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Why did Virgil Want to Burn The Aeneid?
by Aubrey Weese
Publius Vergilis Maro, known to us as Virgil, was born Oct 15, 70 BC in Northern Italy. Octavius, who had always been a friend of Virgil, became Emperor in 27 BC, adopting the name of Augustus. He made Virgil in a sense, a court poet, "although [Virgil] always retained his independence of thought and expression" (Milch 7). However it was the Emperor's initial idea, and not Virgil's own, for him to write the Aeneid. Virgil accepted the project although he later wrote that "he thought he must have been just about mad to attempt the task" (Quinn 73).
In the end, after working on the project for eleven years, Virgil thought he had failed in the attempt. He planned a three year trip to Greece and Asia to try to fix what he thought was wrong with the Aeneid. But he died before he could finish, and on his deathbed Virgil asked for the manuscript to be burned. It is puzzling that the author of such a masterpiece, hailed by many as the best piece of literature ever written, and certainly one of the most influential, could look upon his work this way. Not just that it hadn't lived up to his expectations, but that it was bad enough that it should be burned. It doesn't seem to me that Virgil would have asked this simply because he didn't want people to read his work unless it was perfect. He must have thought that there was something actually dangerous about the Aeneid in its present form.
In order to try to guess why Virgil believed the Aeneid to be such a failure, it is important to first be familiar with what Virgil was trying to accomplish with the story. Augustus wanted it to be an epic which glorified Rome and ultimately himself. Virgil himself had a passion for Italy and the peace, order, and security that could come as a result of the Augustan age. He had grown up in the midst of civil war and experienced first hand the pain and suffering that it caused. Uniting all Italy under one rule would put an end to civil war and this was Augustus' plan. So in that sense Virgil shared Augustus' vision and was an ideal choice to write the epic.
But Virgil also had a deep hatred for all wars and battles, a sentiment which is hinted at in the text of the Aeneid many times. Yet, wars and battles are needed for the conquest that eventually leads to the peace which Virgil desired, and exalted in his poem. This contradiction shows up in the Aeneid many places, and there are times when "we can see [Virgil's] personal feelings [are] out of line with the momentum of his story" (Levi 224).
As evidence of this, a careful reader will notice the sadness that seems to pervade the whole poem, a sense of loss and regret, which is a strange mood for an epic about Rome's great and glorious destiny. One would think it should have a triumphant tone, but in fact it reads more like elegy, notes Adam Parry in The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid. Aeneas does not seem to enjoy the pursuit of his goal at all, but follows it because he has no choice. "If I had my way," he says to Dido, "I would never have left Troy and come here at all." "Wars, hideous wars!" the Sybil shrieks at him in book 6, "You will get Latium, all right, but you will wish you had never come." Dido prophecies about Aeneas that, "when he has accepted the terms of a shameful peace, let him not enjoy his realm, or that light he has prayed for." I believe this sense of sadness instead of triumph comes from the fact that Virgil "hated the violence he felt it necessary to commemorate" (Greene 70).
The scene at the very end of the poem where Aeneas kills Turnus is one of the best examples of this. This scene clearly shows the atrocity of war as Aeneas kills his foe in battle even as he begs for mercy. Aeneas' actions here can be interpreted as an act of pietas (duty) to his ultimate goal, destroying everything that gets in its way. Or it can be interpreted as an act of anger that caused Aeneas to lose hold of his virtue, and disobey the command his father gave him in the underworld to "spare the conquered and subdue the proud" (Aeneid 6.853). In any case it is a telling place to end the poem, a "powerfully inconclusive, brilliantly calculated ending, which leaves us pondering the open-endedness of anger and hatred" (Braund 215). The way Virgil wrote the poem here, Turnus ends up looking like a tragic hero, and Aeneas an unadmirable anti-hero.
There is also the telling scene where Aeneas kills Lausus who jumps in front of his father to save him, and utters the ironic words, "Your piety deceives you in your folly" (Aeneid 10.812). The very virtue that Aeneas is so praised for throughout the poem causes the death of Lausus at Aeneas' own hand. So it seems that piety is not really the most important thing; it is being on the right side-the side of Rome, which is synonymous with the side of fate and destiny. It doesn't matter if you are a good man, you will be trampled if you try to resist this. Michael C.J. Putman says in his essay Aeneas at the Metamorphosis of Lausus that "our respect is undermined for Aeneas who is brutalized by an inability to respond sympathetically to his own supposedly characteristic virtue in the operations of others," and "larger abstract notions of slaying barbarous enemies to rid the world of the primitive and the bestial are contently questioned by Virgil when focused against the realities of human emotions" (Putnam 159, 161). Maybe Aeneas was really the one who was deceived by his piety.
In this and other places, Virgil shows a definite sympathy for the losing side. He seems to be glorifying Roman imperialism and yet criticizing it at the same time. This dual theme has caused some critics to take widely varying views on the Aeneid. Some see it as piece of propaganda meant to glorify Rome, with the hard decisions Aeneaus had to make simply the noble sacrifices required of every good Roman for the glory of his empire. All of the drawbacks that Virgil points out to Roman conquest, are seen as being summed up in the line: "so great was the effort it took to establish the Roman race" (Aeneid 1.33). To them, "Rome and it's destiny provide the retrospective justification for Aeneas' actions and sufferings" (Zetzel 188), and weight of the things that were lost in order to found Rome serve to show just how glorious Rome really is. Yet other critics see the poem as an underhanded attempt to undermine everything Augustus stood for. Critics such as Francesco Sforza say that "Virgil was emotionally committed to the opposition of Augustus, and either sabotaged his own poem or made it a kind of concealed accusation of Augustus" (Quinn 75).
But most critics and myself included see the epic as a balance between these two themes. The Aeneid is about the glories of universal Roman rule but it is also about the high price that must be paid to get there. And it seems that possibly, in the course of writing the Aeneid, Virgil may have gradually come to believe that that price was too high. His vision of the future glories of Rome was beautiful, but it was not a certainty. In his prophecy Jupiter says of Rome: "I place no limits on them of time or space: I have given them empire without bound" (Aeneid 1.278-9). But in reality time and history do not come to a halt. Golden ages had come and gone in the past. W. H . Auden in his book Secondary Epic envisioned Aeneas looking at the shield Venus made for him, and asking "What next? After this triumph, what portends?" (Zetzel). Maybe the reading of his epic would cause people to fight brutal wars trying to establish a dream that may never be achieved, or if it was, would not last long enough to really matter. The dream is just a shadowy phantom without substance but the loss of human lives and freedom is cold hard fact. As James E.G. Zetzel says,
The idea that history has an end is a false consolation; wars to end war are a hope, not a reality. The achievement of peace involves brutality and violence, and those do not simply disappear; the retention of stability requires constant effort, and simple polarities of good and evil do not match the real world (202).
Maybe these were some of the thoughts that were running through Virgil's head when he asked for the Aeneid to be burned.
Bibliography
Braund, Susanna Morton. "Virgil and the Cosmos: Religious and Philisophical Ideas" The Cambridge Companion to Virgil. Charles Martindale, ed. Cambridge Univerity Press. Cambridge, United Kingdom: 1997.
Greene, Thomas. "The Descent From Heaven: Virgil" Modern Critical Views: Virgil. Harold Bloom, ed. Chelsea House Publishers. New York, New York: 1986.
Levi, Peter. Virgil: His Life and Times. St. Martin's Press. New York, New York: 1998.
Milch, Robert J. Cliffs Notes on Virgil's The Aeneid. Cliffs Notes, Inc. Lincoln, Nebraska: 1994.
Parry, Adam. "The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid" Modern Critical Views: Virgil. Harold Bloom, ed. Chelsea House Publishers. New York, New York: 1986.
Putnam, Michael C.J. "Aeneas and the Metamorphosis of Lausus" Modern Critical Views: Virgil. Harold Bloom, ed. Chelsea House Publishers. New York, New York: 1986.
Quinn, Kenneth. "Did Virgil Fail?" Modern Critical Views: Virgil. Harold Bloom, ed. Chelsea House Publishers. New York, New York: 1986.
Zetzel, James E.G. "Rome and its Traditions" The Cambridge Companion to Virgil. Charles Martindale, ed. Cambridge Univerity Press. Cambridge, United Kingdom: 1997.