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Life & Times

Virgil as Propagandist

The Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BCE) lived and died during the period of transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire. It was a time when Romans saw the potential in expanding their territory to gain access to material resources and to enslave other peoples for manpower. The success of the burgeoning Roman Empire relied in part on a sort of branding, and this is where Virgil’s work had its greatest significance. The Aeneid is an epic poem, telling the legendary story of the genesis of the Roman Republic several hundred years before the birth of the empire. It was the perfect tool to provide the empire with administrative cohesion, so that personnel in increasingly far-flung regions would still have the stamp of Roman identity. Had the Roman government not maintained its hold on the expanding empire by promoting and perpetuating the Roman brand, the empire would surely have fragmented far sooner than it eventually did, some 350 years on, in BC 330.

Just as the Christians would soon have Adam as their progenitor, so Virgil gave the Romans their progenitor in the shape of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled from Troy, in present-day Turkey, to Italy. The character Aeneas was already known to the Romans from the story of the The Iliad, written by the ancient Greek poet Homer. In The Iliad, Aeneas is the heroic son of prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite (Venus). Following the destruction of Troy by the Greeks, Aeneas finds himself with no fixed abode, which is the catalyst for his wanderings. Virgil took the thread of this minor subplot within The Iliad and expanded upon it to create the legend of Aeneas becoming the ancestor of all Romans.

During Virgil’s upbringing, many myths and legends mentioning Aeneas circulated among the story-tellers and scholars of Rome. A century before Virgil, Cato the Elder had written an account of the origins of the Romans, titled Origines, which began the process of providing Rome with its historical branding. So, Virgil was nurtured in a social environment with a keen appetite for tales of Roman pedigree. It made perfect sense to transform the hero Aeneas into the man from whom all Romans could claim descent. Of course, there may also have been some truth to the legend, as it may be that a number of displaced Trojans did indeed find their way to the Italian peninsula.

Aeneas as the Father of the Romans

In Virgil’s poem, Aeneas and a few others who have survived the Trojan War are commanded by their gods to escape the region and set up home elsewhere. This begins their six-year voyage around the Mediterranean, looking for a suitable place to colonise.

The pre-eminent status of the Roman Empire really began with its victory over Carthage, in Tunisia, during the Punic Wars (264–146 BCE). Virgil tied this into the tale by the inclusion of an affair between Aeneas and Dido, queen of Carthage, which began lovingly but ended acrimoniously, so that Carthage would subsequently become the traditional enemy of Rome in the centuries to come.

During Aeneas’ adventures, he carries with him statues of his house gods Lares and Penates, which symbolise his search for somewhere to settle his people, with the intention that the statues will ultimately be placed at the chosen location. The city Aeneas founded was Lavinium, situated about 50 kilometres south of Rome, on the western coast of Italy. Before he could establish Lavinium, he had to do battle with the Rutuli people, under the leadership of Turnus. Thus, Livinium became the epicentre of the embryonic Roman tribe, which would subsequently found Rome as the capital of the Roman Republic. When Aeneas eventually dies, he is deified to become the god Jupiter Indiges (Indigenous Jupiter), otherwise known as the Pater Indiges, which translates as Father of the Romans. The foundation myth of Rome itself surrounds the story of Romulus and Remus, who are fifteenth-generation descendants of Aeneas.

The Power of Poetry

The Aeneid comprises just short of 10,000 lines in a metre known as dactylic hexameter, which copied Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. It essentially means that each line is broken into six rhythmic components. The Aeneid is divided into twelve books – six relate the story of Aeneas’ travels, and the other six relate his efforts to colonise the Italian coast against considerable local resistance.

The reason why The Aeneid is classified as a poem and not prose is that poetry was considered the higher form of literature by the Romans, hence the term ‘prosaic’ taken from prose, which is often used to mean ‘commonplace’. Poetry was viewed as a high-art form, because it took great skill to shoehorn language in such a way that it obeyed the rules of the chosen metre. Virgil took this discipline very seriously and even used his line structures in an onomatopoeic way to imitate the actions he was describing, such as the galloping of horses. This was important, because poems were performed to an audience, rather than simply recited, so a well-written poem allowed for vocal and physical gesture as part of the show. This brought the story to life in the minds of the audience, so that they were more readily engaged by the events being described.

When Virgil died, in 19 BCE, he was still in the process of editing his masterpiece and wanted the manuscript to be destroyed. However, Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire, ordered that the manuscript should be published and that it should be as true to Virgil’s final edit as possible. As a result, literary scholars consider a few of the lines to be work in progress, because they do not obey the dactylic hexameter. It seems that Virgil worked by first drafting his poetry in rough form, just to flesh out the story, and then painstakingly honed his words until they dropped into his chosen poetic template.

Virgil apparently took around ten years to complete The Aeneid. Although Virgil was not content with its form upon his death, Emperor Augustus saw enormous propaganda value in the work. It became part of the branding package that enabled the Romans to expand their empire and to continue governing it over such a vast expanse of territory. The Aeneid reminded Romans, both distant and near, to be proud of their heritage and to maintain their allegiance to the emperor, because they, like he, were descended from greatness.

The same legend told in prose would not have had the same impact as Virgil’s poetic work, because it needed to be both entertaining and informative. Saving Virgil’s work and sharing it widely meant that public performances could be held across the empire, where communities came together to share the experience. That way there could be no excuse for new generations, who might have never been anywhere near Rome, to think of themselves as anything but Roman. It was a cultural meme that served to keep everyone in the same meme pool – young and old, male and female, rich and poor. The message was that one didn’t need to live or have been raised in Rome to be Roman. All that mattered was that allegiance to Rome was perpetuated via exposure to education about the Roman legend. It was a cultural franchise that continued to work extremely well for a few hundred years after the lives of Virgil and Augustus.