A Platonic Reading of Vergil’s Aeneid

When Vergil began to write the Aeneid in 27 b.c.,¹he had good reason to expect that it would displace Homer’s epics as the staple of education for young Romans. The ascendant glory and substantial achievements of Augustus, whose praises it sings; Roman patriotism and traditionalism; the decline of the predominance of Greek over Latin in Roman education (even rising hostility against the Greek rhetoricians); and the introduction of contemporary Latin poetry into the curriculum the year after he began writing his masterwork: all conspired toward the victory of the new national epic, a victory that was almost immediate. It was Vergil who killed Homer the first time, becoming the classic epic poet of the Latin speaking world.

Would Vergil have wished it so? This essay will try to present plausible grounds for suspecting that he did, and that in what Plato called the quarrel between poetry and philosophy, Vergil took the side of Plato against Homer. Thus, the title of this essay should not be taken to indicate an attempt to characterize Vergil’s philosophical position within the various ancient schools, but rather an argument that Vergil, whose love of philosophical retirement is well-attested, wrote poetry in the spirit and under the guidelines of Plato’s Republic, guidelines appropriate to any philosophical position that recognizes a gap between the interests of political life and the interests of the life devoted to contemplation.

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I

In her “Editor’s Introduction” to Reading Vergil’s Aeneid: An Interpretive Guide, Christine Perkell presents an exceedingly judicious and even-handed introduction not only to the Aeneid itself, but also to the spectrum of major twentieth-century interpretations in the context of a brief sketch of the interpretive tradition as a whole. The principal alternatives with which the tradition presents us are whether to read the poem as speaking in one voice, celebratory of the Augustan empire (the earliest approach), or to detect another voice woven into the poem that stands in tension with this surface strain. This second approach Perkell traces back to Dryden, who maintained that, despite his discernible “republican principles,” Vergil nonetheless endorsed the absolute monarchy of Augustus as the best expedient for the circumstances of his time.²

In the twentieth century these alternatives tended to sheer to either side of the fault line between traditionalist conservatives and cosmopolitan liberal humanitarians. The former, for example T.S. Eliot, sought in the Aeneid nothing less than a vision able to sustain the life of European civilization, the vision of a “civilized world of dignity, reason and order.” To ignore the standard set by Vergil for European literature, Eliot urged, is to risk an historical provincialism, a blindness to our debt to and rootedness in our shared past. “[T]he maintenance of the standard is the price of our freedom, the defence of freedom against chaos.”³

Liberals on the other hand, especially Americans in the wake of the Vietnam War, tended to see in the poem a penchant to undermine the apparent endorsement not of absolute monarchy, but of imperial aggrandizement and the heroic ethos it required for success. They detected a voice sympathetic to the victims sacrificed to Roman destiny, regretful of the price of empire, and skeptical of traditional epic heroic virtues. Some such readers located the tension in a social context, opposing the poem’s “public voice of triumph” to the “private voice of regret.”⁴Others placed the tension within Vergil’s own psyche. The vision of Vergil’s poem, according to W.R. Johnson, vacillates between two moods felt deeply by the poet: Epicurean despair over man’s inability to overcome the dark forces within the soul (that is, in the end, a despair about what politics can achieve) and courageous refusal to give up all hope for redemption in the city and in history.⁵

Perkell expresses her own judgment that the reading that finds “internal contradiction” has won out with most scholars.⁶The central questions now revolve around the way in which to describe the character, expression, and meaning of the voice(s) opposed to the main surface message of the poem. I wish to address precisely this question, but in a way which, to my knowledge, has not been attempted by any party to the controversy, because it rejects an assumption shared by all parties. This assumption is that, given a multiplicity of voices, there are only two alternatives: either Vergil maintains authorial control and subordinates all other resonances to the principal voice that either affirms or resists the Augustan project, or the text exhibits tensions that Vergil either did not see or could not come to a conclusion about.

The third alternative is that Vergil does maintain authorial control, but affirms two distinct alternatives that, in the human condition, are incompatible yet inescapable. On this reading, Vergil’s problem is the problem of the national poet whose vision of man is informed by philosophy—the problem explored at length in Plato’s Republic. He bears the responsibility of shaping the vision of a city he knows to be imperfect and incapable of perfection, while at the same time indicating and fostering in the soul the perfection that transcends the city. He asks us to look at human life within the horizon of political passions as shaped by the poet’s imagination, before attempting to pass beyond to the horizon of universality that belongs to philosophy.

Thus the vacillation Johnson observes between political engagement and critical distance may belong to the nature of this mythopoetic undertaking more than to the anguished soul of the poet; and the question whether to read Vergil as imperial mythmaker or skeptical critic may rest upon a false dichotomy. Vergil writes at a time when the Empire has been largely achieved. It may indeed be part of his intention to mute the passions of imperialism and thus aid the Emperor’s policy of restraint (a project in which the Georgics would play a role as well). The more urgent political task, however, is to help consolidate the Augustan peace and to offer the Romans a vision of the ends they ought to pursue in the Empire they must administer. He may be a mythmaker, as Eliot would have it—but also, as Johnson would have it, a dissolver of myths, because the philosophic perspective by which he is informed stands beyond all myth.

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II

As the first poet to take the side of Plato in his struggle against Homer and the tragedians, Vergil founded what became the dominant tradition of European literature: a tradition of both depicting the ideal of the ordered soul and cultivating it in the reader. So well did he succeed that the struggle itself fell into obscurity. Let us remind ourselves of its field of engagement.

In the Republic, Socrates elaborates the conditions for the just city, the city in which the rule of reason over the appetites predominates, with the aid of spiritedness or thumos. The key to maintaining this order is education; and in the first place this means poetry, the right kinds of stories about gods and men (375a-377d). The education of the soldiery, from whose ranks the rulers are to be chosen, is crucial. Their thumos, the dominant element of their souls, must be given direction and formation by providing the right kind of heroes to capture their moral imagination. Socrates identifies the principal difficulty: “Glaucon, . . . with such natures, how will they not be savage to one another and the rest of the citizens?”(375b)⁷Such guardians may threaten their own countrymen. We recall the many griefs caused by Achilles’s wrath against his confederates. Such a disordered soul cannot provide the right model; Achilles is pathologically spirited from the point of view of both the philosopher and the citizen of the good city.

The right kind of stories should, Socrates argues, portray heroes obedient to the rule of reason. They should also not paint death and the underworld in frightening tones, since fear of death will weaken the courage of the citizens; accordingly the heroes should always mourn with measure and decorum (386a-388d). Tragedy in general should be abjured, because it perniciously habituates its audience to let slip the reins of the passions and indulge in them (606c-607a). The gods, too, should be represented as reasonable and hence as never given to wars and vendettas, so as not to offer the example of quickness to anger. They should be sources only of good to mortals. They should be truthful, never deceiving; and in their unalterability they should provide a model for the steadfast soul (377d-382e). Men should have ordered souls and confidence in an ordered universe.

Of course, no one can claim that Vergil adheres to these standards with any strictness, which is fortunate for lovers of poetry who do not live in Socrates’s imaginary city. The important thing to see is that Vergil takes them as guidelines for his reform of epic poetry. He inherits certain stories and characterizations of gods and heroes, but he makes use of them to tell a more orderly tale. He does this precisely out of a concern for the problem which prompts Socrates, the problem of the political self-destruction wrought when the spirited passions turn back upon one’s own fellow citizens, leading to civil wars such as Rome endured for more than half a century before the Augustan peace. This is the dominant political theme of his poem.

For the most part, Aeneas exhibits a well-ordered soul. He resists the rage that prompts him to kill Helen on sight, the anxious grief for his wife that would ruinously lead him back into the captured city, and the erotic passion that would bind him to Dido and distract him from his mission (II: 567–633, 735–800; IV: 259–396). In each of these instances he orders his actions for the sake of the good of his people, as a proper guardian ought.⁸But he is not immune to the allure of glory, especially for his sons and heirs—again, he is not a cosmopolitan philosopher, but a political man. Thus, though his conduct may suggest to many interpreters a stoic model, he is no stoic sage. He does not exactly listen to reason; it is the voice of his goddess mother or some other representative of the divine will that tells him the good of his people, not reason. But let us return to this point shortly when we discuss the gods.

The Aeneid does not entirely eschew tragedy either; Dido’s story is one of the best-relished tragedies of European literature. But placed next to Aeneas, who serves as its foil, the tragedy is defanged of its pernicious effects. When Dido’s love is spurned, the poet describes her suicidal madness by means of images borrowed explicitly from Greek tragedy—the maddened Pentheus from Euripides’s Bacchae and Orestes driven by the Furies from Aeschylus’s Eumenides.⁹This occurs just a page after the famous comparison of Aeneas’s steadiness of mind in the face of his passion to an oak standing firm in the bellowing winds. Likewise the mournful wailings of others serve to highlight the mourning of Aeneas, always measured.

Vergil’s underworld, too, stands halfway between the unmitigated gloom of Homer and the pure Socratic guidelines. It is dark and indistinct, but not quite terrifying (VI: 268ff.). Monsters do appear to test the nerve of Aeneas, but their fearsomeness is deflated by his guide, the Sibyl (VI: 290–294). In fact, the clear evocations of the Myth of Er, which concludes Plato’s Republic (the thousand years of purgation before reincarnation, with punishments for the malefactors and delights for the good), convey a reassuring sense of order missing in Homer—especially since the terrors of the punishments remain undescribed.¹⁰

The terrifying images come not in the underworld of Book Six, but rather in the following book. There Juno invokes the infernal power of the fury Allecto, too horrible even for the tastes of the subterranean gods:

From the dark underworld
Home of the Furies, [Juno] aroused Allecto. . . .
Even her father Pluto hates this figure,
Even her hellish sisters, for her myriad
Faces, for her savage looks, her head
Alive and black with snakes. ¹¹

Her work is to ruin the best hopes for civil union between the Trojans and Latins by driving the madness of furious rage and bacchic frenzy upon the souls of the latter. The first and most optimistic simile of the poem—the comparison of Neptune’s stilling of the sea to a man of weighty authority calming an incipient civil riot (a clear allusion to the Augustan peace)—is here overturned: the raging mob with firebrands in hand prove intractable to the authority even of Latinus their king. What is frightening is not the fate of departed souls, but the outbreak of passions that derange the soul and overturn the peaceful authority of prudent rulers.¹²

The prudence of Latinus, like that of Aeneas, rests ultimately on listening to the gods; and so we return to the question of the place of the gods in the poem. We find that the gods are not quite the perfect, rational beings demanded by Socrates. Here, more than anywhere, Vergil could not but compromise halfway, since he had not, like Socrates, the luxury of starting from scratch. In the very prologue of the poem he raises doubts about the reasonableness of his gods: “Can anger/ Black as this prey on the minds of heaven?”¹³The gods, as in Euripides, are less admirable than the heroes. This is no fault of Vergil’s; whereas it is he who sings of Aeneas, it is the Muse, the voice of poetic tradition, who sings of Juno (I: 1–10).

Jupiter, on the other hand, proves the exception; with his immense calm and foresight, he epitomizes reason and self-command. Here again we find Socrates echoed: “But if they do make gods so [i.e., subject to human failings], at least they shouldn’t dare to make so unlikely an imitation of the greatest of the gods.”(388c) Jupiter appears as the figure of the divine reason of the Stoics, or perhaps it is better to say that Jupiter exhibits the serenity of the soul fully aware of and in accord with the cosmic order. He is the spokesman and principal agent of fate.

We see the same kind of compromise over the Socratic principle that the gods should never quarrel. Vergil’s gods do in fact come into conflict with one another, but the resolution of their conflicts indicates the shift in the direction set by philosophic guidelines. In the gods of Homer we see conflicting principles at best in a tense balance, and, when out of balance, drawn back by the threat of violence or the specter of chaos. In Vergil, on the other hand, conflicts generally involve a question of the transgression of proper jurisdictions. To resolve them, one resorts to the standard of the ordered whole.

The prudence of Latinus and Aeneas, then, rests upon listening to the gods. But the gods are ranged in their jurisdictions under Jupiter, and their communications to Aeneas and Latinus are communications of Jupiter’s ruling and provident will. This will, in turn, rests upon an awareness of the cosmic reason which appears under the name of fate. And what is the ordinance of fate that illumines the mind and guides the will of Aeneas, enabling him to subordinate his passions to the pursuit of the good? Ultimately it is the same ordinance that dictates to Latinus the betrothal of his daughter to Aeneas: that the Trojan and Latin people should found an empire that will give laws to the world and bring peace and order.

Now, for Vergil, the empire has been accomplished and the foundations laid for peace. What remains is that the Romans should invest their pride and best energies, their spirited element, to the end of maintaining the rule of law—that Romulus and Remus, hitherto the patron genii of imperial conquest (as well as emblems of the specter of civil war), should become lawgivers (I: 292–3). The goodness of this end is recognized by the prudential reason of the poet. Which is to say that ultimately the prudence of Aeneas consists in being ruled by the rational mind of Vergil, a mind that, unlike that of Aeneas, can transcend the loyalties of blood and nation to contemplate the good of the whole made possible by the historical situation. Yet he must appeal precisely to the loyalties of blood and nation, and so invests the pursuit of that good with all the glory and pride due to the chosen instruments of destiny. He is not, as is often claimed, simply giving voice to Roman communalism in place of Greek individualism;¹⁴rather he is fulfilling the national poet’s civic responsibility as articulated by Plato.

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III

Indications of Vergil’s Platonic opposition to Homer appear as well when we consider his echoes of the Homeric poems. Aeneas’s ultimate inability to transcend blood and nation contrasts with Achilles at his highest and most human moments.¹⁵On the most apparent level of the Iliad, the hero and the reader are brought to look upon the actions and the passions of the story within the broad horizon of the human condition as such. Vergil, on the contrary, insistently keeps this horizon closed for both the hero and the reader, at least on the level of the drama and dominant imagery of the Aeneid.¹⁶We may begin to take the measure of this difference by contrasting the scenes in which the two heroes receive their divinely crafted shields.

When Aeneas receives from Vulcan the shield depicting the future episodes of Rome’s career of greatness, he does not understand its meaning:

All these images on Vulcan’s shield,
His mother’s gift, were wonders to Aeneas.
Knowing nothing of the events themselves,
He felt joy in their pictures, taking up
Upon his shoulder all the destined acts
And fame of his descendants. ¹⁷

The shield concerns Roman glory, and Aeneas takes it up to establish Rome and to preserve his Trojans. This scene epitomizes the virtues identified by Eliot as labor, pietas, and fatum, Aeneas’s willingness to take upon himself the task of being true to his people and their destiny. Precisely these virtues qualify him as the good citizen.

The simple joy he feels stands opposed to the anger felt by Achilles (in Iliad XIX:16) when he gazes upon his shield. The shield of Achilles is the closest approach in Homer’s epic to a philosophic vision of the whole world and man’s place in it. The polarities there depicted of order and chaos in nature itself, in man’s relationship to nature and in man’s relationship to man delineate the permanent parameters of our existence. Achilles responds with anger precisely because he does understand what it means. He sees that the life of his choice, the life of the warrior which he is living to its tragic limits, occupies a very small place in the whole, a place that exists moreover only as a result of human failure to maintain decent order.¹⁸He is angry at his fate, which appears as his doom because he can look at it within the perspective of the whole of human life. Nonetheless, he is glad of the divine honor of the gift, the acknowledgement of his superhumanity even in the midst of his human misery.

Nothing so heady for Aeneas. His horizon is the horizon of his city and his people; even the scenes of the afterlife depicted on his shield center on the meaning for Roman political history of the key figures of Catiline and Cato (VIII: 666–670). The whole of his shield is limited to the perspective embodied in the two cities of Achilles’s shield, the city at peace and the city at war, the sphere of the strictly human; except that for Aeneas, they are not cities as such, but the oscillations in the fortune of his city. He has no use for contemplation of the city as such or man’s place in nature, much less of nature itself. Surely Eliot is wrong to see in him the harmony of action and contemplation. He rather testifies to their separation. If anyone in the poem typifies their union, it is the poet.

The confinement of the surface of the poem to this perspective is signaled already in the first simile:

When rioting breaks out in a great city,
And the rampaging rabble goes so far
That stones fly, and incendiary brands—
For anger can supply that kind of weapon—
If it so happens they look round and see
Some dedicated public man, a veteran
Whose record gives him weight, they quiet down,
Willing to stop and listen.
Then he prevails in speech over their fury
By his authority, and placates them.
Just so, the whole uproar of the great sea
Fell silent. . . . ¹⁹

In the Iliad, the material for the similes is drawn from all the regions of Achilles’s shield other than that of the city at war;²⁰they provide relief from the perspective of war as well as gradual openings onto the vast horizon eventually depicted on the shield. In the Aeneid the first simile places our imaginations firmly in the sphere of Roman civil unrest and its ultimate pacification, as eventually depicted on Aeneas’s shield. Not the contemplative remoteness from war but rather mindfulness of the actually achieved political suppression of it offers us relief.²¹The Iliad portrays the human grandeur achieved in the midst of human failure, the failure to maintain an order in which to live a happy life; the Aeneid serves in the first instance to cultivate citizens who will cooperate in overcoming this failure. Whereas the former locates itself by opening onto a larger horizon, the latter does so by showing the horizon within which it is confined.

Confining Aeneas to his proper horizon helps make comprehensible what for most interpreters is the crux of the poem: the slaying of Turnus.²²How can this paragon of self-command suddenly give in to his murderous rage? To Johnson this means the victory in history of the dark forces represented in Juno, which in the end prove unassimilable to the vision of the cosmic reign of the good and rational.²³But Aeneas is not the paragon of reason; rather, he occupies the proper place assigned to him by reason. The contrast with Homer in the light provided by Plato helps us to see this as well.

The Iliad ends with a high point for Achilles, when his love for his father allows him to transcend his rage against Hector and hostility to his enemy Priam, and to see himself and this bereaved king as sharing in the same human lot. Vergil has the conquered Turnus appeal to the very same filial piety in order to draw the contrast:

If you can feel a father’s grief—and you, too,
Had such a father in Anchises—then
Let me bespeak your mercy for old age
In Daunus, and return me, or my body,
Stripped, if you will, of life, to my own kin.
You have defeated me. . . . But go no further
Out of hatred. ²⁴

If we see Achilles’s final generous humanity as a success, we are inclined to see Aeneas’s vengeful wrath as a failure, especially in light of the persistent theme of self-control and the exhortation to Romans to spare the conquered. But we would be missing the proper contrast.

We know that Aeneas is a man whose passions, even at their highest pitch, are never as vastly boundless as Achilles’s. Though he does indulge in an Achilles-like rampage upon the first news of Pallas’s death (X: 510–605), he is already able, by the time he kills Lausus, to reward the filial piety of this young enemy with an honorable return of body and armor to his arrogant father—and this wholly by the prompting of his own spirit (X:812–832). We are inclined to expect that he would afford Turnus a decent burial; nor do we imagine him adding desperate insult to injury once his immediate rage has been satisfied and the conflict reaches an end. His humanity is something we are ready to take for granted, not something that we need to see dramatically evoked. There will be no equivalent of Achilles’s scene with Priam because no need for it is likely to arise.

But should not Aeneas spare Turnus in the first place? It is not easy to see why he should. The injunction of Anchises to the Romans to spare the conquered need not apply to Aeneas. For, as Augustine so pertinently observed, the Romans spared the conquered because they were strong enough and proud of it.²⁵Likewise, when Achilles is humane to Priam, it is to a much weaker man who is entirely at his mercy, as well as at the bidding of the gods. It is by no means clear that Aeneas’s position is sufficiently strong that he could afford to spare Turnus. Why would not prudence dictate that this past and potential destroyer of the peace be eliminated as a threat to the finally achievable unity of the two peoples? If Aeneas were acting under the control of reason, might he still kill Turnus? It is not clear that we can find any unambiguous moral principle on which to fault Aeneas. What is safe is inhumane; what is humane threatens hard-won security. To attempt a cleavage of this dilemma is to shrink from Vergil’s political realism.

But Aeneas does not act on the basis of any such maxims of conduct or dictates of prudence. If he did, indeed, we might find him less sympathetic. Rather, he undergoes a vacillation of passions:

Fierce under arms, Aeneas
Looked to and fro, and towered, and stayed his hand
Upon the sword-hilt. Moment by moment now
What turnus said began to bring him round
From indecision. Then to his glance appeared
The accurst swordbelt surmounting Turnus’ shoulder,
Shining with its familiar studs—the strap
Young Pallas wore when Turnus wounded him
And left him dead upon the field; now Turnus
Bore that enemy token on his shoulder—
Enemy sti11. ²⁶

Battle fury and loyalty to his fallen comrades drives him to finish off the foe, and filial piety evoked by Turnus’s plea begins to sway him as it swayed Achilles. What rekindles his anger? It is another instance of filial piety, a piety toward his ally Evander who had entrusted his son Pallas to Aeneas, as well as toward Pallas himself whom Aeneas treated as a son. In other words, it is piety against piety. How to choose between them which he ought to have preferred? In being swayed by the more particular attachment rather than the one that would extend his range of moral vision to the more universally human, Aeneas abruptly closes off the path to the openness of vista we find in Homer. But in doing so, he is faithful to the description of a good Platonic guardian, whose characteristic disposition is to be “gentle to their own and cruel to enemies”(375c); for because of the sight of Pallas’s plundered warbelt, “torn from one of mine”(XII:947), Turnus appears to him under the aspect of “enemy.” By the standards of the Republic, whose terms Vergil here invokes with precision, his thumos is rightly modulated and rightly directed. To ask more of him is to ask Aeneas to be something other than a good guardian.

In slaying Turnus, the more Homeric hero, Aeneas is faithful to the Platonic model, which is a model of faithfulness to the city. It may not be too fanciful to see him also as an image for the poet himself, who, we might say, slays Homeric poetry out of a loyalty to his city, and not without a divided heart. Vergil’s victory is not a matter of superiority as a poet, but is required by the very decree of fate that decreed the Roman Empire. If there is any hope for Rome to foster peace and the rule of law, it needs the epic purged of Achilles.

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IV

But does not the Aeneid also have its moment of philosophical vision in Book VI, when Anchises gives Aeneas a lesson in cosmology? Yes and no. Anchises’s eclectic blend of platonistic and stoic cosmology, with its “fiery energy. . . . Imprisoned in the darkness of the body” and stains of souls “washed by floods or burned away by fire”²⁷is more myth than philosophy. To say that it provides “a solution to the problem of human suffering”²⁸seems somewhat to the point, but it is doubtful that this solution is something to satisfy a philosophic mind such as Vergil’s. It seems to serve a limited purpose, which is to offer to Aeneas a rational vision of the universe that supports the subjugation of unruly passions, to which pious duty alone has hitherto prompted him.²⁹It harnesses the two strands of philosophy familiar to an educated Roman that are most promising for this task, and lends their support to both a moral exhortation to maintain the soul’s rule over the body and a reassuring vision of the afterlife for those capable of such self-rule. This most philosophic moment of the Aeneid recalls nothing more distinctly than the Myth of Er, which is to say the least philosophic moment of the Republic, and the one that puts that dialogue’s poetic prescriptions into practice.

On the other hand, this passage that seems to promise to carry us beyond the Roman political horizon might, especially if we are already put in mind of the Republic, also recall to mind the passage of that dialogue that describes just such an experience: the Allegory of the Cave. If so, it must strike us as odd that the delivery of true knowledge of nature, that which is meant in Plato by leaving the cave, is here delivered precisely in a “cavern . . . profound, wide-mouthed, and huge.”³⁰ What, if anything, are we to make of this?

The cave of the Republic is, it seems, the world in which shared opinions hold us fast, and in which men strive for distinction on the basis of these mere opinions—in other words, the city. The ascent to the vision of truth requires education in reasoning soundly, especially in dialectic. Aeneas’s descent into the cave of Elysium, on the other hand, requires of him animae et pectus firmum (VI:261), i.e., thumos and a steadfast heart. On the way he does receive a piece of education from the “learned” or “knowing” Sibyl; he learns that the visions of underworld gods that cause him fear and arouse his thumos to respond with violence are no more than insubstantial “shadows” and “images of forms” (VI:293–294)—these fiendish forces that are so real to the raging Turnus and Amata. In other words, the man of thumos is disabused, by one who knows, of the false opinions about the terrors of the underworld gods that vainly misdirect his fear, anger and courage—exactly what is called for in the guardian’s education.³¹This prepares him for the more reassuring vision of the reward that awaits the virtuous.

This may suggest an interpretation of Aeneas’s famous exit through the Ivory Gate, whence depart false dreams into the upper world (VI:893–898). This purported acquisition of truth is still governed by the exigencies of myth, which is to say by the needs of the cave. The image of serene life proffered here is an imperfect image of the philosophic equanimity achieved by true freedom from the dominion of passions, but in terms accessible to one who has had no taste of the life of contemplative detachment. This contrast with Plato’s cave is underscored by what appears to be an echo of the Republic here. Aeneas’s question as to why the blessed souls can wish to return to daylight (VI:721) has no precedent in epic literature; but it might remind us of Glaucon’s objection against forcing the blessed philosophers to return to the cave to govern (519d). The vision of a more satisfying life puts into question the value of the endless strivings of the pursuit of political aims. In the Republic, the blissful alternative is the happiness of “one able to know the causes of things,”³²toward which a tale of the afterlife helps direct us. In the Aeneid, the corresponding tale of the afterlife helps direct the reader toward a more disciplined and public-spirited kind of heroism, as exemplified by the parade of Roman heroes which culminates the journey. The dream is a false dream because it is only an approximate image of the true blessedness, which, if drawn faithfully, would contribute much less to the education of political men. While the Allegory of the Cave leads the reader away from the struggle for distinction within the city’s horizon and toward the contemplation of first principles, Vergil’s myth of the underworld moves from a cosmological/eschatological vision to a celebration of the glory of Roman heroes, and finally to the exhortation that Romans should excel above all in the arts of lawful and peaceful rule.

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V

According to Socrates, the lie that is poetry is “useful, so as not to deserve hatred” when used “as a preventive, like a drug, for so-called friends when from madness or some folly they attempt to do something bad”; and “likening the lie to the truth as best we can” makes it especially useful (382c-d). Vergil’s myth, a sort of halfway house in the direction of philosophic reason, adheres to this standard when it provides a vision able to cultivate in Roman political men the proper kind of affections—particularly of the spirited element, which is prone to a kind of madness that turns those who ought to be friends into enemies.

We find Vergil himself proffering us a model of such half-true speech in Book I. Blown by the raging storm onto the Carthaginian shore, Aeneas addresses his lost, battered, and dispirited people:

“Friends and companions,
Have we not known hard hours before this?
. . . Now call back
Your courage, and have done with fear and sorrow. . . .
We hold our course for Latium, where the Fates
Hold out a settlement and rest for us.
Troy’s kingdom there shall rise again. Be patient:
Save yourselves for more auspicious days.”
So ran the speech. Burdened and sick at heart,
He feigned hope in his look, and inwardly
Contained his anguish. ³³

Here Aeneas acts as a true statesman, giving his men the hope they need to carry on their task, though on his part that hope is a pretense that hides his anxieties. He bids them trust in the gods and their fate to fulfill their strivings. The immediate sequel is a speech in which the god Jupiter announces the decree of fate that insures the Romans boundless empire—the first of the “three great set pieces that are at the heart of the poem’s Augustan ideology.”³⁴ Whatever Vergil’s own doubts or anxieties about the desirability and the eventual fate of the Roman Empire, he plays the part of the good statesman when he accepts the given situation and directs the hopes of his fellow Romans to a cosmic vision that gives them every encouragement a poet can to maintain the rule of law and civil peace.

The history of the poem’s reception testifies to the success of its strategy of multiple levels of meaning. It easily passes for a celebration and justification of the Augustan empire, while more attentive reading of the abounding alternative indications has prompted pertinent and searching questions about ethics and metaphysics, the soul and the divine. Of such kind, in fact, are the questions that vaguely trouble Aeneas at the outset, especially questions about the divine. But they are gradually laid aside as his horizon increasingly narrows to the love of his new city-to-be and the glory of its heroes. They remain provocative questions, however, for the reader who is not confined within that horizon. But there can be no question that the poem provided the Latin-reading world with its exemplary hero, who served for many centuries as the model of the excellent citizen and leader, and thus in some measure fulfilled the fate for which its author seems to have intended it.

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Notes:

1. Simple references to the Aeneid will be given in terms of the line numbers of the Latin text; in the case of quotations from the translation by Robert Fitzgerald, line numbers from the translation will be given, followed by the corresponding Latin line numbers in brackets. Translations not identified as Fitzgerald’s are my own.
2. Perkell, 17; Dryden, Vergil: The Aeneid: Translated by John Dryden, with Mr. Dryden’s Introduction (New York, 1944), xx, xxi.
3. Eliot, “What Is a Classic?” (1944), in On Poetry and Poets (London,1957), 68–71.
4. Adam Parry, “The Two Voices of Vergil’s Aeneid,” Arion 2 (1963):66–80.
5. Johnson, Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid (Berkeley, 1976), 150. It appears to be part of Johnson’s aim to eschew the imputation of kowtowing to tyranny in the public/private split and to portray Vergil’s refusal of a comfortable solution to his own inner anguish as courageously resolute.
6. Perkell, 20–21. One wonders whether this phenomenon represents the prevailing of a stronger view or rather the liberal dominance of what counts as the academic mainstream—or, as I am inclined to think, both. The direction of Perkell’s own bias may be judged by what she presents as an ironic counterpoise: the association of Eliot’s view with conservative thinkers as opposed to the anti-fascist Christian humanism of Haecker, Eliot’s interpretive guide. The proper conclusion to draw in this instance would seem to be that the Christian humanism represented by Eliot and Haecker stood against both right and left insofar as these were understood in fundamentally secular and political terms.
7. All quotations are from the translation by Allan Bloom.
8. Cf. Republic 412d-e. Aeneas is a guardian in the proper sense, i.e., a ruler chosen from among the warrior class. His position differs, however, from the Platonic guardian inasmuch as his loyalty is not to a people unified under the laws given by a founder, but to a people yet to be founded whose laws are yet to be given. Aeneas serves as founder of that people in a very limited sense; he brings about the union of Trojans and Latins that constitutes the Roman stock.
9. IV:465–473. It is noteworthy that Vergil includes a theater among the Carthaginian public buildings Aeneas finds under construction (I:427–429); the queen clearly has a taste for tragedy.
10. Cf.esp. VI:748–51.
11. Fitzgerald VII:443–450 [= Latin 324–329].
12. It is noteworthy that Book IX, from which Aeneas is absent, provides the starkest examples of vainglory and raging battle-fury blinding characters to what are obviously prudent courses.
13. Fitzgerald I:18–19 [= Latin 11].
14. Cf. for example Gary Miles’s “The Aeneid as Foundation Story,” in Reading Vergil’s Aeneid (Norman, Okla., 1999), 234
15. Aeneas has, indeed, a proximate ability for such transcendence, inasmuch as his gentleness and generosity extend to anyone who does not stand as enemy; but in the end his loyalties and their attendant spiritedness prevail, and he slays his supplicant enemy. Modern readers with pacific inclinations find this outcome troubling. For Plato’s Socrates, however, the problem seems to have been the reverse: How can the savage character of the warrior be tempered with the gentleness of the fellow-citizen? That the warrior is necessary and must be savage is taken for granted.
16. This essay seeks to articulate the character and boundedness of the citizen-horizon characteristic of the Aeneid. It does not attempt to explore the contemplative horizon, which seems to occupy, for the most part, an allegorical level distinct from the surface of the poem. For example, John Alvis (in Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Vergil [London, 1995]), has pointed out that the three principal divinities in the poem (Jupiter, Juno, Venus) exemplify the three parts of the soul distinguished in Republic V (reason, spiritedness, appetite), and that we can gain many insights by observing how these gods partake in the action in relation to the play of these soul elements in the characters. I have profited much from Alvis’s discussion; however I don’t think he maintains an adequate heuristic distinction between the levels of meaning.
17. Fitzgerald VIII:987–992 [= Latin 729–731].
18. Cf. Mark W. Edwards, The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume V, Books 17–20 (Cambridge, Mass.,1995), 208–209.
19. Fitzgerald I:201–212 [= Latin 148–154].
20. Cf. James Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Durham, N.C.,1994), 186–189.
21. Cf. Perkell, 37–39.
22. Cf. Perkell, 21.
23. Johnson, 138.
24. Fitzgerald XII:1266–76 [= Latin 932–938].
25. City of God, Book 1 Preface.
26. Fitzgerald XII:1276–1287 [= Latin 938–944].
27. Fitzgerald VI:981–987, 998 [= Latin 730–734, 742].
28. R.D.Williams, “The Sixth Book of the Aeneid,” in Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid(Oxford, 1990), 191.
29. Even if we accept the argument of Hardie (Vergil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium [Oxford, 1986]) that Vergil employs a variety of elements from poetic and philosophic tradition to ground the accomplishment of the empire in a cosmological vision, it remains the case that this use of philosophy is not itself philosophical but mythopoetic; the question is whether Vergil’s own vision was confined to ideology or whether the poem contains a genuinely philosophical voice as well.
30. Fitzgerald VI:331 [= Latin 237]
31. The refashioning of the cave/myth complex to distinctly Roman purposes (though with a greater emphasis on cosmological context) had already been performed in the “Dream of Scipio” from Cicero’s Republic, also clearly a source for Vergil’s underworld.
32. Vergil, Georgics II:490. The sentence continues: “ and who has cast beneath his feet all fear and inexorable fate and the roars of hungry Acheron.”(491–492) Cf. Alvis, 150–152.
33. Fitzgerald I:270–286 [= Latin 198–209]
34. Perkell, 23. The other two “set-pieces” are the description of the images on Aeneas’s shield, discussed above at the beginning of section III, and the pageant of Roman heroes in Hades, noted in section IV.