It’s drinking-time, comrades, time to stomp the ground with an unfettered foot, to honor with Salian feasts the couch of the gods. Before now it was forbidden to bring out the Caecuban wine [i.e., wine of the best quality and vintage] from ancestral cellars, so long as a Queen, together with her band of men stained with vile perversion, was preparing insane destruction for the Capitol and ruin for our rule, being so abandoned as to hope for anything imaginable, drunk as she was upon sweet fortune. But when scarcely a single ship escaped from the flames it lessened her madness, and Caesar reduced her thoughts to the stern reality of fear.…
This was a great poem, but it is also unrestrained propaganda, libel run wild, without a syllable of truth in it.
Maecenas was associated with, and helped promote, the poetry of Propertius and Varius Rufus as well as Horace. But his chief linkage, the one which fixed him permanently in literary history, was to Virgil. He did well by some of his poets; Virgil died rich, Horace received the free gift of a Sabine farm. But Virgil certainly did the most to earn the gifts he received, and became essentially the emperor’s mouthpiece. His Eclogues are the main source of the pastoral tradition in Latin, and thus in English and French. His Georgics set the mode and pattern for didactic poetry, a form abandoned in the twentieth century but of great importance before then. The Aeneid was Rome’s archetype of the heroic narrative epic. Augustus was extraordinarily lucky to have Maecenas directing his patronage toward Virgil.
In the Georgics, Virgil evokes and idealizes the life which, he believes, Augustus is giving back to Italy—simple, direct, close to the earth and to the workings of Nature: pastoral heaven, in short. (The title derives from the Greek word georgos, “one who works the soil.”) It is a life without ceremony, flattery, formality—and, we see, without intrusive clients:
O happy beyond measure the tillers of the soil.… Even if no high mansion with proud portals pours forth from every room a mighty wave of men coming to pay their respects in the morning; even if men do not gape at pillars inlaid with lovely tortoise-shell … or at Corinthian bronzes;…even if the pure olive oil they use is not spoiled with perfume, yet they enjoy sleep without worry, and a life that cannot bring disillusionment.…
Nothing is going to disturb such men; they have found their centers, they enjoy “sleep without worry … gentle slumber beneath a tree,” unmoved by military honors, the threat of “Dacians swooping down from the Danube,” the death throes of kingdoms, the haves and have-nots.
His furrows are ever piled high with harvest and his granaries are filled to overflowing.… The pigs return well fed on acorns, the woods produce wild strawberries … Meanwhile, sweet children hang about his lips, his chaste household preserves its purity, the cows’ udders hang full of milk.…
This is the life the ancient Sabines once cherished; so, too, Remus and his brother; thus, surely, brave Etruria waxed strong, and Rome became the fairest thing on earth.…
All of this would be echoed by Horace: “Beatus ille qui procul negotiis,/Ut prisca gens mortalium,/paterna rura bubus exercet suis/solutus omni faenore.…” “Blessed the man who, far from wheeling and dealing, like the first of mortal men, plows his ancestral acres with his own oxen, free from all usury.”
The Aeneid was the most important long poem to be written in any European language since Homer’s Iliad. Through it, Virgil achieved an influence over human thought, and the conception of poetry as an art form, that no other writer could claim. Not until Dante, who made Virgil his fictional guide through the Inferno, would any poet rival the imaginative achievement of the Aeneid. And of course Dante paid grateful tribute to his guide for showing him what writing could be and do: “Since you my author and my master are/And it was from you only that I took/That lovely style that I am honored for.”
Essentially, Virgil wrote the founding myth of the Roman people, setting forth what was expected of their nature and destiny under the guidance of Augustus. Its importance, both as art and as political utterance, was recognized long before it approached completion. “Stand aside, Roman writers; give way, Greeks!” wrote that entrancing love-poet Sextus Propertius, who had been broken financially by the proscriptions of Octavian and Antony. “Something greater than the Iliad is being born!”
Virgil freely admits that other peoples, such as the Greeks, are better at certain things than his Romans. “Let others make more lifelike, breathing images from bronze, which they will,” he writes. “Others can excel as orators, as astronomers. But, Romans, keep in mind that your art form is government. You must keep men practiced in the habit of peace, be generous to the conquered, and stand firm against the arrogant.” For the real Roman, the art of power was what counted.
To show what this means, Virgil will tell the story of Rome’s foundation by that man of destiny, the Trojan hero Aeneas, who, with his venerated father, Anchises, and little son Ascanius, escapes from the burning ruins of Troy and, pursued by the hostility of the goddess Juno, after many perilous wanderings by sea, founds the city of Rome, the second Troy, a city destined for an equally mythic greatness. “I sing of warfare and a man at war,” the epic begins, or in John Dryden’s translation:
Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by fate
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore.
Long labors, both on land and sea, he bore.…
In part, the Aeneid is an imitation of Homer’s Odyssey. Aeneas was already a character in the Iliad. In some respects, the Aeneid is almost impenetrably complicated, but its story may be summarized, in a very simplified form. Setting sail from burning Troy (book 1), Aeneas reaches Carthage, which is not written about as an enemy to Rome, but as a luxurious refuge from the terrors of the sea; it is ruled by the beautiful Queen Dido, to whom he relates, in the manner of Odysseus, the fall of Troy and his voyaging (books 2 and 3). Dido and Aeneas fall in love (book 4), but the gods oblige him to take to the sea again, deserting her, breaking her heart, driving her to suicide, and, not incidentally, providing the substance of later operas. His venerated father dies; Aeneas holds funeral games for him (book 5), sails on, and makes landfall in Italy, where he finds the entrance to the Underworld near Cumae (book 6). There he meets the shade of Dido, who bitterly reproaches him with many curses. Aeneas can think of no justification for his conduct—there is none—and is forced to the lame excuse that he didn’t mean it: he left her because Jupiter told him to. There he also meets the shade of his father, who tells him about the destiny of the city he is about to found, Rome.
In book 7, Aeneas reaches Latium and seeks marriage to the Princess Lavinia, whose previous suitor, Turnus, grows furious and, incited by the ever-vengeful goddess Juno, makes war on Aeneas and the Trojans. In book 8, Aeneas acquires celestial armor, including a stupendously elaborate shield made by Vulcan. It is a prophetic object, showing a number of future events involving Rome, including Augustus’ victory over Antony at Actium.
After prolonged warfare (books 9–12), Turnus is killed and Aeneas’ hegemony over the new Rome is complete.