Concordia

Virgil’s characterisation of Aeneas is careful and deliberate, but students often find something distant and unreal about him, some artificial quality. He is not a character with whom they instinctively tend to sympathise or identify. This quality of distance, however, encourages them to consider other ways of engaging with a character, particularly to examine and judge the ethical bases of action. How are we to judge Aeneas’ treatment of Dido? What are we to make of the killing of Turnus? What gives human action meaning and dignity in a world subject to the forces of fate and the gods? None of these questions find simple answers in Virgil’s work. The greatest difficulty for students of the Aeneid is also the greatest source of its continuing relevance and depth: it is a self- conscious work of profound ambiguity which defies neat argument and tidy interpretation. While there is much that celebrates Rome, delicate descriptions of those who have died young question the cost of empire. The entire poem is suffused with a sense of melancholy, doubt, and insubstantiality. It even queries its own value by calling the power of art into question: does art transform suffering into something human, beautiful, and meaningful, or is it just an illusion? Addressing these difficulties presented by the Aeneid can widen students’ conception of ways of reading literature by making them think differently about how and why to examine style, character, ambiguity and more, an experience that many find richly rewarding. The Aeneid is a poem about the labor , the hard work, which Aeneas undertakes as he accepts and effects his fate. It also demands labor of its readers. One of the great delights and privileges of reading it with students each year is that they voice these difficulties, they question the things that don’t quite seem to fit, and in doing so they open up new angles and ideas, which, with careful and honest exploration, can bring fresh insights. MAB

Concordia Winter 2021

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Virgil’s Aeneid has been a set text almost since its composition. The presence of graffiti in Pompeii which quote from the Aeneid suggests widespread reading of the poem in the first century, and the preponderance of first lines of books among these graffiti might suggest that they were learnt as school texts. Students of the Aeneid today thus find themselves in a line of education unbroken for almost 2000 years. Studying a poem that is so distant in age and so complex in conception brings significant challenges. Once the student has translated the text, they are presented with a poem that is full of allusions, a poem which is consciously set in a literary tradition and expects to be read against that tradition. Its opening words, ‘arma virumque cano’ (‘I sing of arms and the man’), could be translated by any Fourth Former, but a reader familiar with The Iliad and The Odyssey will see the bold challenge which Virgil sets himself: his epic will encompasses both the martial themes of The Iliad and the human experience of The Odyssey , and in writing it he sets out to rival Homer. Large-scale allusion to the Homeric epics shapes Virgil’s poem, but the work is also full of small-scale allusions. At first, students are often surprised by the closeness with which Virgil follows his models, sometimes wondering whether it constitutes plagiarism. With further exploration, though, they come to realise that the poet expects the audience to consider the subtle differences between the ‘imitation’ and the model, as these differences are one way in which the poet gives form to new ideas. Aspects of character can also be puzzling.