Virgilio

The poem recounts the journey of Aeneas toward Italy and the war he was forced to wage > so that he might found his city and bring the Penates into Latium, giving rise to the Latin race, the Alban fathers, and the lofty walls of Rome (Book One). The poem is divided into two parts. The first, which chronicles his wanderings until his arrival on the shores of Latium, adopts the structure of the *Odyssey*, while the second, recounting the clash with the Latins, takes the *Iliad* as its model. The poem is remarkably complex, as several interpretive keys coexist and overlap. First and foremost, the *Aeneid* is the song of a preordained destiny: laying the foundations for the building of Rome. To this grand design all must submit, mortals and gods alike. Unlike in the Homeric poems, the dynamic unfolding among the gods—and in particular the clash between Juno, Aeneas’s nemesis, and Venus, the hero’s protective mother—is only apparent. In the final book, the twelfth, Jupiter addresses Juno: > What shall be the end, my wife? What remains? You well know, and must know, that as the tutelary deity of his homeland, Aeneas belongs to heaven and is raised by the fates unto the stars. What do you seek? With what hope do you cling to the icy clouds? The *Aeneid* is the epic of human history (in philosophical terms, one might say of Being becoming manifest in history) rather than that of individuals. Beneath providence, however, life quivers, yearning to break out into the open. Disrupting the established order are, above all, the female figures: Dido; the Trojan women who refuse to journey on; Amata, mother of Lavinia, the bride destined for Aeneas; Camilla, the warrior woman; and Juturna, sister of Turnus, the foe doomed to succumb. These are women who reject destiny with a furor that swells and spreads through a progressive loss of control, culminating in self-destruction. Amata’s fury is portrayed by Virgil through the famous metaphor of the spinning top (“as, driven by a lash, a top spins wild” in Book Seven), while Dido’s cries rail against the betrayal of love and trust: > Did you hope, then, to conceal such villainy, you traitor, and slip away in silence from my shores? Can neither our love, nor the hand you once pledged me, hold you back? Nor Dido, doomed to die a cruel death? . (Book Four); and Juturna, who, acknowledging her powerlessness to save her brother, begs to die, though immortal herself: > But what joy can remain sweet to me, brother, without you? Is there an abyss deep enough to open for me, plunging a goddess down into mortal depths? Having spoken, amid long moans, she veiled her head in her azure mantle and hid herself in the river’s depths .(Book Twelve). Aeneas himself at times steps outside his role as a hero obedient to duty, revealing an individuality of his own. When Vulcan gifts him a splendid suit of armor, already emblazoned with Rome’s future exploits, Aeneas behaves, at last, like any other human being: > All this Aeneas admires upon the shield of Vulcan, given by his mother, and, ignorant of the events, delights in the images, shouldering the fame and the fates of his descendants (Book Eight). Another major, and strikingly modern, theme is war. Virgil, unlike Homer in the *Iliad*, lingers over the cruelty of war, not least through a meticulous description of the wounds inflicted upon bodies by the warriors’ blows. Yet what is compelling is that the war is framed as the consequence of King Latinus’s weakness; though conscious of the need to ally with Aeneas and welcome him as a son-in-law, he retreats into seclusion, allowing events to run their course. > Swept away by the storm, at the mercy of fate, alas, we are. For all of this with sacrilegious blood, he cries, you, you, wretched men, shall pay the forfeit. For me quiet approaches: in sight of the final haven, a happy death will strip me of all things. He said no more, shut himself in his palace, and abandoned the reins of events . (Book Eight). War is always brought about by the weakness of those who desire peace yet cannot bring themselves to resist. The primary interpretive key—that of the fulfillment of an already written destiny—is so dominant that it often renders the reading heavy and tedious. The translation by Mario Ramous is splendid, just as Gianluigi Baldo’s commentary is deeply compelling. Why read it? It is well worth it for the delineation of the female figures and for certain seemingly marginal episodes, such as the heroic friendship of Nisus and Euryalus.