The Aeneid — themes & analysis

Virgil calls Aeneas pius — devoted, dutiful — more than a hundred times. The Latin word is wider than the English "pious." It means duty to the gods, duty to one's family, duty to the state, all at once. It is the Roman virtue, the quality the empire wanted to see in itself, and Virgil makes it Aeneas's defining attribute. Aeneas does not have Achilles's rage or Odysseus's cunning. He has pietas, and that has to be enough.

The poem is unsparing about what pietas requires. It requires Aeneas to leave Dido, who has saved him and loved him, because Jupiter has ordered him to Italy. It requires him to drag his elderly father out of burning Troy on his back and lose his wife in the smoke without turning around. It requires him to kill a man who is begging for his life because that man has killed a young friend Aeneas had promised to protect. Each act is correct. Each act is also costly in a way the poem refuses to soften.

Virgil's question is whether a man who suppresses every personal desire for collective purpose is admirable or hollow. He never quite answers it. Aeneas weeps often, but the weeping does not change what he does. He is the most obedient hero in classical literature and the least free. The Greeks chose their fates with their eyes open; Aeneas executes one. The poem invites you to admire him and to mourn the man inside the duty, in the same line, without resolving the tension.

The contrast with Homer is exact. Achilles in the Iliad rages against his commander and refuses to fight; Odysseus in the Odyssey lies to anyone in his way to get home. Both act on what they want. Aeneas almost never does. Pietas is what makes him Roman, and pietas is what the poem treats as both the highest virtue and the heaviest cost. The empire was built on it. So was the unhappiness of every founder it required.

Where to follow it: Book 2 (carrying his father out of Troy), Book 4 (leaving Dido), Book 6 (the prophecy of Rome), Book 12 (killing Turnus).

The Aeneid is told from inside a future already known. The reader knows Rome is coming. Augustus has already founded the empire by the time Virgil writes. The characters know it too, in pieces — Jupiter announces it to Venus in Book 1; the Sibyl prophesies it at Cumae; Anchises shows it as a parade of unborn souls in the underworld in Book 6; the shield Vulcan forges for Aeneas in Book 8 shows scenes from Roman history that have not happened yet, including the battle of Actium where Augustus defeated Antony. The poem keeps lifting its eyes from the action to the long arc.

This makes the Aeneid feel different from Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey are urgent because their characters do not know the outcome; in the Aeneid, the outcome is the subject. Aeneas's choices feel less like decisions than like the working out of something already decided. He does not choose Italy; Italy is set down for him. He does not choose to leave Dido; the order arrives from Jupiter through Mercury. He does not choose to kill Turnus; he is acted on, in the final lines, by a fury he cannot name.

Virgil is exact about this. The gods of the poem are powerful but bounded. Juno hates Troy and tries for twelve books to stop the founding; she cannot. Venus protects her son but cannot remove the suffering from his path. Even Jupiter, the king of the gods, says he is administering fate, not making it. The frame of the poem is bigger than any of its actors. They are all working a destiny set down before them.

What this gives the poem is a strange grandeur and a strange melancholy. Rome is going to be built; that much is certain. But the men and women who build it are caught in something they did not author and cannot refuse, and Virgil keeps showing the cost. Anchises in the underworld shows Aeneas the parade of Rome's future heroes — and weeps for the young Marcellus, who will die early, before Aeneas's eyes. The future is glorious. It also has its dead.

Where to follow it: Book 1 (Jupiter's prophecy to Venus), Book 6 (the parade of Roman souls), Book 8 (the shield of Aeneas), Book 12 (Juno yields to fate).

Dido is the most fully drawn character in the Aeneid. She is the widowed queen of Carthage, who has built a great city in exile after her husband's murder. She receives the storm-battered Trojan fleet, listens to Aeneas tell the long story of Troy's fall, and falls catastrophically in love with him during a hunt interrupted by a divine storm. Books I and IV are her books. They are the emotional center of the poem.

What happens to her is not presented as simple. Aeneas does not seduce her cynically; the gods arrange it. He does not abandon her lightly; Jupiter sends Mercury with an explicit order to leave. He does what pietas requires. Virgil does not let any of this make Dido's grief less real. She rages, pleads, curses his line, and finally builds a pyre in the courtyard, climbs it, and falls on the sword Aeneas left behind. Her last words are a curse — that her people and his will be enemies forever, and that an avenger will rise from her bones. The Punic Wars, Hannibal at the gates of Rome, are seeded into the poem here.

The Carthaginian queen, in Roman eyes, was supposed to be a foreign menace; Dido is the great enemy seen from inside her own life. She is not vilified. She is given the most affecting language in the poem and treated as a tragic figure on the scale of Sophocles. When Aeneas meets her again in the underworld in Book 6 and tries to explain himself, she turns away from him without speaking and walks back into the shade — and Virgil treats her silence as more eloquent than any speech.

The technique is the heart of Virgil's method. Rome is built; the queen at Carthage dies for it; the poem will not pretend otherwise. Dido becomes the figure for every people Rome will later destroy — the Carthaginians most directly, but also the Gauls, the Britons, the cities of Asia. Their grief is given the most beautiful language in the poem. It does not stop the founding. It refuses to be forgotten while the founding goes on.

Where to follow it: Book 1 (Dido welcomes the Trojans), Book 4 (love, abandonment, and her death), Book 6 (her shade in the underworld).

The Aeneid is the most deliberate piece of literary imitation in classical literature. Virgil's readers had Homer memorized, and Virgil knew it. The first half of his poem rewrites the Odyssey: a hero blown off course by the gods, taken in by a queen on a foreign shore, telling the story of his past at her dinner table, descending to the underworld, finally arriving home. The second half rewrites the Iliad: an arriving army, a war over a woman promised to one man and claimed by another, a young friend killed in battle whose death drives the hero to a final duel.

The echoes are exact and constant. Aeneas in Book 3 meets the same monsters Odysseus met — Polyphemus, the Harpies — but they are already familiar to the reader, encountered earlier in another poem. Dido in Book 4 plays the role of Calypso and Circe combined, with the morality reversed: the woman is sympathetic, the leaving is the wrong some part of the poem cannot fully forgive. The shield of Aeneas in Book 8 echoes the shield of Achilles in Iliad XVIII, but where Achilles's shield shows the timeless human world, Aeneas's shows specific scenes from the future history of Rome. Pallas dies in Book 10 the way Patroclus dies in Iliad XVI — and in both poems, his death is what releases the hero into a final, terrible rage.

What this does is make the Aeneid double-voiced. Every scene is what is happening in Italy and what happened in Greece, at the same time. The reader is being asked to compare. Sometimes Aeneas is a lesser figure than the Greek hero he echoes — he does not have Odysseus's wit, does not have Achilles's overwhelming force. Sometimes the comparison goes the other way: Aeneas chooses the future, where the Greek heroes only chose themselves. The poem invites both readings and commits to neither.

Virgil's larger argument is that Roman epic is something different from Greek. Homer's heroes are individuals; Virgil's hero is an instrument of the state. Homer's gods are vivid and petty; Virgil's gods are administrators of fate. Homer's wars are about who wins; Virgil's war is about what kind of civilization wins, and at what cost. The Aeneid is in conversation with Homer about the very meaning of heroism — and is never fully resolved on whether Roman heroism is an advance or a loss.

Where to follow it: Book 3 (Odyssey monsters revisited), Book 4 (Dido as Calypso, reversed), Book 8 (the shield, Roman not human), Book 10 (Pallas as Patroclus).

The Aeneid does not end with Rome founded, or with a wedding, or with a return home. It ends in the middle of a duel. Aeneas has driven Turnus to the ground. Turnus is wounded; he raises his hand; he speaks. He surrenders. He asks Aeneas to give his body back to his father, or to spare him for the sake of the old man waiting in the city. He says: you have won. Take Lavinia. Hate me no further.

Aeneas hesitates. The poem says clearly that he is about to spare him. Then he sees the sword-belt of young Pallas on Turnus's shoulder — the trophy Turnus stripped from Pallas's body in Book 10. Pallas was the son of Aeneas's ally Evander, sent to fight at Aeneas's side, killed in his first real battle. Aeneas had promised to bring him home safe. He could not. The belt is the visible proof of the failure. Aeneas, in the poem's word, is kindled by furies. He drives the spear through Turnus's chest. The poem ends in the next four lines: Turnus's limbs go cold; his life flees with a groan, indignant, into the shadows below.

The ending has unsettled readers for two thousand years. Augustine could not bear it. Dante kept thinking about it. Modern critics divide sharply: some read the killing as just — Turnus deserves it; Pallas demands it; the founding requires it. Others read it as the final crack in the poem's loyalty to Rome — Aeneas, the man who has been called pius for twelve books, kills a surrendering enemy in a fit of rage, and the poem ends not on the founding but on a soul going down to the underworld unwillingly. The same word — indignant — closes the poem and closed the death of Camilla earlier; Virgil seems to be marking the loss as a loss.

What the ending suggests, without saying it, is that the founding cannot be made clean. Aeneas's last act in the poem is not a wedding or a city-laying; it is a killing, done out of grief for a young man he could not save, on a man who was begging. The Aeneid does not provide a triumphal ending because Virgil cannot give one. He has spent twelve books showing what Rome costs. He will not, in the last lines, pretend the cost was paid by someone else.

Where to follow it: Book 10 (Pallas killed; Turnus takes the belt), Book 11 (Pallas's body sent home), Book 12 (the duel and the final lines).