Virgil’s Aeneid is the last of three foundational works of Western Civilization. The thematic focus of the three epics takes the form of ever expanding circles: first, individual honor (the Iliad); then marriage (the Odyssey); and finally the city (the Aeneid), Rome itself:  the earthly type of the heavenly city, universal and timeless, and always coming into being but “not yet, not yet.” The meaning along with the cost of the epic endeavor enlarges with each work. Virgil’s debt to Homer is everywhere evident, but he surpasses his great teacher in several ways. One is that it’s impossible to read the Aeneid on its own. Its existence really depends on Homer. In one sense, it establishes the underlying principle of the entire epic tradition, of carrying the past forward and redeeming it as it goes. Anyone reading the Aeneid who hasn’t first read Homer won’t get close to grasping its meanings, for the entire Homeric past is embedded in every one of its lines (its first six books are modeled on the Odyssey and its last six on the Iliad). Each of its lines carries meaning from texts that exist outside its boundaries. Virgil’s method teaches us to read past surfaces, to look to realities not immediately present in what’s before us. A second is that the theme of a calling that’s implicit in Homer’s two works is now made explicit. Virgil takes as his hero a man who has the same courage and care for a family as Homer’s two heroes, but he adds to him a quality of piety that they lack, a deeper reverence for the gods and a conscious awareness of a calling, to do their will. A third is harder to describe because it’s intangible; it’s a quality that permeates every line of Virgil’s work, what good readers experience as his “melancholy,” his deeply-felt sense of the ephemeral character of things: all things pass, even the heroic deeds of men. Each of these first three qualities feeds into the fourth and last. It’s a peculiar way in which Aeneas stands in his world because he conceives of it differently from the way Odysseus and Achilleus do their worlds. In the destruction of Troy, Aeneas lost his world, everything that gave him meaning in life, his wife, his country, his language, his past. He had to start over. His concern in that endeavor wasn’t simply his own heroism or excellence. It was the good of others. The Rome that he’s called on to bring into being will be unlike any other city in one particular way: its governing ethos is that what men have in common is more important than the differences separating them. Because Aeneas is a man, he has an intrinsic link with all other men, regardless of their race or sex or station in life. In this one respect, the cost or suffering that Aeneas takes on himself goes far beyond anything the Homeric heroes know. Aeneas has at least as much in common with Old Testament figures, particularly Abraham and Moses, as he does with Homer’s two heroes, and in some ways he more closely approaches Christ than they do.

       One helpful note on the plot of the Aeneid. The “real time” of the epic begins with Saturn who was forced into exile in Italy (ages before Aeneas’ time) where he instituted what was commonly known as “Golden Age” and made a place for refugees or fugitives—the ancient prototype of Rome and actually of modern America. One of Saturn’s descendants, Dardanus, migrated east and produced the line that led to the founding of Troy. But we don’t come to this “real time” till late, in Book VI. The actual “plot time” is different. When the Aeneid opens, its hero, Aeneas, who has been struggling for eight years to found his city, is forced to make land at Carthage. It’s there in the company of Dido, the queen of Carthage, that he tells the story of Troy’s destruction and his efforts afterwards, really his repeated failures, to settle his people. After a year’s dalliance in Carthage, he receives a stern rebuke from the gods to get on with his work, and he sets off for Italy. When he arrives, Aeneas will face his greatest, certainly his most violent challenge: it’s there that he’ll make an amazing discovery—that he’s actually returning to his ancient origins, an action that Eliot perfectly captures in his, “In my beginning is my end…. In my end is my beginning.” And it’s there that he’ll have to overcome the racial and ethnic prejudices that have kept the peoples of Italy apart and in a state of constant war if he’s to unify the country and bring Rome into existence. The epic ends not with the cutting up of timber and laying down of foundations but with Aeneas killing Turnus, his bitterest enemy and the one man most likely to keep the civil wars going and thus thwart the founding of Rome.

       Two scenes are particularly noteworthy: when Aeneas describes the fall of Troy in the opening half of the epic, we’re finally allowed to experience what we only knew about in the Iliad and Odyssey: Troy going down in flames, its buildings crumbling stone by stone; its heroes killed; its women raped; its King, Priam, horribly, almost sacrilegiously, murdered—its homes, its temples, its ancient customs trampled, destroyed. Another is the moment when Aeneas arrives at Carthage and sees the temple that Dido built in honor of Juno. On the temple panels are represented the scenes of the Trojan War with Aeneas as one of its great heroes. The irony of the moment is that the man looking at the scenes carries within himself the weight of his failures. For eight years, he’s been unable to find the land the gods have been calling him to. He knows what it means to keep going in the face of defeat. Like its two predecessors, this epic ends with a Parousia action, the Return of the King, but with its mythic overtones of founding an eternal, universal city, it’s impossible not to feel Christ’s call to the New Jerusalem and the cost of getting there.