18 - The Aeneid

Summary

THE ‘AENEID’ AND ITS AUGUSTAN BACKGROUND

Virgil's Aeneid was conceived and shaped as a national and patriotic epic for the Romans of his day. Certainly the Romans hailed it as such, and it rapidly became both a set text in education and the natural successor to the Annales of Ennius as the great poetic exposition of Roman ideals and achievements. As will be seen later on, there are discordant elements in the patriotic theme, but it is essential to recognize that Virgil's primary intention was to sing of his country's glories past and present, and of the greatness yet to come. For all his universality he is a true Augustan.

For many years Virgil had been preparing himself for this crowning achievement of poetic ambition. The Romans regarded the epic poem as the highest form of literature, a form constantly refused by Horace and Propertius as too heavy for their frail shoulders. There is a passage in the Eclogues where Virgil himself says that his thoughts were beginning to turn towards epic, but he was rebuked by Apollo, god of poetry:

cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem uellit et admonuit: ‘pastorem, Tityre, pinguis pascere oportet ouis, deductum dicere carmen.’

(Ecl. 6.3–5)

When I was going to sing of kings and battles, the god of Cynthus plucked my ear and chided me: ‘Tityrus, a shepherd should feed his sheep to grow fat but sing a song that is slender.’

In his comment on the passage Servius tells us that this refers either to the Aeneid, or to the deeds of the kings of Alba Longa, which Virgil had begun to write about, but had abandoned the project because the names were unmanageable.