As recently as the early twentieth century, the Aeneid was embraced as a justification of the Roman—and, by extension, any—empire: “a classic vindication of the European world-order,” as one scholar put it. (This position is known among classicists as the “optimistic” interpretation.) The marmoreal perfections of its verse seemed to reflect the grand façades of the Roman state itself: Augustus boasted that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.
But in the second half of the last century more and more [“pessimistic”] scholars came to see some of the epic’s most wrenching episodes as attempts to draw attention to the toll that the exercise of imperium inevitably takes. […]
But perhaps we don’t need a translation to drag the Aeneid into the modern era. Maybe it’s always been here, and we’re just looking at it from the wrong angle—or looking for the wrong things. Maybe the inconsistencies in the hero and his poem that have distressed readers and critics—the certainties alternating with doubt, the sudden careening from coolness to high emotion, the poet’s admiring embrace of an empire whose moral offenses he can’t help cataloguing, the optimistic portrait of a great nation rising haunted by a cynical appraisal of Realpolitik at work—aren’t problems of interpretation that we have to solve but, rather, the qualities in which this work’s modernity resides.
This, at any rate, is what was going through my mind one day fifteen years ago, when, I like to think, I finally began to understand the Aeneid. At the time, I was working on a book about the Holocaust, and had spent several years interviewing the few remaining survivors from a small Polish town whose Jewish population had been obliterated by what you could legitimately call an exercise of imperium. As I pressed these elderly people for their memories, I was struck by the similarities in the way they talked: a kind of resigned fatalism, a forlorn acknowledgment that the world they were trying to describe was, in the end, impossible to evoke; strange swings between an almost abnormal detachment when describing unspeakable atrocities and sudden eruptions of ungovernable rage and grief triggered by the most trivial memory.
Months later, when I was back home teaching Greek and Roman classics again, it occurred to me that the difficulties we have with Aeneas and his epic cease to be difficulties once you think of him not as a hero but as a type we’re all too familiar with: a survivor, a person so fractured by the horrors of the past that he can hold himself together only by an unnatural effort of will, someone who has so little of his history left that the only thing that gets him through the present is a numbed sense of duty to a barely discernible future that can justify every kind of deprivation. It would be hard to think of a more modern figure.
Or, indeed, a more modern story. What is the Aeneid about? It is about a tiny band of outcasts, the survivors of a terrible persecution. It is about how these survivors—clinging to a divine assurance that an unknown and faraway land will become their new home—arduously cross the seas, determined to refashion themselves as a new people, a nation of victors rather than victims. It is about how, when they finally get there, they find their new homeland inhabited by locals who have no intention of making way for them. It is about how this geopolitical tragedy generates new wars, wars that will, in turn, trigger further conflicts: bella horrida bella. It is about how such conflicts leave those involved in them morally unrecognizable, even to themselves. This is a story that both the Old and the New Worlds know too well; and Virgil was the first to tell it. Whatever it meant in the past, and however it discomfits the present, the Aeneid has, alas, always anticipated the future.