In Our Time - The Aeneid

Episode Date: April 21, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'The Aeneid'. Out of the tragedy and destruction of the Trojan wars came a man heading West, his father on his back and his small son holding his hand. This isn't Odysseus, it's Aeneas and in that vision Virgil gives an image of the very first Romans of the Empire.Virgil's Aeneid was the great epic poem that formed a founding narrative of Rome. It made such an impact on its audience that it soon became a standard text in all schools and wiped away the myths that preceded it. It was written in Augustus' reign at the start of the Imperial era and has been called an apologia for Roman domination; it has also been called the greatest work of literature ever written.How much was Virgil's poem influenced by the extraordinary times in which it was written? How does it transcend the political pressures of Imperial patronage and what are the qualities that make it such a universal work?With Edith Hall, Leverhulme Professor of Greek Cultural History, Durham University; Philip Hardie, Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at the University of Oxford; Catharine Edwards, Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, Birkbeck College, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, out of the tragedy and destruction of the Trojan Wars came a man heading west. He was carrying his father on his back and he was holding the hand of his small son. This is Odysseus, it's Ineus.

And in that vision, Virgil gives an image of the first Romans of the empire. Virgil's and Eard was the great epic poem that formed a founding narrative of Rome. It made such an impact that it soon became a standard text in all schools and wiped away the myths that preceded it. It was written in Augustus reign at the start of the imperial era and has been called an apologia for Roman domination. It's also been called the greatest work of literature ever written in Europe.

But how much was Virgil's poem influenced by the extraordinary times in which it was written? How does it transcend the political pressures of imperial patterns? And what are the qualities that make it such a universal work? With me to discuss Virgilineard at Catherine Edwards, Senior Lecture in Classics and Ancient History at Berkbe College University of London, Edith Hall, Professor of Greek Cultural History at Durham University, and Philip Hardy, Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at the University of Oxford. Edith Hall, could we start with the first literary citing of Ineers?

He's a Trojan figure in Homer's Iliad. How do we come across him? And why do you think Virgil picked on him? Well, Virgil picked on Aeneas for two reasons. One is quite simply that he was the ancestor of Augustus, under whom Virgil is writing, and he's writing a genealogy and ancestry for him. But the second reason is that he's the most important Trojan

to survive the fall of Troy, and Augustus wants to trace back his ancestry to Troy. And what is he doing in the Eliad? Well, he's always just number two to Hector, who's the great Trojan warrior. He's, if you like, Hector's deputy, second-vest warrior. And he's met on several occasions. He actually meets most of the really important Greeks.

This is very important. This is a man who has confronted on the battlefield, Menelaus, Diomedes, and several other really top Greek warriors. He's got an extraordinary military record as a hero. The crucial moment, though, comes in book 20 of the Iliad, where he actually confronts Achilles himself, the super warrior, the son of a goddess. and he's only just escaped certain death at the hands of Achilles

because he's whisked off the battlefield by Poseidon. He's always being rescued by the gods in the area. That's the really important thing. And Poseidon actually says, we must rescue him because Zeus will be very, very angry if we don't, because he's got to preserve the Trojan line. He has to survive. We must rescue him.

And by the way, he's always been particularly good about offering gifts to the gods. He's very, very pious. So it's as if, sort of, whoever put Homer was, and put that together was foreshadowing or foretelling that several hundred years later, Virgil would come along and need this man. It is, it really is. I mean, Virgil was very fortunate that there were these passages in the Iliad for him to write to. They're almost prophetic.

Scholars these days, though, and it's probably a path we don't want to go down today because it's about linear, but scholars these days are now thinking that the myths of colonisation from Asia to the west, centering on figures like Hanirs were much, much earlier than people used to think. It may be that Homer's already writing, sorry, composing. the Iliad 2 a colonisation myth. Can you just outline briefly the adventures, as it were, and the destiny of Abinus in Virgil's 12 book epic? Right. It's 12 books. The first half basically is spent wandering around

on a protracted and very painful cruise of the Mediterranean, trying to find the destined homeland. And the second half is spent fighting in it and forging alliances and killing off the people who are opposed to the treasurer. Trojans coming in. So we start basically at Troy, in the imagination anyway, with Troy falling, and by the end of the poem, we're actually killing the main opponent to the Trojans' arrival in Italy. We are founding the Roman race, which is what we're told right at the beginning of the poem. This is the story of the great struggle to found the Roman race. Philip Pardy, can you give us something of the cultural context?

Editha Thel has already mentioned. This was written under Augustus at the time of the First Emperor. Augustus who'd beaten Mark Antonia and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium, and he was the adopted son of Julius Caesar, and so were just a few decades BC, and there's a great flourishing of writers at the time, a magnificent flourishing, Livy, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil. So can you just fill out that context in which Virgil finds himself? Yes, and the coming of Augustus to power coincided with the maturation of Roman culture, literature and art for a couple of centuries before that time, Greek, culture and art had been pouring into Rome, and the Romans had been assimilating it. As far as literature goes, in the generation before Virgil, a number of writers, in particular Catullus and his circle and Lucretius, had polished the Latin poetic language,

which was, as it were, ready there for Virgil to take up and create this great classic, which was writing in the first 10 years of Augustus's reign between 29 and 19. BC, the death of Virgil. And Virgil was a contemporary of other poets, particularly Horace, with whom Virgil was very close indeed, Love Ellegis like Perpurgis and Tobolus. So the creation of a new political order, restoring stability after the civil wars of the previous decades, coincided perhaps fortuitously

with this great maturation of culture, art and literature. It's a subject in itself, but it has a fascinating. When you have a renaissance of such intensity, you wonder, is this patronage, is this fortune? We know that Augustus himself wrote plays, although not many, there aren't any sort of traces that might be found. Other things are being found at the moment, which is served. We know there's a man called Mycenae, who was a great patron of the arts on Augustus' behalf. So do you think it was direct patronage that simulated this, or was something else going? I know it's unanswerable, but I would like to know what your essay is.

Well, patronage certainly exploits it. One has to be a little careful in thinking about any very directed patronage from the centre. I mean, there are people who think that the need was more or less written to order, but I think that that is to over-emphasise the directness of the relationship between Augustus and Mycinaus, his right-hand man, who is, if you like, his minister of culture, but that will be a rather anachronistic way of putting it. One has to be aware of, for example, taking the model of Italy and Germany in the 30. and one shouldn't think of a Ministry of Information as such.

But certainly the rewards for poets like Virgil and Horace were great and were told that at his death, Virgil had an estate of 10 million cestasies, much of which may have come from. What does that mean? Sorry, Cestas. Well, it's a unit of a Roman currency. Ten million cestas is a lot of money. So Virgil was certainly rewarded for his writing. But as you see, Augustus was a...

very cultured man and he would have valued literature that was not just banging an ideological drum. Finally, can you just give us a little bit about Virgil himself? As I understand it, we don't know a great deal, but it seems he was the son of a farmer, perhaps? Yes, he came from the north of Italy from a village near Mantua, which had quite recently become enfranchised in the Roman citizenship. He was educated in the north of Italy. He then came south. He spent some time in the Bay of Naples at the school of an Epicurean philosopher before coming to Rome.

One shouldn't overestimate his humble background. He would have had a very good education and indeed one remarkable fact about the Roman poets is that hardly any of them come from Rome itself. They mostly come from outside Rome. Catherine Edwards, The initial image I gave at the beginning of the programme, and he is carrying his father out of Troy, holding his son by his hand.

We have the past, the present, the future of what will be Rome. That's a very emphatic notion. It's already been mentioned by Edithall, and amplified by Philip Hardy, that this was written under Augustus, the first emperor. He wanted to create a new sort of Rome, pretend it was a republic, but it was an imperial. Can you explain why

Anir, why Virgil might have started with that? Why that was such an important image for Augustus as well as for Virgil? Well, that image of Augustus, sorry, of Aeneas, and, yes, confusing with here, perhaps an interesting slip, that Aeneas, with his father on his back and holding his son by the hand, is a kind of an archetypal image of Aeneas. and it embodies really Pietas, a piety towards the family. And that was a very important virtue in terms of how Augustus himself was perceived.

Augustus, as has already been mentioned, was the adoptive son of Julius Caesar, and he claimed that in taking up arms after Caesar's murder, he was avenging his father, and that was an act of Pietas in itself. So his relationship with his father was a very important part of legitimating his own rights. to power. And he traced his own ancestry because he was the son of Julius Caesar's wife's uncle, not right?

I mean, it's like my mother talking about people in Wickman, but he was Caesar's great, nephew. Yes, he was Caesar's great nephew. And they traced their line, they said they could trace their line back to Aeneas. But that's right, back to Ineus's son, Eulas. Yes. So we have the context there

for Augustus being allied with Aeneas. How far to just take further what Philip was saying, How far do you think this was written for Augustus? I mean, there seems to be a balance here from what I've read from the three of you before this programme. It wasn't mere propaganda by any means. On the other hand, it was written under Augustus, who was a great patron and interesting and demanding man.

So can you just open that up a bit? Because it serves Augustus purpose very well. Let's leave it at that. I think it's absolutely true to say it serves Augustus purpose well. The story was around in Rome in Latin literature before the time of Augustus, so it was already an important story, even back in the third century, B.C.E. When Rome was in conflict with Greeks. But it comes to have a new importance under Augustus.

And in terms of how the poem is perceived in antiquity, I mean, one can say that it's a problem to say it's specifically written for Augustus, or Augustus has commissioned it, perhaps. But in terms of how it's received in antiquity, it is received as a poem which endorses Augustus. when Ovid writes a few decades later about the Aeneid, he calls it Your Aeneid when he's writing to Augustus.

And Servius, the commentator on the Aeneid in the 4th century, one of his opening comments is to say the Aeneer is written to, because Virgil wanted to be the Roman Homer, and because he wanted to praise Augustus through his ancestors. But he gives Augustus a great deal because you come from Troy, you're a great survivor, this man is a man of destiny. He's also driven by the gods and goddesses in it. I mean, there's a verse here, you promised once a progeny divine of Romans,

Progeny divine of Romans rising from the Trojan line, and after time should hold the world in awe until the land and ocean give the law. So he's giving that to Neos and he's handing that on to Augustus inside the poem, isn't he? That's absolutely right. And I think it's very important to see the mission of Anius himself within the poem is to get his sort of straggling bunch of survivors to a new homeland. but it's a homeland that has this brilliant future already set out for it. And that's a future which is going to be brought to fruition under Augustus.

One of the important things about Aeneas is that he's actually awfully unwilling to pursue his project in many ways. He's a man who's weighed down by despair at the beginning of the programme. He doesn't really want to leave Troy, but he's forced into this. He's not a man who is out there pursuing his own glory. He's not out there on his mission for his own ambition, but because he has to do it as his duty. And I think in that sense, there's a sort of illusion of Aeneas' project

in finding a new home for his people and the larger Roman project of empire, which is in a sense made more, is dissociated perhaps from the quest for glory, which one might otherwise be tempted to associate with it. And these tensions between destiny and passion and between duty and love are most fiercely portrayed Philippe Hardy when Aeneas has blown off course a few times,

but most importantly, when he in book one, he goes to Carthage and he meets Dido, the founder and queen of Carthage, and he sees a freeze where his own story is told, and that takes him into a conversation under love affair, massive love affair. Before that, we've mentioned, I did in the introduction, the sort of peerlessness of the Latin,

Could you read a few lines of Latin from this point and then tell us what they say? Yes, I'll take the passage in which a very famous phrase, Lacrimaeererum, tears of things occurs. And this is a moment where Ineus, having been shipwrecked at the very beginning of book 1 and nearly lost his life, has landed with difficulty on the coast of Carthage. He arrives in what seems of wilderness. He doesn't know whether it's inhabited. And he makes his way in from the coastal wilderness to this.

splendid new city that is being built. And at this point he's actually come inside the city and he enters a temple of the goddess Juno. And in this temple there are very fine works of art of frieze, which he and his faithful companion Akartis look at. And these scenes depict the Trojan War, that is to say, Ineus's own past. And this is a very emotional moment for Aeneas, who has both reached to. civilization, after fearing that he might never see civilization again,

he sees these great works of art, and what is more, these artworks, represent his own past. And he then reacts in this following passage, I'll read it in Latin and then say a bit about it, constit at lacrimands, quesiam locus inquit akate, quite regio-in teris nostri nonplena laboris, e'en priamus,

Sunt Hik etiam so a primeal laudy, Sunt lacrimairairum et mentem mortalia tangunt. Solway, metus, ferret heik aliquam to bifama salutem. Sik aitonimum pictorah, Moulter gemens, Largo, cremectat fluminae Wultum. The passage is framed with tears, and Eas weeps when he sees these scenes, and tears occur both at the beginning and ending of this excerpt.

And De Nier says, what place on earth is, though, that is not full of our sufferings? And then he utters this famous line, sunt lacrimairarer. There are tears of things at mentem mortality tanguant, and mortal things touch the mind with splendid sound effects. The phrase lacrimairum and what it means has been endlessly discussed. It's a very good example of the way in which Virgil actually strains at the limits of latinity, the tears of things, what kind of a genitive, objective, genitive tears shed for things,

or possessive genitive, the tears that in here belong to things. And those two words have often been taken out of context and used almost as a motto for the sensibility and pathos of the poem. Thank you. And then he meets Dido and tells his story, can you put Dido into this? Because Dido, the book, which is the one that I'm, I studied at school, and anybody who did Latin at school listening to this program, about the same time, who did the DNA, Wood studied that book.

It was Augusta's favourite book. People are supposed to have wept it at the time. And ever since, it's extraordinary moving. This passionate love affair, then destiny drives through passion. So can you tell us about Dido? What happened between them and then what happened? Dido is an absolutely magnificent woman. She's a worthy companion and consort for Aeneas.

It's the near miss. It's the great near miss of history. She's queen of Carthage. She's a widow. She's decided to dedicate her life to building up Carthage and being queen of Carthage. And she thinks that she marries Eneas in a cave where they have an absolutely sort of passionate encounter. But it's not a true marriage. And eventually he must leave her, even though we are emphatically told several times,

really does love her with all his heart. Because his destiny is to found Rome, and Rome is not to be in a lion. with Carthage. In fact, quite the opposite. Rome is destined to be a deadly enemy of Carthage. The important thing about this book, though, I think, is for the point of view of the Aeneid, is that it's got a lot of very dramatic speeches. It's got about love. It's got extraordinary long dialogues and encounters between the two lovers, and that's the only book like it in the poem, which does not speak of love most of the time at all. And that is why it's

everybody's favorite book. And everybody has got a tragic love affair in their past. and there is nobody whose mind this mortal thing does not touch. Catherine Edwards, when Ennis leaves is told, is ordered to leave Dido, can you tell for those who might not have been what happens, what she does, and why he is driven in this way? Can we come back to the founding of Rome notion in all this? I still think that was terrific. I wish you'd have gone on for hours ago, but we didn't have time.

Can you just take us, why they're left, and this Rome idea, but let's bring that back into the discussion. Right, well, when Dido and Ineus get together, rumours start circulating about their association, and Dido's neighbour, Yarbaz gets to hear about it. There's a big passage rumor, isn't it? That's right. And Yavaz praised Jupiter, and he says, you know,

this is dreadful, this is appalling, I've made all these sacrifices to you and so on, and now this is happening. I wanted to marry Diodin, and she refused me, and now she's gone off with the Neos guy. So this worries Jupiter, and he sends Mercury to tell Aeneas to get on with the job. He's meant to be founding Rome, and what's he doing, hanging around in Carthet? So Mercury tells O'Neus he's got to get on with it.

And O'Neus is torn. He starts to make preparations to go, and he doesn't tell Dido, and she finds out, and then he's really in for it. And that's when we get these sort of great torrents of passion, as Dido takes Aeneas to task for having. deceived her. And there's a sort of scholarly debate about whether it really was a marriage or not. The marriage is actually referred to at the time as culp her, a sin, a crime. So it looks as though Dider is self-deceived as much as anything else. But nevertheless, she is passionately

outraged by Aeneas behaviour. And she threatens that she will kill herself. This doesn't necessarily seem like a threat that's going to be carried out, except that we've already been warned earlier in the poem that Dido is going to die. And so there is this passionate exchange. And then Anir says he must leave. I'm going to Italy, not of my own accord. Italiam non-sponte sequo, he says. And off he goes.

But then Dido plans that she will kill herself and she makes a pyre out of the... On top of which she puts the sort of marriage bed and she sort of commits suicide with Annius's sword and calls down curses on him. And one aspect of her curse is to set up the future conflict between Roman Carthage, because she calls for an Avenger from Carthaginian blood, who will...

Ex-Sariara Likwisnos, Altor. It's one day Hannibal will come along and get you. Yes, because she curses Rome. She said we will never get... But also it brings room into the Augustan play of things, doesn't it? Because Virgil is writing in the time of Augustus. idea of the North African Queen, who was Cleopatra. And so this Cleopatra must be playing in people's minds while talking, thinking about Dider.

That's absolutely right. Mark Anthony, Augusta's great opponent in the Civil War, had been allied with Cleopatra. They were defeated at the Battle of Actium in 31. Cleopatra committed suicide in 30, so just a few years before the poem was being written. She, too, was a great North African queen. And there are all sorts of ways in which Dido and Cleopatra are assimilated. And at one point, Dido is described as being palida, morti futura pale with death to come. And that's a phrase that's almost exactly echoed at the end of book eight,

where we have the shield of nears described, and there are scenes on it from Rome's future history. One of the central scenes is the Battle of Actium, where we see Augustus defeating Cleopatra. And Cleopatra there is described as, pale with deftar calm. He did actually visit on the travels in the in the inner. Before he gets to Carthage, we have very carefully gone to Actium.

Yes, that's right, they visit Actium along the way. Which has made sure the Battle of Actium is in the people's head, that this is the moment that Augustus did actually win the world. There's a general point to make there about the relationship of the Ineer to Roman history. One of the greatness of the poem is that Virgil decided not to write a historical epic about the exploits of Augustus himself. And that was perhaps the major decision when he was planning the poem. He decided instead to write about the remote legendary Homeric past,

characters who do not appear in Roman history, but through whom Virgil is thereby enabled to allude in subtle and indirect ways to actual characters from Roman history. Dido is, in some respects, Cleopatra, which is also a lot of other things. She is Homeric characters, Circe Calypso. That is one of the ways in which the poem is able to transcend the immediate historical context

by being open to lots of different ways of reading the characters. When Innes goes to the underworld, as Odysseus did, is that a direct, it seems like, is it? And what does he find there in his underworld? Well, yes, so it's based very directly on Odysseus' journey to the land of the dead in the Odyssey.

All books of the Inid are very closely modelled on things in Homeric poems, and that's a very deliberate imitative strategy on Virgil's part. When Adisius goes to the Land of the Dead, he meets characters from his past, from Troy, his mother, and he learns a little bit about the immediate future, about how he's going to get back to his home, Ithaca. When Ineus visits the underworld, he sees likewise people from his own past, including climatically Dido. but more importantly, Ennis sees the future and this time it's the future stretching far into the distance down to the time of Augustus

and this is through the device of a parade of the unborn souls of future Roman heroes who are displayed to Ineus by his dead father An chis is a very strange device but it is the major forward-looking prophetic section in the poem Edith Hall, in the Underwall, Ancius, Annes's father, gives a speech on cosmology.

So we're talking about a book that has got many, many strands. Can you just open that up a bit for us? I think it's one of the most important aspects of the Aeneid as a whole that it tries to, and very much succeeds, in making the destiny of Rome part actually of a cosmic order. It's actually got a whole philosophical. and indeed scientific dimension. Rome must rise as inevitably as the planets revolve around the sun, basically. Phillips actually the person who's written the great book called Cosmos and Imperium

in which this speech of Ancise that shows how the religious beliefs about what happens to souls when they die actually are part of the panoply of the inevitability of the rise of Roman history. the Aeneid manages to combine the philosophical with the religious, with the historical, with the aesthetic in a completely unprecedented way. Hello. Yes. Yes, the speech that Ancaises gives to his son is in two parts

and the bit that people tend to remember is the second and longer part, which is, as I said, this review of future Roman history through these unborn heroes. But the first part is this very grandiose account of the nature of the world and the nature of the soul, which uses philosophical language, particularly the kind of language that Lucretius, the great Roman philosophical poet,

who had written a poem on the Epicurean view of the world, a generation before Virgil. Virgil directs this philosophical language, the sublime questions of physics, and gives us this speech, which functions as a kind of overture to the parade of heroes. framing Roman history, suggesting, as Edith says, that somehow Roman history is the inevitable consequence

of the way that the world has been created. Catherine Edwards, is the philosophy as indicated by Edith and by Philip? Is this very pleasing to Augustus? Is he saying something that will please Augustus' view of the world at that time? Well, I think it would be quite hard to pin down Augustus' particular philosophical predilections. I mean, in some ways, one could see some problems in the earlier philosophical part of the speech in relation to the great Roman project

in that one of the themes of Ankii's speech is that the kind of embodied life on earth is actually rather wretched and it's much better to be dead and that would seem to be somewhat in tension with this celebration of Roman's glorious earthly achievements which comes in the latter part of the speech Yes and the immediate trigger for that speech

is a question from Ines who sees the souls waiting to drink of Lethe and clamouring to go up again to the world above using a Pythagorean notion of reincarnation. And Ineus who thinks that life up on Earth is pretty hellish, in fact, wonders why do they want to go back? And Ancise explains, well, this is the nature of the soul and there is this cycle of reincarnation, and before the souls go up, they drink of the river of Lithi.

So they have forgotten. And that is why they are willing to go to the world above. So that is a very pessimistic, really, view. of human life, but the speech also works in this other way to give this of grand overture to Roman history. So it's typical of the complexity of Virgil's poetry. Can I bring in, Catherine, what might seem a very rather crude

dichotomy when look at it. It seems to be, say, it's about destiny of Ineus, the duty of Ineus. And at the same time, it's about the passion of died and we're going to come to the passion of Ternus and the anger. So passion and anger and destiny induced. and the gods are there. So it isn't a simple story of a man's got to do what a man's got to do and does it.

By no means, no. But it is, there are all sorts of elements in this poem which explore intense emotion. And the poem begins with the anger of Juno. That's what kind of sets things in motion. It's a woman anger. Well, a female, that's right. The goddess Juno sets things in motion.

She wants to stop. the Trojans from fulfilling their mission to found Rome because she's a great lover of the Greeks and also supporter of Carthage. Now, so there's the passion of Juno, there's the passion of Dido, the anger of Turnus and furor, this word for intense passion is something

that comes up talking about Dido, love as well. So there's a definite kind of link those sort of very angry, passionate characters. And Ineus is someone who seems to be always pushing a position where he needs to overcome emotion and pursue duty. So it looks as though founding Rome is a project which involves kind of putting

the larger purpose before your personal feelings. Despite the anger of Juno and the power of Nido, the place of women in the book, there's the absence total of Ineus's wife, first wife, and so on. So women are, is marginalised the word or what? Well, actually, you know, I've got her marginalised. A lot of people these days argue that it's hopelessly sexist and beyond redemption, precisely because women are constantly the empty vessels into which the gods inject nasty, bad, furor and passion and sexual feelings and emotion which are distanced. You've also got the women of Troy who burn all the ships on Sicily because they're so upset with having to be dragged on and on and on around the Mediterranean, nearly wrecking the whole enterprise. It's usually women or it's turnus who's equated with Dido in all kinds of ways and is very young and very gorgeous. But I don't think it is. I actually think that you have to take the poem as a whole. And Dido is very carefully exculpated in all kinds of ways. It's the goddesses that.

machinating goddesses who take her off her vow of celibacy. And it actually says before this she had achieved peace of mind. And she's just so memorable. She transcends the poem, as does Camilla, who is the great Amazonian-Italian-Iroman who people don't talk about. She's absolutely stunning. She's like Jane of Arc. But it is important, isn't it, that the powerful women are the ones who die. And the only woman who survives the poem is Lavinia, who doesn't speak.

They only, they die in the poem, in the poem's own terms. but the fact is the way they've been written means that they have more people know about Dido than about Aeneas. There is a great contrast with women of Homer, and there are no powerful, successful women in Virgil unlike Penelope, or Helen, who in her own ways is both very powerful and successful survivor. And Camilla, you've referred to Camilla, is perhaps the greatest female figure, well, after Dido in the Ineered. She is an Amazonian queen She's a woman out of place Trying to fight in a man's world And inevitably she dies a tragic death

But that sense of loss It's very great It is yes It is great But I think we should also Pay attention to some of the details Of the death of Camilla Which is in many ways parallel

To the death of Di Diya Lots of people die in the Ineat But it's Camilla and Diadio Are the only ones who die Very long drawn-out, painful eroticised deaths And I think that's something

Actually rather We could see something rather sinister in that. Obviously it is a very complex poem, but I think in it... The spiritual sexuality is certainly quite strange, and that the first erotic scene in the poem is a meeting between Venus who's dolled herself up in a very kinky get-up, meeting her son, which is actually modelled on a scene in Homeric hymn and early Greek hymn to Aphrodite or Venus,

where Aphrodite seducese, Ine, his father, Anchisies, and from this union will be born Eneas. So that is the first erotically charged encounter with these overtones of incest at the beginning of the poem. And it sort of goes on from there. I think that's a very strange reading. I'm sorry for him. I think that the greatness of this poem is that Eeneas actually never ever.

He has to renounce all forms of real emotional support that he's ever offered. And in the end of that encounter, when she disappears, he says, why won't you just once, mother, let me talk to you? he has never had a mother because she's a goddess. He loses his father. As soon as he loses his father, he washes up on Carthage and he's offered love, he then has to renounce that. This guy, he doesn't even love Lavinia,

as far as we can make out, who's the Italian princess, the alliance with whom is going to matroro. I think his personal sacrifice and lack of love is another way, which is rather, to me, more satisfying than just saying that Virgil like kinky sex with, you know. Well, yes, again, I can trivialise it,

but there was a great debate of course as to whether Ineus was in love with Dido. We know that Dido was in love with Ineus, but Virgil is very reticent on the subject of Ineus' own feelings. It's only in book six when Ineus sees the ghost, The Shadeo in the Underworld, that the word love, Amor, is used of Ineus's feelings. But I think there are strong hints earlier on.

One of them is the way in which the first appearance of Dido in book one is in a form that will remind Ineus of that previous apparition of his mother. Venus, whom Ineus mistakes. Are you perhaps Diana, the goddess of chastity, not the goddess of love? And similarly, at the moment of the first appearance of Diodo, compares her to Diana. So there are very strange undercurrents here. We have to get on to the founding of Rome.

I'm very sorry. We haven't got on much time, and it has to be founded before we finish. And here we meet Ternus about whom we've talked, and people might not be familiar with Ternus. So could you tell us who Ternus was when Ineus got to Italy? And fill in that, and then what happened next between Ternus and Ineus? Okay, Ternus is the prince of the Routelians. He's actually engaged to marry Lavinia, who's the daughter of King Latinas.

So when Aeneas comes, and he's the man from the east who is destined to marry Lavinia, obviously Ternus is displaced. And he's, in a way, he plays Hector to Aeneas's Achilles in the last books of the Aeneid. And he's a great warrior. He's also fired with almost mad. by Juno, who urges him on to fight. And so you have this ongoing battle between the Trojans and the Italians, or some of the Italians, because Aeneas is an alliance with others of the Italians,

and culminating in the single combat between Ennis and Ternus at the end, and then we have Enoch's killing Ternus and thereby cementing his own settlement in Italy. But the killing of Ternus in itself has caused a lot of discussion, because it was, he had wounded him, he could have spared him, but decided to kill him because Ternus had killed his best friend, Pallas. And again, there's an analogy with the Odyssey. Could you, a lot of people are disturbed by that. Again, it seems to say, look, you're presenting to Augustus,

not a sort of harmonious ending. You're presenting this savage act of vengeance to end this poem. I think that here, here, Anis, he's avenging Palace, who has been a sort of adoptive son, and I think that is the crucial thing. He has said, I will look after this young Latin. And that adoptive relationship, he's avenging that. He sees his baldric on Ternus, and it's that that inflames him right at the end.

So we have the theme of avenging that father-son relationship right at the end, which brings us back to Augustus. However, Ternus, in a way, wins. Again, I think we have to be very complex about this. Just before he dies, Juno cuts the deal with Jupiter that says that, okay, the Trojans will stay, but they are going to have to change their language to Italian. And they are going to have to take on the Italian religion and the old Italian ways. And that's because that is what Turner puts into Rome as the Italian warrior.

So we may have the blood from Troy, but we're going to have the old ways of Italy for the Roman Empire. So Turner lives on in an incredibly important way. And I think that that tends to get underestimated because people are so worried about Anir's finally losing it. Do you think that the end that is in the end of the poem now is the end that Virgil intended? Because he died, some people think, before he'd finished it. And there's also something recorded that he said he wanted to destroy. So he could explore those two.

Well, he died anyway, before he said it was finished, and then that he wanted it destroyed. Yes, the ancient lives of Virgil tell us that he left it incomplete and he wanted to take another three years to polish it up. and there are some signs of incompletion, most notably half-lines, that he would not have left as half-lines. And there was this story that Virgil, on his deathbed,

asked for the ineer to be burned, but Augustus overruled it, and that's been the source of a great myth of the unfinished and perhaps unfinishable poem, much imitated by later poets, despairing or pretending to despair of their work. Is the ending, the ending that Virgil, would have intended, I think certainly yes, and it is a very sudden surprise ending. It's a surprise ending that goes with a surprise beginning. The beginning of the Ineed is the classic in Medias Rays, launching into the middle of the action, beginning with a storm, a very violent storm that nearly overwhelms Ineus in the middle of his journeys. This is not the beginning of his wanderings from Troy. And corresponding to that very sudden, violent beginning, we have this very

violent end and at the end in a way Ineus embodies figuratively the forces of the storm that had nearly destroyed him at the beginning. So there is a kind of neat symmetry about it, but it nevertheless is a surprising and shocking ending, but deliberately so I think. Catherine, do you agree with that? Yes, I do. I think it's perhaps also worth bearing in mind another dimension in terms of the historical context and insofar as on what's to pursue a parallel between Ineus and Augustus. Augustus in his career had hardly exemplified a kind of absence of emotion and restraint. During the Civil War years, he was involved in a number of extremely violent acts of, for instance, putting people to death after the Battle of Perusia.

He had begged for mercy. So Augustus himself, at certain points in his career, was known for these bloodthirsty acts. and in some ways one could see Ennis's allowing anger to overcome him at the end as perhaps serving also to legitimate some moments in Augustus' career that he might have felt rather problematic. Yes, although many people would say that Augustus would have wanted to forget those actions. And one thing he did was to change his name from Octavian to Augustus. And one consequence of changing your name is to put your past behind you. So there is a big question about how that pre-Augustus, as it were, past,

how much that should be allowed to colour our reading of the poem. And I think today the three of us have been mostly presenting a fairly sort of pro-Augustin, as it were, picture of the in-eer that this is a poem that constructs a Roman and a specifically Augustine identity. But it's fair to say that the orthodoxy among, at least Anglo-American readers of Virgil critics today is that the poem is anything but 100% pro-Augustus.

So many contemporary readers actually regarded as subversive and would say that the end of the poem undercuts a lot of what has been, the work that has been done in the rest of the poem. But they have to say that because they are living in a post-colonial era. And if they think that if they say it's pro-Augustin and they carry on reading it, that will get them into trouble. It's about contemporary politics of empire. You know, the discussion of the poem has got implicated in Anglo-American feelings about empire.

It's a problem. It is, we haven't got. any time to talk about this. It's a dumb nuisance really. But I mean, the fact is it was influenced Dante and Milton and it was a big influence on British imperial life in the 19th century. Now how can we

do that in half a minute? I haven't a clue. Can anybody in any office around the table? Well, I think it's incredibly, I think what we also haven't talked about is beauty. This poem is visionary. It may be that its vision is of a utopia ushered in by Rome. But I think if we hang on to that

utopia and this visionary nature of it, we begin to understand why it's inspired everybody, and it's perfectly all right to like it. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, Adieth Hall, Catherine Edwards and Philip Hardy. Next week we'll be talking about sensory perception with Richard Gregory, Gemma Calvert, and David Moore.

And thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.