Hellenistic/Roman
Virgil
70–19 BC
“Such time, such toil, requir'd the Roman name.”
Virgil was the chief poet of Augustan Rome, writing under the patronage of Maecenas and the settlement of Augustus. The makes the founding of Rome a story of fate and pietas: Aeneas carries an imperial destiny the gods have fixed and pays for it with private loss. Destiny here is a public order spanning generations. Private happiness yields to the task. Augustine and Dante inherit that picture of providential history and of the cost exacted by a public calling.
In the Conversation
3 of the Great Ideas
Politics
War and Peace
War is the cost at which the peace of empire is bought, and the hero who founds a lasting peace must bear the grief of the killings that were required to make it possible.
State
The state is a providential undertaking whose founding is laid upon its hero as a task, and whose vocation is to bring the peoples it conquers under the rule of law.