The Aeneid

I sing of warfare and a man at war.

From the sea-coast of Troy in early days
He came to Italy by destiny,
To our Lavinian western shore,
A fugitive, this captain, buffeted
Cruelly on land as on the sea
By blows from powers of the air behind them
Baleful Juno in her sleepless rage.
And cruel losses were his lot in war,
Till he could found a city and bring home
His gods to Latium, land of the Latin race,
The Alban lords, and the high walls of Rome.
Tell me the causes now, O Muse, how galled
In her divine pride, and how sore at heart
From her old wound, the queen of Gods compelled him
A man apart, devoted to his mission (Aenead 1.1-16)

 Virgil was born in Mantua in 70 BCE.

Educated at Cremona and Milan, and as part of an
Epicurean community at Naples.
Epicureanism is an anti-Platonic, atomist
philosophy, that found its most enduring
expression in the poem De Rerum Natura by
Lucretius.
Virgil wrote Eclogues, Georgics and ended his life
writing Epic, ascending the generic hierarchy from
pastoral to didactic to epic poetry.
His later career coincided with the reign of
Augustus Caesar, who, like Pericles in Athens, and
the Medici in Renaissance Florence, was one of
the greatest patrons of the arts in Western history

 I sing of warfare and a man at war.

The end-stopped first line of the poem
alerts us to its principle theme and
metaphor: War. It invokes the general
concept of war, the craft-knowledge
suitable to those who perform this
skilled labour, and the individual
practitioner. This theme seems to
herald a work modelled on the Iliad
rather than the Odyssey, though in
fact it will conflate the Homeric epics.

 The poem is interested in its origins as a means of

self justification. Cities are built with hierarchies,
and one meaning of hierarchy is orientation
towards an origin.
From the sea-coast at Troy in early days.
The Roman tradition of tracing their origins to the
losing side in the Trojan war predates Virgil by
centuries, but has little historical basis. This form of
identification distinguishes them from the Greeks,
in relation to whom they may have felt an anxiety
of influence, even as they absorbed and translated
Greek literature and institutions.
The phrase early days is deliberately unspecific:
whose early days? The worlds? This phrasing
intimates to us the poems ambition.

 He came to Italy by destiny.

The third person pronoun beginning the third line in the
English translation juxtaposes the poet of the first line with
his protagonist, and indeed Virgil will hand his job over to
Aeneas when his story reaches Libya.
Italy is the location in which the poem is being written, and
so these first three lines align the geographical and temporal
poles within which the action takes place.
The greater emphasis on Destiny differentiates this poem
from the Homeric narrative on which it is modelled.
Everything that this poet writes, and that this protagonist
acts, has been written from outside time by the fates. It has
the gravity of something that could not have been otherwise,
and yet it is characterised by much existential terror during
Aeneas first person narrative.
Existential anxiety may also be attributed to the narrator as
he sets out to write a poem that will rival Homer.

 To our Lavinian western shore,.

This line restates the destination in
female terms. Aeneas ordained spouse,
is the haven in which he will finally rest.
The word shore rhymes with war in
English, and reminds us that this haven
is implicated in a great deal of pain that
has been undertaken to reach it. It is
therefore something valuable in a way
that it wouldnt be if it were merely
foreordained.

 Destiny and existential uncertainty

support and undermine each other in
giving to these events their unique
value for a Roman audience.
A fugitive, this captain, buffeted
The contradictions inherent in
Aeneas character echo the
contradictions of the narrative itself:
a fugitive is in a state of radical
uncertainty whereas a captain is
authoritative.

Cruelly on land as on the sea

By blows from powers of the air behind them
Baleful Juno in her sleepless rage
These lines reinforce the idea that this poem is telling a
cosmic, and not just a personal story, because they refer
to the four elements: earth(land), air, fire(rage) and water.
However, the cosmic turmoil is contained within a personal
animus held by Juno towards the Trojans.
The wind blows Aeneas across the mediterranean, but there
is a pun in this word blows that makes it also signify the
blows of Junos fists.
One can be philosophical about the actions of elements, but
when there is a malevolent will behind them, it raises
questions of moral agency. Are the gods above morality?
Should their malevolence be understood as a force of
nature, or forces of nature as their malevolence?

And cruel losses were his lot in war,

Till he could found a city and bring home
His gods to Latium, Land of the Latin race,
The Alban lords and the high walls of Rome.
The idea of cruelty is repeated here. This time it describes not the
actions of a person, but the quality of a feeling.
Loss in itself is incapable of cruelty, and so this is a transferred epithet
that properly belongs to Juno. Yet it points up again the ambiguity
about her malevolence: is she a person or a force?
Loss almost rhymes with lot, a word meaning chance and signifying
blind material processes rather than intentional harm.
Both of these concepts, loss and lot, are intrinsic to the notion of war.
Loss is both an absence and a present emotion. War is destructive,
and yet it helps to create the Roman state.
What does it mean for the city mentioned in line 10, that it is founded
upon loss and lots?
As with the furies in The Oresteia, Aeneas destiny involves several
changes of name that efface the home he has lost , such that it needs
to be excavated by this poet.

Tell me the causes now, O Muse, how galled

In her divine pride, and how sore at heart
From her old wound, the queen of gods compelled him
A man apart, devoted to his mission
Aeneas is compelled by Juno but her freedom is only relative
freedom within the constraints imposed by fate, a fate
which dictates that she will eventually fail to prevent his
search for a new home.
Her chief characteristic is resentment, an emotional
replaying of an originary insult that imprisons its sufferer.
Is it his destiny or her victimization of him that makes him a
man apart?
Aeneas singularity is that of a public figure with a mission.
Does he have a private self that we can see? Does he
suffer in private and carry out his destiny in public?

 Junos divine pride stands in opposition to the

walls of Rome that are to be built. The walls of
cities are an important way in which this poem
figures personal and public identity.
Junos identity is bound up with Carthage: Juno,
we are told, cared more for Carthage/ Than for
any walled city of the earth(1.24).
Carthage was Romes great enemy in the period
immediately preceding the time when Virgil was
writing, and so he gives the ancient history of
Troy contemporary relevance. Junos hatred of
Aeneas is Carthages hatred of Rome.
The clash of civilizations is a clash of egos.

 Juno recruits Aeolus to torment Aeneas with wind that

destroys some of his fleet: their seams/ Parted and let the
enemy pour in(1.170)
The breach of the walls of Troy is remembered and its
narration prefigured in these lines.
The metaphor is extended when Neptune, resenting Junos
incursion on his demesne, orders the winds home: When
rioting breaks out in a great cityIf it so happens they look
round and see/ Some dedicated public man, a veteran/
Whose record gives him weight, they quiet downhe
prevails in speech over their fury/ by his authority(1.201ff).
The sea is a rioting crowd, and Neptune a patrician ruler
whose authority comes from his record i.e. from the writing
down of significant events in which he has been involved.
The winds that he banishes are replaced by the breath of
his words.

 This complex of imagery returns in the account

of the overrunning of Troy. Aeneas and his
followers dress as Greeks in order to attack
them, but when the ruse is discovered the
Greeks converge on them as when a cyclone
breaks conflicting winds / Will come together
they knew .our speech / Alien to their
own(2.549ff).
Likewise Helenus says in 3.640 Should I /
Detain you by more talk while the winds rise?
Speech, wind, warfare, cities, ships, and the sea
are bound together in a complex of associations
that tells us about historical events, but even
more, perhaps about historiography and poetry.

 Poetry is recited, and the breath of

the poets words stirs emotion in his
hearers. A bad poet might find
himself confronting an unruly crowd,
but a good poet has authority,
speaks the citys highest ideals. He
doesnt have to impose his authority.
He is authoritative.
Neptune doesnt calm the sea by
force, but because he is the sea. If he
had to enforce his authority he would
already have ceased to possess that
authority and have become a tyrant.

 Juno is Saturnian Juno(1.44), referring to her father,

the titan who was overthrown by her
husband/brother, Zeus. The incestuous relations
among the gods are a kind of analogue to the chaos
they create among men. The emergent family
relationships among them mirror the order they
impose on men.
Kinship relations and incest taboos mark the
originary point of difference between nature and
culture.
Juno is a person, and not just a force of nature, to the
extent that she is capable of feeling shame: she
understands herself as part of a community in which
people care what other people think of them,
because the meanings of words and of the people
they describe are generated communally.

 Junos father Saturn is a god associated with melancholy,

and with material history. His Greek equivalent is Kronos, or
father Time. Melancholy is a medical disorder, and also a
spiritual sickness involving rage directed inwards against
the self. Juno is not melancholy but choleric: She directs
her rage outwards, yet within the overall structure of the
poem perhaps this is still an inward rage.
Junos shame comes from having been judged less
beautiful than Venus by Paris. Venus bribed him by offering
to help him steal Helen from Menelaus.
The conflict described in the Aeneid, involves international
and civil warfare, but it is also a squabble within a family,
between two sisters: Venus and Juno.
Juno represents marriage and Venus love. Yet for all her
championing of marriage it is Junos protg, Dido, who is
emotionally incontinent, and Venus son, Aeneas, who
conquers his passion with civic virtue.

 A sisterly squabble is not quite vehement enough to serve

as a metaphor for the hugely destructive war between
Carthage and Rome. Therefore the conflict quickly
escalates into one between lovers. Venus makes Dido fall
in love with Aeneas because she is afraid Juno will inspire
her to kill him, yet there is a deep symmetry between
desire and hatred, as events will prove.
The qualities in Aeneas that inspire Didos love are artistic
qualities: She who bore him/ Breathed upon him beauty
of hair and bloom/ Of youth and kindled brilliance in his
eyes,/ As an artists hand gives style to ivory(1.801ff).
Upon arrival in Carthage, Aeneas finds a painting of his
own life He himself he saw in combat..(1.665)
This is a moment of self-consciousness for Aeneas, but the
self he is conscious of is his public self. Is this the only
dimension of his person that the epic gives us?

 While these wonders were being surveyed/ By Aeneas of Dardania,

while he stood/ Enthralled, devouring all in one long gaze,/ The
queen paced toward the temple in her beauty(1.674).
It is as if Dido is the message coming to him from this painting. His
wonder is replaced by her beauty, a limitless emotion by an aesthetic
experience, an experience of alterity by a narcissistic mirroring.
In the same way, Aeneas appears to Dido in the midst of an account
of him that she receives from his men. They appear to each other
out of stories, but in each case the story is Aeneass.
Dido herself comes from an artistic family: her brother, Pygmalion,
was famous for falling in love with a statue he created that was so
lifelike it came to life. He murdered her husband Sychaeus, an
example of the ideal brother /sister relation having become
pathological.
Why does Virgil cast suspicion on his own vocation as an artist?
Perhaps he is suggesting that art has to have a public function in
order to not be narcissistic, and perhaps he is also alerting us to the
danger that an individual acting in the public interest might lose sight
of the worth of other individual lives.

 Virgil hands the narration over to Aeneas in Book II

and he begins Sorrow too deep to tell, your majesty,/
You order me to feel and tell once more(2.3/4)
Here at last we get a glimpse of Aeneas private self,
a profundity that cant be expressed without falsifying
it. And yet he will express it, and what he says, he
indicates, will be true to the experience. He employs
a common rhetorical trope here: in the course of
saying he cant express something he expresses it.
In this narration Aeneas is set opposite his Greek
counterpart, Ulysses (Odysseus), known to Homer as
the man of many stratagems but here characterised
by guile and envy(2.122), and as a ruffian (2.10).
This characterization is filtered through the account of
Sinon, and is itself a piece of cunning originating with
Ulysses.

 Their similarities and differences inflect each other: both sea

wanderers, both looking for home, one Roman, one Greek,
one known for piety, the other for cunning, one returning to
his wife, the other mourning his wife, each worried about his
son, each patronised by a different goddess.
The symbolic resonance of the sea is perhaps their greatest
unifying element. The sea is pathless and symbolises at once
their alienation and their individuality : in 2.955 Aeneas
describes himself turning Aside from the known way,
entering a maze/ Of pathless places on the run
Odysseus spends a long period as a solitary wanderer, but in
Aeneas case there are his companions and his household
gods, always reminding him of his public function. Although
the Homeric hero had a function in establishing the identity
of the Greeks, the Homeric Greeks were a loose
confederation of feudal kingdoms. Aeneas is the forefather of
a Republic and then an Empire.

 Aeneas and his friends make several abortive attempts

at creating Troy that, by their deficiency, serve to
highlight the glory of the state that they finally
establish.
The first attempt is in Thrace, where he founds a city
called Aeneadae, but is faced with a gruesome
prodigy/ Beyond description: when the first stalk came
torn/ Out of the earth, and the root network burst,/
Dark blood dripped down to soak and foul the
soil(3.40). This Thracian kingdom is infected by a
primal wrong, that they will appease by giving its
victim funeral obsequies.
At this be sure that in a maze of dread/ I stopped
appalled(3.67). Aeneas thought he was home, but
hes still in the maze that he entered when Troy fell,
trying to understand it.

 For I am Polydorus./ An iron hedge of spears covered my

body, / Pinned down here, and the pointed shafts took
root(3.64)
The Ovidian metamorphosis of Polydorus into a bush is a
prodigy because it defies the laws of physics. It was a
fundamental tenet of the Epicurean philosophy in which Virgil
was educated, that nothing can come from nothing.
As well as meaning that there was no point before the
universe existed, it means that a bush cant come directly
from a corpse full of spears.
The existence of such prodigies doesnt mean that Virgil is
making a statement of belief in ex nihilo creation, but
suggests that such a transformation comes about by
unnatural means.
Aeneas is attempting to transform the defeat of Troy into a
new beginning, but he cant do it this easily. It has to happen
through long labour, and through organic processes within the
body politic that he leads.

 They go to Apollos Oracle on the island of Delos looking for posterity and an
abiding city, asking By what sea way/ Dost thou direct us?....grant us a sign,
enter our hearts(3.118ff).
In Platos writings, Socrates demonstrates a method of getting at the truth.
Method comes from meta hodos meaning over a path. Aeneas travels are
a method similar in ways to that of Socrates in that there are many
apparently wrong turnings before one gets to the truth.
Aeneas method involves the reading of signs, and communing with the
knowledge of the heart.
However, they misread the signs given by Apollo, and try to set up a new city
on Crete, the site of original labyrinth created by the archetypal artist
Daedalus. Aeneas wandering has been characterized as the navigation of a
maze, and in a sense he will build his city on this maze, but only after he has
abolished it by making sense of it.
Before this happens they have to keep getting lost: Pallinurus himself, could
barely tell / Day from night..could not keep direction..three starless nights
we wandered blind.(3.279ff).
In another potential settlement they meet the Harpies with young girls
faces, but foul ooze below,/ Talons for hands, pale famished nightmare
mouths.grotesquely whirring down(3.300).
These creatures are an unnatural conjunction of things that dont go together.

 Their horrifying virginity resembles that of the Furies in the

Oresteia, and they describe themselves as innocent
Harpies.
Innocence can be a terrible thing, devoid of morality or
reason. In seeking for an origin, the Roman imperium has
to find something different from this.
Troy is not innocent exactly. Rather, it is complex, full of a
history of glorious deeds, and its earlier origins are lost in
time.
The monstrous travesties of origin that they find are not
just unnatural, but seem artificial, things that must have
come about by malevolent intent.
Are they an effect of the repression of the older generation
of gods by the younger generation. They prophesy famine
for the Trojans, a prophecy that doesnt come true, and so
they are among the forces militating against the ultimate
coherence of the Roman identity.

 A more reliable guide is Helenus, Trojan intepreter of the

gods will,/ You know the mind of Phoebus, know his
tripod,/Know the Apolline laurel; know the stars, / The
tongues of birds, and all the signs of birdflight(3.490ff).
This is a world in which nature and culture are always
turning into each other. Nature is full of signs that only
specialists can read, and beings like the Harpies give signs
that are misleading. How is anyone to interpret with
confidence in such a world?
One reason we have to trust Helenus directions is that we
know theyre true from the Odyssey, and from other parts
of the Greek canon.
He also warns Aeneas of the vagaries of interpretation, and
the ways in which meaning always borders on chaos,
especially in a universe where method is not rational, but
is dependent on the knowledge of the heart and of
prophecy.

 Youll see a spellbound prophetess, who sings / In her deep cave

of destinies, confiding / Symbols and words to leaves. Whatever
verse/ She writes, the virgin puts each leaf in order/ Back in the
cave; unshuffled they remain; / But when a faint breeze through a
door ajar/ Comes in to stir and scatter the light leaves, / She
never cares to catch them as they flutter/ Or restore them, or to
join the verses;/ Visitors unenlightened turn away(3.593).
The rearrangement of the Sibyls prophecy by a blind force like
the wind, is a striking metaphor for what can happen to authorial
intention in the process of interpretation, or what happens to the
inexpressible when we try to express it.
This Sibyl is another of those characters who ask for eternal life
but forget to ask for eternal youth, and who only want to die.
Monsters are beings that fail to communicate. The Cyclops is
unbearable to see, Unreachable by anything you say(3.820ff).
Polyphemuss giant mass.Vast, mind-sickening, lumpish,
heavens light / Blacked out for him(3.870ff)
The emotions raised by these beings are deeper than hatred.

 Even one of Ulysses men is kindred in the

context of these monsters. Monsters therefore
are a symbol of the completely other, and not
just of the relative other represented by lovers
and enemies. A monster isnt an enemy
because an enemy is somebody with whom you
can communicate.
The Sibyl mediates the monstrous to the
human. She operates from a grotto, the word
that gives us grotesque. This word she uses to
describe the Harpies indicates a portal between
Earth and Heaven or Hell. Heaven and Hell
occupy different parts of the same territory in
this poem.

 And nearby , in a place apart a dark

Enormous cave the Sibyl feared by men.
In her the Delian god of prophecy
Inspires uncanny powers of mind and soul,
Disclosing things to come.(6.15ff)

The Sibyl is the mediator between this world and the next. She has
attributes of both monstrous and human beings.
Her contradictoriness is seen in the words nearby, in a place apart
suggesting closeness and distance at the same time. She is
physically close by, but in what sense is she apart?
She lives in a cave, a primitive type of dwelling that has Platonic
associations in that the cave is that from which philosophers gain
egress by rational means.
Her method is prophetic, not rational.
Apollo inspires uncanny powers in her: the uncanny is something
that is familiar and alien at the same time.
These are powers of mind and soul, but whats the difference?

 The sea Aeneas has traversed, and the existential uncertainty he

experiences after the destruction of Troy, have been continually
compared to the labyrinth, or to a maze.
Daedalus flight from Crete to Cumae is another kind of difficult or
unheard of path.
He built a temple to Apollo at Cumae, where he depicted the events
in Crete: Pasiphae/ Being covered by the bull in the cows place,/
Then her mixed breed, her child of double form, / The
Minotaur(6.38).
Cumae is a place of hybrid forms, in which earths mysteries are
solved by transcendent knowledge: Daedalus himself, unravelled
all/ The baffling turns and deadends in the dark(6.44)
These types of knowledge belong to the artist as well as the
prophet.
There is one thing that defeats the representational powers of
Daedalus: the death of his son, Icarus: Twice your father had tried
to shape your fall/ In gold, but twice his hands dropped.(6.49)
His grief is inexpressible. Is it too an impossible hybrid, a kind of
monster composed of presence and absence?

 Instead of trying to answer this question, a message

from the Sibyl tells them The hour demands/ no
lagging over sights like these(6.58). The story is being
propelled forward from within by the demands of a
mysterious deity who speaks through the Sibyl:
As she spoke neither her face/ nor hue went
untransformed, nor did her hair / Stay neatly bound: her
breast heaved, her wild heart/ Grew large with passion
she had felt the gods power breathing near(6.76)
This kind of passionate utterance contrasts with the
measured, decorous art of Virgil, seen in the negative
description of her transformation. The Sibyl allows him
to do things that he cant do in his own persona.
He is the mind of the poem, and she an avatar of the
soul. Soul is psyche in Greek, a word that means
breath originally. Her prophecy is the breath of a god.

 In response to her entreaties Aeneas poured

out/ Entreaties from his deepest heart(6.90).
Dealing with the gods calls not for politics but
for vulnerability. He prays that The fortune / Of
Troy shall have pursued us this far only(6.100).
He is asking for a break in his narrative, and a
change to a new identity, a request he is
granted but that will cause new suffering.
The cause of suffering here again will be/ A
bride foreign to Teucrians, a marriage/ Made
with a stranger(6.142).
The monstrosity of hybrids is connected in this
narrative to marriage with a stranger: Lavinia.

 The entrance to hell is a dark pool in a gloomy forest, where you

cant see your reflection. Those unblest have to depart from the
scene where Aeneas crosses the threshhold (6.360). We the
readers are among the blessed.
If hell is the realm of monsters, why does it only admit the
blessed? The latin word sacer from which we get the English
sacred has two opposed meanings: it means cursed and blessed.
homo sacer is one who has fallen out of the webs of meaning
that form a community. He can be killed but not sacrificed. One
who is blessed has transcended the webs of meaning that bind a
community and entered another realm. These two forms are hard
to tell apart from the perspective of ordinary life.
In this environment, the rules governing poetic decorum are lost
sight of too, and Virgil says May it be right to tell what I have
heard,/ may it be right and fitting by your will, / That I describe the
deep world sunk in darkness..(6.366)
People understand themselves by looking at reflections in others,
but here, the Sibyl and Aeneas are Dim to one another.As one
goes through a wood by a faint moons / Treacherous
light(6.370).

 Allegorical images of those things that destroy human

community in the upper world are the first sights they
encounter: Before the entrance/Grief and avenging Cares
have made their beds,/ And pale Diseases and sad Age are
there,/ And Dread and Hunger./And sordid Want//and
raving Discord/About the doorway forms of monsters
crowd(6.376ff).
Aeneas quickly learns however, that they are empty images
down here, rather than the fearful creatures they are above.
His drawn sword here has merely symbolic efficacy.
Among the allegories he met at the entrance to the cave was
Deaths own brother, Sleep(6.381)
This may be a journey into Aeneas own psyche prompted by
inhaling the fumes from the lake, rather than a physical
journey into a world beneath the earth.
This is the world of the Eumenides, formerly known as the
furies, who, in the Oresteia, enforced the claims of the female
dimension of the cosmos.

 Charon is outraged to see a living body rather than a somatamorphic soul in

this realm, until the Sibyl appeases him by identifying Aeneas The very image
of so much goodness(6.546). Aeneas, in having a body, is a true image.
Governing this realm is Minos, the king of Crete who presided over the building
of the labyrinth. He is a kind of infernal patron of the arts who mirrors in a
distorted way Augustus Caesar.
His justice is an iron law(6.590), assigning unfortunate souls to categories
without pity for the lives and accusations(6.585) that led them to their ends:
Souls of infants wailing souls falsely accused. Souls who contrived their
own destruction (6.576ff).
Among these souls in a special area called The Fields of Mourning..those
whom pitiless love consumed/ With cruel wasting, hidden on paths
apart(6.595).
The unaccountable spontaneity of love makes it a path that is individual to
each person. Here Dido wandered(6.605).
Yet following a methodical path, or a path directed by fate, can also appear to
be a type of wandering. This is the path that Aeneas has followed , and further
along this path he meets men famous in war (6..642), one of whom,
Deiphobus, asks Have you come from your sea wandering, and did Heaven /
Direct you?(6.714).
Heaven is as idiosyncratic in its judgments and directions as any individual. It is
in the right because it is heaven, not because its judgments are self-evidently
true.

 At this point Aeneas reaches a fork in the path, one leading left
to the place of punishment, the other leading right to Elysium.
The left side is sinister in Latin, and right is not just a
direction.
Aeneas is curious about the forms of evil but it is decreed/
That no pure soul may cross the sill of evil (6.756). This is the
realm of the absolutely other.
It also a place of political exile. It is where the Titans, the old
overthrown gods are punished, and where men who took arms
in war against the right(6.819) are held. We may wonder if this
is where Mezentius will end up.
All these dared monstrous wrongIf I had / A hundred tongues,
a hundred mouths, a voice/ Of iron, I could not tell of all the
shapes/ Their crimes had taken, or their punishments(6.835).
In asking about the forms of evil, Aeneas may have suggested
that evil is logical in the way that justice is logical in the upper
world. Evil defies categories however, and justice can be
similarly perverted in its attempts to match individual evils with
their condign punishments.

 What does it mean then that close by this place are places of
delightWhere souls take ease amid the Blessed Groves(6.855).
It points to a potential similarity between evil and the good as
things which are beyond bodily existence. Is the difference
between them merely a political one?
Souls here possess their own familiar sun and stars (6.858). The
comforts of this place are the comforts of the familiar.
These people died in battle for their country(6.884) or in their
lives were holy men and chaste/ Or worthy of Phoebus in
prophetic song(6.885). Elysium is where the conformists go.
Anchises is encountered by chance, but chance is another word
for fate where Aeneas is concerned. He is among souls about to
embark on their second lives.
Although up to now souls have been presented as identities
reified by their deaths, often in painful ways, this suggests that
souls are altogether different from these identities. They drink the
water of Lethe(6.958) in order to mark a disjunction between
the lives they have lived and those they are embarking on, but
what is the underlying principle of continuity?

 First then, the sky and lands, and sheets of waterAre fed within by
Spirit, and a Mind/ Infused through all the members of the world/ Makes
one great living body of the mass.(6.975). This cosmology uses the
Epicurean idea of generative seeds(6.982).
It has just as much in common with Stoic, Platonist and Pythagorean
thought. Virgil is a religious poet, but not a philosopher. He synthesises
aspects of all his philosophical contexts in Anchises cosmology.
The body is an impurity that continues to afflict souls in hell, and their
imprisonment in the identities they had in life is a symptom of this bodily
entrapment.
A few abide / In happy lands, till the long day, the round/ Of time
fulfilled, has worn our stains away,/ Leaving the souls heaven sent
perception clear (6.1000).
Time in this perspective is not an infinite linear progression, but describes
a circle, upon the closure of which the soul is enlightened and knows
what heaven knows.
Less enlightened souls are reincarnated having turned Times wheel a
thousand years(6.1005). Their description has overtones of physical
labour, rather than contemplative enlightenment.
What these circular metaphors do above all is to suggest that Time is a
place, when seen from the highest perspective.

 The first half of Aeneas journey in the underworld was concerned with
mourning the losses of past generations, but now Anchises shows him
Souls of the future, living in our name(6.1015).
Although spirit is posited as the principle underlying all things within the
universe, names are also unifying principles between individuals on
earth.
Spirit, like psyche means breath, and a name too is a breath of air.
Language is the substance of a poem, and of the myths that inform it,
and this substance is at once perduring and something that its hard to
get a grip on, as Aeneas finds he cant embrace his father in the
underworld.
Anchises tells him the names to be heard for places nameless
now(6.1039). So names are not just given by chance, but exist outside
time. They have a resemblance therefore to the Platonic forms.
The name Romulus will be transferred from the individual who bears it
to the empire that he founds. Under his auspices/ Illustrious Rome will
bound her power with earth, / Her spirit with Olympus(6.1048)
The boundedness of Rome is twofold, like the two circles of time, one
material and the other supernal, both symbolized by one great city
wall(6.1050)

 Rome will find her greatest leader inCaesar Augustus, son of the
deified (6.1060). Julius Caesar had been deified following his death,
and was one of the tutelary deities of the Roman empire, as distinct
from the republic.
Augustus brings once again an Age of Gold/ To Latium, to the land
where Saturn reigned in early times(6.1065).
Saturns association at once with melancholy and with past happiness is
a material version of the Platonic notion that learning is a remembering
of prenatal knowledge.
Prior to this restoration of the golden age, Rome will suffer that
enormity of civil war, / Turning against your countrys very heart/ Her
own vigor of manhood(6.1121).
This word enormity echoes the enormity of the Sibyls cave. It implies
something that is outside the normative values that produce civic
harmony. It implies the self-division of beings who exist in relation to an
other ,and who find that the other is part of their identity.
We saw how Aeschylus projected the inner conflict onto a Persian other,
and thus avoided civil war. Rome too will find a foreign other that saves
it from its own self division, but is also a sign of its self-division.

 Roman, remember by your strength to rule/ Earths

peoples for your arts are to be these: to pacify, to
impose the rule of law, / To spare the conquered,
battled down the proud(6.1151).
This line marks the difference between the Roman
project outlined by Virgil, and the Athenian project
outlined by Plato. Rome wants to conquer the whole
world, and Athens wants to exclude the world and
inhabit its own transcendent identity.
Arguably we can see here the difference between
Platonic and Epicurean transcendence. Platonists
abstract truth from the material whereas the
Epicurean imposes its truth on the material.
Both of these alternatives are implicit in both Platonic
philosophy and Virgilian Epic, but the emphasis is
more on violent imposition in Epic.

 Having moved from mourning the past to

celebrating the future, the trip to the underworld
ends with an implicit acknowledgement of the fact
that these alternatives also include one another.
Augustus son, Marcellus is seen among the souls
of the future, and Anchises mourns for him
proleptically.
Aeneas is now ready to fulfill his destiny, but he
returns by the Ivory gate, which is the passage for
false dreams, and not the gate of horn where true
dreams go up to the world.
Is this meant to imply that Aeneas heroism is
false in some way? Or does his bodily existence
exempt him from the meanings of these gates?