In killing Turnus, Aeneas throws off the dark specter of Greece haunting Rome and vindicates Cato the Elder. The liveliness of the Aeneid, its blushing and passionate characters and their actions, were drawn from the realities of history and Rome’s lived experience. as Italy and the Lavinian shores. They were not Greek. While Homer was providing a new poetic metaphysic in his epic, Virgil’s project was just as ambitious if not grander in reaching into the wellspring of memory and Roman self-consciousness to fill his epic with allusions and direct references to the very images and stories which moved the Roman heart and soul; indeed, the soul of the West, precisely because of Aeneas’ triumph over Turnus and his “troops of every stripe” was the victory of Western civilization over its competitors. Cato believed that Greek softness would destroy the traditional values of the Roman people. But at last he succeeded in founding his city, and installing the gods of his race in the Latin land: and that was the origin of the Latin nation, the lords of Alba, and the proud battlements of Rome. gods to be motivated by emotions recognizable to humans—jealousy, In ancient times Lavinium had a close association with the nearby Laurentum. Προμηθεύς, ὃς εὗρε πρῶτος τὴν…. Later, it was called Laurentum after the laurel discovered by Latinus, as he took charge following his brother’s death and increased the city. Eliot rightly called “our classic.” Virgil’s epic will remain the quintessential Western epic, so long as there is a West whose patrimony runs through the same history and personages that moved the Aeneid from start to finish. topping off the armies rides Camilla, sprung from the Volscian people” (7.922-934). Virgil’s ability to draw from such a diverse and extensive wellspring of memory and consciousness testifies to his genius and the importance of story, memory, and consciousness to the Roman people. Again, in reading or listening to these words the Roman reader would have instantly known what Virgil was describing and deliberately evoking. Virgil’s question, “Can anger / Black as this prey on for so long—until line 131—emphasizes The featured image is “Venus Receiving the Arms of Aeneas from Vulcan” (c. 1630) by Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It awakens and enlightens the mind and moves the soul to pity, compassion, and anger all the same. Instead of attributing forces of good and evil to the sane bene addidit ‘Lavina’, ut ostenderet ad quam partem Italiae venisset Aeneas, quia et multi alii eo tempore ad Italiam venerant, ut Capys, qui Capuam, Polites, qui Politorium condiderunt. against the forces of fate, which have ordained Aeneas’s mission well aware of the seers and schooled in times to come . victory over the nations of the Dawn and blood-red shores According to Roman mythology, which links Lavinium more securely to Rome, the city was named by Aeneas[3] in honor of Lavinia, daughter of Latinus, king of the Latins, and his wife, Amata. "I sing of arms and of a man: his fate had made him fugitive: he was the first to journey from the coasts of Troy as far as Italy and the Lavinian shores Across the lands and waters he was battered beneath the violence of the high ones for the savage Juno's unforgetting anger." The Latins were diverse and the peninsula reminiscent of Hellenic Greece in being a collection of city-states and colonies. The Fosso di Pratica was re-routed around the end of a runway; however, today's small brook is in no way compatible with the concept of a port. we learn much about him. As Rome expanded outside of her seven hills she came into a series of deadly conflicts with the neighboring peoples. Rome, we must recall, started out as a single city among many cities in the Italian Peninsula. The basis for the port, the only one between Ostia and Anzio, was evidently the mouth of the Numicus river. The relationship between Aeneas and Dido is heartbreaking, to say the least. Romans reckoned the will of the gods to be the cause of all events the poet asks the muse to explain the causes of Juno’s ire. The vanity, pride, generosity, and loyalty, for example. The shield, then, bearing in it the labor of Vulcan and telling the story of Rome’s triumph over the world, entirely foreshadows and prefigures the subsequent thousand years of history up to the time of Virgil and Augustus Caesar. Your donation to the Institute in support of The Imaginative Conservative is tax deductible to the extent allowed by law. that will plague Aeneas throughout his quest: the “sleepless rage” We know from Virgil’s use of the past tense into shape with a mother’s tongue. First, it was called Lavinum after Lavinus, the brother of Latinus. To be sure, he was right to add ‘Lavina’, so that he could show what part of Italy Aeneas had come to, because many other men had come to Italy at that time, as for example Capys (who founded Capua) and Polites (who founded Politorium). He voluntarily went into exile in Lavinium. In Vergil's account, King Latinus is warned by his father Faunus in a dream oracle that his daughter is not to marry a Latin: The clashing of Europe and Asia in the Aeneid evokes the exotic adventures and “grueling war[s]” against Parthia, Egypt, and the Jews which had recently transpired. “Men in their prime from Argos, ranks of Auruncans, Rutulians, Sicanian veterans on in years, Sacranians in columns, Labicians bearing their painted shields . The grandest image of Virgil’s Aeneid is the shield forged by the god Vulcan in the eighth book of Aeneas’ adventure to “Lavinian shores and Italian soil.” Virgil pays homage to Homer, his master and mentor, who also describes a grand image on a shield forged by the gods for Achilles. The work is broken up into two halves, separated by the purgatorial descent of Aeneas to the afterlife in the sixth book, which serves as the intermediary bridge between the two. founding Rome, to which Virgil alludes in the image of walls in Please consider donating now. spends the first half of the epic wandering in search of a new home In an age when other histories of Rome were being written, Virgil had the audacity to tap into the living wellspring of the Roman psyche and tell a tale that T.S. What are you waiting for?” In doing so he united past and present together. Additionally, the fact that Turnus is the leader of the Latin armies also represents the complicated legacy of Greek colonization and the Roman-Hellenic Wars where Rome eventually triumphed over the sons of Achilles and Alexander. first mission in the epic, to emigrate from Troy to Italy, as a fate Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words). The triumph of Augustus Caesar at the Battle of Actium and the restoration of order to a disordered world is, therefore, the continuation of what Aeneas had begun in bringing order to the disordered world of Italy. Indeed, he offered a comforting future from this union of past and present in challenging and changing times. Lavinian shores – hurled about endlessly by land and sea, by the will of the gods, by cruel Juno’s remorseless anger, long suffering also in war, until he founded a city and brought his gods to Latium: from that the Latin people Aeneas’ duty, his laboring duty, is to bring civilization to Italy (and the world) through the sword and shield. Aeneas’ battle against Turnus, the Latins, and the barbarians who aid him, is nothing less than a mytho-poetic recapitulation of the memories of Rome’s historical battles against the Latins to unify Italy, her conflicts with the Greeks, and the final destruction “of the Orient” and its “troops of every stripe,” which marked the triumph of civilization and the will of the gods.