The national epic of Italy

Virgil’s masterwork Aeneid has inspired great art. Frescoes and mosaics made
in antiquity are scattered all over the country

I sing of arms and of a man... — Opening line of Aeneid

Floundering as most of us do in our narrow worlds, it is likely that we are barely acquainted with the name Virgil (70-19 BC), ancient Rome’s greatest poet, ‘pillar of the Latin language’. It is equally likely that we have never heard of the Aeneid, his masterly work in verse that remains one of the loftiest achievements of the western world in literature. Homer’s two great epics in Greek, the Iliad and the Odyssey, we might know something about, but it would be salutary to remember what a contemporary of Virgil’s prophesied even as the Aeneid was being written although as yet untitled: "Give way, Roman authors; give way, Greeks. Something greater than the Iliad is born, I know not what."

What is the Aeneid about? Virgil, already celebrated for his poetic brilliance — and high in the favour of Augustus, the Caesar, who became the first emperor of Rome and to whom is credited the saying, "I found Rome brick, and I left it marble" — conceived the idea of an epic that told the story of Aeneas, a Trojan hero, who had already figured in Homer’s work.

Myth and legend, prophesies and dark words, wanderings on this earth and journeys to the underworld, were all to come together in his work. In nearly 10,000 lines, distributed over 12 books, he told the story: now filled with song, now with the clash of arms, fragrant with love at one end and with the engulfing gloom of tragedy at the other. Aeneas, escaping from burning Troy, "much buffeted on land and sea `85 much, too, having suffered in war", sets out for Italy but is forced to land on the northern coast of Africa; there the Queen of Carthage, Dido, falls in love with him but Aeneas has to set sail again, and Dido, distraught with passion for her lover, prepares to kill herself, her death creating a long-lasting enmity between Carthage and Rome. The Trojans sail to Sicily, but then Aeneas journeys to the underworld where he meets Dido. It is a phantasm that he sees and Virgil describes it with great beauty: "Thrice would I have thrown my arms about her neck, and thrice the ghost embraced fled from my grasp; like a fluttering breeze, like a fleeting dream."

But then higher tasks beckon him and, leading the Trojans, Aeneas reaches the Tiber; war ensues in which the Trojans triumph over the king Latinus. Aeneas marries the king’s daughter Lavinia, and founds Lavinium that became the parent town of Rome. The epic does not say this but, with time, he, the Trojan, was to emerge as an ideal figure and to be seen as the legendary founder of Rome itself.

There is, however, a sub-text that runs along this ‘historical epic’. It alludes to the whole course of Roman history as it proceeds, culminating in the reign of Augustus. It also turns into a myth of the founding of Rome, lauding Roman virtues, legitimising the currently ruling dynasty "as descendants of the founders, heroes and gods of Rome and Troy".

The struggle of Aeneas, as he attempts to found a city for his people, mirrors in many respects that of Augustus in re-establishing Rome. Ceaseless labour, the iron will never to yield, piety, pride, sacrifice, all become themes in themselves. And all is told with passion and in words of incomparable beauty.

Unhappily, we are denied access to Virgil’s original, it being in Latin. But much as, with us, our two great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, occupy in peoples’ minds positions far more exalted than is given ordinarily to great poetic works, the Aeneid came over the centuries to be held in the deepest reverence. Virgil had written a great deal before he set his hands to writing this epic: pastoral poetry and didactic works, for instance — "I sang of pastures, of sown fields, and of leaders", are the words inscribed on his tomb in Naples — but when he saw the life of his times in all its complexity, the "tears of things, the human situation which touches the heart", a melancholy seems to have come over him. And as for his person, stories grew around him.

Traditionally, he is known to have wanted, in his last years, to burn and destroy the epic he was close to finishing — a wish not granted by his Emperor, who could not bear the thought of this great work disappearing forever – but to this fact legends kept being added. In the centuries that followed his death, his name came to be associated with miraculous powers, and the place where he was buried turned into a pilgrimage destination. The veneration that his name commanded made even the Church a bit nervous, for at his tomb a tripod burner still stands. The ultimate compliment to Virgil came, however, from Dante, the "Supreme Poet of Italy", when he made him a central character in his own immortal work, The Divine Comedy, guiding the narrator through Hell and Purgatory.

The Aeneid, one knows, also inspired great art: frescoes and mosaics made in antiquity that are scattered all over Italy and even further off. It may be difficult to travel to see them, but happily a very large number of them have been gathered in the two volumes that Diane de Selliers, the celebrated publishing house of Paris, brought out a couple of years back. Containing a fresh translation of the epic in French, and studded with superb reproductions, as also the Latin text from an illustrated manuscript of the epic, the volumes are crisp and precious: a delight to hold in one’s hands.

In the end, a brief snippet. On the Great Seal of the United States that was fashioned in 1782, three different mottos in Latin are engraved, one of them reading NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM. The meaning? "A New Order of the Ages". And the source? Virgil’s Aeneid.

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