Aeneid

“Much the same happens within a great nation, where lawlessness often / Bursts into riots, where people become mobs savage with passion, / Firebrands, stones start flying through air (fury furnishes weapons) / Then, if they happen to glimpse a man worth their respect for his righteous / Conduct, they’re silence. They prick up their ears and await his instructions, / He, with his words, brings passions to heel, lulls panting to calmness.”

Evoking Augustus quelling the civil wars, this image of Neptune calming the winds in Book 1 provides an early model of the ruler Aeneas must become.

“[…] Take heart once again and dispel your fears and depression. / Maybe the day’ll come when even this will be a joy to remember […]” 

Virgil adeptly switches between the public persona Aeneas must maintain and the private, vulnerable experience of the man. This line from Book 1—Aeneas’s pep talk for his men while he despairs, privately, in his heart—is one of the most famous quotes from the poem. 

“I am no stranger to hardship. I’m learning to help those who suffer.”

Dido is defined by her compassion. Like Aeneas, life has not treated her kindly, but suffering has only honed her generous spirit. This early characterization of her virtue only heightens the tragedy of her fall at the end of Book 4.

“I am afraid of Danaans, not least when they offer donations.” 

This is Laocoon’s warning to the Trojans urging them to burn the Trojan horse. The Romans, who considered themselves a straightforward, honest people, stereotyped the ancient Greeks as dishonest and wily (much like their favorite hero, Odysseus).

“Father, did you think or hope I could run off and leave you abandoned? Did such a monstrously unjust thought find voice in my father’s / Mouth?”

When Anchises tries to demand that Aeneas leave him behind to die in Troy, Aeneas responds with this line, one of the earliest and more poignant expressions of his filial piety.

“Live fulfilled lives, you whose struggles with fortune are over / Now. We’re still being challenged by one fate after another. / You’re celebrating the birth of your stillness; no more ploughing salt seas […]”

Aeneas addresses Andromache and the other Trojans who have settled in their strange mini-Troy. He is jealous that their wanderings are over and does not seem to recognize that their obsession with living in the past is unhealthy.

“Passion’s blind fire feeds on the harvest. / Images course through her mind: of his courage, his family / distinction.”

Virgil opens Book 4 with an image of Dido in the throes of love. It is Aeneas’s very virtue that sets her alight; while he personifies the dutiful Roman, she descends into a very un-Roman lack of self-control.

“Ruthless Love! Hearts break, humans die. How far must you force us?” 

Virgil addresses Love directly, imitating language of Roman love poets. Book 4, more than any of the other books, is inspired by the genre of elegy, which concentrates on love and sorrow.

“Father Aeneas won’t let this anger intensify further, / Or let Entellus’ embittered rage turn him into a monster.” 

In the role of arbitrator at Anchises’s funeral games in Book 5, Aeneas is very paternal. In his authoritative benevolence, he almost resembles the father of the gods, Jupiter. Removed from the emotional heat of the fight, he pulls the Sicilian boxer Entellus back from his destructive, Homeric rage. He will not be able to do the same for himself at the end of Book 12. 

“‘[…] Going down to Avernus is easy […] But to recall those steps, to escape to the fresh air above you, / there lies the challenge […]!’”

The Sibyl’s famous phrase describing the way to the Underworld is a play on words. It is easy to die, she says, but less easy to come back to life, as Aeneas will do here at the end of Book 6 and as he did, in some ways, after the traumatic annihilation of Troy.

“You, who are Roman, recall how to govern mankind with your power. / These will be your special ‘Arts’: the enforcement of peace as a habit, / Mercy for those cast down and relentless war upon proud men.”

These are perhaps the most important lines of the poem, when Anchises defines for Aeneas what a good Roman should be. 

“If I can’t influence powers above, I’ll move Acheron’s waters. / Granted, I won’t be allowed to repel him from Latium’s kingdoms, / And it’s immovably fixed in the fates that he’ll marry Lavinia. / Yet…there is room to prolong and delay these momentous proceedings […]”

This is a summary of Juno’s modus operandi. While she knows she ultimately cannot change the end result fated by Jupiter, she will succeed in making Aeneas’s journey as painful and long as possible.

“The Teucrians’ lack of response is a puzzle: Why don’t they come out and fight, on the level, take arms against foemen’s / Arms and be men, and not hide in a camp?” 

Aeneas, who rushed into battle in Book 2, is now an expert at tactics. He has matured. It is Turnus who is stuck in the proverbial Dark Ages, unable to understand why the Trojans will not come out and meet him on the field of battle, as a Homeric hero would.

“Is it, Euryalus, gods who implant these obsessions,’ said Nisus, ‘Deep in our minds? Or do each individual’s passions become god?” 

Nisus, one of the doomed lovers of Book 9, raises an interesting question: Can the characters of the Aeneid ever be sure that they have generated their own thoughts via free will, or has a god, perhaps, manipulated them? Or, on a deeper level still, are the gods simply personifications of powerful human emotion?

“Fortune favours the bold.” 

While this famous line of Turnus is often attributed to the Aeneid, Virgil actually lifted it from a Roman comedy, Terrence’s Phormio. 

“Each man has his day marked. Life’s short years can’t be recovered. That’s why a man’s real task is to reach beyond life in achievement, / Pass beyond fate, beyond rumour to fame.” 

Jupiter comforts his son Hercules with this line when Hercules is saddened that he cannot intervene to save Pallas’s life. While the Romans, too, prized glory, this sentiment is more reminiscent of Homer. Eternal fame (Greek: kleos) was Achilles’s primary goal.

“Mars, even-handed and deadly, was dealing out grief and destruction / On both sides, both equally slaughtering, equally slaughtered, / Victors and victims […]”

That the battle is so evenly matched is a credit to both the Trojans and the Italians; their descendants, the Romans, will certainly be unparalleled in battle. On a metaphorical level, this passage also describes Virgil’s attitude toward portraying the realities of war. He will give equal attention to the experience of both the victors and the victims. 

“Peace for the dead, for the losers in Mars’ game of chance, that’s the only / Favour you beg? I’d be willing to grant the same terms to the living! I wouldn’t be here, if fate hadn’t granted me this place to settle. / I’m not at war with your people.” 

Here Aeneas claims to the Italians, as he did to Dido, that conflict was never his intention. He appeals to authority: It is Fate, not a desire to war with the Italian people, that has brought him here. 

“[…] Hot, but with feminine tastes, in her passion for booty and plunder.” 

This line provides a controversial description of the cause of Camilla’s downfall: her “feminine” desire for spoils. It is possible Virgil is being critical here towards women. As we have seen, male warriors have a fatal desire for finery, too (e.g., Nisus and Euryalus, Turnus).

“Tears flowed over Lavinia’s fevered cheeks as she listened, / Noting her mother’s appeal. An intense blush crimsoned her features, / Spreading its radiant warmth through her face with suffusions of fire. […] Love disturbs Turnus’ heart.”

The Italian princess Lavinia’s famous blush is her one action in the poem. Lavinia never speaks in Virgil’s text. In some ways her silence makes her the perfect Roman woman, who is seen rather than heard.

“Think of a black shape flitting through vast estates of a wealthy / Master: a swallow, who sweeps through his towering halls on her feathers / Gleaning the crumbs and the fragments of food for her garrulous nestlings, / Noisily threading the porticoes’ emptiness, circling the still pools’ Waters. / Juturna, like her, now careers through the thick of the foemen […]” 

This is an example of an epic simile, a literary device invented by Homer. The epic simile often compares action in battle to an idyllic scene from peacetime, reinforcing the connection between these two spheres of human life.

“Greedy for battle, he’s already buckled his legs into golden / Greaves. How he hates the delays!” 

As the narrative barrels towards its conclusion, Virgil breaks the fourth wall by describing Turnus, one of Juno’s agents of delay, as now loathing his assigned role.

“Jupiter, was it your will that these peoples who’d one day be living / Bonded for ever in peace should collide in such terrible conflict?”

Virgil asks this to Jupiter of the Trojans and Italians, but he must have had the various factions in the Roman civil wars in mind. How can any divine apparatus intend and sanction such violence? It is a repeated motif in ancient texts that the will of the gods can sometimes be incomprehensible to man.