Was ‘Aeneid’ critiquing or glorifying empire?

Composed between 29 and 19 B.C. by the Roman poet Virgil, “The Aeneid” tells the story of the Trojan hero Aeneas and the founding of Rome while exploring themes of duty, fate, and struggle. Published after Virgil’s death in 19 B.C., despite his wish for it to be burned because he considered it unfinished, the epic poem remains a monumental work of classic literature.  

Scott McGill and Susannah Wright, Ph.D. ’24, classics professors at Rice University, recently published a new translation of the poem with an introduction by Emily Wilson, the prominent classicist and translator of Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” In an interview with the Gazette, which has been edited for clarity and length, Wright and McGill discussed the poem’s role as Rome’s national epic, and the questions it poses to modern readers as a celebration of imperial power and a meditation on the costs of conquest for both victors and victims.

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How do you explain the poem’s enduring appeal to this day?

Wright: Above all, it is a really compelling story. It includes everything from epic battle scenes and adventures at sea to a tragic love affair and a journey to the underworld, and it also speaks to themes that remain relevant to many readers today — how to balance private desire and public duty, how to keep going when all seems lost, and how to determine the obligations we have to future generations. The poem is also very interested in questions about the ethics of migration, because the Trojans are, in a sense, at once both refugees and conquerors.

McGill: The poem also has a lot to tell us about the relationship between poetry and power because it was written as a national epic under the emperor Augustus, and in some ways, for Augustus. And yet, Virgil shows a great deal of artistic independence. It would appear that Virgil takes his poem in a different direction than we suspect Augustus would have anticipated. That possibly illustrates Virgil’s heroic temperament as an artist, and Augustus’ tolerance for different perspectives and different points of view.

Virgil died before the publication of “The Aeneid.” What do historians say about Virgil’s wishes to burn his work and why was it published regardless of his wishes?

McGill: There have been different interpretations. One is simply that Virgil had planned to revise “The Aeneid,” but he got sick and died. We know that the poem is incomplete because there are incomplete lines, and he would not have kept them in the work and had it published. It’s a story that may be meant to illustrate his perfectionism as a poet, but there is political interpretation, and this was taken up by the writer Hermann Broch, who wrote that Virgil’s wish to burn his poem was a protest because it could be used to justify absolute power. It’s completely speculative, but the story has been used to say that Virgil didn’t want to create a poem that can glorify autocracy. Of course, the follow-up to that story is that Augustus saved the poem, had one of Virgil’s friends edit it, and ordered its publication; and it has been in circulation ever since.

Wright: Virgil’s epic can certainly be read as glorifying the Augustan regime, and therefore as having a celebratory, perhaps even propagandistic approach to Roman power. But the other side is that Virgil takes a lot of care in illustrating the costs of that power. In many cases, he reserves his deepest sympathy for the characters who oppose the Trojans’ destined mission, those who resist them and who become victims of Aeneas and his followers — and in that way, the poem can also be interpreted as a sophisticated critique of Roman imperialism.

What do you hope your translation would reveal to new readers of “The Aeneid”?

McGill: We hope that it reveals the deep humanity of the poem, the profound sympathy that it shows to all its characters, and the richness of its emotional world. Epic poetry, especially if you’re a young reader, can feel like something you have to do, but not necessarily enjoy. Our hope is that the poem can come alive, and not only through the story, which is an incredible story, but also in the richness of its humane vision.

Wright: There are two big misconceptions that readers often have about “The Aeneid.” One of them is that it’s merely a kind of propaganda piece for the Roman empire and for the Augustan regime. The other is that it’s a flat rehashing of Homer and isn’t engaging creatively with the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” To us, “The Aeneid” is neither of those things, but something much deeper and much richer. We hope that our translation will enable readers to connect with the immediacy and the urgency of the questions this ancient poem still poses today.

Virgil took inspiration from Homer’s masterpieces. What are the differences between the two authors?

McGill: Virgil is deeply reliant on Homer, but where Virgil takes Homer and the epic tradition in a new direction is in his understanding of and depiction of the hero. In Homer, the hero is concerned with his own glory, with accumulating fame, kleos in Greek. Virgil makes Aeneas a new kind of hero, who’s not so committed to his own kleos, but to history and to public duty, serving the Trojan refugees that he’s leading, and making sure that they get to Italy. Whereas the Homeric hero is all about accumulating personal glory, the Virgilian hero is about self-sacrifice; putting one’s own needs second to what one has to do for history and for the community.

Wright: Aeneas’ journey in the first half of the poem resembles the “Odyssey,” and the battlefield scenes in the second half certainly call to mind the “Iliad.” But it’s a complicated dynamic. When we leave Aeneas at the end of the poem, he’s caught up in a frenzied rage that might make us think of Achilles. At the end of the “Iliad,” though, Achilles shows mercy and has a profound moment of reconciliation with his enemy; Aeneas, in contrast, gives in to fury. That illustrates the depth of Virgil’s engagement with Homer: this isn’t a flat reproduction of what we see in the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” but a masterful and creative response to those poems. That’s part of the power of Virgil’s epic.

How did “The Aeneid” come to be the founding myth of the Roman empire?

Wright: The story of Aeneas as a precursor to the Roman people goes back prior to Virgil, to the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., when Greek historians began to connect Aeneas with Rome as a founding figure and trace Roman ancestry back to the Trojans. Virgil doesn’t, by any means, invent Aeneas, but he gives Aeneas, who was a relatively minor figure in Homer’s “Iliad,” new primacy at the center of his epic. During Virgil’s time, Augustus emerged, after the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., as the first emperor of Rome, and it was as this new regime was being consolidated in the 20s B.C. that Virgil wrote “The Aeneid.”

McGill: Augustus wanted to promote cultural renewal, which for him meant a return to Rome’s origins and its foundational virtues. “The Aeneid” certainly fits with that. It’s a two-pronged foundation myth for Rome, where you’ve got the Trojans on the one hand, and then you’ve got Romulus and Remus on the other. The Romans reconcile this by making Aeneas the ancestor of Romulus and Remus.

No translation is absolute. How close to the original is your translation of Virgil’s epic?

McGill: We certainly were committed to staying as close to the Latin as possible. We wanted to remain true to the substance and content and especially the tone and feel of the poem as well as the language. Virgil’s Latin largely comprises everyday words, and we wanted to make sure that our language reflected that as well. On the formal level, we translated the poem into blank verse; unrhymed iambic pentameter, which is the cultural equivalent to Virgil’s dactylic hexameter.

Wright: The particular metrical pattern that we chose has had a long life in the English tradition, as a meter associated with epic verse. In addition to employing a cultural equivalent to Virgil’s meter, we also did our best to capture his poetic devices and sound effects, because we wanted to approximate as much as we could the experience of reading the poem in Latin.