VIRGIL

Virgil was the closest thing to the poet laureate of AugustanRome. Augustus saw himself as the liberator of the Roman people,the man who had brought peace after years of civil war, and whocontrolled and expanded Rome's enormous empire. The new rulerwas eager to find artists and poets to celebrate and to immortalizehis achievements. But many of the most talented poets of the age-- including Horace, Propertius, and Ovid -- refused to writethe grand political epic that Augustus hoped for. Only Virgilcame close to giving the emperor what he wanted. The close associationbetween the Aeneid and imperial power has made many readers uncomfortablewith it -- including, perhaps, Virgil himself.The poet, who lived from 70 to 19 B.C.E., spent ten years onthe Aeneid, and it was still unfinished at the time of his death.Legend has it that he ordered his executors to burn the work,although the emperor overrode his dying wishes. Perhaps -- asHermann Broch suggested in his diffuse, dream-like novel The Deathof Virgil -- the poet finally decided that he had gone too farin toadying up to the powers that were. The Aeneid has often beenread as a conservative, pro-imperialist, triumphalist celebrationof imperialism in general and of the emperor in particular.It is certainly concerned with the historical power of Rome.Rome is not just any big city (as Troy, in the Iliad, could beany city under siege, or Ithaca, in the Odyssey, any homeland).Rome, for Virgil, is the culmination of history. The poem looksobliquely at the contemporary Rome of the poet's own day, fromthe perspective of the distant mythological past. But the Aeneidremains deeply rooted in the history of its time. Auden famouslycriticized Virgil for his craven attempt to make the particularitiesof his own time look like universal truth, and to make AugustanRome seem the culmination of a progressive world history: No, Virgil, no: Behind your verse so masterfully made We hear the weeping of a Muse betrayed.