St. Paul had gone to pay homage to his tomb
in naples; others began to scour the Aeneid for
mystical messages. In an impressive act of creative appropriation, the Christian poetess Proba
retold the life of Jesus using only lines from the
Aeneid as material. The tradition of Christianizing virgil culminated in his serving as dante’s
guide through Hell and Purgatory.
In the political sphere, ambitious nations
sought every opportunity to align themselves
with his poetry as a way of claiming to be the
next glorious Rome. elizabeth I of england
stamped her coinage with a virgil quote to com-
memorate her defeat of the Spanish armada.
Half a century later, the english poet Richard
Fanshawe called Charles I the “augustus of our
world” and dedicated to his son a new translation
of book Iv of the Aeneid. Similarly, the French
poet Pierre Perrin dedicated his new transla-
tion of virgil’s Aeneid to Cardinal Mazarin, the
power behind louis XIv’s throne, saying, “Sir,
the famous century of this grand author, does it
not seem to have come around again?…Is Paris
not now a Roman triumphant?…Is our mon-
arch not a nascent augustus, in his first years
already the most victorious, already the most
august of kings? and your eminence, sir, are you
not a faithful Maecenas?”
Writing these words towards the end of World
War II, eliot’s emphasis on this poem seems
almost superstitious, as though invoking its
bright vision of order would help vanquish the
ugly chaos and disintegration that had become
synonymous with the modern era.
at the heart of the Harvard school’s ar- gument is the Aeneid ’s difficult ending.
aeneas begins the poem as a heroic underdog,
the leader of a ragtag band of Trojans who survived the terrible greek destruction of Troy.
His destiny, he is informed, is to find a new
homeland for his people in Italy. There he will
marry and establish a line that will become a
new and glorious ruling race: the Romans.
The first half of the Aeneid (books I–vI)
follows aeneas’ travails as he desperately tries to
reach Italy. They end with his famous visit to the
underworld, where his father’s spirit gives him
the Roman mission statement:
others, I have no doubt,
will forge the bronze to breathe with
suppler lines,
draw from the block of marble features
quick with life,
plead their cases better, chart with their
rods the stars
that climb the sky and foretell the times
they rise.
but you, Roman, remember, rule with all
your power
the peoples of the earth—these will be
your arts:
to put your stamp on the works and ways
of peace,
to spare the defeated, break the proud in
war.
It is the last two lines that are most important: conquest must be balanced by the all-important clementia, mercy. That the command
