The Aeneid, a 2,000-year-old poem that reads like a playbook for U.S. politics today
At a time when empires are making a comeback, Virgil's Aeneid is more relevant than ever
The new regime in Washington now has a taste for something that's very old: a global empire, the way ancient Rome aspired to have.
U.S. President Donald Trump has talked of expanding America's reach, to Panama, to Gaza, to Greenland, and to Canada, to fulfil what he referred to in his second inaugural address as "manifest destiny."
"The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons," President Trump said in his speech, Jan 21.
We might have thought this kind of political thinking was dead and gone: the whole business of taking over someone else's land without their permission, the way Europeans conquered Indigenous lands centuries ago.
But in the United States — and Russia, too — the idea of empire is making a late-stage comeback.
"When President Trump chose me for this position, the primary charge he gave me was to bring the warrior culture back to the Department of Defence," Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth said during his Jan. 14 confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"He, like me, wants a Pentagon laser-focused on lethality, meritocracy, war-fighting, accountability and readiness."
The Aeneid as a guide to imperialism
One of the blueprints for imperialism has always been The Aeneid, by the Roman poet Virgil, working between 29 and 19 BC.
It tells the story of Aeneas, a Trojan leader on the run with his son, carrying his aging father on his back, escaping with other refugees the burning city of Troy, which had been laid siege by the Greeks, whose soldiers had hidden in a giant wooden horse.
It picks up the story where Homer's Odyssey and Iliad leave off: Aeneas and his people sail west to found a new home in a land where they may or may not be welcome. At first, they're blown off course to North Africa, to Carthage, where Aeneas tells Queen Dido his war stories, and where Dido, against her best instincts, falls in love with him.
But there's a problem: "pius" Aeneas, as he's called in the poem (meaning dutiful and, for lack of a better term, job-oriented), has his eyes on his mission to found a new city for his people, and doesn't have time for love. Heartbroken, Dido kills herself.
Eventually, Aeneas and crew land in Hesperia, what's now Italy, and do battle with the locals. The way Virgil saw it, long before Romlus and Remus were on the scene, this landing was the founding of Rome.
In many ways, The Aeneid is a story of conquest meant to please his patron, Emperor Augustus, who was busy transforming Rome from a republic to an empire, and needed the good-news propaganda. Aeneas was the son of Venus, a goddess: therefore Rome, and her empire, are sanctioned by the heavens.
That divine sanctioning of empire is what many leaders in the decades and centuries that followed took from the poem, too.
"This text by Virgil — elite men were reading," Susanna Braund, a retired professor of classics at the University of British Columbia, told IDEAS.
"This formed their worldview. And when you look at the imperial projects of the British, and the Spanish and the Portuguese, these were guys who were totally raised on the idea that you go west and you bring your 'culture,' in scare quotes, to the 'uncultured natives' in scare quotes."
But there is another way to read the poem through the lens of the character of Dido — whose sad tale prompted an opera by Henry Purcell in the 17th century — that sees her as more sympathetic, more worthy of attention than dutiful, dull and narrow-minded Aeneas.
"There are people who see in the treatment of characters, particularly Dido, the tragic Carthaginian queen," said Daniel Mendlesohn, author of Ecstasy and Terror: From The Greeks to Game of Thrones. According to Mendlesohn, there's "a subversive view of the imperial project."
A celebration of empire or critique?
So was Virgil secretly building a critique of the Roman Empire into The Aeneid, right under Augustus' nose? It remains an open question.
"When you read between the lines there are at the very least ambivalent attitudes present in the poem about empire," said classics professor Paul Hay.
But Sarah Ruden, who has translated The Aeneid into English, adds the epic poem shows another side that focuses on humanity.
"Virgil appears to be the first author who gives a sympathetic depiction of cannon fodder, of nobodies, of unheroic characters who don't want to be in war.
"But they are humanized — they are real people to him. They have a past. They have a tragedy."
And yet there have been many, including Benito Mussolini, who used The Aeneid to justify his own fascist goals (he famously subsidized the publication of the poem during his reign), who see the poem as a model for empire building.
The lesson, however, for those who interpret it that way is simple: read it again.
Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to this episode.
*This episode was produced by Tom Jokinen.
Guests in this episode:
Daniel Mendelsohn is a writer and classicist in New York State.
Susanna Braund is a retired professor of classics, University of British Columbia.
Shadi Bartsch is a Helen A. Wegenstein distinguished professor of classics at the University of Chicago.
Paul Krause is an instructor of humanities at Chesterton Academy of Albuquerque in New Mexico.
Tedd Wimperis is an assistant professor of classical languages at Elon University in Elon, North Carolina.
Paul Hay is a professor of classics at Hampton Sydney College in Hampton Sydney North Carolina.
Sarah Ruden is a translator of Virgil's Aeneid in Connecticut.
Ellen Harris is the author of Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, and a retired faculty member in music and theatre arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Susan Botti is a soprano and composer of 'Gates of Silence.'
Aeneid readings by Susanna Braund, of Sarah Ruden translation.
David Collins, of Cecil Day Lewis translation (both available as audiobooks commercially).
The aria "Thy hand Belinda.." (known popularly as Dido's Lament) by Joyce Di Donato, from the recording 'War and Peace: Harmony Through Music,' Erato 2016
