Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

18
THE AENElD
I. THE AENEID AND ITS AUGUSTAN BACKGROUND
Virgil's Aeneid was conceived and shaped as a national and patriotic epic for the
Romans of his day. Certainly the Romans hailed it as such, and it rapidly
became both a set text in education and the natural successor to the Annales of
Ennius as the great poetic exposition of Roman ideals and achievements. As will
be seen later on, there are discordant elements in the patriotic theme, but it is
essential to recognize that Virgil's primary intention was to sing of his country's
glories past and present, and of the greatness yet to come. For all his universality
he is a true Augustan.
For many years Virgil had been preparing himself for this crowning achievement
of poetic ambition. The Romans regarded the epic poem as the highest
form of literature, a form constantly refused by Horace and Propertius as too
heavy for their frail shoulders. There is a passage in the Eclogues where Virgil
himself says that his thoughts were beginning to turn towards epic, but he was
rebuked by Apollo, god of poetry:
cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem
uellit et admonuit: 'pastorem, Tityre, pinguis
pascere oportet ouis, deductum dicere carmen.' {Eel. 6.3—5)
When I was going to sing of kings and battles, the god of Cynthus plucked my ear
and chided me: ' Tityrus, a shepherd should feed his sheep to grow fat but sing a song
that is slender.'
In his comment on the passage Servius tells us that this refers either to the
Aeneid, or to the deeds of the kings of Alba Longa, which Virgil had begun to
write about, but had abandoned the project because the names were unmanageable.
Donatus (Vita 19) has the statement that Virgil began a Roman theme, but
finding the material uncongenial went over to pastoral instead. We cannot be
sure that these interpretations are correct, as the Virgilian passage may be a
conventional 'refusal' (jecusatio) of the Alexandrian type, 1 but it is quite certain
that a few years later Virgil was indeed planning and preparing himself for the
1 See Clausen (1964) i8iff. and above, p. 317.
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