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THE AENEID
penumbra of allusion which enriches and adds to the density and universality
of the legend, so that Virgil could extend its significance from the heroic days of
Troy to his own contemporary world.
"What were the reasons which led Virgil to wish to extol Augustan Rome by
symbolizing its trials and achievements in the person of its first founder? The
ancient commentators were clear that this was his purpose, and, although it will
be argued later that other purposes came more and more to the fore as the
composition of the poem proceeded, their view was basically right. Servius says
(at the beginning of his commentary on the Aeneid): ' Virgil's intention is to
imitate Homer and to praise Augustus by means of his ancestors'; in Donatus
(Vita 21) we are told that Virgil's special interest in the subject of the Aeneid
was that it would contain the origin of the city of Rome and of Augustus;
finally Tiberius Claudius Donatus (Prooem. Aen. i) says 'his task was to depict
Aeneas as a worthy first ancestor of Augustus, in whose honour the poem was
written'. What reasons would Virgil have for regarding Rome under Augustus
as the proper subject for his magnum opus?
First and foremost he had lived his life in a period of disastrous and appalling
civil war, a period in which all that Rome had achieved through the long
centuries of her history appeared likely to vanish in carnage and confusion. The
wars of Marius and Sulla were succeeded by the struggle for power between
Pompey and Caesar, culminating in the invasion of Italy by Caesar and his
Gallic veterans. Pitched battles followed in which Roman fought Roman: the
victory of Caesar was annulled by his assassination, and the power struggle
broke out again, first with Antony and Octavian against Brutus and Cassius,
and then with Antony and Octavian jockeying for power against each other,
with the remnants of the Republican party of Pompey still threatening both of
them. The sense of guilt felt by the Romans is powerfully expressed by Virgil
himself at the end of the first Georgic:
di patrii, Indigetes, et Romule Vestaque mater,
quae Tuscum Tiberim et Romana Palatia seruas,
hunc saltern euerso iuuenem succurrere saeclo
ne prohibete. satis iam pridem sanguine nostro
Laomedonteae luimus periuria Troiae;
iam pridem nobis caeli te regia, Caesar,
inuidet atque hominum queritur curare triumphos,
quippe ubi fas uersum atque nefas; tot bella per orbem,
tam multae scelerum fades, non ullus aratro
dignus honos, squalent abductis arua colonis,
et curuae rigidum falces conflantur in ensem.
hinc mouet Euphrates, illinc Germania bellum;
uicinae ruptis inter se legibus urbes
arma ferunt; saeuit toto Mars impius orbe;
336
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