AeneidVirgil
About Aeneid
Virgil's , composed between 29 and 19 BC, is the epic Augustus wanted and the epic Virgil wrote, and the two are not the same. The poem follows the Trojan prince Aeneas from the burning of Troy, through the wanderings of Books I–VI, to the war in Italy of Books VII–XII, and it ends, abruptly, with the killing of Turnus at the gates of a future Rome. The first six books answer the and the second six answer the . Together they trace the founding of the city that will become an empire.
The poem is governed by the word pius, which does not mean pious in the modern sense but describes the man who keeps faith with the gods, with his father, with his son, and with the fate laid on him. Aeneas bears his father out of Troy on his shoulders and carries his household gods through the Mediterranean, and the image becomes the poem's emblem of duty as a weight that cannot be set down. What he gives up to carry it, above all the love of Dido in Book IV, is the cost the poem insists on counting.
Underneath the imperial argument runs a second voice, the voice Virgil gives to what Rome has had to destroy in order to be founded. Dido's curse, the father Anchises weeping in the underworld for the young Marcellus, the final silence that falls over Turnus, all register a grief the triumphal reading of the poem cannot absorb. The is the tradition's central text on fate treated as a public and historical destiny, and on war and peace treated as the price at which a state is made.