The AeneidI sing of warfare and a man at war.From the sea-coast of Troy in early daysHe came to Italy by destiny,To our Lavinian western shore,A fugitive, this captain, buffetedCruelly on land as on the seaBy blows from powers of the air – behind themBaleful Juno in her sleepless rage.And cruel losses were his lot in war,Till he could found a city and bring homeHis gods to Latium, land of the Latin race,The Alban lords, and the high walls of Rome.Tell me the causes now, O Muse, how galledIn her divine pride, and how sore at heartFrom her old wound, the queen of Gods compelled him –A man apart, devoted to his mission – (Aenead 1.1-16)

• Virgil was born in Mantua in 70 BCE.• Educated at Cremona and Milan, and as part of an

Epicurean community at Naples.• Epicureanism is an anti-Platonic, atomist philosophy,

that found its most enduring expression in the poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius.

• Virgil wrote Eclogues, Georgics and ended his life writing Epic, ascending the generic hierarchy from pastoral to didactic to epic poetry.

• His later career coincided with the reign of Augustus Caesar, who, like Pericles in Athens, and the Medici in Renaissance Florence, was one of the greatest patrons of the arts in Western history

• “I sing of warfare and a man at war.”• The end-stopped first line of the poem alerts

us to its principle theme and metaphor: War. It invokes the general concept of war, the craft-knowledge suitable to those who perform this skilled labour, and the individual practitioner. This theme seems to herald a work modelled on the Iliad rather than the Odyssey, though in fact it will conflate the Homeric epics.

• The poem is interested in its origins as a means of self justification. Cities are built with hierarchies, and one meaning of ‘hierarchy’ is ‘orientation towards an origin’.

• “From the sea-coast at Troy in early days….”• The Roman tradition of tracing their origins to the losing

side in the Trojan war predates Virgil by centuries, but has little historical basis. This form of identification distinguishes them from the Greeks, in relation to whom they may have felt an anxiety of influence, even as they absorbed and translated Greek literature and institutions.

• The phrase ‘early days’ is deliberately unspecific: whose early days? The world’s? This phrasing intimates to us the poem’s ambition.

• “He came to Italy by destiny….”• The third person pronoun beginning the third line in the English

translation juxtaposes the poet of the first line with his protagonist, and indeed Virgil will hand his job over to Aeneas when his story reaches Libya.

• Italy is the location in which the poem is being written, and so these first three lines align the geographical and temporal poles within which the action takes place.

• The greater emphasis on Destiny differentiates this poem from the Homeric narrative on which it is modelled.

• Everything that this poet writes, and that this protagonist acts, has been written from outside time by the fates. It has the gravity of something that could not have been otherwise, and yet it is characterised by much existential terror during Aeneas’ first person narrative.

• Existential anxiety may also be attributed to the narrator as he sets out to write a poem that will rival Homer.

• “To our Lavinian western shore,….”• This line restates the destination in female

terms. Aeneas’ ordained spouse, is the haven in which he will finally rest.

• The word ‘shore’ rhymes with ‘war’ in English, and reminds us that this haven is implicated in a great deal of pain that has been undertaken to reach it. It is therefore something valuable in a way that it wouldn’t be if it were merely foreordained.

• Destiny and existential uncertainty support and undermine each other in giving to these events their unique value for a Roman audience.

• “A fugitive, this captain, buffeted…”• The contradictions inherent in Aeneas’

character echo the contradictions of the narrative itself: a fugitive is in a state of radical uncertainty whereas a captain is authoritative.

“Cruelly on land as on the seaBy blows from powers of the air – behind themBaleful Juno in her sleepless rage”These lines reinforce the idea that this poem is telling a cosmic, and not

just a personal story, because they refer to the four elements: earth(land), air, fire(rage) and water.

However, the cosmic turmoil is contained within a personal animus held by Juno towards the Trojans.

The wind blows Aeneas across the mediterranean, but there is a pun in this word ‘blows’ that makes it also signify the blows of Juno’s fists.

One can be philosophical about the actions of elements, but when there is a malevolent will behind them, it raises questions of moral agency. Are the gods above morality? Should their malevolence be understood as a force of nature, or forces of nature as their malevolence?

“And cruel losses were his lot in war,Till he could found a city and bring homeHis gods to Latium, Land of the Latin race,The Alban lords and the high walls of Rome.”The idea of cruelty is repeated here. This time it describes not the actions of a person,

but the quality of a feeling. Loss in itself is incapable of cruelty, and so this is a transferred epithet that properly

belongs to Juno. Yet it points up again the ambiguity about her malevolence: is she a person or a force?

Loss almost rhymes with lot, a word meaning ‘chance’ and signifying blind material processes rather than intentional harm.

Both of these concepts, loss and lot, are intrinsic to the notion of war. Loss is both an absence and a present emotion. War is destructive, and yet it helps to create the Roman state.

What does it mean for the city mentioned in line 10, that it is founded upon loss and lots?

As with the furies in The Oresteia, Aeneas’ destiny involves several changes of name that efface the home he has lost , such that it needs to be excavated by this poet.

“Tell me the causes now, O Muse, how galledIn her divine pride, and how sore at heartFrom her old wound, the queen of gods compelled him – A man apart, devoted to his mission –”Aeneas’ is compelled by Juno but her freedom is only relative

freedom within the constraints imposed by fate, a fate which dictates that she will eventually fail to prevent his search for a new home.

Her chief characteristic is resentment, an emotional replaying of an originary insult that imprisons its sufferer.

Is it his destiny or her victimization of him that makes him a man apart?

Aeneas’ singularity is that of a public figure with a mission. Does he have a private self that we can see? Does he suffer in private and carry out his destiny in public?

• Juno’s divine pride stands in opposition to the walls of Rome that are to be built. The walls of cities are an important way in which this poem figures personal and public identity.

• Juno’s identity is bound up with Carthage: “Juno, we are told, cared more for Carthage/ Than for any walled city of the earth”(1.24).

• Carthage was Rome’s great enemy in the period immediately preceding the time when Virgil was writing, and so he gives the ancient history of Troy contemporary relevance. Juno’s hatred of Aeneas is Carthage’s hatred of Rome.

• The clash of civilizations is a clash of egos.

• Juno recruits Aeolus to torment Aeneas with wind that destroys some of his fleet: “their seams/ Parted and let the enemy pour in”(1.170)

• The breach of the walls of Troy is remembered and its narration prefigured in these lines.

• The metaphor is extended when Neptune, resenting Juno’s incursion on his demesne, orders the winds home: “When rioting breaks out in a great city…If it so happens they look round and see/ Some dedicated public man, a veteran/ Whose record gives him weight, they quiet down…he prevails in speech over their fury/ by his authority”(1.201ff).

• The sea is a rioting crowd, and Neptune a patrician ruler whose authority comes from his record i.e. from the writing down of significant events in which he has been involved.

• The winds that he banishes are replaced by the breath of his words.

• This complex of imagery returns in the account of the overrunning of Troy. Aeneas and his followers dress as Greeks in order to attack them, but when the ruse is discovered the Greeks converge on them “as when a cyclone breaks conflicting winds / Will come together…they knew ….our speech / Alien to their own”(2.549ff).

• Likewise Helenus says in 3.640 “Should I / Detain you by more talk while the winds rise?”

• Speech, wind, warfare, cities, ships, and the sea are bound together in a complex of associations that tells us about historical events, but even more, perhaps about historiography and poetry.

• Poetry is recited, and the breath of the poet’s words stirs emotion in his hearers. A bad poet might find himself confronting an unruly crowd, but a good poet has ‘authority’, speaks the city’s highest ideals. He doesn’t have to impose his authority. He is authoritative.

• Neptune doesn’t calm the sea by force, but because he is the sea. If he had to enforce his authority he would already have ceased to possess that authority and have become a tyrant.

• Juno is “Saturnian Juno”(1.44), referring to her father, the titan who was overthrown by her husband/brother, Zeus. The incestuous relations among the gods are a kind of analogue to the chaos they create among men. The emergent family relationships among them mirror the order they impose on men.

• Kinship relations and incest taboos mark the originary point of difference between nature and culture.

• Juno is a person, and not just a force of nature, to the extent that she is capable of feeling shame: she understands herself as part of a community in which people care what other people think of them, because the meanings of words and of the people they describe are generated communally.

• Juno’s father Saturn is a god associated with melancholy, and with material history. His Greek equivalent is Kronos, or father Time. Melancholy is a medical disorder, and also a spiritual sickness involving rage directed inwards against the self. Juno is not melancholy but choleric: She directs her rage outwards, yet within the overall structure of the poem perhaps this is still an inward rage.

• Juno’s shame comes from having been judged less beautiful than Venus by Paris. Venus bribed him by offering to help him steal Helen from Menelaus.

• The conflict described in the Aeneid, involves international and civil warfare, but it is also a squabble within a family, between two sisters: Venus and Juno.

• Juno represents marriage and Venus love. Yet for all her championing of marriage it is Juno’s protégé, Dido, who is emotionally incontinent, and Venus’ son, Aeneas, who conquers his passion with civic virtue.

• A sisterly squabble is not quite vehement enough to serve as a metaphor for the hugely destructive war between Carthage and Rome. Therefore the conflict quickly escalates into one between lovers. Venus makes Dido fall in love with Aeneas because she is afraid Juno will inspire her to kill him, yet there is a deep symmetry between desire and hatred, as events will prove.

• The qualities in Aeneas that inspire Dido’s love are artistic qualities: “She who bore him/ Breathed upon him beauty of hair and bloom/ Of youth and kindled brilliance in his eyes,/ As an artist’s hand gives style to ivory”(1.801ff).

• Upon arrival in Carthage, Aeneas finds a painting of his own life “He himself he saw in combat..”(1.665)

• This is a moment of self-consciousness for Aeneas, but the self he is conscious of is his public self. Is this the only dimension of his person that the epic gives us?

• “ While these wonders were being surveyed/ By Aeneas of Dardania, while he stood/ Enthralled, devouring all in one long gaze,/ The queen paced toward the temple in her beauty”(1.674).

• It is as if Dido is the message coming to him from this painting. His wonder is replaced by her beauty, a limitless emotion by an aesthetic experience, an experience of alterity by a narcissistic mirroring.

• In the same way, Aeneas appears to Dido in the midst of an account of him that she receives from his men. They appear to each other out of stories, but in each case the story is Aeneas’s.

• Dido herself comes from an artistic family: her brother, Pygmalion, was famous for falling in love with a statue he created that was so lifelike it came to life. He murdered her husband Sychaeus, an example of the ideal brother /sister relation having become pathological.

• Why does Virgil cast suspicion on his own vocation as an artist?• Perhaps he is suggesting that art has to have a public function in order to

not be narcissistic, and perhaps he is also alerting us to the danger that an individual acting in the public interest might lose sight of the worth of other individual lives.

• Virgil hands the narration over to Aeneas in Book II and he begins “Sorrow too deep to tell, your majesty,/ You order me to feel and tell once more”(2.3/4)

• Here at last we get a glimpse of Aeneas’ private self, a profundity that can’t be expressed without falsifying it. And yet he will express it, and what he says, he indicates, will be true to the experience. He employs a common rhetorical trope here: in the course of saying he can’t express something he expresses it.

• In this narration Aeneas is set opposite his Greek counterpart, Ulysses (Odysseus), known to Homer as the ‘man of many stratagems’ but here characterised by “guile and envy”(2.122), and as a “ruffian” (2.10). This characterization is filtered through the account of Sinon, and is itself a piece of cunning originating with Ulysses.

• Their similarities and differences inflect each other: both sea wanderers, both looking for home, one Roman, one Greek, one known for piety, the other for cunning, one returning to his wife, the other mourning his wife, each worried about his son, each patronised by a different goddess.

• The symbolic resonance of the sea is perhaps their greatest unifying element. The sea is pathless and symbolises at once their alienation and their individuality : in 2.955 Aeneas describes himself turning “Aside from the known way, entering a maze/ Of pathless places on the run –”

• Odysseus spends a long period as a solitary wanderer, but in Aeneas’ case there are his companions and his household gods, always reminding him of his public function. Although the Homeric hero had a function in establishing the identity of the Greeks, the Homeric Greeks were a loose confederation of feudal kingdoms. Aeneas is the forefather of a Republic and then an Empire.

• Aeneas and his friends make several abortive attempts at creating Troy that, by their deficiency, serve to highlight the glory of the state that they finally establish.

• The first attempt is in Thrace, where he founds a city called Aeneadae, but is faced with a “gruesome prodigy/ Beyond description: when the first stalk came torn/ Out of the earth, and the root network burst,/ Dark blood dripped down to soak and foul the soil”(3.40). This Thracian kingdom is infected by a primal wrong, that they will appease by giving its victim funeral obsequies.

• “At this be sure that in a maze of dread/ I stopped appalled”(3.67). Aeneas thought he was home, but he’s still in the maze that he entered when Troy fell, trying to understand it.

• “For I am Polydorus./ An iron hedge of spears covered my body, / Pinned down here, and the pointed shafts took root”(3.64)

• The Ovidian metamorphosis of Polydorus into a bush is a prodigy because it defies the laws of physics. It was a fundamental tenet of the Epicurean philosophy in which Virgil was educated, that ‘nothing can come from nothing’.

• As well as meaning that there was no point before the universe existed, it means that a bush can’t come directly from a corpse full of spears.

• The existence of such prodigies doesn’t mean that Virgil is making a statement of belief in ex nihilo creation, but suggests that such a transformation comes about by unnatural means.

• Aeneas is attempting to transform the defeat of Troy into a new beginning, but he can’t do it this easily. It has to happen through long labour, and through organic processes within the body politic that he leads.

• They go to Apollo’s Oracle on the island of Delos looking for “posterity and an abiding city,” asking “By what sea way/ Dost thou direct us?....grant us a sign, enter our hearts”(3.118ff).

• In Plato’s writings, Socrates demonstrates a ‘method’ of getting at the truth. Method comes from ‘meta hodos’ meaning ‘over a path’. Aeneas’ travels are a method similar in ways to that of Socrates in that there are many apparently wrong turnings before one gets to the truth.

• Aeneas’ method involves the reading of signs, and communing with the knowledge of the heart.

• However, they misread the signs given by Apollo, and try to set up a new city on Crete, the site of original labyrinth created by the archetypal artist Daedalus. Aeneas’ wandering has been characterized as the navigation of a maze, and in a sense he will build his city on this maze, but only after he has abolished it by making sense of it.

• Before this happens they have to keep getting lost: “Pallinurus himself, could barely tell / Day from night…..could not keep direction…..three starless nights we wandered blind.”(3.279ff).

• In another potential settlement they meet the Harpies “with young girls’ faces, but foul ooze below,/ Talons for hands, pale famished nightmare mouths….grotesquely whirring down”(3.300).

• These creatures are an unnatural conjunction of things that don’t go together.

• Their horrifying virginity resembles that of the Furies in the Oresteia, and they describe themselves as “innocent Harpies”.

• Innocence can be a terrible thing, devoid of morality or reason. In seeking for an origin, the Roman imperium has to find something different from this.

• Troy is not innocent exactly. Rather, it is complex, full of a history of glorious deeds, and its earlier origins are lost in time.

• The monstrous travesties of origin that they find are not just unnatural, but seem artificial, things that must have come about by malevolent intent.

• Are they an effect of the repression of the older generation of gods by the younger generation. They prophesy famine for the Trojans, a prophecy that doesn’t come true, and so they are among the forces militating against the ultimate coherence of the Roman identity.

• A more reliable guide is Helenus, “Trojan intepreter of the gods’ will,/ You know the mind of Phoebus, know his tripod,/Know the Apolline laurel; know the stars, / The tongues of birds, and all the signs of birdflight”(3.490ff).

• This is a world in which nature and culture are always turning into each other. Nature is full of signs that only specialists can read, and beings like the Harpies give signs that are misleading. How is anyone to interpret with confidence in such a world?

• One reason we have to trust Helenus’ directions is that we know they’re true from the Odyssey, and from other parts of the Greek canon.

• He also warns Aeneas of the vagaries of interpretation, and the ways in which meaning always borders on chaos, especially in a universe where ‘method’ is not rational, but is dependent on the knowledge of the heart and of prophecy.

• “You’ll see a spellbound prophetess, who sings / In her deep cave of destinies, confiding / Symbols and words to leaves. Whatever verse/ She writes, the virgin puts each leaf in order/ Back in the cave; unshuffled they remain; / But when a faint breeze through a door ajar/ Comes in to stir and scatter the light leaves, / She never cares to catch them as they flutter/ Or restore them, or to join the verses;/ Visitors unenlightened turn away”(3.593).

• The rearrangement of the Sibyl’s prophecy by a blind force like the wind, is a striking metaphor for what can happen to authorial intention in the process of interpretation, or what happens to the inexpressible when we try to express it.

• This Sibyl is another of those characters who ask for eternal life but forget to ask for eternal youth, and who only want to die.

• Monsters are beings that fail to communicate. The Cyclops is “unbearable to see, Unreachable by anything you say”(3.820ff).

• “Polyphemus’s giant mass….Vast, mind-sickening, lumpish, heaven’s light / Blacked out for him”(3.870ff)

• The emotions raised by these beings are deeper than hatred.

• Even one of Ulysses men is kindred in the context of these monsters. Monsters therefore are a symbol of the completely other, and not just of the relative other represented by lovers and enemies. A monster isn’t an enemy because an enemy is somebody with whom you can communicate.

• The Sibyl mediates the monstrous to the human. She operates from a grotto, the word that gives us ‘grotesque’. This word she uses to describe the Harpies indicates a portal between Earth and Heaven or Hell. Heaven and Hell occupy different parts of the same territory in this poem.

• “And nearby , in a place apart – a darkEnormous cave – the Sibyl feared by men.In her the Delian god of prophecyInspires uncanny powers of mind and soul,Disclosing things to come.”(6.15ff)

The Sibyl is the mediator between this world and the next. She has attributes of both monstrous and human beings.

Her contradictoriness is seen in the words ‘nearby, in a place apart’ suggesting closeness and distance at the same time. She is physically close by, but in what sense is she apart?

She lives in a cave, a primitive type of dwelling that has Platonic associations in that the cave is that from which philosophers gain egress by rational means.

Her ‘method’ is prophetic, not rational.Apollo inspires uncanny powers in her: the uncanny is something that is familiar

and alien at the same time.These are powers of mind and soul, but what’s the difference?

• The sea Aeneas has traversed, and the existential uncertainty he experiences after the destruction of Troy, have been continually compared to the labyrinth, or to a maze.

• Daedalus’ flight from Crete to Cumae is another kind of difficult or “unheard of path”.

• He built a temple to Apollo at Cumae, where he depicted the events in Crete: “Pasiphae/ Being covered by the bull in the cow’s place,/ Then her mixed breed, her child of double form, / The Minotaur”(6.38).

• Cumae is a place of hybrid forms, in which earth’s mysteries are solved by transcendent knowledge: “Daedalus himself, unravelled all/ The baffling turns and deadends in the dark”(6.44)

• These types of knowledge belong to the artist as well as the prophet.• There is one thing that defeats the representational powers of Daedalus:

the death of his son, Icarus: “Twice your father had tried to shape your fall/ In gold, but twice his hands dropped.”(6.49)

• His grief is inexpressible. Is it too an impossible hybrid, a kind of monster composed of presence and absence?

• Instead of trying to answer this question, a message from the Sibyl tells them “The hour demands/ no lagging over sights like these”(6.58). The story is being propelled forward from within by the demands of a mysterious deity who speaks through the Sibyl:

• “As she spoke neither her face/ nor hue went untransformed, nor did her hair / Stay neatly bound: her breast heaved, her wild heart/ Grew large with passion…she had felt the god’s power breathing near”(6.76)

• This kind of passionate utterance contrasts with the measured, decorous art of Virgil, seen in the negative description of her transformation. The Sibyl allows him to do things that he can’t do in his own persona.

• He is the mind of the poem, and she an avatar of the soul. Soul is ‘psyche’ in Greek, a word that means ‘breath’ originally. Her prophecy is the breath of a god.

• In response to her entreaties Aeneas “poured out/ Entreaties from his deepest heart”(6.90). Dealing with the gods calls not for politics but for vulnerability. He prays that “The fortune / Of Troy shall have pursued us this far only”(6.100).

• He is asking for a break in his narrative, and a change to a new identity, a request he is granted but that will cause new suffering.

• “The cause of suffering here again will be/ A bride foreign to Teucrians, a marriage/ Made with a stranger”(6.142).

• The monstrosity of hybrids is connected in this narrative to marriage with a stranger: Lavinia.

• The entrance to hell is a dark pool in a gloomy forest, where you can’t see your reflection. “Those unblest” have to depart from the scene where Aeneas crosses the threshhold (6.360). We the readers are among the blessed.

• If hell is the realm of monsters, why does it only admit the blessed? The latin word ‘sacer’ from which we get the English ‘sacred’ has two opposed meanings: it means cursed and blessed.

• “homo sacer” is one who has fallen out of the webs of meaning that form a community. He can be killed but not sacrificed. One who is blessed has transcended the webs of meaning that bind a community and entered another realm. These two forms are hard to tell apart from the perspective of ordinary life.

• In this environment, the rules governing poetic decorum are lost sight of too, and Virgil says “May it be right to tell what I have heard,/ may it be right and fitting by your will, / That I describe the deep world sunk in darkness..”(6.366)

• People understand themselves by looking at reflections in others, but here, the Sibyl and Aeneas are “Dim to one another….As one goes through a wood by a faint moon’s / Treacherous light”(6.370).

• Allegorical images of those things that destroy human community in the upper world are the first sights they encounter: “Before the entrance…/Grief and avenging Cares have made their beds,/ And pale Diseases and sad Age are there,/ And Dread and Hunger…./And sordid Want/…/and raving Discord…/About the doorway forms of monsters crowd”(6.376ff).

• Aeneas quickly learns however, that they are “empty images” down here, rather than the fearful creatures they are above. His drawn sword here has merely symbolic efficacy.

• Among the allegories he met at the entrance to the cave was “Death’s own brother, Sleep”(6.381)

• This may be a journey into Aeneas’ own psyche prompted by inhaling the fumes from the lake, rather than a physical journey into a world beneath the earth.

• This is the world of the Eumenides, formerly known as the furies, who, in the Oresteia, enforced the claims of the female dimension of the cosmos.

• Charon is outraged to see a living body rather than a ‘somatamorphic’ soul in this realm, until the Sibyl appeases him by identifying Aeneas “The very image of so much goodness”(6.546). Aeneas, in having a body, is a true image.

• Governing this realm is Minos, the king of Crete who presided over the building of the labyrinth. He is a kind of infernal patron of the arts who mirrors in a distorted way Augustus Caesar.

• His justice is an “iron law”(6.590), assigning unfortunate souls to categories without pity for the “lives and accusations”(6.585) that led them to their ends: “Souls of infants wailing… souls falsely accused…. Souls who contrived their own destruction” (6.576ff).

• Among these souls in a special area called “The Fields of Mourning…..those whom pitiless love consumed/ With cruel wasting, hidden on paths apart”(6.595).

• The unaccountable spontaneity of love makes it a path that is individual to each person. Here “Dido wandered”(6.605).

• Yet following a methodical path, or a path directed by fate, can also appear to be a type of wandering. This is the path that Aeneas has followed , and further along this path he meets “men famous in war’ (6..642), one of whom, Deiphobus, asks “ Have you come from your sea wandering, and did Heaven / Direct you?”(6.714).

• Heaven is as idiosyncratic in its judgments and directions as any individual. It is in the right because it is heaven, not because its judgments are self-evidently true.

• At this point Aeneas reaches a fork in the path, one leading left to the place of punishment, the other leading right to Elysium. The left side is ‘sinister’ in Latin, and ‘right’ is not just a direction.

• Aeneas is curious about “the forms of evil” but “it is decreed/ That no pure soul may cross the sill of evil” (6.756). This is the realm of the absolutely other.

• It also a place of political exile. It is where the Titans, the old overthrown gods are punished, and where “men who took arms in war against the right”(6.819) are held. We may wonder if this is where Mezentius will end up.

• “All these dared monstrous wrong…If I had / A hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, a voice/ Of iron, I could not tell of all the shapes/ Their crimes had taken, or their punishments”(6.835).

• In asking about the forms of evil, Aeneas may have suggested that evil is logical in the way that justice is logical in the upper world. Evil defies categories however, and justice can be similarly perverted in its attempts to match individual evils with their condign punishments.

• What does it mean then that close by this place are “places of delight…Where souls take ease amid the Blessed Groves”(6.855). It points to a potential similarity between evil and the good as things which are beyond bodily existence. Is the difference between them merely a political one?

• “Souls here possess their own familiar sun and stars” (6.858). The comforts of this place are the comforts of the familiar.

• These people died “in battle for their country”(6.884) or “in their lives were holy men and chaste/ Or worthy of Phoebus in prophetic song”(6.885). Elysium is where the conformists go.

• Anchises is encountered “by chance”, but chance is another word for fate where Aeneas is concerned. He is among souls about to embark on their second lives.

• Although up to now souls have been presented as identities reified by their deaths, often in painful ways, this suggests that souls are altogether different from these identities. They drink the “water of Lethe”(6.958) in order to mark a disjunction between the lives they have lived and those they are embarking on, but what is the underlying principle of continuity?

• “First then, the sky and lands, and sheets of water…Are fed within by Spirit, and a Mind/ Infused through all the members of the world/ Makes one great living body of the mass.“(6.975). This cosmology uses the Epicurean idea of “generative seeds”(6.982).

• It has just as much in common with Stoic, Platonist and Pythagorean thought. Virgil is a religious poet, but not a philosopher. He synthesises aspects of all his philosophical contexts in Anchises’ cosmology.

• The body is an impurity that continues to afflict souls in hell, and their imprisonment in the identities they had in life is a symptom of this bodily entrapment.

• “A few abide / In happy lands, till the long day, the round/ Of time fulfilled, has worn our stains away,/ Leaving the soul’s heaven sent perception clear” (6.1000).

• Time in this perspective is not an infinite linear progression, but describes a circle, upon the closure of which the soul is enlightened and knows what heaven knows.

• Less enlightened souls are reincarnated having “turned Time’s wheel a thousand years”(6.1005). Their description has overtones of physical labour, rather than contemplative enlightenment.

• What these circular metaphors do above all is to suggest that Time is a place, when seen from the highest perspective.

• The first half of Aeneas’ journey in the underworld was concerned with mourning the losses of past generations, but now Anchises shows him “Souls of the future, living in our name”(6.1015).

• Although spirit is posited as the principle underlying all things within the universe, names are also unifying principles between individuals on earth.

• “Spirit’, like ‘psyche’ means breath, and a name too is a breath of air. Language is the substance of a poem, and of the myths that inform it, and this substance is at once perduring and something that it’s hard to get a grip on, as Aeneas finds he can’t embrace his father in the underworld.

• Anchises tells him “the names to be heard for places nameless now”(6.1039). So names are not just given by chance, but exist outside time. They have a resemblance therefore to the Platonic forms.

• The name ‘Romulus’ will be transferred from the individual who bears it to the empire that he founds. “Under his auspices/ Illustrious Rome will bound her power with earth, / Her spirit with Olympus”(6.1048)

• The boundedness of Rome is twofold, like the two circles of time, one material and the other supernal, both symbolized by “one great city wall”(6.1050)

• Rome will find her greatest leader in”Caesar Augustus, son of the deified” (6.1060). Julius Caesar had been deified following his death, and was one of the tutelary deities of the Roman empire, as distinct from the republic.

• Augustus brings “once again an Age of Gold/ To Latium, to the land where Saturn reigned in early times”(6.1065).

• Saturn’s association at once with melancholy and with past happiness is a material version of the Platonic notion that learning is a remembering of prenatal knowledge.

• Prior to this restoration of the golden age, Rome will suffer “that enormity of civil war, / Turning against your country’s very heart/ Her own vigor of manhood”(6.1121).

• This word ‘enormity’ echoes the enormity of the Sibyl’s cave. It implies something that is outside the normative values that produce civic harmony. It implies the self-division of beings who exist in relation to an ‘other’ ,and who find that the other is part of their identity.

• We saw how Aeschylus projected the inner conflict onto a Persian other, and thus avoided civil war. Rome too will find a foreign other that saves it from its own self division, but is also a sign of its self-division.

• “Roman, remember by your strength to rule/ Earth’s peoples – for your arts are to be these: to pacify, to impose the rule of law, / To spare the conquered, battled down the proud”(6.1151).

• This line marks the difference between the Roman project outlined by Virgil, and the Athenian project outlined by Plato. Rome wants to conquer the whole world, and Athens wants to exclude the world and inhabit its own transcendent identity.

• Arguably we can see here the difference between Platonic and ‘Epicurean’ transcendence. Platonists abstract truth from the material whereas the ‘Epicurean’ imposes its truth on the material.

• Both of these alternatives are implicit in both Platonic philosophy and Virgilian Epic, but the emphasis is more on violent imposition in Epic.

• Having moved from mourning the past to celebrating the future, the trip to the underworld ends with an implicit acknowledgement of the fact that these alternatives also include one another.

• Augustus’ son, Marcellus is seen among the souls of the future, and Anchises mourns for him proleptically.

• Aeneas is now ready to fulfill his destiny, but he returns by the Ivory gate, which is the passage for false dreams, and not the gate of horn where true dreams go up to the world.

• Is this meant to imply that Aeneas’ heroism is false in some way? Or does his bodily existence exempt him from the meanings of these gates?