Vergil's Empire
Political Thought in the Aeneid
by Eve Adler
Rowman & Littlefield, 416 pp., $29.95

IN STANDARD HISTORIES of literature these days, Virgil tends to be characterized as a fairly gifted versifier and coiner of a few memorable phrases: "Arms and the man I sing," "Love conquers all," "I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts." The "Aeneid"--his epic poem about the founding of ancient Rome, in ten thousand dactylic hexameter lines--was once the dominant classical epic in the West, and Dante justly made Virgil his first guide in the "Divine Comedy." But from the nineteenth century on, Virgil has faded somehow--until he has reached near dismissal, in our own age, as the poor man's Homer: Caesar Augustus needed a heroic poem to justify his rule over the Roman Empire, we have been told, and Virgil obligingly wrote one for him. That's apparently all we need to know about the "Aeneid"--and all we need to know about Virgil, too.

Every schoolboy once knew a fuller story. Born in 70 B.C., Publius Vergilius Maro had a long and close history with the future emperor--in some legends, going all the way back to Virgil's youth, in which he is supposed, as a farm boy from the northern Italian city of Mantua, to have cured some of Augustus' horses. His literary talents surfaced early. The "Eclogues," ten pastoral poems, were so obviously superb that Cicero called him Rome's second greatest hope (reserving first place to himself). And the fourth "Eclogue" had a curious career: Written in the last few decades before Christ, it predicted the birth of a miraculous boy who would restore the mythical Golden Age. Later Christian readers applied this to Jesus and regarded Virgil as a prophet and magician. His four books of the "Georgics"--a seven-year effort on agricultural subjects--won him further praise.

But the twelve books of the "Aeneid," on which Virgil spent his last decade, were quickly judged a masterpiece of Latin literature. We owe the poem's survival to Augustus. Virgil fell ill on his way to Greece, where he intended to spend three years polishing his poem, and died in 19 B.C. in the eastern Italian port city known today as Brindisi. A perfectionist, on his deathbed he asked friends to burn the manuscript. Fortunately, Augustus overruled this dying wish and had a pair of literary scholars bring out the text summatim emendata, with only slight editing.

Part of the explanation for Virgil's modern decline is classicists' general preference for Greek sources over Latin--which began slowly in the Renaissance and gathered irresistible momentum through the sheer power of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German scholarship. The catastrophic decline of reading knowledge in Latin among the generally educated in twentieth-century England and America also contributed to the shrinking of Virgil's natural audience.

BUT SOMETHING POLITICAL seems to be at work in the dismissal of Virgil, as well. His closeness to Augustus (and the emperor's well-known desire to maintain a façade of classical tradition while covertly recasting it in Roman imperial form) has deeply shaped approaches to the epic, for good and later for bad, over the centuries. The first half of the "Aeneid," in this reading, is Virgil's "Odyssey"; it tells of a Trojan warrior named Aeneas, who wanders the Mediterranean after the fall of Troy and eventually founds the city of Rome. Similarly, the second half of the "Aeneid" is Virgil's "Iliad," recounting battles in Italy and connecting Roman history with the heroic age of the Trojan War.