Ideas - How To Build An Empire: The Aeneid Guide to Understanding U.S. Politics

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

For leaders who built empires throughout history, Virgil's Aeneid has been a blueprint for how to take over land that belongs to someone else. Now when empires are making a comeback, it's worth asking if the epic poem is propaganda, or does it carry a message about the horrors of empire, too?

In the summer of 2021, Tabatha Pope was living out of a cheap motel. So when she stumbled onto an affordable apartment, she thought her luck was finally turning around. She was wrong. And as she's cleaning, she comes across a few rubber-made buckets. And they look to be filled with blood. I'm Kathleen Goltar, and this week on Crime Story, the most horrific rental story you've ever heard. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. I fought many wars in my time. Some were fought for land, some for power, some for glory. I suppose fighting for love makes more sense than all the rest. The Odyssey, the Iliad and the Aeneid are the foundation of Western classics. They have a lot in common. Love, war and adventure, blood, guts and gore.

Enough to launch scores of operas and Hollywood movies. Our king Odysseus, the smartest of all the heroes. The Odyssey by ancient Greek poet Homer inspired the film called The Return. He led us for ten years in the Trojan War, before his brilliant plan to build the Great Wharves. The Trojans thought it was a gift and took it behind their walls. And every war movie ever made owes something to Homer's Iliad.

For the free world, it was a breathless moment in history. For failure would have plunged mankind into a new dark age. Terminate with extreme prejudice. Horror. Horror. But The Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil is harder to pin down. It inspired only one movie from 1962. We're from Troy, our chiefs prince Aeneas.

You have a famous man as your leader. Even here in our courts, they tell endless stories of his glorious, but unsuccessful battles. It wasn't a particularly good movie. Come on, follow me. Yet there's just something about the Aeneid that sets it apart from the other epics. It's clear from the very beginning that this is a masterpiece. The Aeneid as a whole is presenting a lot of models for good and bad behavior.

There is something kind of universal about how the Aeneid describes power. And that's just it. Virgil describes power. But he never prescribes how it should work. And that open-endedness? Maybe why Hollywood never knew quite what to do with it. What an honor for us. The last great defender of Troy has found his way to our land. T.S. Eliot believed the Aeneid and its portrait of the founding of Rome could be a model for Europe's post-war reconstruction.

As far as I'm concerned, he's just an intruder. You're too impulsive and essential. But Imperial Rome as a blueprint for nation building. Is that really how Virgil envisioned the Indian? So there are... Canada is facing a near unprecedented set of political challenges right now. I'm Jamie Poisson and on Frontburner, the daily news podcast that I host, we're covering those stories five days a week. We try and bring clarity to Donald Trump's overt hostility to our country and how that has thrown a wrench into our looming federal election. So if you're looking for a show to help guide you through an increasingly chaotic world, find and follow Frontburner wherever

you get your podcasts. There are people who think that it's a kind of flat out endorsement of Roman imperialism, which clearly Augustus had a vested interest in promoting. Empire without end, imperium sine fino. It's all about the version of history created by the victors. One of the things that Virgil really does is he offers a remarkable, subtle critique of Roman imperialism within the work. When you read between the lines, there are at the very least ambivalent attitudes present in the poem about empire.

In other words, is the Aeneid art or just straight up propaganda? That question is at the heart of this documentary by contributor Tom Jokinen. The Aeneid, a political puzzle. I am Torno, King of the Routely. I salute our celebrated visitor and offer him any help he may need on his voyage. WU-TV, Buffalo 29. I remember that movie, The Avenger, one of any number of Italian sword and sandal epics dubbed into English that they used to show on cable TV in the 70s.

It was basically a western in Roman outfits. You watched it with a bowl of Cheerios and a glass of chocolate milk. Back then you had to walk to the TV to change the channel. So you didn't. Now, back to our program. It's hard for me to express my thanks for this welcome. Your bravery is known to all of us.

Though you're in exile, the glory of Troy lives in your name. No words have cheered me more since the glorious days of peace in Troy. Fate has brought us here, to your land. I prefer to look upon it as a return." It's a live-action cartoon with only a wafer-thin connection to Virgil's poem, or the last half of it, when Aeneas and his people, having survived the Trojan War, wind up in Italy and are urged by the gods to found a new land in Rome. Give us refuge in your land.

We have come to the river Tiber by the will of the gods. If you allow it, we shall stay. You have my word that your request will be considered by us most favorably, Ineia. Ineias is the good guy, but Ternus, the local Etruscan, is a cad. With evil motives, it comes down to one last mano a mano battle. It's not something you pay attention to when you watch it as a kid. It's the same theme that runs under the melodrama

in all Westerns. The good guys like Aeneas are founding a new nation. But hang on. When he finally gets to the promised land, it turns out that there are people already living there and they're not so happy about the idea of ceding their territory to this band of Trojans. So we have a problem.

We see the violence that's necessary to found this new nation. Now this is a paradox. Violence for the greater good. To dig into the politics of this idea of what is and isn't necessary to found a nation depends on a much finer touch than what you get in something like The Avenger. Come on, follow me. He looks just like a carpet tramp, exactly like the rest of them. For that you have to get out of Hollywood and go back to the source.

you have to get out of Hollywood and go back to the source. All fell silent now, and their faces were all attention when from his place of honor, Aeneas began to speak. This is book two of the Aeneid, as translated by Cecil Day Lewis, commandingly read by David Collins. It's the story of the end of Troy and the beginning of something even bigger. And even though the poem is over 2,000 years old, it's not hard to read the Aeneid as a poem about the very politics that we're dealing with today. USA! USA! USA!

What's interesting about Virgil, and as we know this is fairly rare in literary history, is that he is already a kind of classic in his own time. My name is Daniel Mendelson. I'm a writer and classicist, and I live in the Hudson Valley of New York. Virgil was born in 70 BCE in ancient Rome. Augustus will soon be on the throne, and Rome is morphing from a republic to an empire. He lived through turbulent years. Turbulent? Those years were mayhem.

Because the 60s BCE and the 50s BCE were full of political disturbances, which culminated in the Civil War that began in 49 BCE between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. I'm Susanna Brand. I'm a retired professor. I taught at UBC, and now I live on Salt Spring

Island in British Columbia. The Civil War continues down to Octavian's defeat of Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BC at the Battle of Actium. And Octavian, who then takes the name Augustus, establishes himself as the autocrat, as the sole ruler. LW – Augustus was very controlling of Virgil. CB – We know that Virgil was close to Augustus. We know that this was a commission to write a great epic on the scale of Homer, but about Rome. We know that it rifts Homer in very complicated and sly and sophisticated ways. LW – He was the protege of Augustus, that's the first Roman emperor, who has a better reputation than he deserves. And here, here is the man, the promised one you know of, Caesar Augustus, son of a god,

destined to rule where Saturn ruled of old in Latium. I'm Sarah Rudin. I'm a translator of Virgil's Aeneid, and I live in Connecticut. The Aeneid is in a way a sequel to the Odyssey and the Iliad in that it picks up after the destruction of Troy, but from the Trojan perspective, from the point of view of the defeated, with Aeneas as their leader. The poem comprises 12 books, 9,800 lines of Latin hexameter, and in publishing terms, it was an instant bestseller. It's clear from the very beginning that this is a masterpiece, and people understood that at the time. Not just the coterie of people, literati, who were attached to the circle of Mycenas and Augustus, but ordinary Romans, fellow poets, understood understood even while Virgil was composing the Aeneid that it was,

as one Roman poet put it, something greater than even Homer is being born. The Aeneid was, as T.S. Eliot called it, our classic. It really is far more than Homer in terms of its cultural importance, the work of antiquity that influenced Western culture, civilization, and our literary tradition. My name is Paul Krauss. I am an instructor of humanities at Chesterton Academy of Albuquerque in New Mexico. So already people are scrolling lines from the Aeneid on the walls of Pompeii within a century of its publication, which means that it has filtered down into the popular consciousness as well. Do you mean like they're writing graffiti on the walls of quotes from Aeneid?

Yeah. There are graffiti in Pompeii with the, you know, Armo Wirumque Cano, the first half line of the Aeneid, scrawled on the walls. Arma hui Rumque Cano. I sing of arms and the man. Troia in cui primus aboris. Arms and a man, I sing. First from Troy's shores, fate's fugitive. The first from Troy.

Came to Italy and Lavinium's cubs. On land and sea, divine force shook him. So that means it was already being taught in schools. It's penetrated the consciousness of Rome from the minute that it appeared. The poem as a whole became so famous over the centuries that it prompted a game, the sortes. You open the book at random, then you put your finger on a passage and that passage will supposedly predict your future, like a fortune cookie. Do you happen to have a copy of the Aeneid handy there? Do you have one by? Yes. Because I can't resist, I have to ask that there's this game that famously through history people play.

Oh, the sorties where Gileani. Yeah. So you open the book at random and you put your finger in it will tell you your fortune. Do you mind? Do you want to give it a shot? Let me see. Okay. Book four, line 334.

Oh, Queen, I will never deny that you, who are able to list many things by speaking, have deserved this. Hmm. Hmm, very cryptic. Well, I hope that's not an omen. Let me try. Broken in war and foiled by fate, with so many years already slipping away, the Greek

staff constructed a horse, employing the craft of the goddess Athene. Okay, that's not good. So about 3,000 years ago from us, the story is that the Greeks sacked the city of Troy, which is in the modern-day territory of Turkey. It was high as a hill, and its ribs were made from planks of pine wood. And they burned the city and the Trojan refugees roamed the Mediterranean looking for a new home. But when my kinsmen, through the spiteful intrigues of Ulysses,

I dare say, you know, the tale was driven from the land of the living. I was ruined. It's the story of one of those refugees, Aeneas, who fled the burning city of Troy with his father and his son. He was carrying also his household gods, the little statuettes of his household gods, his Trojan gods. And after many tribulations as he travels

with his bunch of survivors, refugees, he travels through the Mediterranean, and he heads west and founds a community in Italy that would later become Rome. Part of what makes Aeneas a good leader, Aeneas has long-term vision. And then he shared out the wine which Goodocestes had casked in Sicily and given them and spoke these words of comfort to his sad-hearted friends. Comrades, we're well acquainted with evils then and now.

Worse than this you have suffered. God will end all this too." Because he's constantly referring to this fate, this destiny, that he and his followers will found a new civilization that will be very powerful. One day, who knows, even these will be grand things to look back on. So he's able to appeal to this vision throughout all of the hardships and all of the troubles that he and his manager on their way from Troy to Italy. My name is Paul Hay. I'm a

professor of classics at Hampton Sydney College in Hampton Sydney, Virginia. After the fall of Troy, he escapes with his ragtag band of survivors of the devastation of Troy and has been told that there is this land on the Italian peninsula, which is going to be the future home of this remnant of a destroyed civilization. So he gets blown by a terrible storm onto the coast of North Africa and ends up near the city of Carthage. Land of Queen Dido.

When he gets to the city, Dido welcomes him, and Aeneas spends the next two books, books two and three of the epic, telling her his story. Oh, my country, oh, Ilium, home of the gods, oh, Troy town town famous through war. So now the sky rolled round and night raced up from- I'm Shadi Bartch. I'm the Helen A. Wagenstein Distinguished Service Professor

of Classics at the University of Chicago. The towering horse which stands in the heart of the city spilt out armed men and flushed with triumph. Sinon is stirring the blaze everywhere. There are Greeks packing the open gates. All who ever came in their thousand... Startled from sleep, I scrambled to the rooftop and stood there, motionless and glistening.

It was like fire. The raging south winds send into the wheat. Wherever the roads are narrow, they're blocked by Greek detachments. A front of steel stands there. Delirious rage pitched me ahead. How beautiful to die in battle. Look out! What happens next, as Aeneas tells the Queen his war stories, is admittedly a little bit Hollywood.

But now, for some while, the Queen had been growing more grievously lovesick. The love affair with Dido, the Queen of Carthage. The gods step in to make sure that Dido falls in love with him while he's telling his story. Feeding the wound with her lifeblood, the fire biting within her. He seeks help from the Queen of Carthage and she's called Dido and she takes him in. Much did she muse on the hero's nobility and much on his family's fame, his look, his words had gone to her heart and lodged there. She could get no peace from love's disquiet. He's completely destitute. He has lost many of his men and ships and he overwinters there

and they fall in love with each other. Why do these nerve-wracking dreams haunt me? This man, this stranger I've welcomed into my house, what of him? And for a long time it looks like he's going to settle there and he says this is good enough, we've done so much traveling, we've traveled for seven years and I'm going to settle here, she's going to take me in. She offers to share power with him. How gallantly he looks, how powerful in chest and shoulders. Dux femina facti is the Latin phrase. When Ineos gets to Carthage, he watches, he's invisible in a cloud provided by his mother

Venus, and he sees that she is the Dux femina facti. A woman was the leader of the enterprise. She is building a city. She's going to be the founder of this city of Carthage. It's a new city and that's why he has such fellow feeling for her. She's a powerful woman, very much the powerful queen, beautiful, glamorous, in control of everything. I really do think and have reason to think that he is heaven-born. Until Cupid strikes her with his arrow and she falls desperately in love with Aeneas and she becomes very weak because of that. There's an opera about their love affair and we'll dig into it later,

Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell written no later than 1688, which concerns itself with the affair between the Trojan hero and the Carthaginian queen. Behold upon my bending spear, a monster's head stands bleeding. Behold upon my bended spear, a monster's head. Possibly the most sexually provocative lyric in all of Baroque opera, which has a reputation for the naughty. But back to the poem. And then Ineosus sent a message from Jupiter via the god Mercury who says, no, this is

not where you're supposed to settle. Your divine providence takes you to somewhere else, to a western land, Hesperia, which is another word for Italy. This new love affair is now a big problem for Aeneas. His romance for Dida seems to be delaying whatever this supposed destiny is. And there's maybe even a fear that rather than fulfill his destiny as the founder of a new city in Italy, that instead he'll just become the Prince Consort of Queen Dido in North Africa.

Stay, Prince, and hear great Jove's command Jupiter intervenes by sending him a dream in which he is told he has his own city to found and he needs to abandon Dido's city. The story of Dido is the downfall of a woman from great strength and resilience and resourcefulness into something really rather craven. All the while he was speaking, she gazed at him askance, her glances flickering over him, eyes exploring the whole man in deadly silence. If I burn the oars, he won't pair of tendons at his inner thigh. What you're hearing now is not Virgil, but part of a modern composition by Susan Boddy, performing here with lyrics by Linda Gregerson.

This is from Gates of Silence, a musical telling of the doomed affair of Dido Winonaus, it premiered in 2010 in Nashville and tells a story from Dido's point of view. Not so he suffers, no. But so he isn't able to walk without help. Susan Boddy. I don't think I ever actually perform it exactly the same way. It's really a dramatic monologue that's placed in the music. It's sort of her desperation to make, to keep him from going, right? Yeah, it's her rage. I mean, he's going and, and, you know, she just is, she wants to just take him apart.

You've already seen how I love him. What need for these eyes? I mean, it's the greatest betrayal you know Dido is a tragic figure who takes her own life out of grief traitor the pledge you made our passion for each other even your Dido's brutal death won't keep you I hope that heaven's conscience has the power to trap you in the rocks and force reprisal down your throat as you call my name. Sweet leavings, while divine fate kept you sweet, receive my breath and free me from this pain. I lived. I ran the race that fate allotted.

I'll send the underworld a noble ghost. I saw the walls of my great city standing. A happy, no, a more than happy life if Trojan ships had never touched these shores. Her maids now saw her falling on her sword, still speaking, saw her blood foam down the blade and fleck her hands. You're listening to The Aeneid, a political puzzle by Tom Jokinen. The four states, the stern sheet,

the benches, I'm Nala Ayad. The yard, the wooden peens. Up to this point, Anais has been through a lot. He escaped the defeat at Troy, washed up in Carthage, fallen in love with the queen, and then left her to carry on his quest to found a new civilization.

["The Great English Composer, Henry Purcell"] Henry Purcell, the great English composer, wrote an opera dealing with Dido and Aeneas, and you have that wonderful four or five minute moment, Dido's lament. There is a sense that she is hurt to the point of death, dying of a broken heart, you might want to say. My name is Ellen Harris, and I'm the author of Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and I am a retired faculty member in music and theater arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tell me more about Dido in the opera because she has a bit less opportunity to express herself in the Aeneid. And we don't know a lot about her. She, in the Aeneid, I mean, there's a background. She's a widow. She's vowed chastity to her late husband. None of that exists in Dido and Aeneas.

So it's frequently, because it was at least once performed for a girls boarding school, when Dido and Aeneas is performed, Dido is frequently portrayed as a much younger woman than the Dido of history. in earth, may my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast. And what's her frame of mind, the character, what's her frame of mind in this piece? I think she's basically saying, forgive my mistakes, forgive me for doing this, forgive me, remember me, but I'll forget my mistakes. Forgive me for doing this. Forgive me. Remember me, but I'll forget my fate. I think that there's a kind of forgiveness embedded in that. The curious thing about Dido in this opera is that she's never happy. Have you sung the role?

Oh, years and years ago. Yes. What's it like? The most emotional music in the opera is hers. The epithet of Aeneas that is constantly reiterated throughout the poem is Pius, P-I-U-S, which is not the same as pious, although it looks like pious. It means dutiful, and Book Four dramatizes that in a wrenching way. Because we are made aware that to found this new nation state, great sacrifices must be made. And Dido becomes the sort of symbol

of the terrible violence and suffering that has to happen in order for empires to be founded. And now in our time, as people push back against the idea that Virgil was celebrating empire and invasion, we've started to read the poem a little bit more sensitively, with more attention to the discredited voices that upon reflection may speak truth all along. You know, she's the collateral damage. It's interesting that the Odyssey has been made into movies and the early ad has been

made into movies, but the Aeneid doesn't really lend itself in the same way and I think it's because of the lack of magnetism of the hero, Aeneas. He has so many responsibilities, he's forever weighed down. The first sight we have of him in book one of the Aeneid is when a storm has washed him up on the shore of North Africa. This is just before he meets Dido and he believes he's lost several of his ships and he's at a terrible low ebb, but he pulls himself together and he knows what he has to do. He has to go out and kill some deer to feed his men. So he's always repressing his personal wishes to be the leader, but he is almost dull. be the leader, but he is almost dull. He is almost dull because of that. Yeah, but aren't we all? I mean, we all have burdens, right? We're not heroes like Odysseus.

No. We have burdens. We have things weighing us down. We have burdens weighing us down. And this quality of pietas, this very difficult to translate word, but this idea of devotion of selflessness, devotion to your family, your father, your children, your companions, your native gods, and to the future that these gods are telling you about but you don't really understand, does lead to suppression of the self. So clearly, pietas does not include loyalty to Dido.

It certainly does not, no. That would be selfishness. So that's where his selflessness, his devotion to the cause, what the gods are telling him to do, take your son and your companions and go on to this western land, which he can barely imagine. His next move is to the underworld and there he finds his dead father, Anne Dido, who's so heartbroken she won't even speak to him. Venetian Dido wandered in that broad wood, her wound still fresh. And when the Trojan hero encountered her and recognized her dim form through shadows, as a person sees the new moon through clouds, or thinks he sees it as it rises, he wept and spoke to her in tender love.

Poor Dido, then the messenger was right. Your own hand held the blade that brought your death. And it was my fault? By the stars, the high gods, and any truth below the earth, my queen, it was against my will I left your country, and by the orders of the gods, who now ordain my journey through this shadowed squalor these depths of night." She only glared in fury while he was pleading, while he called up tears. The Aeneid can be read as a piece of propaganda written on behalf of a patron,

Emperor Augustus, but then with Dido and other characters, the ones who get in the way, Virgil makes them sympathetic even more so than dull Aeneas. So the question becomes, is he planting the seed of doubt about the whole imperial project? the seed of doubt about the whole Imperial project. There are other people who see in the treatment of various characters, particularly Dido, the tragic Carthaginian queen who kills herself after Aeneas abandons her, who see in characters like her a kind of subversive view of the Imperial project. Virgil appears to be the first author who gives us sympathetic depictions of cannon fodder, of nobodies, of unheroic characters

who don't want to be in war, but they are humanized, they are real people to him. They have a past, they have a tragedy. We see the violence that's necessary to found this new nation. The Aeneid is definitely a foundation story. It can be likened to stories told by the Pilgrim Fathers or even stories told by the Maori settlers when they got to New Zealand in their canoes. It's really a universal theme telling your foundation story.

The foundation story as Virgil has it ends up in a battle between the Trojans and the native Italians and finally between Aeneas and the native leader Turnus. It gets personal. Turnus it turns out had himself killed a man named Pallas who was Aeneas' friend. So when Turnus loses the battle to Aeneas... who was Aeneas' friend. So when Ternus loses the battle to Aeneas... He is fatally wounded and he goes down onto one knee and he looks up to Aeneas and he says, I'm not going to grovel. You should go ahead and do what you must do. Either you kill me or if you want to be merciful, send me back alive to my father. And there's a long moment, it's very cinematic,

I think, where Aeneas stands there, he's got his sword in his hand, but he's swayed a little bit towards being merciful, towards turness, and he nearly stops himself. stops himself. But then he sees that Turnus is wearing the belt that Aeneas' young friend Pallas had once worn. Now Turnus had killed Pallas, this young man who had been entrusted to Aeneas' care, like a son, really, a surrogate son. It was Pallas' first battle, Tones' the experienced warrior. He'd killed Pallas and he'd taken his sword belt. Now did his feelings veer this way and that. post quam saevi monumenta dolores ex suvias quasit, furis acensus et ira terribilis. Tune hink spolis in dute mejorum eirri piare mehi, palas teoc vulnere, palas imolat, The To fugit indignata sub umbras.

Aeneas stared, the spoils brought back to him his wild grief, and he burned with brutal rage. So you'll escape in loot from one of mine? It's Pallas who now slaughters you to offer your vicious blood in payment for your crime. Incensed, he thrusts the sword through Turner's chest. The body's warmth and strength dissolved. The life groaned in its rancer and fled down to Hades. The conclusion of the Aeneid is about trying to move on from civil war

and collaborate in creating a successful new civilization, a new city. And now a celebration of imperialism? It's a celebration of Rome and its history and culture. And for the Romans, one of the things they liked about their accomplishments was that they had taken over much of the Mediterranean world through conquest. Often the Romans saw their military conquest of foreign enemies as defensive in nature. We would probably not be convinced by some of their arguments for what constitutes a defensive war, and sometimes it seemed to involve deliberately misremembered or forged details. The Romans were proud of their military might.

And one of the famous passages of the Aeneid, Aeneas has journey to the underworld in order to get advice from his deceased father. So you have come at last. The love that your father relied on has won through the hard journey, and I may gaze my son upon your face." And his father reminds him that other civilizations will be good at things like oratory or astronomy. For the Romans, their art is the art of war.

"...let others fashion from bronze more lifelike, breathing images, for so they shall, and evoke living faces from marble. Others excel as orators, others track with their instruments the planets circling in heaven and predict when stars will appear. But Romans, never forget that government is your medium. Be this your art, to practice men in the habit of peace. Spare the conquered, but beat down the proud. Generosity to the conquered, and firmness against aggressors.

And that's what will make them strong. And here, here is the man, the promised one you know of, Caesar Augustus. His empire shall expand past Garamants and Indians to a land beyond the zodiac and the sun's yearly path, where Atlas the Skybearer pivots the wheeling heavens, embossed with fiery stars on his shoulder. His empire shall expand. It's hard not to hear that as imperial propaganda. For the Romans, their imperial conquest is sort of unambiguously seen as a positive.

Empire without end. Empire without end. Peace through war. Imperium sine finum. Firmness against aggressors. Sound familiar? Outside the stadium stands this gigantic monolith of Carrara marble, a monument to Mussolini himself.

The lower portion alone weighs over 300 tons. Mussolini is building a new Rome. This is what propaganda does. This text by Virgil which was acclaimed even before it was finished and became a central part of the school curriculum immediately, immediately at Virgil's death in 19 BCE and has remained the central text of the European curriculum right down all the way through the 19th century and into the 20th century. This is a text that elite men

were reading all through these years. But these elite men who are trained on the story of the Aeneid of westward travel and conquest, appropriation of other people's lands, this formed their worldview and if you look at the imperial projects of the British and the Spanish and the Portuguese in particular coming to the Americas these were guys who were totally raised on the idea that you go West and you bring your culture in scare quotes to the in scare quotes, to the uncultured natives in scare quotes. That is your mission. And you do it with divine sanction, the divine sanction of Christianity.

That was the mission in 19th century America too, which like Virgil's Rome had just been through a civil war when the idea of moving from Republic to Empire took hold, starting with the westward expansion into First Nation lands. In 1872, Ulysses S. Grant was president. The Wheeler Survey was studying which natural resources of the west were the best to exploit. And it was then that Christopher Cranche wrote a new American translation of the Aeneid.

Christopher Cranche was a transcendentalist poet and artist, and in 1872, Cranch published the first full-length verse translation of the Aeneid in America. Cranch's Aeneid is a post-American Civil War translation and reflects, in some way, American attitudes after the Civil War. What is it about his translation? What's the message of his translation for America at that time? One of those messages seems to be a real trauma about living through Civil War and the hopes that we can move on in the future as one collective people and

we can move on in the future as one collective people and work together in order to revitalize the country and to see ourselves as a unified people, just as the Trojans and the native Italians can refer to themselves by the end of the Indian as Romans. And just as after the American Civil War, rather than refer to oneself as, you know, an Ohioan or a Pennsylvanian or a Virginian, there's a hope that maybe we could see ourselves maybe more definitively as Americans. It's hard though to escape the fact in the Aeneid that either Republic or Empire is achieved through violence and what what was the feeling in the 19th century of America at the time about

that the message in the Aeneid that you got to break a few eggs. There's a famous series of paintings by the Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole called the Course of Empire that seems to suggest there's a kind of inevitable collapse to civilizations that spread themselves too thin through imperial conquests, that every empire has a kind of rise and fall. And so if America attempts to be an imperial superpower, the same thing will happen to them that ultimately happened to Rome. In the end, the direction America takes from civil war until, well, until last week is known well enough. America prepares. All America alters its pattern of life and work, to meet the demand for protection.

Gulf of America. The armaments of war that an that the battle world must have if democracy is to survive, purchasing Greenland, the United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, Canada is the 51st state, and we will pursue our manifest destiny. When President Trump chose me for this position, the primary charge he gave me was to bring the warrior culture back to the Department of Defense. If you wanted law and order in this town, you've got it. I'll shoot the first man who starts for those steps. Starring Ronald Reagan as Frame Johnson.

And there's a Dido in every western story. And introducing Ruth Hampton, whose maddening kisses touched off the feud and tore the badlands apart. I told you to keep away from her. I asked him to come. I told you to keep away from her. I asked him to come. You get a lot of these ideas about universal prosperity, universal peace being guaranteed by the Empire. The notion that the Empire is on a civilizing mission and it's bringing the light of civilization

to the dark places of the world. The idea that it's selected by the gods, that all of this is happening under the aegis and protection and approval of the divine powers that be. This is what the Aeneid puts forward as a kind of burgeoning, nascent, imperial ideology. I am Ted Wimperis, assistant professor of classical languages at Elon University in Elon, North Carolina. It's nothing but speculative, but this idea of the make America great again ideology of Trumpism already so far with imperial goals involving Greenland, Panama, and where I am in Canada,

right? Testimony from now Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth talking about how he wanted a return of, quote, warrior culture to the US military. Sounds like the Aeneid. I mean, I wouldn't accuse anybody in that administration of having read it, but it does have the feel too of being even more modern than Mussolini. There is something kind of universal about how the Aeneid describes power in this way. In a lot of ways, I think, because the Aeneid also looks back to a lot of earlier, more ancient traditions about power and a lot of earlier ideologies involving kingship and then, you know, warrior elite, you know, this kind of stuff. There's, you know, imagery about royal power adapted from

ancient Egypt, from ancient Persia, from Mesopotamia, from earlier Greek examples like Alexander the Great. What fine young men they are! Look at their stalwart bearing, the oak leaves that shade their brows, decorations for saving life. His are the auguries, my son, whereby great Rome shall rule to the ends of the earth, shall aspire to the highest achievement, shall ring the seven hills with a wall to make one city blessed in her breed of men. Virgil is pulling on a lot of different threads as he's crafting this image of the Roman Empire. And certainly looking at a lot of political discourse nowadays, especially among the nationalist

right, the techniques that Virgil uses in this more propagandistic vein are absolutely recognizable within a lot of modern dayday political movements and ideologies this sort of nationalist right. There's yet another take on the Aeneid, one that still puts Aeneas at the center of the poem, not as the hero, but as a victim of war himself. It was like grasping a wisp of wind or the wings of a fleeting dream. So in the end I went back to my friends, the night being over. I was astonished to find when I got there a great number of new arrivals come in, both women and men,

a sorry concourse of refugees assembled for exile. From all sides they'd come together, their minds made up, their belongings ready, for me to lead them wherever I wished to cross the sea. And now was the dawn star rising over the ridges of Ida, bringing another day. The Greeks were holding the gates of the city in force. Troy was beyond all hope of aid. I myself struggled with this for a long time. And it wasn't until I was writing a book

about the Holocaust actually, when I was interviewing a lot of Holocaust survivors, that I began to understand that what Virgil is really up to is that it's a great portrait that he makes in the Aeneid of a survivor, someone who is trudgingly, if that is the word, putting one foot in front of another, which is the most that he can manage in order to get to a place where he thinks he's going to be safe. This apparition left Ineos stunned. His hair stood up and words stuck in his throat. There's a kind of hollowed out quality about him, which only made sense to me when I started thinking of him

as a survivor. And I think if we reread the Aeneid as the tale of a survivor, a lot of it sort of snaps into place. Just because people have used the Aeneid to justify their savage imperial ambitions doesn't mean that's the only way to read it. Mussolini was Mussolini, but I wouldn't want him leading my classical literature seminar. monumenta Dolores ex suvias quasit, furii acensus et ira terribilis. Fatu, profugus, la vinnia qua veni. Tune hink spolii sin dute meorum,

eirri piare mehi, palas teoc vulnere, palas imolat, et poinam skeloratec sanguine sumit. Hoc dicens fermad verso sub pectorae condit, fervidus, ast illi solvuntu frigore membra, vita que cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras. CB It's really interesting because he can't fall in love with Dido because he's traumatized basically. He goes into the underworld because he's obsessed with his own dead. And I guess even the violence is a reaction to his own trauma. I mean, that's very modern. It is, strangely, but I think it's also very ancient. War was a very concrete reality for the ancients in ways that are very hard, I think, for us to really appreciate, you know, it was always going on. And when you won a war against another country,

you killed all the men and enslaved all the women and children, and that was just a fact of life. So it sounds very modern, but I don't think the experience was very modern. And I think it's just, I think it sounds modern to use words like, you know, traumatized, but I think the experience was quite real. In the end, Virgil's Aeneid shows the costs of imperialism and war, and that these costs aren't limited to money and material.

The costs are moral, too, and the founding of Rome came with a price. Whether that price is worth paying is something the reader, either ancient or modern, has to struggle with as the poem continues to invite us, maybe even demand from us, that we question our own origin stories and what it took for us to land in the place that we now call home. One day, who knows? Even these will be grand things to look back on. Through chance and change, through hosts of dangers, our road still leads on to Latium. There, destiny offers a home and peace. There, duty tells us to build the second Troy, hold on and find salvation in the hope of better things. You've been listening to The Aeneid, a political puzzle by Winnipeg contributor Tom Jokinen.

Special thanks to Susanna Braund for readings from the translation by Sarah Rudin. Other excerpts from the Aeneid read by David Collins from the translation by Cecil Day Lewis. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideas. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Nikola Lukcic is our senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.