65 pages • 2 hours read
VirgilAeneid
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | BCEA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Rage, Madness, and Fiery Passions
For Romans, the most important virtue (besides, perhaps, pietas) is self-control. A good Roman should stoically take stock of the situation and, no matter how upset or emotional events may make him, resolve to perform his duty. Anchises codifies this mentality with his definition of what it means to be Roman in Book 6. He urges Aeneas to defeat the proud but spare the vanquished (852-53). This view stands in stark contrast to the older, Homeric code of virtue, in which a warrior excels when he leverages his passions—primarily, his anger—to find victory on the battlefield.
The tension between rational duty and irrational rage is a repeated motif in the Aeneid. Images of a character losing control are often accompanied by the element of fire, which characterizes some of the most chaotic moments in the poem (e.g., Pyrrhus’s blazing armor and the razing of Troy in Book 2, Dido’s funeral pyre in Book 4, the burning of the Trojan ships both by the Trojan women in Book 5 and by Turnus in Book 9).
Fire is an unpredictable and uncontrollable element. Like passion, it has an incredible power to destroy, but also to make way for new growth and new life. Virgil makes this connection explicit when he compares Aeneas and Turnus’s rage to a controlled forest fire: “Just like burn-off fires that are launched from opposing directions / Into a tinder-dry forest and crackling thickets of laurel […] so Aeneas and Turnus / Wreak devastation together in battle” (Book 12, lines 521-26). Virgil’s text challenges the reader to reflect on the nature of anger and its utility.
Omens and Rituals
Supernatural occurrences are of paramount importance in the Aeneid. While Juno and her allies cause narrative delay, supernatural events keep the plot moving along. When the Trojans are unsure where to go next or what to do, it is usually a divine portent—a ghost, a sign, a divine apparition, or a prophecy—that shows the way. This pattern fits well into the Roman religious worldview. Portents in nature were considered the most common way for the gods make their will known to man, and the Romans developed various types of divination to detect and interpret these signs.
Omens are also a useful characterization device for Virgil’s pious hero Aeneas. While some omens present themselves organically, others are only provided because Aeneas has asked for them via a ritual or a sacrifice. Virgil can use omens to kill two narrative birds with one stone: Their appearance further supports his portrait of Aeneas as a favorite of the gods while also keeping up the pace of the narrative.
Fathers and Sons
In Roman culture, the relationship between father and son was of paramount importance. A crucial aspect of Aeneas’s proto-Roman virtue is not only his filial devotion to his father, but also his paternal devotion to his son. Virgil presents several models for functional, healthy father-son relationships (Anchises and Aeneas, Aeneas and Ascanius, Evander and Pallas), but also bad models (Achilles and Pyrrhus, Mezentius and Lausus, who arguably deserves a better father). He even maps the father-son relationship onto characters not related by blood, like Aeneas and Pallas.
Virgil often leverages the close bond between father and son to generate pathos for losses in war. There is an ongoing sub-motif of fathers reacting to the death of their sons (Priam and Polites in Book 2, Evander and Pallas in Book 11). Even Mezentius, the character Virgil is perhaps least sympathetic to in the entire poem, is deeply grieved at the death of his son Lausus in Book 11. Evander’s words are as tragic now as they were to the ancients: “I’m a father who’s outlived his own son” (Book 11, line 161).
The Founding of Cities
In writing the Aeneid, Virgil intended to create an elevated, fully fleshed-out foundation myth for the Roman nation. As such, his narrative is preoccupied with the founding or destruction of cities. It opens with the sack of Troy and ends with the events that will lead to the founding of the city of Rome (though the action does not happen in the poem itself).
Some of the Aeneid’s cities, like Carthage, will become major rivals of Rome in the future. Others, too dysfunctional to survive, will peter off and fade into the mists of time, like Aeneas’s several failed attempts on the Greek islands and Andromache’s mini-Troy in Book 3.
In concentrating on how cities—and empires—are created, Virgil examines the questions of how to settle disparate peoples in the same place, whether multiple cultures can come together to form a new one, and whether cultural assimilation is a violent act or a unitive one—questions that are still relevant in the modern day.
