One might expect that Aeneas, the man of destiny, embodies pietas and battles furor wherever he finds it, but Virgil is far too sophisticated a poet to present his story as a simple battle of good versus evil.
Aeneas is in many ways an exemplar of pietas. He loves and respects his father Anchises, and is a devoted father to his young son Ascanius.
As Aeneas flees Troy in Book 2, Virgil describes him carrying his elderly father on his back while leading his son by the hand. Whatever may happen, it will be for us both, the same shared risk, and the same salvation. Let little Iulus come with me, and let my wife follow our footsteps at a distance. It was a popular theme in Roman art, and became a favourite subject for later European painters, as you can see from the image used to illustrate this section Figure 4.
You might have also noticed that Aeneas does not forget the slaves of the household, for whose well-being he is responsible, and gives them instructions as to how to escape and where to meet. The gods are the symbol of the Trojan people, and must be kept safe until they can find a new home. Even in the midst of the chaos, Aeneas remembers to observe appropriate religious scruples. Because he is covered with blood, he might defile the holy objects by touching them before he can purify himself, so he makes sure that they are instead carried by Anchises, who as a non-combatant is religiously pure.
Shortly afterwards we find out that Aeneas loses track of her, and that by the time he realises she is not with him, it is too late. Is this simply a tragic accident in the chaos of war, or is Aeneas to blame for what happens? His pietas is also shown by his concern for the well-being of his followers. His first act when he lands safely in north Africa after surviving the storm in Book 1 is to find high ground to see if he can spot any survivors from the other ships in his fleet; next he goes hunting, making sure that he shoots enough meat for all those with him.
He is aware that his followers are in low spirits, and makes efforts to comfort them and to conceal his own anxieties. Thus in many ways Aeneas appears to be the ideal Roman leader: able to take charge yet concerned with the greater good of the group rather than his own personal self-interest.
If you have time, you might like to explore this section of the Aeneid further and think about how Aeneas is presented. During the sack of Troy, despite repeated messages from the gods, he is frequently overcome by battle-lust and desire to take vengeance on the Greeks, and it is not until his goddess mother intervenes that he accepts his destiny to save the survivors of his people and find a new home.
But the greatest clash in the poem between furor and pietas comes at the very end, and we will explore this in the next section. The second part of the Aeneid narrates the events of this war, and by the time we get to the final book of the poem Book 12 , we have encountered many sympathetic young characters who have lost their lives. In Book 11, there has been a brief truce between the two sides, to allow them to gather the dead bodies and mourn them, and Aeneas has proposed that he and Turnus should meet in single combat to settle the conflict, but the truce broke down before a decision could be reached.
At the start of Book 12, Turnus decides to face Aeneas in single combat, and a solemn treaty is drawn up that both sides will abide by the result of the duel. Aeneas tries to prevent his men joining in the fighting but is wounded by a stray arrow, while Turnus enthusiastically joins in the battle.
But when Aeneas is magically healed by his mother, the goddess Venus, and returns to the fray, Turnus realises he must spare his people more suffering and so agrees to a duel again. The king and queen of the gods, Jupiter and Juno, who have been watching events from the heavens, agree between themselves that the war must now end, and Juno agrees to give up her support for Turnus and her hatred of the Trojans, who will now marry the Italians and become Romans.
The summary given in the previous section takes us to the final lines of the poem, in which Aeneas and Turnus finally meet in single combat.
According to him, Aeneas was pius to consider mercy, but also pius to avenge Pallas, and so his actions are entirely praiseworthy. Instead Virgil has set up a situation in which Turnus is incapacitated but not killed, and so Aeneas has the option of sparing his life if he chooses to. As he lifts the rock to attack Aeneas he is overcome with supernatural weakness and terror caused by divine intervention now that the gods have turned against him.
Hector is one of the most sympathetic characters in the Iliad and so, by implicitly comparing Turnus to him, Virgil encourages us to feel pity for the Italian hero. He is alone, abandoned by his sister and by the goddess who previously protected him. In his final speech he humbly accepts his responsibility for causing the war, and offers to give up all his claims, so that Aeneas has total victory without needing to kill him.
When Rome was at its height, the easiest way to justify the recent brutal events was to claim that the civil wars and the changes in leadership had been decreed by fate to usher in the reign of the great Augustus.
Yet the Aeneid is by no means a purely political work; like other epic poems, its subject stands on its own as a story for all time. Virgil did not invent the story that Rome descended from Troy; he crafted the events narrated in the Aeneid from an existing tradition surrounding Aeneas that extended from the ancient Greek poet Homer through the contemporary Roman historian Livy.
However, in that scene, he is no match for Achilles, who has been outfitted in armor forged by the divine smith Hephaestus. Poseidon rescues Aeneas from certain doom and praises the Trojan for his piety. Poseidon also prophesies that Aeneas will survive the Trojan War and assume leadership over the Trojan people.
Greek art from the sixth century B. Archaeological evidence suggests that the myth of Aeneas was often depicted in art on the Italian mainland as early as the sixth century B.
The settlement of Aeneas and the Trojans in Italy and their connection with the foundation of Rome entered the written tradition centuries after Homer, at the end of the third century B.
The Aeneid is therefore a classic foundation narrative. As with other ancient epics, our hero has to remain resolute in the face of significant divine hostility. Juno, queen of heaven and goddess of marriage, despises the Trojans because she lost a divine beauty contest known as the Judgement of Paris. Venus wins the Judgement by giving a bribe to Paris, a Trojan prince who acts as judge. The bribe is in the form of Helen of Sparta, the most beautiful woman in the world.
Paris prefers this bribe to the bribes of the other two contestants - Juno and Minerva. Read more: Guide to the classics: Homer's Iliad. Unfortunately, Helen is already married to the Spartan king Menelaus, and so the Trojan war follows soon after. Juno takes badly her loss in the beauty contest, and hates everything Trojan, both during the war, and after.
The hatred and vindictiveness shown by Juno to the Trojans anchors the whole Aeneid, and it only comes to an end in the final book. The Aeneid is written in dactylic hexameters , the same metre as the two Homeric poems - the Iliad and Odyssey although it is written in Latin, not in ancient Greek. A new reader of the Aeneid with a background in Homer can usually identify many passages that have Homeric resonances.
Indeed many readers through time have felt that Virgil is too reliant on Homer. He was an astonishingly well-read poet, and this breadth of learning is embodied in his poems. Virgil's fourth eclogue has also been referred to as his Messianic Eclogue as it told of the birth of a special child whom would bring wide social peace, thus being later seen as prophesying the birth of Jesus Christ.
Some scholars assert the passage most likely referred to the imminent birth of a child of Augustus and his wife Octavia. Virgil also composed the Georgics , written between 37 and 30 B.
Georgics focused on the ins and outs of agricultural life, serving as a straightforward treatise supported by Augustus. Rural Italian farms were left in ruins when the war forced farmers to serve, with many countryside denizens ultimately relocating to a packed Rome, much to the emperor's dismay.
It told the saga of an exiled hero Trojan prince named Aeneid a fter the destruction of Troy by the Greeks in the 12th century B. The poem reflected on the realm of Roman history from its earliest days, foretelling significant events leading to its current reign by Augustus.
But to retrace your steps and return to the breezes above—that's the task, that's the toil. Virgil spent 11 years working on the Aeneid , left unfinished at the time of his death. His art inspired others such as his younger contemporary, poet Ovid, whose work was reminiscent of Virgil's but with his own bold aesthetic—a practice repeated through the ancient literary Silver Age.
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