The Aeneid: “I sail for Italy not of my own free will”

 Aeneas Defeating Turnus by Luca Giordano.

1/ At some point in the poem, after a lot of fighting, Aeneas says to the people there:  

“What unmerited misfortune, Latins, 

Could have embroiled you in so sad a war 

That now you turn your backs on us, your friends? 

[…] 

Never should I have come here had not Fate 

Allotted me this land for settlement, 

Nor do I war upon your people…” 

(Book 11) 

(translated by Robert Fitzgerald)

There is a much stronger sense of humans being bound by fate in the Aeneid than in Homer’s epics: in the Odyssey, Odysseus is cursed to wander for years and to finally return home without his men, and he gets help from Athena and Penelope, but he also uses his own strength and intelligence to return home and reclaim his place; in the Iliad, Akhilleus is told to have two possible destinies, and seals his fate the moment he returns to battle after Patroklos’s death; the entire Aeneid is about Aeneas being bound by fate and following the path that has been drawn for him. 

The two characters who fight against fate and therefore become more interesting are Turnus (who loves Lavinia) and Juno (the Romans’ Hera). 

The quote from the headline comes from Book 4—Aeneas says that to Dido. 

2/ There are many great passages through the poem. This one, for instance: 

“The two assailants were like fires begun

On two sides of a dry wood, making laurel 

Thickets crackle, or like snow-fed streams

That foam and roar seaward down mountain-sides

And leave, each one, a watercourse laid waste.

With no less devastating power these two, 

Aeneas and Turnus, cut their way through battle.”

(Book 12) 

I like that. At some point, I would have to check out other translations, but I’m fond of Robert Fitzgerald. 

3/ I’ve now finished reading the Aeneid, after over 2 weeks.

I like my friend Himadri’s idea about the parallels between Aeneas and Hamlet: both men have to ignore their own feelings and inclinations, to fulfil some obligations—Aeneas is to lead his people to Italy and set up a new kingdom and Hamlet is to avenge the death of his father. 

The problem with the Aeneid, however, is that Virgil doesn’t really depict the struggle. I would even say that the characters in the Aeneid don’t have much of an inner life, except Dido and maybe Turnus. I’m not judging Virgil against Shakespeare—I’m comparing him to Homer. In the Iliad, we can see Akhillleus’s wrath; we can see him develop and change; we see him refuse to fight but get drawn back into it after death of his close friend, and become a ruthless killing machine, rejecting his own humanity; but in the end, he regains his humanity as he meets Priam and thinks of his own father. In the Odyssey, Odysseus might not change as much, but he’s multifaceted and self-contradictory; he’s intelligent, resourceful, a great actor and storyteller, but also proud, dishonest, sometimes reckless and ruthless. In the Iliad, we can see Akhilleus grapple with his own mortality. In the Odyssey, we can see Odysseus calculate the steps to get home safely and watch everybody and regain his kingdom. Compared to them, I don’t think Aeneas has much of an inner life, by which I mean that we see him act but don’t see him think. 

When Virgil writes about the love story between Aeneas and Dido, he focuses almost entirely on Dido, not showing Aeneas’s struggle between his own feelings and his duty. Book 6 is the only time we come a bit closer to Aeneas, as he travels to the Underworld and comes across the ghost of Dido, and only now realises that she has died. Later on, Virgil doesn’t depict his thoughts either—I don’t even know how Aeneas feels about marrying Lavinia. How does she compare to Dido? Or his dead wife Creusa? We don’t know. 

We don’t see Lavinia either—we are told in some brief moments that she’s unhappy about having (inadvertently) caused so much suffering—but how does she feel about Turnus? Or Aeneas? No idea. 

Considering his reputation, I don’t doubt that Virgil’s a great poet—I just can’t tell as I read the Aeneid in translation—I can only judge it as a narrative. What I see is that the characters don’t have much of an inner life, generally speaking, and Aeneas is a rather bland character—he doesn’t have much of a personality. And if we look at the two characters who try to fight against fate, Juno is almost entirely defined by her anger, her hatred of the Trojans; Turnus is more interesting, he may be largely defined by anger and pride, but we do see his disappointment, frustration, doubt, and so on. 

I would say that the most vividly drawn character in the Aeneid is Dido—the story of her and Aeneas is one of the saddest, most haunting stories in all of literature. There are quite a few moments throughout the Aeneid, but the best parts, in my opinion, are Book 4 (the story of Aeneas and Dido) and Book 6 (the Underworld), followed by Book 2 (the sack of Troy) and Book 9 (Nisus and Euryalus).