Virgil Lives!

...Epicurus was far too optimistic about our ability to tame these demons, and in his desire to spread this philosophy to the entire populace, Lucretius threatens the civic order...

...But something political seems to be at work in the dismissal of Virgil, as well...

...Fortunately, Augustus overruled this dying wish and had a pair of literary scholars bring out the text summatim emendata, with only slight editing...

...Roman, remember by your strength to rule Earth's peoples—for your arts are to be these: To pacify, impose the rule of law, To spare the conquered, battle down the proud...

...The first half of the Aeneid, in this reading, is Virgil's Odyssey...

...It may be true that the radically rational philosopher is freed from fear of both the gods and death—while limiting himself to rationally moderate pleasures...

...The catastrophic decline of reading knowledge in Latin among the generally educated in twentieth-century England and America also contributed to the shrinking of Virgil's natural audience...

...In Homer, Odysseus refuses Circe's offer of immortality because of his loyalty to Penelope and Ithaca...

...Eliot tried to resuscitate the Latin poet, declaring that, "Our classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil...

...Not much of the dominant classical systems, but part of Virgil's genius is to have discovered another ethos, one that acknowledges something like divine providence in history, especially in the fated nature of Rome...

...That would enable the philosopher to achieve his proper happiness—and the masses to enjoy as much good fortune as they are capable of...

...For these I set no limits, world or time, But make the gift of empire without end...

...We owe the poem's survival to Augustus...

...Between the imperial reading of Virgil and the general anti-imperial feeling of the twentieth century, however, the Aeneid's high place in the Western literary canon was doomed...

...His main virtue is piety—something without precedent in the Greek stories of Achilles and Odysseus...

...he has been affected by Epicurean materialism, but is not wholly certain of the ultimate truth about nature...

...Not because seeing other people struggle is sweet to us, But because the fact that we ourselves are free from such ills strikes us as pleasant...

...In this, perhaps the most famous passage in the poem, the classical arts and sciences are not rejected, but are left to other peoples, subordinated in Virgil's vision to the god's specific demands of the sacred city...

...One reason for his hesitation was his worry about what the city he envisioned, even if it was a kind of holy city, might lead to...

...His closeness to Augustus (and the emperor's well-known desire to maintain a fagade of classical tradition while covertly recasting it in Roman imperial form) has deeply shaped approaches to the epic, for good and later for bad, over the centuries...

...Adler believes that Virgil is powerfully grappling not only with Homer, but with Lucretius, his Latin predecessor in the first century b.c...

...Part of the explanation for Virgil's modern decline is classicists' general preference for Greek sources over Latin—which began slowly in the Renaissance and gathered irresistible momentum through the sheer power of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German scholarship...

...In a world where even the highest god is characterized as committing rapes and abductions, what hope is there for a perpetual peace under a human emperor...

...in the eastern Italian port city known today as Brindisi...

...BY ROBERT ROYAL In standard histories of literature these days, Virgil tends to be characterized as a fairly gifted versifier and coiner of a few memorable phrases: "Arms and the man I sing," "Love conquers all," "I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts...

...For example, the arms he sings are not simply a continuation of the old heroic ethos of Homer...

...In Virgil, Aeneas both braves death in battle and seeks a new city for the Trojan gods...

...And the fourth Eclogue had a curious career: Written in the last few decades before Christ, it predicted the birth of a miraculous boy who would restore the mythical Golden Age...

...Born in 70 b.c., Publius Vergilius Maro had a long and close history with the future emperor—in some legends, going all the way back to Virgil's youth, in which he is supposed, as a farm boy from the northern Italian city of Mantua, to have cured some of Augustus' President of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., Robert Royal is the author of Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy, Divine Spirituality...

...But from the nineteenth century on, Virgil has faded somehow—until he has reached near dismissal, in our own age, as the poor man's Homer: Caesar Augustus needed a heroic poem to justify his rule over the Roman Empire, we have been told, and Virgil obligingly wrote one for him...

...Later Christian readers applied this to Jesus and regarded Virgil as a prophet and magician...

...Even though he announces in the first few lines of the Aeneid that Aeneas has to bring gods into Italy, force and religion run up against a limit in the classical cosmos because the neediness of all living beings finds no final remedy among men or gods: "It would be folly," Adler writes, "to hope for the disarming of the erotic passions by reason in any but the rarest philosopher, and certainly in any ruler: Dido in spite of her philosophic tutor, certainly pious Aeneas, and ultimately even Jupiter himself are subject to the furor of these passions...

...that city would be subject to perpetual danger from neighbors, as were all the squabbling city-states of classical Greece...

...But Adler believes Virgil detected a fatal flaw in the Epicurean system, which he presents most memorably in the contrast between Aeneas and Queen Dido, and between Rome and Carthage...

...Contrast this, as Vergil's Empire does, with Dante...

...A perfectionist, on his deathbed he asked friends to burn the manuscript...

...But the twelve books of the Aeneid, on which Virgil spent his last decade, were quickly judged a masterpiece of Latin literature...

...In many ways, we are still living in it...

...Every schoolboy once knew a fuller story...

...After World War II, T.S...

...Adler follows the trend in some recent classical studies of spelling the name "Vergil," more closely reflecting the Latin...

...A few recent scholars, partly reflecting contemporary sensibilities, have detected ambiguities in the poem that raise the question of whether Virgil was, in his heart of hearts, a true believer in empire...

...Virgil, still linked in many ways to the old pagan mythology, lacks any such notion of absolute love...

...Trying to solve the problem of clashing city-states in his own time, Dante argues in his essay on monarchy, implausibly, that possession of universal empire would quell the emperor's temptations to tyranny...

...And Virgil hints that there are, humanly speaking, perhaps even seeds of self-dissolution in the most providential and perfect of empires...

...horses...

...Thus, Adler argues, Virgil is consciously seeking to surpass Homer as well as Lucretius...

...But her sensitive and penetrating reading of many passages in the Aeneid does not reduce Virgil to a Procrustean bed of Straussian proportions...

...Yet Virgil does not stop even here...

...The traditional English spelling of the poet's name is "Virgil...

...The shortcomings of Epicureanism, however, convince him beyond all doubt that arms and religion are needed to remedy evil tendencies in human nature...

...But such philosophers are so rare as to be of almost no social effect...

...Anything less would be radically deficient in establishing a stable peace, given the nature of the world and human nature...

...His four books of the Georgics—a seven-year effort on agricultural subjects—won him further praise...

...But Jupiter, Rome's greatest god, promises early in the poem (in Robert Fitzgerald's translation): Young Romulus Will take the leadership, build walls of Mars, And call by his own name his people Romans...

...Epicureans could claim heroic virtue in rejecting the consolations of religion, even if they lived relatively unstrenuous lives...

...If Virgil had been a Straussian avant la lettre, he might have contented himself with suggesting that for the sake of private tranquillity the philosopher should connive at public religiosity, even though false, as a means of restraining and educating the masses...

...Virgil's powerful mind actually leads him to recast almost all the usual elements of this debate...

...Indeed, he invites his own destruction, for the retired life of the Epicurean philosopher depends upon the existence of a peaceful city, which the passions unleashed by disbelief in the gods will not produce...

...This book is stunningly original...

...That, Vergil's Empire notes, is certainly one way to confront the fear of death, but it is ultimately as rare as the way of the Epicurean philosophy...

...If Adler is right, Virgil had ambitions at least as grand as his Greek predecessor—and with good reason...

...The Aeneid—his epic poem about the founding of ancient Rome, in ten thousand dactylic hexameter lines—was once the dominant classical epic in the West, and Dante justly made Virgil his first guide in the Divine Comedy...

...Something of a secret teaching may be glimpsed behind the imperial screen, she argues, which emerges most clearly near the center of the text, where Aeneas' descent into the underworld signals the shift from wandering to battles...

...Nor does the turn to domestic pleasures satisfy Virgil...

...The city that Aeneas had to found would be universal, as Jupiter promised, without limit in space or time...

...There are many signs that the young Virgil was an Epicurean and that he never wholly repudiated that philosophy in adulthood...

...Thus, Lucretius begins the second book of De Rerum Natura: Pleasant it is, when over the great sea the winds shake the waters, To gaze down from shore on the trials of others...

...But if we also reject the Homeric combination of martial valor and human domesticity—a combination traditionally embraced by the Romans—what's left...

...Nonetheless, Dante's vision of the Christian God does provide "a term to men's desire or love in a fully adequate object," says Adler...

...Eve Adler, a classicist at Middlebury College in Vermont, may have just changed all that with her new book, Vergil's Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid...

...The Eclogues, ten pastoral poems, were so obviously superb that Cicero called him Rome's second greatest hope (reserving first place to himself...

...The damage, however, was done: Except for this mop-up operation on a few critical questions, Virgil's position in literature seemed fixed—at a moderate height—forever...

...It is no accident that the modern equivalent of Epicureans— materialistic, disdainful of religion— tend to be overly optimistic about human nature and to resist the idea that we need war or other forms of coercion to restrain vice...

...As Aeneas' dead father tells him in Hades: Others will cast more tenderly in bronze Their breathing figures, I can well believe, And bring more lifelike portraits out of marble...

...The first great poet after Rome's clear emergence as the classical superpower, Lucretius presents a problem—what we might call the anxiety of influence—for all the Augustan Golden Age poets: Horace, Virgil, Sex-tus Propertius, Ovid...

...Almost always, those who free themselves from traditional religion find themselves, like poor Dido, subject to furor: anger and lust...

...it tells of a Trojan warrior named Aeneas, who wanders the Mediterranean after the fall of Troy and eventually founds the city of Rome...

...His new vision of piety and Aeneas' fateful journey have echoes (which Adler does not mention) of Abraham setting out for the Promised Land at the divine command, another point of contact with the Biblical tradition...

...So new and radical was this shift in the ancient world, Adler claims, that it raised the question of whether Virgilian piety—a mixture of duty, religiosity, and loyalty—is compatible with manliness (the root meaning of the Latin word "virtue"), as the ancients understood it...

...It would not be enough for Aeneas to found another city like Troy...

...His literary talents surfaced early...

...Aeneas and his men will suffer along the way (lacrimae rerum, or the sorrows attending all human affairs, is another Virgilian idea that used to be a cultural commonplace...

...An empire, even a benevolent one, may overreach, of course...

...Vergil's Empire draws heavily on Leo Strauss for the political analysis of the Aeneid...

...Similarly, the second half of the Aeneid is Virgil's Iliad, recounting battles in Italy and connecting Roman history with the heroic age of the Trojan War...

...The time has come to restore Virgil's epic poem to its place at the center of Western literature—both for its poetic qualities and because we have not surpassed the Aeneid or the world it portrays...

...Virgil fell ill on his way to Greece, where he intended to spend three years polishing his poem, and died in 19 b.c...

...It is one measure of Adler's achievement in Vergil's Empire that even though she—along with Virgil—cannot answer that question, she is worth reading very carefully, not only for what we can learn about a step in the development of the West, but what we can learn about our time as well...

...But Aeneas returns from the underworld to our life through the gates of ivory, which Virgil goes out of his way to explain is the portal of false dreams and prophecies...

...This was already an unusual claim within the classical understanding of the world and of time...

...Argue more eloquently, use the pointer To trace the paths of heaven accurately And accurately foretell the rising stars...

...That's apparently all we need to know about the Aeneid—and all we need to know about Virgil, too...

...After this analysis, it will be difficult to think of Virgil merely as a gifted imitator of Homer...

...The followers of Epicurus were materialists who denied the existence of the gods and sought as tranquil a life as this world can offer in private enjoyments and material comforts...

...Politics, in particular, was strictly avoided as leading to pointless troubles...

...And so we oscillate between force and restraint, unmindful of their deeper meaning—still caught in the dynamic perceived by Virgil and brilliantly revived for us by Eve Adler in Vergil's Empire...

...Aeneas' visit to the underworld in Book Six of the Aeneid even led people to believe that Virgil was a "naturally Christian soul," anima natu-raliter christiana, in the Middle Ages...

...But Virgil, in Adler's reading, is much more of a philosopher than he is often thought, and Lucretius offered a particular challenge for Virgil—because of the Epicurean philosophy Lucretius laid out in his book-length poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things...

...But nothing is sweeter than to occupy a lofty sanctuary of the mind, Well fortified with the teachings of the wise, Where we may look down on others as theystumble along, Vainly searching for the true path of life...

...It is equally no accident that the modern equivalent of Vir-gilians—with a religious vision about the need for the right kind of piety in the human city—are more likely to view both arms and religion as essential to the good of the United States and the restraint of evil in the world...

...That was the only way it could fulfill its divine mission...

...Translations of the Aeneid continue to appear...

...But that too is only a half-measure against death...

...Indeed, Adler's account of Virgil's views on universal empire has urgency not only for literary studies but for our reflections on empire in the current global situation...

...As daring and inventive as Virgil was, he knows that pure reason comes up against a limit— although a human limit that Virgil was occasionally tempted to cross...

...Pleasant it is also to behold great armies battling on a plain, When we ourselves have no part in their peril...

...But in Adler's reading, Virgil goes a step further...