19 BC If its homeland is a tribe’s identity, how devastating it must be to lose one, and how like rebirth to find (found) another. That’s the plot of Vergil’s epic. In twelve books, each of around 800 hexameter lines, the Aeneid tells the story of how a party of Trojans escapes the Greeks’ destruction of their city and wanders the Mediterranean for six years until fetching up, first in Carthage, then on the coast of Latium to establish a new home. Some of those lines are curtailed, as though awaiting their endings, and the whole comes to an abrupt end – suggesting that Vergil didn’t quite finish his masterpiece.
Unlike Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey on which it draws, the Aeneid is written to a nationalist agenda, explicitly to provide a myth for the founding of Rome – and specifically the empire under the Julio- Claudian dynasty. Buttressing the myth is the theme of continuity and rebirth: the religious beliefs and moral virtues of the archaic age refreshed in the vigour of the Latin peoples.
To reinforce this theme, Vergil adapts a device used in the Odyssey. Exactly in the middle of both epics, the heroes visit the underworld for advice on how to get home. While Odysseus wants to get back to his literal home, Aeneas needs to find out where his tribal identity will finally be ‘at home’.
The shade of his father, Anchises, answers his question with a prophecy detailing the Trojans’ founding of Rome, from Romulus through the age of kings, the Republic, the defeat of Carthage and Gaul, right down to the establishment of the empire under Caesar Augustus.
Aeneas and his followers marvel at such news, but the prophecy device exerted a powerfully authenticating effect on Vergil’s contemporary readers, who experienced the poem’s fictional action as verifiable history. They were in the position of the gods, knowing as fact what the poem’s characters can only glimpse as improbable guesses about the future.
In The Divine Comedy, Vergil takes Anchises’ place as Dante’s guide to the underworld. The Aeneid has been the same to European and American foundation stories as a whole.