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THE AENEID
heroic poem that would celebrate Rome's greatness. At the beginning of
Georgics 3 he speaks of his future poetic ambitions — he will not write on the
well-worn themes of Greek mythology, but will dedicate a special temple of
song in Mantua, his birthplace. In the midst of his temple will be Caesar
Augustus, with triumphal processions from all parts of the world offering their
tributes: Trojan ancestors of the race of Assaracus along with Apollo the patron
god of Troy will be present in the great concourse of Roman majesty. This is
a clear prolepsis of the Aeneid, with the Trojan connexion of the Romans in
general and the Julian gens in particular well to the fore. Evidently at this time
Virgil's ideas were already focused on the two extremes of the time-scale of the
Aeneid — the dramatic date which is the period immediately after the Trojan war,
and the symbolic date which is the Augustan age, of which so much in the
Aeneid is prototype and anticipation.
The eventual choice of Virgil's epic subject was becoming clearer in his mind
while he was writing the Georgics. He rejects the mythology of Greece; the
reason he gives is that it has become trite, but a deeper reason can clearly be
seen, namely that to satisfy him his subject had to be Roman. He did not wish
to write about the Argonauts (the theme of his later imitator Valerius Flaccus),
nor about the Seven against Thebes (on which Statius wrote a century later),
because his deepest poetic inclinations were rooted in Rome and Italy, the
country of which his own Cisalpine Gaul had only recently become a part,
which he already loved for the natural beauty of its farmlands and mountains
and was soon to love also for its imperial message of peace and civilization for
the world. But he decided too that direct historical writing or contemporary
panegyric would confine his sensitivity for the universal application, would clip
the wings of poetic symbolism; and so he left the panegyrics of Augustus to the
prose-writers, and the historical theme to the Silver Age poets Lucan and Silius
Italicus. He chose instead a subject which was national, yet shrouded in the mists
of legend; a subject capable of readjustment to suit his poetical purpose; a
theme which was well known but flexible, not unlike our King Arthur story
before it received its more definitive shape from Malory. The theme was the
foundation by the Trojan prince Aeneas of Lavinium in Latium: from here
Aeneas' son Ascanius (also called lulus, as founder of the Julian gens) would
move to Alba Longa, and three hundred years later Romulus would transfer the
settlement to Rome. The voyage of Aeneas to Hesperia, the western land, was
destined by the gods so that a new city should replace the ruins of Troy; the
theme of destiny, the theme of the responsibility of Aeneas to fulfil the will of
the gods, is dominant throughout the whole poem, and is perhaps the major
point in which the Aeneid differs from its Homeric models. References to the
legend can be traced as far back as the sixth century B.C., but it was evidently in
the third century B.C. (as Rome began to expand into the Greek world) that the
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