“Hindsight as foresight makes no sense,” insists the speaker of W. H. Auden’s great poem about the Aeneid, “Secondary Epic,” objecting to perhaps the most provocative element of Virgil’s epic: the startling juxtaposition of poetic myth with the specifics of recent history and contemporary events.
Whether or not this boldly original fusion makes “sense,” it certainly makes for an extraordinary artistic and imaginative feat: a poem built as a collage drawn from very disparate sources. The epic, quasi-Homeric tale of Aeneas and his people is fused with the tales of numerous real, historical figures, and narrative patterns drawn from literary sources are interwoven with actual Roman history. By an almost impossible conceptual leap, the distant myth of the poem becomes a foreshadowing and a prophecy of events that were, from Virgil’s own historical vantage point, already in the past.
The Aeneid engages especially with two distinct eras in the history of Rome. The first is the time of the three great Punic Wars (“Punic” = “Phoenician,” and hence, “Carthaginian”) between Rome and the great seafaring empire of Carthage in northern Africa. These wars took place from the mid-third to the mid-second centuries BCE and entailed many costly decades of fighting between the more established and wealthier Carthaginians and the nascent power of the Romans.
Dido’s wonderfully operatic dying curse on her former lover foreshadows the future wars between her people and the descendants of the treacherous Trojans.
During the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian general Hannibal crossed the Alps with his army and his elephants, invading Italy. But the Romans repeatedly defeated the Carthaginians, and by 146 BCE the great city of Carthage was sacked and destroyed, leaving the Romans in control of a vast swath of the Mediterranean coastline, including many territories that had once been under Carthaginian control.
The encounter between Aeneas and the Carthaginian queen Dido in Book 4 of the Aeneid provides a mythical parallel to the historical story of Rome and Carthage. Dido dies from love and shame, not open warfare. But she takes her own life with the sword of Aeneas. His parting vision of her funeral pyre both recalls and anticipates the devastated city of Carthage, sacked by Rome. Dido’s wonderfully operatic dying curse on her former lover foreshadows the future wars between her people and the descendants of the treacherous Trojans:
“Unknown avenger, rise up from my bones
to chase the Dardan settlers now and always,
with fire, with steel, whenever you are strong.
I ask that shore fight shore, and sea fight sea,
and arms fight arms—I pray for lasting war
to fall on them and on their children’s children.” (4.752–57)
The furious, passionate Carthaginian queen reappears as a shade in the Underworld. She bitterly refuses to speak to Aeneas, despite his pleas and excuses. Roman readers might be prompted to wonder whether dark memories of the great fallen empire of Carthage might haunt the rising power of Rome.
Allusions to the wars with Carthage are interspersed with references to the more recent Roman civil wars, which had taken place during Virgil’s own lifetime. Dido recalls the ancient power of Carthage itself, which was to be defeated by the Romans. But her rich, powerful court and her involvement with a foreign guest create a different parallel: with Cleopatra, also a North African queen (of Egypt rather than Carthage), who hosted and had affairs with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and who was defeated by Octavian (the future Augustus) at the Battle of Actium.
Like Cleopatra—whose family, the Ptolemies, had come to Egypt from Macedon—Dido is of a different ethnicity than the surrounding people, because she has fled to Africa from Tyre (modern Lebanon). In Virgil’s poem, popular gossip, personified as Rumor, suggests that Dido and Aeneas are indulging in a shamefully illicit affair, distracted from the proper business of government:
the two were keeping lengthy winter warm
in luxury, unmindful of their realms
and taken captive by their shameful lust. (4.229–31)
For any Augustan Roman reader, these lines would have recalled the love affair of Antony and Cleopatra. In choosing to leave Dido behind, Virgil’s Aeneas identifies himself as a leader who could temporarily behave as Antony had done—but who chooses instead to reject love and pleasure for the good of the Roman state.
Some of the most vivid and memorable passages of the poem are paradoxically precise evocations of uncertainty.
Like the Roman god Janus, typically depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions, Virgil’s portrait of Roman history and his own Augustan age offers a double vision in its distinct, incompatible, yet entangled stories. Aeneas’s military struggles against the Rutulians echo the wars of Rome against foreign invading armies, such as Carthage.
Yet we are also invited to see the Trojans, not the native Italians, as the eastern, luxury-loving imperialist invaders who oppress a noble rustic people. Moreover, the conflict between the different inhabitants of the same Italian homeland is legible as the first of a long series of Roman civil wars. Like Julius Caesar, Aeneas arrives on Italian soil with an army, and makes war on the native inhabitants—his own future countrymen. The poem presents the Trojans, and the future Romans of Virgil’s own time, as both the underdogs and the oppressors, both the migrants and the colonizers, both the wretched refugees and the imperial overlords.
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In a world where images are so numerous and so difficult to understand, truth itself can be in danger, threatened by false interpretations and distorted, misleading half-truths. Rumor, a frightening, quasi-divine personification, is an essential element in the Aeneid. She shows up first in Troy, spreading false claims about the Trojan Horse (2.22)—and thus laying the groundwork for the city’s fall. She whips up the people of North Africa with lies and partial truths about Dido and Aeneas:
She clings to fictions and distorted lies
as much as she announces what is real.
Rumor was overjoyed to fill the nations
with ever-shifting tales, inventing stories
that freely mingled fact and fantasy. (4.222–26)
It is Rumor, as much as Juno, Aeneas, and Dido’s own sense of honor and shame, that brings about the death of Dido and the future wars between Rome and Carthage. On Italian shores, Rumor flies through the towns, spreading gossip and tales about the strange new immigrants as effeminate, luxury-loving Easterners, and laying the foundations for war.
The beautiful ambivalence and mystery of Virgil’s own poetic art has both an aesthetic and a quasi-political function, in teaching the reader to remain in a cognitive place of doubt.
In Homer’s Iliad, Conflict (Eris) plays a similar role, stirring up the people to fight. But Virgil, in shifting from “conflict” to the more purely semantic “rumor,” suggests that the roots of violence between people may lie in our capacity to make meanings, and all its inherent danger of false interpretations.
The beautiful ambivalence and mystery of Virgil’s own poetic art has both an aesthetic and a quasi-political function, in teaching the reader to remain in a cognitive place of doubt. Some of the most vivid and memorable passages of the poem are paradoxically precise evocations of uncertainty. A famous passage describes the journey of Aeneas and the Sibyl to the land of the dead:
The pair moved dimly in the lonely night
through darkness and the empty homes of Dis,
his hollow realm—like travelers in the woods
beneath a grudging moon’s uncertain light,
when Jupiter surrounds the sky in shade
and black night steals the color from the world. (6.323–28)
The passage evokes the pathetic fallacy by which humans ascribe their own feelings to the natural landscape: in theory, the night should be “dim” (obscuri) and the humans “lonely” (sola), but Virgil switches the terms around. And yet the mystery is more than a standard rhetorical trope: it prompts us to wonder why these humans, together in a pair, are “lonely,” and whether their feelings and motivations might be as mysterious as those of the “grudging” moon. Virgil’s humans struggle to find a place for themselves in nature, in the world, and in relationship to one another.
The struggle belongs to a whole people—the future inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Aeneas declares that he comes to bring not the sword but unity:
“I will not make Italians bow to Trojans;
nor do I seek a kingdom for myself.
Both undefeated peoples must commit
to everlasting peace and equal laws.” (12.229–32)
The poem acknowledges that this optimistic public message may be only part of a complex, often sad and confusing truth about how the empire will be founded on the bloody, wounded bodies and fiery resistance of numerous people, each with their own stories, their own fates, and their own yearnings for a home of their own.
Virgil’s great poem makes us feel the tears of things, reopening the fiery wounds of history and igniting our hearts with the traces of forgotten flames.
Virgil’s magnificent poem has been canonical since the time of its composition. The conventional “Virgil” spelling—“i” rather than “e”—is a meaningful mistake, motivated by the poet’s extraordinary canonical status from the late Roman Empire onward. It suggests that the inspired bard could serve as a virga, a support or staff, for those in need of guidance or wisdom—a conception later echoed by the poet Dante, whose Inferno imagines this pagan as the narrator’s guide through Hell.
The Aeneid has perhaps had more influence on later European and Anglophone literature than any other work from ancient Greek and Roman antiquity. Paradise Lost, Milton’s epic of civil war, exile, and a journey to a new, heavenly homeland, fuses the Aeneid with other classical and biblical models. Writers and rulers across Europe and the Americas have looked back to Virgil’s epic as a model for their own founding myths, in the construction of new nations, new colonies, new empires. The Aeneid has a special relevance for the United States, a country founded by immigrants who fled from earlier homelands, often believing that divine providence justified their claim on a land already inhabited by many distinct groups of indigenous peoples. The inhabitants of modern societies have seen themselves in this tale of an empire whose political “dominion” is now long gone, but whose memory and cultural influence, through Virgil’s own poetry, survives.
As an epic celebration of imperialism, colonialization, and warfare, the Aeneid is often viewed with justifiable wariness by twenty-first-century readers. Yet skeptics are likely to find themselves disarmed and moved by the beauty of Virgil’s poetry, by the vividness with which he describes intense and contradictory feelings, and by the profound sadness, ambivalence, and humanity with which the Aeneid treats its own triumphalist, providentialist narrative. No story ever has only one meaning, least of all the story of empire. Every great victory is a great defeat. The glorious sweep of progress toward Roman civilization and prosperity means the end of an idyllic, virtuously rustic Golden Age. To preserve one lost homeland, another is destroyed. Fire catches fire. One ravaged city smokes and lights the burning hearths of another. A journey forward leads back to the past.
In such a large, complex, dangerous, and confusing world, can one person make a difference to anything?
This ancient epic raises profound, provocative questions that are now more pressing than ever, as old empires crumble and new powers arise, as swift, fearsome Rumor sweeps through our electronic devices and our minds, and as environmental disasters, wars, and poverty push ever greater numbers of people to seek refuge in lands where others already live.
In such a large, complex, dangerous, and confusing world, can one person make a difference to anything? Can hope and history rhyme? What does it mean to do the right thing? Are moral and religious quests doomed to cause more harm than good? How can we choose between competing loyalties? Is it worse to betray your country or your friends? Which matters more, principles or feelings? Can people with different cultures, different histories, or different religions live together in peace? How are individual lives intertwined with the larger stories of their communities? How is the history of each human society affected by others? How do we distinguish myth from history, or truth from hearsay? Is self-control always good? Is rage always bad? What are the ethical and humanitarian costs of war? When people can no longer live in their homes, where can they go? Do we have a duty to welcome immigrants? Do asylum seekers have a right to gain refuge, even when their presence stirs up conflict and violence in their new home? When does compromise become treachery or defeat? What can we do to protect future generations of humans? How do we decide who belongs where? Who owns the land? Who gets to choose?
Virgil’s great poem makes us feel the tears of things, reopening the fiery wounds of history and igniting our hearts with the traces of forgotten flames. All readers will find echoes of our forbears’ stories and our own in this narrative of forced migration, of displaced people seeking a home, of a painful passage from one world to another, of lands stolen and lands claimed, and of a terrible, costly struggle to build a better future for our children.
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From The Aeneid. Used with the permission of the publisher, Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. Copyright © 2025 Emily Wilson.
