Week Ten
Virgil, Aeneid
Does a sense of mission help one live a better life?
Through more than two and a half centuries of war, an obscure city-state came to dominate the Italian peninsula, finally achieving complete hegemony with the subjugation of Tarentum, the last holdout in the wealthy Greek south, and the pacification of the Etruscans. Generally, Rome did not destroy the cities it defeated, instead pursuing a policy of assimilation, often granting some form of citizenship rights to the conquered—though also requiring that they provide soldiers for Rome. Its armies often lost battles, but Rome was always able to levy more troops, persevering until victory was won. Italy in hand, Rome looked outwards and, in 264 B.C., entered its first war against the old Phoenician colony of Carthage over control of the island of Sicily. The Romans created a navy for this fight, and that opened up long-range imperial possibilities. Carthage was the great enemy during the days of the Roman Republic, which is the name by which we know the Roman territorial empire under the mixed constitution realized after Rome expelled its last king in 509 B.C. We see again the democratizing trend in which the royal, executive component is assumed by various elected magistrates and priesthoods. In the case of Rome, two annually elected consuls held the supreme office, presiding over the Senate—the aristocratic body which served as council. The legislative power was held by various assemblies of the citizenry, in which the democratic factor could be found—summed up in the power belonging to the office of the tribune of the plebs.
Eventually, breathtaking inequalities of wealth and dignitas generated massive resentment: is the labor of Roman civilization simply for the aggrandizement of a few? The Senate and the People came to blows. The Gracchi brothers were assassinated; several of Rome’s Italian allies revolted; there were significant slave uprisings. Marius (c.157-86 B.C.), a Roman general and leader of the popular party, with the removal of the property qualification for service in the military, created a professional soldiery devoted to their commanders more than to the state. Liberty was a rallying cry for the nobles, not for the poor—who had to focus on the simple justice of bread and land. Marius’ mortal rival, Sulla, was the first citizen to march into Rome to achieve political ends by force of arms. Julius Caesar would be the second to do so, during his struggle with Pompey, champion of the aristocrats—but this time it was not in the name of republican principle. In the last of the civil wars, Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted heir, Octavian, emerged victorious, establishing the Principate in 27 B.C., an ideological fiction to disguise absolute monarchy under the forms of the old republican constitution. Caesar Augustus, as Octavian would be styled, was to 327 Virgil be understood simply as the leading citizen (princeps, “first”). Salvation from the horrors of civil war came with a high price: the state now depended on this one man’s auctoritas (authority).
Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 B.C.), or Virgil, furnishes the political theology for the Roman empire in his great, incomplete epic, started in 29 B.C., wedding myth to history. As a poet, he was influenced by the Hellenistic, Alexandrian style of Theocritus and Callimachus. His poetry flows from a deep assimilation of his Greek and Roman predecessors, brought to bear in a dense allusiveness, only feasible with written verse as opposed to the oral poetry behind Homer. If one thinks of the Iliad as tragic and the Odyssey as comic (in the sense of having a happy resolution), then the Aeneid is comedy, showing the realization of a beneficial providence. Though there are malign divinities (“Can there be anger so great in the hearts of gods on high?”), with Juno’s actions analogous to Poseidon’s vengeful attempts to derail Odysseus’ return home, malevolence does not win out. Jupiter plans for Rome to possess “imperium sine fine” (empire without end). Tracing the founding of Rome to a hero, the “pious” Aeneas, who escapes the Greek destruction of Troy, Virgil returns us to that question of how “East” and “West” relate. In his war with Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Octavian had opposed Latin rectitude to Greek decadence. Is that opposition rehearsed in the story of Dido and her Semitic-African state? Certainly we see a Latin resistance to the Hellenistic romanticism which understands love to be the path to personal realization in a post-political world. Virgil sums up the rationalization of Roman power: “to establish peace, to spare the humbled, and to conquer the proud.” It is true that local grandees need humbling, but can imperial power escape the same nemesis?
- David Franks