The Ancients - Virgil

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

One of Antiquity's greatest poets, Virgil's legacy is seen across history. Following in the footsteps of his predecessor's Homer and Hesiod - Virgil's work inspires people even today. With inspiration for his poems coming from the political turmoil and change around him, Virgil's work offers insight into the tumultuous time he was living in.But who was Virgil, and why are his work's still so revered?In this episode, Tristan is joined by Dr Anne Rogerson from the University of Sydney to help shed some light on this mysterious figure. Looking at Virgil's three most famous works, The Georgics, The Eclogues, and of course The Aeneid - why has Virgil's legacy and name persevered throughout history?For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, where you might remember a few months ago, we talked all about that epic poet Homer and we talked all about the Iliad and the Odyssey, that great titan of ancient Greek history. Now we're

talking about another figure, a Roman figure, perhaps the counterpart of Homer but maybe I'm stretching it a bit too far with saying that. But we are of course talking about the figure of Virgil, the man who created the Georgics, the Eclogues and of course the Aeneid. Now to talk through who Virgil was and to give an overview of his various works and what influenced Virgil in the creation of these great stories, these great pieces of literature from our distant past. But I was delighted to interview a few days ago, Dr. Anne Rogerson from the University of Sydney. And without further ado, to talk all about Virgil, here's Anne. Anne, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Thank you very much. It's very nice to be here.

You're more than welcome and a huge thank you once again, because I know you're dialing in from Sydney for this episode and it's quite late in the day there. But it's to talk about a favourite topic of yours and one that I must admit I don't know that much about, so I'm really looking forward to learning more about this figure. Virgil. The legacy of this figure, Anne,

I know he's often ranked amongst one of Rome's greatest ever poets, but alongside what he actually wrote, the legacy of those works too, it's absolutely astonishing how they endure down to the present day and will continue to in the future too. That's right. One of the things that's so interesting about Virgil is that ever since he first wrote his poetry, it has been read continuously, not just in Rome, in Italy, where he was writing, but throughout what was the Roman Empire and then beyond that as well.

It's one of the foundational texts of the Western tradition. Of the Western tradition, that is preserved. And one thing I'd love to ask about, first of all, set the scene, big basic question, who was Virgil, Anne? Well, Tristan, we don't actually know very much about Virgil the person. Most of what we know about him is basically from little, I guess, what is thought to maybe be autobiographical clues in his own work, in his poetry. He wrote three main big poems, the Eclogues, the Georgics, and then the Aeneid. And they occasionally will mention things like where he came from, Mantua in Italy. But they're not autobiographical poems in the sense that, say, a love poem might be. They're not about his own experience,

or they don't even really pretend to be very much. So there are a few little clues about him, and we know his dates, more or less, in the sort of first century BC, as Octavian, who then became Augustus, took over Rome after many, many years of kind of conflict and civil war. That's when Virgil was writing and that's kind

of the politics behind his poetry is the imposition of peace after a long period of turmoil. But apart from that, most of what we have about Virgil from the ancient world is probably apocryphal. There's a biography that dates back to the time of Suetonius, about 100 years after Virgil was living. But it seems just to be a collection of made up stories about him. Right. That's interesting. So because it is in my notes here, the fact that there is this biography of Virgil, but from what you're saying there, Anne, actually, the veracity of that biography is very much doubted. It is very much so. And that's because some of the stories in

that biography are very typical of stories that you hear about important figures from the ancient world, whether those are sort of cultural figures like a great poet like Virgil or rulers, for example, or generals. And it doesn't seem like it can really be trusted. It looks like a patchwork of the sorts of things that you would say about someone who was culturally a giant. And so I know, okay, fine, perhaps it's dubious whether they're true or not, but what are some of these things

that are highlighted about Virgil, therefore, in these works? Well, I guess a lot of the stories about him that really stick with me are about his childhood and about how there were these signs, almost magical signs, even before he was born of what an amazing poet he was going to be. So there are some stories in the biographical tradition about his mother and how, you know, she had this dream when she was pregnant that, you know, she was going to give birth to someone who would grow like this great tree. And, you know, the tree is like a symbol of Virgil's future greatness

and the greatness of his work. That's a kind of an interesting tradition. You get those sorts of stories about miracles around the birth and early childhood of a lot of important figures from the ancient world, like Alexander the Great or Octavian, who became Augustus, and Julius Caesar and so on. But they really need to be taken with a huge grain of salt, that sort of stuff. I mean, as being someone who's read a lot around the Alexander myths and all of that,

I completely agree the amount of a shovel full of salt that you sometimes have to take for some of these stories, Anne. I mean, it's really interesting, the time period of Virgil. A bit more on that first, if you don't mind. Can you set the context of what the late Roman Republic is looking like at the time that Virgil is living? Oh, a mess is a very short answer. The Republic starts to break down in the sort of first century BC, which is when Virgil is born. And some of his poetry, which does seem to reflect his own life

experience is about the confiscation of land during the Triumvirate period. It sounds like his family's farm was confiscated and what this was the Roman rulers who were kind of victorious in civil wars taking land from Italian people and giving them to their soldiers as like basically payment for fighting in the war on their side. Sounds like Virgil's family lost their land in that process in what we call the confiscations or the prescriptions. And so he lived through a period of great instability with various sides for fighting against each other, Italian against Italian, basically, Romans against Romans. And he's very interested in his work in sort of thinking through both the turmoil of civil war,

but also the kind of almost like psychic trauma that that kind of conflict creates for people. And then also in his lifetime, Octavian kind of rises to the top and everybody else is kind of defeated. Mark Antony and Cleopatra are defeated at the Battle of Actium, another historical event that is included in Virgil's poetry. And by this point, Virgil's a young man and he's in Rome and he gets taken up in the kind of intellectual circle that builds up or gathers together around Octavian and Octavians they call him sometimes his culture minister which is not entirely an accurate phrase but this guy called Mycenaeus who's an equestrian who was one of Octavians and Augustus's great supporters and allies and also someone who was patron to a lot of poets, so not just Virgil but Horace, for example.

And Virgil's starting to write poetry or is writing poetry in that kind of group of very intellectually ambitious and very, very talented people around this newly kind of emergent and triumphant ruler. And then he doesn't spend all of his time in Rome. He's also down in Naples where there's a sort of philosophical school. But he's writing kind of at the heart, really, of political world of ancient Rome at a time when there's a great promise of peace because Octavian has managed

to kind of defeat his enemies and he's saying that he's going to bring this new golden age to Rome and bring peace where there have been many years of war, prosperity where there's been loss, and Romans will all be kind of one and the enemy will be outside rather than inside and all that kind of thing. And it's great hope.

But also I think it's important to sort of remember as we're reading this poetry, which talks a lot about hope and about the hope for the future and about the hope for peace after long years of war, is that that hope was very uncertain. Everything was really very contingent on Octavian kind of surviving and thriving and being strong enough to kind of build the empire that he then did build and to live for many years and create a stable new political system in which there was an

emperor on top, whereas before there'd always just been a senate. So Rome shifts in Augustus's time from being a republic to being a completely different form of government really. That was a successful kind of endeavour and Augustus lived for many years but as a young man he actually was not always in best of health. It wasn't clear that his dominance was going to last and Virgil's writing in that at a time of hope and fear equally I think. So that's the kind of political context that I think is really important for understanding his poetry. It's so interesting to highlight as you mentioned that mix of hope but also fear that something might still go wrong I also find it really interesting there that you

mentioned another famous name in that literary circle Horace do we therefore have evidence of the likes of people such as Horace and Virgil interacting, working together, cooperation in the literary sphere. They certainly seem to have actually to have been quite friendly with each other and reading each other's work and commenting on it and responding to it. Virgil, we have a poem of Horace's, a satire, which talks about a trip he makes with Mycenaeus and some of Mycenaeus' kind of circle and Virgil is mentioned there as a friend who's gone along on a journey they're going sort of south in Italy down south from Rome and you see similar themes appearing in in the poetry of Horace and Virgil and another contemporary whom you and your readers have probably heard of as well as Propertius who was one of the great love poets of the late Republic.

And Propertius actually writes a poem about the Aeneid before the Aeneid was published, but while it was being composed and Virgil was giving readings and sharing kind of highlights of this great epic he was working on. And Propertius writes this poem that says, great epic he was working on. And Propertius writes this poem that says, make way Romans, step aside Greeks, something greater than the Iliad is being born. And what he means is that this great epic that Virgil's writing is going to be even better than the Homeric epics that it models itself on. You've put a bit of a tease out there, therefore, Anne, and we'll get to that big climax of the works, as it were, as our chat goes on. I'd like

to kind of take a step back now though and talk through almost his rise to literary prominence with Virgil. I mean what are some of the earliest works that we know of from Virgil? The earliest work that we can be sure is Virgil's is the Eclogues which is a collection of pastoral poems and that's by pastoral that's just a label that's given to a sort of poetry that each poem is not too long. They are set sort of off in sort of farmland slash forests on the edges, right, of the rural world where shepherds, usually shepherds, are kind of looking after their flocks,

but also seem to have a lot of time to sing songs to each other and again, like in competition with each other. I mean, having said that, I said that's the earliest work that we can be sure of. There is also a little collection of so-called sort of juvenilia, which doesn't seem to have actually been by Virgil, but written by other people after Virgil died in sort of in his style and through many hundreds of years was actually attached to the Virgilian corpus and people thought that he wrote that stuff as well. But now people think he didn't write that kind of stuff,

the early works. And this idea of rural living, which you do seem to see in the eclogues, rural living, which you do seem to see in the eclogues. Is this a key symbol, a key theme that we see in Virgil's works, from the eclogues and from there on? Yes, Virgil's poetry is really, it's a beautiful celebration of the Italian kind of landscape and countryside. And you see that through the eclogues into the Georgics, which is his next big work, which is a didactic poem about farming and cultivation of the land. And then into the

Aeneid, his great epic about the foundation of the Roman race, much of which is set in kind of prehistoric Italy. And you get a sense of a poet who really loved the countryside and its trees and its wildlife. Trees and wildlife. And let's keep on the Eclogues a bit longer there, Anne. I'd love to learn a bit more about this. I mean, what is the influence for Virgil, do we think, with the creation of these poems? Is he looking back on Hellenistic writers, poets before him and then getting the inspiration for his poems from that? What do we know around the creation of the eclogues? So the eclogues were modelled on a set of poems called the idylls by a Greek poet called Theocritus. And you're absolutely right, that's Hellenistic. So,

you know, several hundred years earlier in the great tradition of Greek poetry. And some of the eclogues are almost translations of Theocritus' idylls and some of them are sort of, I guess, riffs on the themes of Theocritus, inspired by. They're very firmly within a tradition of poetry and it's not a Roman or Italian tradition, it's a Greek tradition, which is the case for a lot of Roman poetry, that it looks back to Greek models as much as to any kind of native tradition.

Right, okay. So are there any particular excerpts from the eclogues that you find particularly striking that help in the story? Are there any particular parts of these poems that come to the fore straight to mind? Well, there's two things that really stick with me about the eclogues, or two poems. One I've already kind of alluded to loosely it's it's a conversation between two shepherds and one of them is leaving the countryside and the other one is is staying and it's about the great sadness of the separation of the two friends but particularly the sad fate of the one who has to go and he has to go because the soldier has come and taken his his land and you get the kind of

real sense of sort of heartbreak of having to leave the land and that's the one that sort of makes people think that Virgil and Virgil's family must have experienced this very very thing that happened to lots of people at the time. The other of the eclogues that really sticks with me and with a lot of people, perhaps his most famous poem is one which is much more hopeful. And it's about the birth of a child who's going to bring back a golden age, an age of kind of miracles. You know, there'll be multicolored sheep and sheep with multicolored wool and the ground will be sort of abundant and everything will be flowering and blooming and fruiting and what have you. And for a long time, people who read Virgil through late antiquity into the Middle Ages and the

Renaissance thought that Virgil there was talking prophetically about the birth of Christ because the time is roughly right. You know, Virgil's writing, but just BC. He probably wasn't, but that's the poem that is sort of behind the tradition of the Christian Virgil, the proto-Christian Virgil. That's probably one reason why when Dante writes his great poem, so this is an Italian medieval poet where he goes down into the circles of hell, he has a guide, and it's Virgil who's his guide. And Virgil can be the guide because he is this kind of pre-Christian sage who is greatly respected for his wisdom and learning, despite the fact that he's a pagan, because they thought he had some kind of innocence that Christ was coming. That is very, very cool indeed. I had no idea about that whatsoever, Anne.

Also, I love the idea that they associate a golden age with multi-colored sheep wool i mean of all things it's absolutely okay well let's move on because i know we're going to get to the Aeneid but of course you also mentioned that other key set of poems associated with Virgil which is the next step so talk to me about the Georgics how do do the Georgics come about? Do we know anything about their creation? The Georgics are a didactic poem in four books, and they're written in the same meter. The meter is like the rhythm of poetry, the same meter as epic. And there's a great tradition of didactic poetry, again, that goes back to Greece, but which also before Virgil had a great Roman proponent, I guess. So the

earliest Greek didactic poetry is by a poet called Hesiod, who's roughly the same time as Homer. So this is, you're talking a long, long time before Virgil. He also wrote about farming in one of his poems. So the influence of Hesiod is kind of woven through the Georgics. The great Roman didactic poet is Lucretius, who was sort of a generation older than Virgil, so not that much earlier than Virgil. And his epic poem wasn't about farming, it was about philosophy and Epicurean philosophy and why you shouldn't be afraid of death, the nature of the soul and that kind of thing. But Virgil takes the didactic genre and turns it back to agriculture, but it's not really like an agricultural manual. You'd be hard-pressed

to successfully farm, even on a very small scale, just using georgics, although there's a lot of information in there, but it's more using farming and agriculture as a way of thinking about life and man's relationship to nature and politics again can sort of the benevolent control of nature and the danger of war and to that might disrupt you know profitable agriculture and so in regards to didactic for the more well for forgive my ignorance but what is didactic didactic just means educational that it's just another word for teaching basically so if someone's didactic they're just trying to teach you something the didactic poetry is poetry that sets out to educate its readers and it's so it's poetry in which the the narrator of the poem will often adopt the role

of a teacher and will speak directly to the reader and you should do this, or we always do this because this is the right way to do something. It's a funny kind of genre, really, but it's one that is surprisingly kind of popular in the Roman period. And also, as I said, it goes back again to the Greek world. I love those Greek links there. Well, let's focus in on the material of the Georgics itself. You mentioned already four books and you mentioned how it's centered around farming and agriculture. How does he therefore divide this topic up into these four different books? Well, some of it's about animal husbandry and some of it's about trees and some of it's about sort of crops and fields and then towards the end in the final book he actually starts and this is where you sort of see the influence of Lucretius coming

on at the very end is this sort of this climax which is a plague comes and what you do with about sort of illness and disaster so it's a bit like a handbook in that it's divided by kind of types of farming I guess but then it's illustrated bit like a handbook in that it's divided by kind of types of farming, I guess, but then it's illustrated by exciting stories along the way, particularly at the end. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway, visit Chief Poetin as he prepares for war with the British,

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So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. history here. And why does this format, does it prove very successful? Does it prove, what do we know about its reception? I mean, why is it so highly regarded as this epic didactic poem? Partly because the poetry itself is very beautiful and partly because it has very strong sort of moral overtone to it. So there's a sense in the poem that it's not a dry handbook, it somehow holds out a key to living life well, and that's always attractive. The Georgics, I mean, all of Virgil's poetry,

it's remained famous and read over 2000 years now, but all of the poems, you know, they have, I guess they have their fluctuations in popularity. The Georgics were particularly, well, they were popular in the early 20th century, perhaps more than now. So there's, there's kind of quite a lot of work being done on the sort of the way that they were read and taken up by people in the early 20th century, which perhaps is no surprise if you've got a period of, and this is, this is particularly in Europe and in England, to periods of war and a yearning for finding some kind of key and answer to let's get back to the land and let's all be productive and have enough to eat, no more

rationing and impose order on the landscape that will also impose order on society. So that in times when those questions are paramount, that tends to be a time when the Georgics gets read a lot. And that's interesting there, Anne, because if we focus on contemporary Romans who would have read this poetry, I mean, who was Virgil's target audience at the time that he's writing? Well, so he's writing for the educated elite. So he's writing largely for aristocratic families and for equestrians. So this is like the second tier, I guess, of society. But his writing, I think his primary audience is probably his close intellectual circle, although his poetry is much more widely circulated.

But it's very densely elusive poetry. It's to sort of fully understand what's going on in the poems would require perhaps more knowledge of Greek and Roman literature than anyone currently living has, right? It's packed with illusion and with references to what now is quite obscure little bits of this Greek poet and that Roman response to that Greek poet and Virgil mashing it together and making something new. They are exercises in intellectual kind of pyrotechnics almost, as much as they are very entertaining, very, very beautiful

poems. I guess like all great poets, he's able to be appreciated no matter how much, you know, how much knowledge you bring to it, because there's something there for everybody. But there's a lot there. A lot, therefore, is contemporary poets and for cultured people like Mycenaeus, his patron, people who really know the literature he's responding to. So as close circle as it were at the time, Anne. I mean, one last question from me, and this is going on a bit of a tangent before we get to the Aeneid but we've had people on the podcast in the past highlighting the importance of farming of agriculture for roman republican soldiers for roman citizens sometimes hundreds of years before let's say the time of augustus the pyrrhic war and so on and how that continues that seems to be like a key part of the Republican mindset

for many, many figures over the centuries. Is there, and of course, in their figures like Cincinnati, aren't there, and returning to the plough, with Virgil's focus on the Georgics, or well, on agriculture, on farming, on the benefits of rural lifestyle, is there an appeal going back to this time of when the Roman citizens were enjoying that the life of the farmer and the virtues of the farmer? Do you think there's

any heralding back of that in Virgil's works? Yes, I would say I think you're right, absolutely right about that, the kind of republican valorization of the farmer as the figure of the Roman or the farmer slash soldier, I guess. And as you said, like Cincinnati, you put your plow down and you get your sword and then you go back to your farm when you've done your military duty. And so the farmer is the great figure of the Roman. And perhaps that's one reason why Virgil writes this didactic poem about farming, because it's really about Rome, because we all know that Romans are farmers. And it's important probably to remember as well that when he's writing the Georgics, this is a period where the Roman agricultural landscape is changing a bit.

There's not so much sort of small farming going on because some really very wealthy people are buying up the little farms and creating mega plantations is the wrong word but huge scale farming where one person with revenues or I guess all funnel through to one person or one family and the people doing the farming may not be not their own land anymore and there are poems by Horace Virgil's contemporary that kind of lament that and the loss of kind of identity, Roman identity, that is a result from that. So in a way, it's kind of the Georgics, I guess, you could think of them almost as both a nostalgic look back

at a time before people's farms started being taken away from them, but also a manifesto, I guess, that agriculture is at the heart of Roman-ness, that it's important to remember that the Romans or the Italians are kind of this nation of farmers. This nation of farmers, indeed. Well, thank you for allowing that slight tangent there, and relevant tangent, but tangent nonetheless,

because let's move on to the big one. I know this is one of your pet favorite topics of them all so we've got 10 or 15 minutes to focus on this sorry i know you'd want more time but okay the Aeneid within Virgil's life set the context like when and how does this great story come about why does Virgil decide that his next story is the Aeneid? I wish we knew. So the Aeneid is about the foundation of the Roman race, and it takes its name from its hero, Aeneas, who's a survivor of the Trojan War. He's a nephew of King Priam, the king of Troy. And he takes the Trojan refugees, some of the survivors, on a long journey to try and find a new homeland

to settle. And eventually they come to Italy, and eventually they manage to settle there, but after another war, which is kind of like a replay of the Trojan War on Italian shores against the native Italians. Why does Virgil write that particular story? Well, one answer that is an answer that's been around for a very long time is that he does it to praise Augustus through the story of his ancestors. And that the reason that Augustus is connected to Aeneas is because Aeneas has a son called Eulus. And Augustus is a member of the family that call themselves the Gens Iulia, the Julian family, and they claimed they were descended from this great mythic hero. So a bit like why would, say, a British writer write an epic about King Arthur if the current monarch claimed to descend from Arthur? That would be the answer. So the Aeneid, it's kind of about

Augustus in that it's about Augustus's ultimate ancestor, but he's a very complex figure, Aeneas, as a hero. He's not just this kind of perfect individual who shines a sort of radiant glory on his descendants by getting everything right and by being successful in all of his endeavours. He's sometimes despairing, he gets lost, doesn't know what he's doing, he needs a lot of help from the gods to kind of find out where it is that he has to go. He suffers great kind of personal loss on the way and he has to kind of not only leave Troy,

which is his homeland and which at one point he says if he had any choice in where he could be, he'd be back in Troy. And he says that even as he's journeying inexorably towards Italy, that he loses his homeland, he loses his wife, who disappears as Troy kind of overrun by the Greeks. He falls in love with a Carthaginian queen, Dido, and then has to leave her because the gods won't let him stay in Carthage. And then he gets to Italy and has to fight another another war and he's really overwarmed by this stage in his story and then right at the end of the poem there's this very troubling moment. His last act is to kill an enemy soldier like fine on the battlefield but the soldier has surrendered and so he in a fit of rage kills someone who's lying at his feet. So as a character to reflect entirely positively on Augustus is a funny choice

and people have thought about what that means for a very long time and consensus at the moment is that there are multiple perspectives woven into the Aeneid and one is about the glory of the Augustan lineage and the glory of Rome and Rome's divinely ordained rise to empire and dominance in the Mediterranean. And that is certainly one strand in the poem. You absolutely can see evidence of that. But the competing one is a strand that says, well, heroes are imperfect. There's great sacrifice and loss involved in success. People die, people get angry, people mourn. There's a lot of mourning in the Aeneid for dead soldiers. And that's the cost of empire. And that's something that shouldn't be forgotten. And I think that sort of double voice, the sort of celebration of success, and the acknowledgement

of everything that has gone, that has been lost, or broken to attain that success is a product of Virgil's time, of living through civil war and turmoil and hoping for a better future, but knowing that a lot's not there anymore that you would like to be there. Is there sort of a relatable nature of these figures in the fact, as you mentioned there, Anne, they're not perfect. They have imperfections. They're not this absolute hero figure. They are human like everyone else. Yes. Not everybody finds Aeneas a particularly relatable hero because he is this great figure of the Roman term is pietas. It's a bit hard to kind of translate into English, but it means something like loyal duty towards the gods, towards your country and

towards your family and dutiful service, even at the face of great personal cost, and also in the face of a great cost to others, like we have already mentioned Dido, the Carthaginian queen, with whom Aeneas falls in love, and then whom he abandons, she ends up killing herself. She blames him, and so do a lot of readers of the Aeneid, and so have they over the centuries. He can relate to him in that he's a figure of human weakness, as we all are, but some people find him a bit cold. And it's largely one of the moments where people really don't like Aeneas is when he leaves Dido and how he leaves Dido. I mean, well, let's focus in on that a bit more, Anne, because the Dido figure, of all figures in the Aeneid, she seems to be the most renowned, most famous alongside Aeneas, or perhaps in some cases, she's more famous than Aeneas, because she does, as you've hinted at there,

you know, the sorry story of Dido, it's such a key part of the Aeneid narrative, isn't it? It is. Very interestingly, so the Aeneid is an epic of 12 books. Dido appears in the first book, which is where Aeneas and his Trojan followers arrive in Carthage. And then the entirety of book four is the story about Aeneas and Dido and their love affair, which they first sort of try to keep secret, and then the word gets out, and eventually the gods find out about it, which is Jupiter who's the king of the gods and he's kind of keeping an eye on Aeneas's kind of achievement of his Roman destiny sends the messenger god Mercury down and to tell Aeneas you've got to leave Dido and then well he prepares to leave and she finds out and there are

these great emotional scenes of Dido begging Aeneas to stay not to leave her or just to stay for a little while and he doesn't he can't but she's the most vivid of the characters and most sort of I guess she's one of the larger than life characters in the Aeneid she's this great tragic heroine and she's modeled on on the heroines of the tragic stage and she's been enormously I guess mostines of the tragic stage. And she's been enormously, I guess, most popular and kind of engrossing for readers of the Aeneid for a very long time. So you get writers like Saint Augustine saying that when he was a young boy, a schoolboy, he wept for Diderot. So she's the one who tugs on the heartstrings. And what's interesting is that Virgil didn't

need to write her story in Aeneas' story, because Greek and Roman myth, and particularly the myths about these foundational figures, the figures who establish cities or establish races like the Romans, there are multiple competing threads, I guess, in these mythical narratives. And Virgil is picking and choosing the ones that he's going to relate about his hero Aeneas. But the Dido thread, which is pre-Virgilian, is not set in the same time period as the Aeneas leaving Troy and founding the Roman race thread. So he's done something slightly anachronistic

in weaving those two together, if that makes sense. Actually, those two stories should be separated by at least a generation. So he pulls Dido in, makes her so important. I think partly to really bring to the fore that message I was talking about earlier of the fact that there is great cost, there is great sort of human suffering associated with the actions of people, men who win wars, who found cities. And she's interesting too,

because she's queen who rules her own people, right? Because her husband is dead. So she too, like Aeneas is in exile. Her husband was murdered by her brother. And so she has to flee where she comes from. So she's just building a city in Carthage when Aeneas arrives and establishing temples and law courts and so on. And that's one of the reasons she's so initially attractive to Aeneas is that she's doing exactly what he wants to do. He wants to settle and build a new city. And there is this great queen who's already doing it.

So she's a victim of Aeneas, but she's also a model of someone successfully doing something that he doesn't actually ever do in the epic. He wants to do it. It's his destiny to found a new city. But 12 books later in the Aeneid, and all he's done is kill someone. And his city founding lies in the future. The story of Dido deserves a separate podcast in its own right. And so I wish I could ask so many more questions about it, like her Carthaginian

nature and so much more. But we've got to move on as we start to wrap up now I mean maybe one last question on the Aeneid actually from what you were saying there it's so interesting to look at parallels such as I'll always go back to this example I love this example of how following Alexander the Great's death the general Ptolemy creates a story linking him to the last native Egyptian pharaoh, Nectanebo II, to legitimize his and Alexander's rule over Egypt. And it sounds like with the Aeneid story and the character of Aeneas and his son Euless, it's once again, can we argue that it's to legitimize Augustus as the first emperor of Rome, to say that he is the right person to be the ruler of this

empire? I think you definitely could say that. That's part of what's going on. It's certainly an aspect of the Aeneid that Augustus himself picks up on after it's published, which is shortly following Virgil's kind of premature death. And there's this story, which may or may not be true, that on his deathbed, Virgil asked for the Aeneid to be destroyed because it wasn't quite finished and he wasn't perfect. So that can't be left to posterity. And Augustus steps in and says, that's not going to happen and appoints two literary executives and it gets kind of polished off and published. but almost immediately Augustus is really pushing his link to Aeneas via Euless much more than he has done in the past. So when he builds the great, what's called the Forum Augustum, the Forum of Augustus, it's kind of decorative scheme is the early kings of Rome, statues of Rome's great

heroes around the sides and there's this great statue of Romulus, the first king of Rome's great heroes around the sides. And there's this great statue of Romulus, the first king of Rome. And mirroring the great statue of Romulus, there's an enormous statue of Aeneas with his son, Ulus, and his father as well as they escape from Troy. This sort of great image that Virgil in the Aeneid has made iconic about Aeneas

as the saviour of a family line who escapes from Troy with the dynasty intact and sets out to establish it in another place. And how mad, just from what you're saying there, that Virgil, perhaps on his deathbed, didn't actually want the Aeneid, perhaps his most famous work, to be published. Virgil was such a perfectionist as a poet. We have this story that he wrote three lines a day, which is like maybe 20 words a day kind of thing. Yeah, don't tell an author that, yeah. It took him years to write the Aeneid and it's clearly not finished. There are a couple of lines that are only like half written. So what are called half lines. There

are a couple of places where it's a little bit repetitive. So they're not wanting it to be published. That's probably the mark of a supreme artist. Like my work's not perfect. I'm not ready to let it go. But I have to say, I'm very glad that Augustus stepped in and stopped the Aeneid from being burned. Absolutely quite right. I mean, and this has been absolutely brilliant. One last question. I could ask so many others, but the legacy of Virgil, it lives on with later Roman poets.

And of course, as we highlighted at the start, it then continues on, well, down to the present day in the Western tradition, doesn't it? It does. So you can see Virgil's influence from almost immediately after the Aeneid comes out. I guess his first

great poetic successor is the poet Ovid, whom your listeners probably know as the author of the Metamorphoses and of great sort of love poetry as well. But because Virgil is taught in schools, well, from the first century onwards, everyone reads Virgil, some better than others. Everyone knows at least a bit of Virgil with anyone with any kind of education and if you haven't read the Aeneid you've certainly got you know so in the middle ages or in the renaissance a handy little stock of quotes from Virgil a bit like you know we have quotes from Shakespeare that we almost half don't recognize as Shakespearean everyone's got a little bit of Virgil. And all great writers are reading

Virgil because he's this model of poetry and of poetic diction and style that you encounter in school, but that I think if you yourself are a writer, you return to because he's so good. Well, Anne, with that thought, we'll wrap it up now. Last but certainly not least, you've mentioned the figure Ulysses already and his story, part of his role in the Aeneid. And you've written a book about this figure, if I'm not mistaken. I have, yes. I wrote a book called Virgil's Ascanius, Imagining the Future in the Aeneid, which is about Ulysses because Ulysses has two names. Ulysses is the name that links to the Augustan family. He also has the name Ascanius, which is what I chose to

call him in the book. That was the product of my PhD at the University of Cambridge some years ago now, but a great joy to write. And no doubt indeed. Well, Anne, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you very much for having me. Well, there you go. There was Dr Annegerson talking you through giving you an overview of the life and works of virgil i hope you enjoyed the episode now last thing from me if you'd be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on spotify on apple podcasts wherever you get your podcast from well we the whole team we greatly appreciate it as we continue our mission to share these incredible stories from our distant past with you to give them the limelight that they deserve. But that's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.

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