Ides of March Lecture: Augustus and Virgil’s 'Aeneid'

 by Anya Shankar

The annual PGS Ides of March lecture took place on Monday 14th March, only a day before the notorious date of the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. We were very lucky and grateful to have Dr Tristan Franklinos visit us from the University of Oxford to talk about Rome’s first Emperor, Augustus, and Rome’s most famous mythological hero, Aeneas, as told by Roman poet Virgil. 

The Aeneid is widely regarded as Virigil’s masterpiece, and one of the greatest Latin literature works of all time. Virgil was the poet that all other poets looked up to and wanted to be at the time and his genius is still highly regarded today. The Aeneid is an epic poem that tells the story of Aeneas, a Trojan who fled Troy to the Italian shores and is suspected to be connected to the founding of Rome. The Aeneid was written during a significant period of social and political change in Rome, with the fall of the republic and the reign of Rome’s first Emperor, Augustus Caesar. Dr Franklinos explained how the poem can be considered a debate, inspiring the readers and audience to ask questions about Augustus’ empire and the plausibility of the poem’s central hero. When Augustus read the epic, he considered it a celebration of his empire, however, many scholars argue that it can be seen as a criticism of his regime. It does seem to celebrate the peace and stability that Augustus put out after Caesar’s civil war. 

Virgil makes many clear links between Augustus and Aeneas, mainly that neither of them are very bright. Aeneas is presented as unintelligent, he receives hints from his mother Venus and his father, Anchises, haunts him in dreams, but he still remains blissfully unaware. One of the Aeneid’s most famous passages in book 6 tells the tale of Aeneas visiting the underworld. There were two gates to leave the underworld; one was a gate of horn which represented true dreams, and a gate of ivory which represented false dreams. Aeneas exited through the gate of ivory, meaning his important journey, in which Anchises describes what will become of Rome’s descendants, merely felt like a dream to him. Aeneas gets many things wrong as a leader, which leads the reader to think about why Augustus did certain things during his time as Emperor and whether, to new readers, it is a time that we would’ve been happy living in. 

Aeneas is given a shield by Vulcan, the Roman god of metalwork, in which he ‘not unaware of prophets, not ignorant of the coming ages, had fashioned the affairs and triumphs of Italy and Rome; on it, every generation of Ascanius’ line, and the battles they fought in sequence’. The lengthy and intricate description of the shield, is one of the most famous examples of ekphrasis, a Greek word for a detailed description of a work of art as a rhetorical, literary device. 

Virgil and many Roman poets used a technique that involved repeating a certain phrase or sentence throughout their poem. This evokes specific images in their poems, which then can be symbolic of their work. Moreover, Virgil flipped the way similes were used in poetry which shows his poetic genius. Most of the time, poets compared people to natural phenomena in similes. Virgil reversed this through a famous opening simile in book 1: ‘just as when, among a great people, sedition often arises and the low-born rabble rage in their passions, and already torches and stones fly about and fury aids arms; if, by chance, they catch sight of a man given weight by his honour and deeds, they fall silent and stand with attentive ears, he governs their passions with words and soothes their hearts.’