the dead Pallas’ belt on
his waist, could be read as a subtle criticism of Augustus’ character when he was younger of
ruthless violence on the battlefield (when he was known as Octavian). In this, the Aeneid is
certainly a poem of its time, because an understanding of the time that it was written is certainly
needed to fully appreciate the subtleties within it.
We could also argue that the Aeneid is a poem of its time in its presentation of women. Perhaps
out of step with the typical poets and authors of Augustan Rome, Virgil certainly presents various
women who hold an awful lot of power. We see Dido, a woman who takes her people away from
her evil brother, Pygmalion, entirely alone, and builds up a new city-state, Carthage, with them
that we know lasts to contemporary Rome and is only destroyed after three wars fiercely fought
against generals like Hannibal who terrified the Roman Republic. Camilla is a princess-warrior
who rivals the other epic heroes in that she is able to take down a soldier fleeing on horseback – a
feat normally reserved for epic heroes such as Achilles and Diomedes – and she kills tens of men
before she eventually dies. These women are powerful, and Virgil was certainly ahead of its time
in showing them as such, but there is one aspect that undermines that power: all of them die.
Dido kills herself in passionate and heart-breaking anger at Aeneas after he leaves her; Camilla is
felled by an enemy spear in battle; and even Amata, Latinus’ queen, who holds some power over
who her daughter is to marry, quickly is consigned to insanity and kills herself when she realises
that Lavinia will never marry Turnus. In fact, the only leading woman to survive the epic is
Lavinia, an entirely silent figure who embodies the Roman female values of chastity and modesty
(pudicitia). This is significant in that Virgil could be suggesting that this is the ideal Roman
woman, and that any woman who oversteps the boundaries of power, like Camilla and Dido, will
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