The Aeneid: Rome's Founding Myth

today we're talking about the enid or rome's founding myth um and so we're going to get a little bit of context uh for being able to understand this a lot of times you might be familiar with the roman empire at its height and indeed that's the actual context or the very beginning of the roman empire is the actual context for this text because this is when it's composed and yet nevertheless it is attempting to narrate uh into the mythic past anyway um preceding eras in roman history or looking at looking at uh uh historical memory in rome and trying to uh create myths around that and so i just want to look at a little bit a couple centuries before in the main period of the roman republic and so rome here in the middle rome at a certain point has beaten off purists and has essentially its first colonies after its first war with carthage this is at the beginning it's about to have a uh this what's called the second punic war which is to say the second war with the roman republic over control of the western mediterranean with the great punic or phoenician city-state of carthage with its whole empire that already included at this point much of spain you might know that um it's just an interesting um tidbit has nothing to do with anything but anyway cartago or carthage just means new city in phoenician and then cartago noah which is to say cartagena means new new city and then i think there's a new cartagena to credit nueva or something like that and so then that's new new new city so i like that anyway it's like all the places that are where the river is the word for river and then it's called river river like anyway you know there's a lot of places like that yeah the phoenicians not that inventive of people so yeah this is what brings a good point so if you're a lot of you haven't been here before um so in a quick comment like that i can repeat the comment so that people can hear us online but if you have a long comment or question we have a microphone and so we'll pass you guys the mic because all the people watching online there's usually more people online than here and they really enjoy your comments and we also remind people who are joining us online that if you type your comments into the facebook chat leandro can ask the question so we were dealing before with a couple weeks ago we did cleopatra and essentially the end of the hellenistic kingdoms this is when this is still at the height of the hellenistic period as rome is emerging though as the new great power in the west it's right after this second war when the carthaginians are really defeated that rome becomes the greatest power of the ancient world here but still at this stage the heirs of alexander the solicits and the ptolemies especially are the are the perceived anyway to be the greater or more sophisticated powers all right so we did a little bit of a timeline so you can also get a some context scope i like to have a little bit of a blueprint here so we can kind of see it so the text here that we're going to be looking at the aeneid is written here at the end of virgil's life as they're counting down here to get you know to the end of before common era at the end of bc obviously they weren't actually counting that way but we in history retrospectively are doing that and so virgil is writing there and what he's trying to do you know is go back and actually talk about a time period not only um at not of rome's traditional founding but in fact all these generations before where did the ancestors of the people who founded rome come from so setting it back into this traditional anyway time period of the trojan war um there is a historical colonel here but the trojan war is understood by ancient people as a uh would have been the mythic version the version that's um told in the iliad and odyssey and the other ancient greek poets those um so this event you know to the extent that there was a real event um took place prior to that thing we always talked about the branches bronze age collapse when these ancient empires the hittites the myceneans um all fell and the greeks lost even literacy and so there's this period that's called the dark ages because we don't have any any text from it so when text starts to emerge the ilia then the odyssey which are oral compositions that are telling that that kind of memory but actually is more referring to this kind of time period because authors are always talking about their own context no matter what they're trying to narrate they've they've forgotten uh there's no historical memory and so the iliad in the odyssey are maybe being orally composed in this kind of time period and are maybe they're traditionally written down in 527 and so already therefore centuries and centuries old you know five centuries old by the time we're getting to the aeneid which is the roman sequel to these ancient great uh works and so that's also then the period of time that we'll look at is the you know the kings of rome the roman republic and then the immediate context that virgil's been having has been the different civil wars that we've been talking about caesar julius caesar and then later his successor augustus victories over their arrivals but then looking back to earlier things those wars with carthage those wars with uh greeks is that clear so just want us lay some grounds and we can kind of see that we'll come back to all those things but i just kind of want to see the the scope of that in chronology so who founded the city of rome the wolf the romulus and remus right and so we have here romulus maybe and remus whoever's the whatever was once which um this particular um image is a renaissance or you know little babies that got put in to an older she-wolf traditionally the she-wolf had been thought to be etruscan so it very in other words very very ancient going all the way back to that time period it's now also possibly thought to be medieval so it's not clear if it's super ancient or if it's actually a lot newer than we thought anyway that's still being worked out but in any event we know when the babies are made and so that's later but it's still part of an ancient tradition that goes all the way back these romulus and remus however as is so often the case when we're dealing with with myth um there isn't one particular single story and that story doesn't simply begin completely systematized like we now think of maybe modern history so in fact if we're going back to the time of virgil when virgil is answering that question who who founded the city of rome he will have had actually multiple different traditions and current myths and stories to go from uh to answer that question for himself so he would definitely know that he and did know he knows all these stories uh the romulus story so in other words there is this guy who is the twin son of a latin priestess so a vestal virgin rhea silvia and when she's supposed to be a virgin nevertheless she's been seduced by the roman god mars who is um an important god in the roman pantheon equivalent of aries a less important god in the greek and when her uh relatives she's a princess of the latin kingdom um find out you know this is very embarrassing and so they have the the children exposed and being exposed then they're raised by a wolf right so that's the romulus and his twin brother remus story there's another um very early story maybe the earliest answer that people had to this uh there's a guy a greek hero named evander who is from the area of greece called arcadia so the peloponnesis uh evander is the son of in in in romans legend mercury in the greek side from hermes um and it's the equivalent god and so there's a thought that he came maybe and introduced all the different types of civilization to the area that becomes rome uh the ineus and so we're gonna talk especially about that one today but so this idea that there is this trojan prince who is the son in the roman pantheon of venus or in the greek uh aphrodite uh and then there's also a story that there's this guy romos who is ulysses son and so as ulysses or as the greeks had him you d odysseus as he's doing going on all those major um important journeys of the western mediterranean uh he has a son at some point with uh uh what's the nymph that he's hanging out with uh cersei cersei yeah and so he has a a child by her and that kid stays you know when he goes up back off to uh ithaca and so then that kid romos uh is the founder then of rome and so a bunch of those different answers so if we look at these these so the greeks had begun to settle southern italy already by the 8th century bce so essentially when the romans even start to think of themselves as you know in their mythic past of when rome was being founded they're already aware that there's greeks around and so greeks are part of their um kind of legendary tradition and indeed when we say this word um i'm we're westerners i'm a westerner and i'm also a latin and so i always think of everything from the latin and roman perspective as opposed to the greek perspective so greeks don't call themselves greek greek is a is the latin word for greek right and that comes from the fact that the area of southern italy was called magna gracia and so this was called the greece of proper originally in terms of the um where that word is they're calling the greeks are saying helas and things like that ayolia for the parts of what we now call greece but anyway because this was the area that the romans first encountered these guys they're like oh they're all greeks right so it's all greek to me for the romans [Music] so there's a the word roma sounds like the greek word romae which means strength and that's a good association to have so the romans like that as an etymology and so they think maybe that that's where the name for their city comes from that it's greek for strength and so early traditions give rome a greek founder so we mentioned this guy ivander from arcadia and that he went to rome a couple generations before or generation before the trojan war and then the other option would be like we say odysseus who in the odyssey is one of the very most important heroes of that ancient greek identity stories the iliad and the odyssey the hero of the odyssey the fact that he is wandering around this whole territory that becomes the roman heartland the western mediterranean it made sense to them that maybe one of his kids or somebody associated with him his son in this case would be the founder and so maybe one of the reasons why we're getting as possibly even the earliest stories there are answers to the question who founded rome where did rome come from is that this question is kind of a greek question to begin with so the greeks were very interested in these kind of mythic stories and mythic origin stories and not everybody in all of these ancient civilizations necessarily thinks in those terms or thinks in terms of the kind of pantheons that have lots of mythic stories to them and so uh the romans had different gods in an ancient religion that they started associating with the greeks when when they got all of this wealth of greek imagery in the form of massive amounts of pottery that the etruscans and romans were continually importing it's the best place to find ancient athenian pots is tuscany because the etruscans were just you know loved the stuff so they're just supporting it and so they are also importing these stories and that's why uh we often are doing the syncretism where i'll say ares equals mars zeus equals jove or jove patter joe father jupiter and so on a fair daddy venus so another story though that doesn't have a greek origin is this romulus story that i mentioned so first mythic king so the romans did look back to at this whole time this is the end of the republic when virgil is writing but they did have a historical memory of a long period of the republic and they looked back to the foundation of the republic as a pivotal moment in in their history preceding that they had a series of kings they're largely just legendary so we can't say maybe the vet last few were have more historical basis but certainly going all the way back to the first one and so one of the stories then that they tell is their first legendary king romulus who is also an eponymous hero by which we mean to say a lot of times when people just in that same way there's that roma's son he's another eponymous hero so a lot of times if you um you want to say well who is the founder of israel well it's a guy named israel you know and so they make up a story about it that guy israel or there may well have been any other any others of those so ultimately this whole trojan origin story becomes so popular because of course the romans are very influential that later in the middle ages when the franks when the people who are the ancestors of the modern french when the franks tell their origin story well it turns out that they also are descended from trojan princes so there was a trojan prince named francis and so an eponymous ancestor of the franks and he ultimately you know let them all on a different journey and they ultimately uh you know descended down to a guy named marovich who's the upon admits ancestor of the mayor of indians the original royal family of the franks right so anyway that same kind of thing always is kind of happened so if you you're sitting around you're saying well we have a town called rome we must have had an ancestor roma's that started the whole thing and that's where that came from and so romulus is that kind of a a story so we said a little bit about the story so there is a a latin princess so the latins are a a tribe that are speaking that latin language um and there's multiple different uh cities not just rome that um speak latin as their original language and so uh there's a king named numater who's one of the latin kings he has a daughter who is a vestal virgin so a priestess who is not uh to the goddess vesta who is not supposed to um have relations with for example gods like mars um but that's sometimes guards like mars aren't taking no and so uh she ends up having then twins there's all sorts of um mythic uh origins where you have twins you know where there's um you know everybody from hercules actually has a twin brother uh caster and pollux we were mentioning before israel so um his his he has a brought twin brother esau so his original name jacob so anyway there's all these kind of mythical um in a lot of these myths there is a twin brother in fact in in the uh uh the gnostic stories of jesus jesus has a as a twin brother and so we hear of this apostle thomas well thomas is uh uh aramaic for twin and he's sometimes called didymus thomas which is a greek discreet word for twin is didymus right so anyway so the idea of it is there's a there's a often there's a divine uh twin and then there's a mortal twin so there's jesus and thomas and there's lots of them that are like that right okay there's the other story that we're going to cover here a lot but anyway we'll just give the the thumbnail of it here there's this idea uh that there is a prince of troy aeneas who is the founder of rome and so although the guy is kind of only a minor figure in the iliad he nevertheless kind of plays a prominent role and we'll see why um if you're going to write a sequel he was a good good character to pick and build from already then by the third century this is something that's quite well known we can't always tell you know the origins of myths because we don't have the beginning we don't have the oral stuff at all but what we can say is that by the time one of these hellenistic rulers one of alexander the great's heirs a guy named king pierce he's a king of an area called papyrus which is kind of like where albania is in that greater albania area so he considered himself like alexander to be a descendant of achilles and when he decided that he was going to be like an alexander and instead of conquering the whole east he was going to maybe make a name for himself by conquering the whole west and he took a giant army to italy and and started trying to uh defend what we what i was just calling magna gracia which in other words the greek southern italy from roman and other latin and italic incursions he fought big wars against the romans and he won every single battle but he lost so many of his men in doing it and so he up lost up to three quarters of all of his troops and supplies winning those battles because of how tenacious the romans were and so this is the origin of our term pyrrhic victory right so it's named for this guy pirus who really won but lost by winning so he had one more war with the romans and he would have been have nothing what is the picture so um this is a vase uh uh from that's kind of what i'm trying to show here is that before um the romans are using this this actually is a greek myth right and so we can see here um in a greek pa vase these are black figure vase and so there's a guy here who's got an armor on right and so that's aeneas and he's carrying a guy on his back so that's his father and kisses who is lame and can't walk on his own and he's got um at least he's probably holding hands here with his son here who is scanias and i don't know there's another boy and maybe maybe it's the second son in the greek story so he didn't make it to rome so anyway so he's bringing his son and and then what i think is happening here is uh he's being urged on by the goddess venus so i think that this is probably venus as a or aphrodite as opposed to his wife who doesn't figure in or doesn't make it in the in the greek stories but that's my understanding of it so that's essentially the story of this trojan prince he's fleeing troy as it's falling and he's carrying his his dad on his back while he's doing it and so that's kind of the most famous um image of aeneas we'll see it a bunch of different times here so uh so i mentioned um you know how this myth had already gotten uh taken hold uh in the romans and so this king purist was you know pretty much playing up the fact that in the same way that there had been this trojan war and achilles fought against the trojans so too pierce as a second uh achilles as another alexander was going to go fight these romans who are just the trojans and he's going to have another trojan war and it'll be a wonderful uh glorious thing so too a little bit before that when the uh when we had the first punic war which is to say the war that the romans fought against the phoenicians against the carthaginians there was in car they had uh divided sicily among them so carthage is a major power in what's now tunisia that's where carthage is and so they had as an overseas colony uh this western part of the island of sicily syracuse was a a very important greek city state in its own right and there was a little here messina is essentially the um a little ally of the roman republic at this point and so um par control of sicily is one of the things that uh and shipping of through the western mediterranean therefore is one of the things that the romans and the carthaginians are fighting over so one of the things that happens at the outbreak of the first punic war is this city of sigesta over here they rebel against carthage and they send letters to rome saying hey we were founded by aeneas you know so when aeneas came here uh you know his trojans came here uh we were founded and then you know then we know you're founded by the trojans too so we should be allies against these carthaginians and so the romans what convenient yeah very convenient right so it was a it was a very good pr on the part of the uh you know the sagestands because not only did the romans win that war uh but the suggestions were made allies in full in in full standing you know so they were not only freed as a city but became um you know a free ally of the romans and so they weren't subject to taxation and everything like that because they're essentially kins people right and so likewise then in the ongoing centuries uh as the romans start intervening more and more in greece proper so when they go across and they they take over papyrus after purist is gone and they start taking over things like macedonia and things like that so in other words making their way into what we more think of as greece proper and the balkans then some of the greek city-states which are continually warring with each other you know they're having fights with each other and one of them has the bright idea hey if you go through the entire iliad and there's like a list of all the different greek cities that sent ships to attack troy we're not on that list and normally that has been a bad thing because that because we don't have any honor and all these things but now we wrote they write to the to the romans and senate and say hey all of these cities that attacked troy you know are attacking us and we didn't attack you so you should you should defend us and so the senate debated that and they said okay that makes sense and so they defended that city so anyway it was a good way that people started to have to have you know in other words it's a mythic origin but in other words people are taking it seriously enough that it's affecting contemporary politics uh so they're believing it right picture my okay is from edward oh really your family's from ajento agrigento yeah yeah they didn't believe about the greek now i have the evidence yeah what's it called what's an arrogant called now is it it's uh oh it is okay but um a lot of the records from the story okay so i just found out all about this two years ago so i'm trying to trace back even back to the worst time yeah this is this microphone the microphone i'm sorry we're supposed to hand the microphone we need to use the microphone because we're live on facebook i'm not sure it's working it does work okay test test i thought it was working all right well anyway the point of it is um audience member here she is from right here and right here by the way the best the best preserved greek temples in all of in anywhere right here right is it there apparently there's still some areas where people speak greek today oh wow oh yeah and uh we visited i went there and we visited the temples and yeah but yeah i i still want to know about all the records uh that would that were destroyed if anything has served yeah so the so the question is yeah i mean uh anyway there's so many greek ruins this was a very important greek settlement obviously syracuse was a massive greek city and there were greeks all over the place but sicily has been conquered so many times again and again and again actually that not a lot of not a lot of records have survived um at least in sicily so other records have been survived other places so interesting okay so another aeneas so julius caesar as you could imagine at the time period we're getting to when the aeneid is being composed caesar becomes the most important popularizer of aeneas as rome's founder he in fact apparently wore when he would go into battle often red boots which are meant to be in imitation of aeneas so aeneas is known for wearing the red boots and um anyway that's an invitation the patrician clan of the julie e which is to say um julius caesar's clan so if you think of the if you look at the roman name how it works his name is gaius you know euless or julius caesar and so that's his cog you know his primomin is just everything only like five or ten there's 20 different roman names it's usually your name gaius or manlius or publius or sextus or any of those kind of things and then that and then the second one is your your clan name and then your cognoman and so anyway so the big clan here the patrician clan of the julie and so they're one of the a handful of very important robin noble families and that's one of the names why we have names like julie or julian jules all of those things are coming from that from that clan um essentially all the girls would be called julia right romans are not very inventive when it comes to those names so what the um julie e claimed is that aeneas had a son named julius or euless or julius depending on how they wanted to say it and so that uh therefore is caesar is not only a second aeneas but in fact he's a descendant of enemies and his uh his propaganda or his belief since aeneas was the son of aphrodite then then obviously the julia are also descended from venus which is an important claim to be able to make so your divine ancestor and we saw when we did the cleopatra lecture that one of the things that freaked everybody out in the roman republic or at least all the republicans the different senators who were afraid that caesar was going to set himself up as king he set a statue of cleopatra up um as venus so in other words it's her face and her imagery but in fact it's meant to be venus into the statch into the temple of venus genetrix which is on the forum and so anyway if you watch the movie uh it's not necessarily the case but the senators are all saying and there's a there's an empty pedestal next to it so that when when caesar declares himself god right that there'll be a divine you know statue of him next to it and then they'll be totally you know slaves to essentially these eastern potentates and so they assassinate him right so anyway he's descended of venus okay so i mentioned before about this idea of when you have multiple different foundational stories you ha it's actually starts out generally speaking as a mess and so if we were to go back uh prior to the composition of the bible in this you know as it's all pieced together in the second temple period and we go back instead to uh the first temple period before jerusalem was destroyed there would have been all of these different founder ancestors of the israelite people right and they would have had different origins and different origin stories there would have been a guy abram or abraham who is either from ur of the chaldees or he's from heron and different depending on how what the legend was so they would have two different ones there would have been we mentioned israel right an eponymous ancestor so in other words there's a place called israel or a tribe uh called israel so they anticipate an ancestor that had that same name who ultimately gets conflated with a guy named jacob who may be a totally different ancestor but ultimately is understood to be the same one the northern kingdom has a guy named joseph as one of their ancestral heroes and also a guy named ephraim who is also again eponymous so the name of one of the tribes is called ephraim or ephraim we sometimes say english but anyway fry likewise anyway they have this kind of their eponymous northern kingdom ancestors the southern kingdom judah has an ancestor they named judah and likewise then the kings of judah have an ancestor they're called davidic kings so the royal house is called the house of david and so they anticipate there's an eponymous ancestor named david and the priests have a are called aaronid priests and so they have an eponymous ancestor called aaron right so anyway there might be and then moses right so and there's traditions that some of these guys are coming from haran which is to say the fertile crescent and some of these guys are coming from egypt so from either side there's two ways you can come from and they come from one or the other right and so that's maybe a bunch of different stories when it's originally composed but by the time that we get it in the final form that we have it now after the biblical the many biblical authors wrote down the stories and after the later editors combine them together to try to make sense of them the way we see it now is that okay of course abraham then is the father of isaac who is the father of jacob whose name gets changed to israel so they are the same guy that he has sons 12 sons including a guy named joseph and a guy named judah who are therefore brothers with each others that joseph has a son named ephraim that judah has descendants that include david and that indeed one of the other brothers levi has uh descendants who are moses and aaron who are made into brothers by one of the biblical writers right and so essentially it's a method of taking old stories combining them together and now we make a system so later writers and editors are interested in systematizing stories that have maybe otherwise contradictions some of the stories maybe have abraham being from ur other ones heaven be from haran they explain it by saying he started in ur he went to iran he came to the land right and so um some of them have abraham being in egypt maybe and he came they explained it by he went to egypt during a famine and he came back this kind of thing okay so the same exact thing we're gonna see uh is these probably totally different origin stories um that were existing at virgil's time as virgil gets a hold of them he pieces them together uh in his own kind of rational way right and so we have aeneas uh as the main character of virgil's epic here he is no longer is this guy evander is no longer a founder he's just somebody who helps aeneas out when aeneas gets to italy so he's still there he's still a figure but he's not the founder anymore aeneas has that son ascanius you know in the greek myth but he now we understand that isconias is just another name for euless so that ancestor of the julians eponymous ancestor of the julian clan that they then have deep later down that those descendants who are romulus and remus who are eponymous again for the city of rome and remus is being maybe that same romance character who now no longer has any association with ulysses or odysseus but it's how do we piece all these things together and try to explain it when there are multiple competing stories and so that's one of the things that's happening here okay so we've seen kind of a little bit of that window into the history going all the way back but what's always most important when we're looking at any text is the context of the author because the authors um largely their memory or historical memory or certainly going back into mythic times their their ability is actually substantially less than what we have today uh given our additional tools of academic in the academic discipline of history that wasn't available to them back then right and so um the immediate context of um of virgil is this period of time at the end of the roman civil war when the roman republic has kind of rapidly expanded it has already defeated the carthaginians and taken over their empire defeated the different successor states the cellucids and the antigonids and and the macedonians and everybody else and also over overshadowed all of um greece proper all the little city states um and then what has happened now in that second round of civil war augustus has uh conquered for example egypt right and so this is now this newly expanded roman empire which is a republic still in name but has become ruled by one man in fact so uh caesar augustus and so this is the immediate context that virgil is thinking about since this is his lifetime so we'll just go a little bit of a review of this context so there's a guy his name is gaius octavius so he's adopted as we saw in the cleopatra lecture by julius caesar when caesar's will is read so caesar's assassinated his will is red he names his great nephew um octavius as his uncle and so then if in just in terms of we sometimes don't think of this we can sometimes call this guy octavius we sometimes call him octavian and we sometimes call him augustus in in english right and so i just want to show you the origins of that so his original name is octavius which is uh his gen's name here in the original roman um he's from this octavia eve clan but when he gets adopted by caesar which was always which is a roman custom to adopt adults even he takes then caesar's name guy is julius caesar but then he takes the name that's adopted out of name you know so octavianus becomes the special modifier and so it's not octavia octavious anymore but octavianus and so that's why we say octavian and so if we know these names if you know the names like adrian or hadrian or fabian so these are all adopting adoptee names right so so fabius is be like one of the fabie right fabiana's is you know adopted out of the uh the phabie so claudius claude claudian so julius julian so when we have those extra little parts of that that's what that's doing so octavian that's why we call him that okay so initially after caesar's assassination he's allied with caesar's uh chief lieutenant mark anthony to defeat brutus and cassius the assassins and the senatorial party however he later fought and broke with anthony and fought to seize complete control of the republic so when he does that when he wins when anthony's dead when cleopatra's dead when he's conquered everything he takes the name imperator kaiser augustus and so this is a new kind of name entirely and so this is now we've saw this whole thing about how caesar when they threatened to make him you know like when he was kind of doing a trial balloon about becoming a king that was so uh odious to the roman people the idea that he would have to take the title rex that they assassinated him or the senators assassinated him so augustus does something completely different so he takes a new title which is simply this just means general at the time so imperator doesn't mean emperor the way it does for us just means general so all of these guys have been generals and the you know the august general caesar and he also then takes the title princeps which means that he's simply the first among equals of the different senators you know in name obviously in fact he's a king right so he but um anyway so that we get then that word because he takes titles like that augustus caesar that has become titles as because of how powerful he is right so um for example when we fast forward to you know the 20th century for there'll be titles like this um so these guys who are all cousins of each other going into world war one and they kind of all look the same so george v is emperor which is that same word imperator just admit general it just meant general in caesar's day but now it means emperor you know because we've had 2 000 years of making that title uh get big likewise for the germans the title kaiser kaiser wilhelm right so that's caesar that's pretty obvious same thing the tsar the caesar of russia right and the type another one of the titles that was used a lot is augustus and so the greeks the byzantines continued to use that as one of their titles we didn't keep it in the west actually i think i personally think that they tricked the byzantines were very tricky i think they tricked the russians and the germans so which is because when the roman empire is divided they made four emperors and the senior emperor was always called the augustus and the and the junior emperors are always called the caesar and so and so they must have at some point or rather the byzantines recognize the german emperors and the and the russian emperors as with the name you know caesar and anyway so i'm not sure we have to look that up but it does seem like they've they tricked us anyway and they're tricked the westerners and easterners so okay so one of the things that happens when augustus takes over is that he has a program of promoting what he thinks of anyway as good old-fashioned traditional roman morals roman values so it's possibly growing out of that fact that he's the guy who's in charge of all kind of the western provinces the latin part of the empire and we kind of even have seen it certainly played up really big in the movie that anthony is off in the east he's been hellenized he dresses in all things greek he loves greek stuff he has children by cleopatra that are named think you know have alexander and celine and apollo you know these kind of phoebus or helios i mean these kind of greek names and so instead of having that kind of temptation of foreign queens from the hellenistic east and also all of the sophistication of the greeks octavius octavian augustus this guy who with these multiple names wants to portray himself as um as a stalwart roman conservative and so here he is um this is for romans the only difference between if you're a political leader you have a toga right and so that's the way the magistrate has but if you're going to be a priest you just take the toka and put it over your head like this and now suddenly you're a religious official and so this is him dressed as the pontifex maximus which is to say the supreme pontiff of rome which is a title that the the bishops of rome ultimately take the popes ultimately maintain that latin title so among that offices in addition to being pontifex maximus uh augustus also was made sensor and so the sensors had been this very um honored position where you get to we think of the word sensor right you're censoring things one of the things they were censoring is do you get to be a senator or not so they have a list of who's who qualifies to be a senator and so he's made a cents for for the purposes of um cleaning up the morals in the city of rome and so if you um aren't measuring up as far as he's concerned he can drop you for example from the senate roles anyway so greek vice roman morals okay so that brings us to virgil the author here so rome's epic poet in this augustine age a guy named publius so again that one of those roman names of the front virgilius morrow so we call in english we say virgil he's a major roman poet he's living through all of those civil wars and he also there is therefore at there at the end of the republic that period of what we call the principle but which is to say the very beginning of what we think of as the roman empire traditionally he's thought to have been from relatively humble origins a roman family in the northern part of italy and he has a patron my mycenas who is political advisor to octavian in the civil war time and then later when augustus is the emperor he sort of kind of serves informally as minister of culture so he's promoting um all these sorts of poets like uh virgil who in turn are you know kind of helping out with the propaganda aspect of what the augustine uh era is meant to be all about and we'll see that in the course of this so what is virgil's uh task that he says before himself is nothing less than essentially writing the romans into the greek universe so um we had that quote earlier that i didn't read out loud but anyway that was on the slide that uh that the that the romans you know had conquered the idea from horus the romans had conquered the greeks but the romans understood the greeks to be more sophisticated than them and so they were in turn conquered culturally by the greeks and so it's critically important then for the romans to explain their origins into this greek sacred narrative now that they control the greek world and so virgil's epic the ania does that and it's uh though laying claim to very very particular real estate that ends up being very interesting and and having a particular purpose to it so the aeneid itself so the epic is modeled directly on the iliad and the odyssey of homer which had been composed centuries earlier and in some sense it's a sequel so it's taking place at the same time and then it's continuing but the difference is is that the aeneid is an entirely literary work so which is to say um virgil is writing and so he's composing text with like you know with pen and paper um uh papyrus anyway uh it's not an oral composition like those earlier works that predate you know that are dating back into that uh greek dark ages before there actually is writing um and so by following then the last trojan prince um out of the iliad the romans become interesting this interesting anti-greeks within the greek universe so they're greeks but they're not saying oh well when odysseus came by he founded us or something like that which would essentially give credit to the uh to the greeks instead they're saying yeah yeah we were around but we were fighting you you know in the kind of thing in this trojan war right so we mentioned so we just go back i brought this light of case again in case we needed some context but we're um we're here uh with virgil the composition of the united st you know a thousand years before virgil is when the traditional dates anyway of when this event would have taken place so aeneas so that i want to look a little bit at the source material before we look um and go through all the themes of the aeneid and so what is the character of aeneas like before virgil gets a hold of him and makes him what we now think of today so there's one of the very earliest again oral compositions going all the way back a hymn that's attributed to homer homerick him him to aphrodite and so in this story zeus makes aphrodite fall in love with a trojan prince a mortal man named ances and this is him his payback for all of the times that venus so aphrodite is constantly making uh zeus fall in love with all these mortal women and in men and getting him in trouble with his wife and everything else and so now she's gotta she's gonna have that uh payback so she has a son by ancis aeneas and and in terms of the iliad he's the second cousin to hector who is the chief uh trojan warrior in the iliad so ankis though is told in this hymn not to brag about the fact that he you know had a had a relationship with aphrodite it's very hard for a mortal guy not to mention that to his friends so he fails to do that when he uh when he does start bragging about it zeus strikes him with a lightning bolt and thereafter he's lame and so that's why when we see him on all the pots and everything like that and nia has to carry him around right where did i read this um oh greek myths by over that english poet whose name escapes me maybe it'll come back who was in the first world war anyway um he tells the story of uh and kisses hanging around out with some other guys and one of them says wouldn't you rather sleep with so and so the daughter of such and such than with aphrodite him herself and kaise says well no i slept with both of them so yeah so you got in trouble for it anyway that's a there's a lot of human nature sometimes in greek myths so all right so when aeneas himself then appears in the iliad he's set apart as a very special by the gods so the gods are actually um kind of constantly intervening in the iliad to save him from different different trouble he gets into so he's protecting a fallen comrade from one of the greek heroes diameters of argo and so he starts losing that fight and so aeneas is saved then by aphrodite before diameters can kill aeneas but as she's whisking him away diameter gets really mad about it and he actually is able to wound aphrodite at which point apollo intervenes and warns diameters in a pretty famous passage where he tells essentially that you really shouldn't be messing around with gods because gods look upon you mortals as the same way that mortals look on potty and sex and so anyway that's the that's the context for that quote from apollo it's him trying to tell diamond he's not to go after aeneas um in a different episode when aeneas is again losing a fight with somebody poseidon who is actually one of the greek allies under almost all normal circumstances so the gods are have taken taken sides um in the trojan war and some of them are on the trojan side usually and some of them are on the greek side usually in this case poseidon is usually on the greek side and nevertheless poseidon intervenes to save aeneas because he points out to everybody who is around wondering why he's doing this that there has been an important prophecy that aeneas is fated to be the trojan prince who survives this war and so that the the royal house of troy is not extinguished and so the line will continue so the main line that has gone down from through priam and through hector zeus is done with them but he wants to preserve uh this house of um anyway this uh of ilium right this is the royal line so um as a result of the prophecy then dozens of greek cities in the greek world and actually neighboring cities and uh all claimed uh to have been founded by aeneas so we saw that about uh the city and in sicily that was claiming it but there's dozens that are claiming that kind of thing and so what he's on a hippocamp yeah seahorse so it's a it's a but a big seahorse it's a it's a kind of a sea monster horse yeah okay so his characteristics that we have um going all the way back to the greeks here are filial piety which um so we think of that word piety now almost exclusively in relationship to uh the judeo-christian god usually so you're pious if you were believing or obedient to god the word originally is is really directed in uh in latin to uh piety to your your father and your ancestors your family so uh filial piety we call that now um so um the story of the fall of troy isn't actually in the iliad but it is a story that's well known to the ancient greeks and so it is depicted uh it's from and it was in other poems and other other versions that haven't been survived uh to us um but uh and included in that is again this this depiction that we keep having of aeneas with his little boy that he's got along with him and he's got his dad on his back right so this there's an caissies the braggart uh who's now lame because of the lightning bolt right and so uh he's always doing that and so the hero is therefore already known in the greek story for filial piety and for preserving then three generations of the patriotic you know of the patriarchal or patrilineal lineage of the trojan royal house and it's going to turn out that actually in fact that's something the romans like you know so uh the romans are kind of a very big into patriarchy um and they're big into the father being always right and being the leader and field piety is one of their things and so we can see the same depiction of um of uh aeneas carrying ankyses on a coin that says kaiser right so caesar julius caesar's coin and he's also got here um with a object now in the roman story the penantes which is to say a little idol uh his household gods so this is a really big value for the romans and it's certainly a big value for augustus because augustus as you remember uh had been adopted he's the grand nephew really of caesar but he gets adopted by caesar he takes caesar's name and he uh his whole indeed explanation for his rise to power is to punish um essentially the people who assassinated his father his adopted father but his father right and so um that is quite associated with the romans with religious piety and so roman depictions have been bringing like i say these uh household gods which the romans called the panates so an old thing in roman religion is to have gods of your own household that are in you know your own kind of family idols your family gods uh and also these laura's which is to say an ancient kind of roman guardian spirit um that doesn't really have a config a com comparable thing in the uh in greek religion so as we're getting then to this place where uh where virgil has all this stuff in front of him we can kind of see that he's kind of lucky i would say or quite fortunate or he's you know also had to think about it to to put all this together but his material is really fortunate so there's a primary greek sacred story the primary greek sacred story the iliad you know so that's at the beginning of how the greeks define themselves and includes then the villains of the story the trojans who nevertheless are portrayed as very noble chivalrous worthy adversaries and indeed the gods of the greek pantheon are on different sides of the story a lot of them are in favor of the trojans so this hector isn't coming off as being this uh terrible uh you know evil villain or something like that in the story and so as a result they've got a people that they can say okay trojans without having it be uh you have to rewrite a bad villain or something like that one of the number one of their number the trojans this guy aeneas he is already fated to go to preserve the royal line and some traditions then found a city and so the romans for centuries by the time a virgil were already making that association and claiming that they're that city that was founded julius caesar himself had associated himself with aeneas in his lifetime he's wearing the boots and showing the showing that he is so it's a it's a story that you want to highlight if you're working for somebody whose boss is augustus so he's working for his patron who's whose boss augustus promotes himself as this pious avenging son and so aeneas also has this this quality right so he's got filial piety as his number one iconic thing so building on all those details then virgil is able to integrate rome into the greek sacred story without having to rely on a greek origin something like being the son of ulysses or the son of odysseus and that would have had to you know had this thing where rome is sort of subordinate to greek or heir of greece in this way it's able to be a fully legitimate rival of the greeks the entire time and they ultimately defeat the greeks as a kind of a payback for the trojan war as far as the romans are concerned in their epic right so how is the epic work so the aeneid itself is an epic it follows those same epic conventions that virgil found when he himself is reading and studying the iliad and the odyssey of homer there's all kinds of things like we call for example an epic convention ornamental epithets so whenever you're going to hear come about upon a hero's name he doesn't just call him achilles usually it'll say things like swift-footed achilles or poseidon earth shaker wise penelope bright-eyed athena so that will happen even if let's say uh we're in this where we mentioned poseidon and he's not shaking the earth right and so it's a it's an epithet that's associated with poseidon it isn't furthering the story but it's part of the um the bag of tricks that allows a bard an oral poet in order to remember and also to compose and also to fill the meter uh of their poetry so it's one of the things that you need when you're doing oral composition it's not as much one of the things you need when you're doing written composition which you're not memorizing but part of the idea that virgil has is he wants this thing to sound like uh the old thing so in the same exact way that if we for example go to modern times the book of mormon is filled with all of this kind of king james bible talk and so he is he you know you know all of these kind of them these and vows and all this kind of thing well this isn't how people talked in the 19th century when the book of mormon is being published but nevertheless is meant to sound bibly and now people were thinking of that as being how the bible talk is i think i think in rome people did um habitually they then poets would read aloud yes they would go to parties and they would read it aloud from their poems or somebody else would read aloud so these are these are are written to be to be recited yes to be performed that's right it is written it is is meant to be read aloud for sure they haven't invented reading quietly yet so they they can't have it so in fact the reading aloud is all they do it's not until we it's not until four centuries later when we get to saint anselm that then that suddenly they've invented reading silently and augustine's like sees he's doing that he's like what are you doing you know that's amazing who was it who was who astonished people by reading without moving his lips as an ansel saint anselm i'm just not answering ambrose ambrose of milan was it it's ambrose is what i'm trying to say uh anyway ambrose of milan anyway so he's um yeah not an someone back ambrose of milan so augustine is amazed by him so it's this you could um we'd all have a party trick if we were around in you know in second century because no one will no one knew how to do that okay so one of those things then uh then an ornamental epithet that we have all the time is pious aeneas so aeneas is piety his filial piety his devotion to the patriarchal line is is brought out um there's a lot of other conventions like immediate race so in other words the idea that the epic is beginning in the middle and so it's starting in the middle of all the events and then at a certain point you tell the back story and so uh and that happens in the elite in the odyssey as well and then they get and they tell the end afterwards right and so those are epic conventions um it's poetry uh with reason not rhyme so we say like a lot of people's poetry is has neither rhyme nor reason you know now it is um but which is to say uh meter to it as opposed to rhymed poetry so it's in the middle ages that uh latin develops rhyming poetry which if you have like uh carmina burano where those amazing rhyme schemes that isn't how it worked in the ancient world instead it's done in the epic meter that again is from the iliad in the odyssey which is called dactylic hexameter which oopsie i'm going to go back sorry went the wrong way here okay pressing the wrong button here which means that there are six different of the feet so hex six and then and dactylic because either one of these is going to be a dactyl or a spondy and except for the second to last one which is always a dactyl and then there's either going to be a spondy or a troche at the end and so that essentially means it could be long long or long short short long short short long long long long long short short long short you know like that is how it's going to always go and i'm really bad at um reading metered poetry but it would be something like and the english one down here uh which is done in dectilly canximeter down in a deep dark delsat an old cow munching of being stuck right and so it would be red like that you know maybe with a a liar but not um not rhymed right the way we think of poetry so if we look at it in latin here and we start right at the the first line of the aeneid uh which is you know it'll be you know long short short long short short long long long long long short short long long right and so i'm aware um and so i sing of arms on the man that man who first from the shores of troy sailed you know that sort of thing and so that's the beginning he's singing about uh the arms the warfare essentially and also the man who uh who who found uh the origin in here anyway here of rome so we'll look a little bit here at the the structure of what um virgil's doing it's pretty creative and so he's definitely trying to do this thing when we're doing a sequel he's also doing all kinds of things although it's written in latin not greek it's showing that it's of the same exact kind of form as the precursors as homer so there's 12 books total the first six are modeled on the odyssey so it's aeneas wandering around like odysseus or ulysses wandering around in the odyssey and then the second half of it is the warfare in italy that's the precursor then to rome's foundation and that's essentially like the warfare that's all through the iliad and so it begins as we sent mentioned in media's race so he's already done almost all of his wandering uh and so he's being blown ashore to carthage when he's at carthage he meets dido and he tells her now in retrospective the backstory where did they all come from and so he tells the whole story of that trojan horse this very famous episode a lot of times people are always amazed they think wait a second the iliad is the story of the trojan war but the whole trojan horse thing isn't even in that even in that epic and it's not right because homer in the iliad is actually not singing about the trojan war he's singing about the wrath of achilles right and so it's following achilles to um achilles death and the recovery of uh of of the armor and that kind of thing hector's armor but it's not all the way to the end of the trojan war the trojan war still got a lot of years left by the time the iliad ends how many years left by the time it's a 10-year siege so the question is yeah and i don't i have to have to do a lecture on the iliad so i mean remember but anyway there's several years left i don't remember how many but essentially uh anyway it goes on you do you know i believe uh it's already the last year okay they just don't get to the end okay yeah it's long but it doesn't get to the end okay that's it all right and so so whoopsie i keep pressing the wrong button there sorry so um so after that we have some of achilles wandering around by boat the same way that odysseus does then after he's told all these stories he falls he and queen dido especially tito falls in love with him but they both fall in love together and she ultimately kills herself then he wanders on or as he's wandering on um he has his dad also dies and so they have funeral games for his dad in sicily at you guessed it that town sagasta that claimed that they were also founded by uh the trojans and they were so important in that first punic war well they make it they make their way into the book right here uh then he also from there goes into the underworld this is one of the things that odysseus does in the odyssey and so modeled on that same part of this odyssey aeneas also goes down there but he goes down there with uh the goal of having this vision of what this future is going to be he's supposed to be founding the city what wonderful thing will will occur in the far future in virgil's time let's say uh when when he goes down there you can see that in the underworld then they get finally to italy uh you set up a they set up the bad guys the bad guys here uh turnus and some of the other uh latins are on the wrong side of it um they aren't as much the the level of the heroic guys as the trojans were in the in the greek epic um they make alliances with the other latins and uh and there's also kind of another future vision of what's going to happen uh by looking for example at um uh at a shield that's his mom gives him so that's showing in fast-forwarding to this amazing battle of actium so tying augustus into the story from all the way back here um the bad guys the turnist attacks the trojan camp they have warfare there's also war among the gods as they are taking sides between generally speaking juno or hera jupiter's wife is always on the bad side so and so she's in favor of carthage and and against the romans um then there's a funeral a funeral for evander we mentioned evander he's one of these allies so he's been helping out uh and then finally there's the final defeat of the bad guys right and so that's the warfare period elizabeth okay never mind we'll post we're gonna push on here okay i don't yeah i'm not sure if the mic is on do you have a i do have a quick question actually yes so by this point carthage had already been destroyed right that's right the final punitive war it happened yes um why then if the whole of the anaya was to serve a kind of political purpose as propaganda did they create such a tragic end for queen dido yeah establish that rivalry i don't really see what the political purpose would be of that right i like that anticipatory question i'm not going to immediately try i would normally go on a tangent but there's not a tangent because we're going to get there that's so i'm i'm so i like that so we'll just mention um we're not gonna go through this but anyway uh there's all of these wanderings and these are sort of like the wanderings of of so we start off in troy uh he goes and finds where some of the other trojans have been hanging out and trying to make uh make their own way he also goes past a lot of the different places for example where odysseus had been and so he sees the cyclops and other kinds of uh you know it's one of the things you do in a sequel right you go and see some of the the highlights from the last book and then like i say at the beginning of this of the beginning of the book but all the way into the middle of the journey he's blown here to carthage who as you just mentioned has been this great rival in roman history but has now been destroyed uh and totally incorporated in uh and then from uh carthage then makes his way up in the and that last half of the book is taking place up here that war right so we mentioned again that it's the sicilian part is happening in that that long ago first punic ally seguesta here um uh in sicily and that's also where they go into oh they go into the underworld here anyway okay so i want to look then you know we don't have a huge amount of time because i did a lot of context and background but i want to just look at three little episodes including the dido episode um from the aeneid so we can kind of have a sense of it and so one of the um one of the lines of latin that i have memorized is quickly s to mayo de neues adona ferentis which is to say um don't trust that you know there's another line in front of this but essentially don't trust the horse trojans whatever it is i fear the greeks even when bearing gifts so beware greeks bearing gifts right and so this is quite a famous um statue in the vatican i think of la akuan who is a trojan prophet who when he sees the um the trojan horse which the greeks actually make the horse but anyway when he sees this and he knows it's a trick or even he thinks it's at least he thinks it's gonna have no good to it uh then at a certain point sea serpents come and as he's making his kind of complaint kill him and his sons and so in the story here of the aeneid as it's told the trojans are like oh well he said don't trust the horse but then he gets eaten by sea serpents so maybe we should shouldn't listen to him right so um this is then that story of the fall of troy the trojan horse and this is the main place where we have it is the aeneid as a story so then in truth a strange terror steals through each shuttering heart and they say that loach on uh la la aquan has justly suffered for his crime so the fact that he didn't trust the horse i think he hit it with his spear in wounding the sacred oak tree with his spear so this um important uh gift by hurling its wicked shaft into its trunk uh they there they think that he's been punished by the gods for that kind of impiety so now they've decided okay we're taking the horse now so pull the statue to her house the goddess's house they shout and offer prayers to the goddesses divinity so we breached the wall and opened up the defenses of the city all prepare themselves for work and they set up the wheels allowing movement under its feet and stretch hemp ropes round its neck the engine of fate mounts our walls pregnant with armed men so obviously all the greeks are inside the horse if you don't know the the story of the trojan horse and now the trojans have uh foolishly brought it into the city so um when the greeks get out and uh the battle ensues um everything immediately falls apart uh aeneas is fighting and he keeps on having to fall back and fall back he's in the palace at a certain point and everything's burning down and at that point aeneas catches sight of helen helen of troy for whom the entire iliad uh technically is she's the casus belly she's the cause for the war uh the fact that paris the trojan prince had stolen her away from uh the spartans is the whole reason for the war technically right so i was alone now this is now aeneas words i was alone now when i saw the daughter of tindarius helen close to vesta's portal hiding silently in the secret shrine the bright flames gave me light as i wondered gazing everywhere randomly afraid of trojans this is her now she helen afraid of trojans angered at the fall of troy greek vengeance and the fury of a husband she deserted she the mutual curse of troy and her own country had concealed herself and crouched a hated thing by the altar so uh things have not gone well for helen but nevertheless he's mad because of this whole war has killed air has destroyed everything right so fire blazed in my spirit anger rose to avenge my fallen land and to exact the punishment for her wickedness shall she unarmed see sparta again and her native mycenae and see her house and husband parents and children and go in the triumphant role of a queen attended by a crowd of trojan women and phrygian servants so all of the trojan women are now going to be slaves and they're going to be taken back to sparta when priam has been put to the sword troy consumed with fire the dardanian shore soaked again and again with blood and so he's really ready he wants to kill her right um but he also says to himself it's not going to be big and honorable to kill an armed woman but it will make me feel good so he's kind of debating with himself at that point and then his mother uh venus aphrodite and this venus in the in the indian here appears and so she convinces him you know stop worrying about this let helen go and now you should be worrying about instead about your own family go save your family which brings us then to that very very famous uh uh image of him with his dad and the sun at his hand his wife um virgil actually writes a story uh so that india's is actually loyal to the whole family so after he has saved his uh dad and as uh son he realizes his wife didn't make it to the rendezvous point and so he runs back and has a whole scene trying to find her but she's already uh been killed and so then he's so he's not a bad guy in virgil or at least not meant to be uh even though he wasn't obviously taking his wife as his first priority was third priority but anyway she doesn't make it so next up a little episode we saw when um i mentioned when he goes to sicily and they have funeral games his dad has died and so now he goes to the underworld uh and this is a big renaissance painting here of his uh descent into the underworld and all the different visions that he's seen there this is an imitation of what had happened in the odyssey of homer but it it becomes quite different because the ideas of the afterlife and underworld have evolved or at least are different for the romans than they had been for the early ancient greeks and so um what we see here is just a little part of his vision it goes on and on and on as he tours the underworld he sees first those that are the wicked that are punished in tartarus that are essentially in hell uh and the later is going to see the blessed that are in elysium which is where his dad is so here as he's seeing in tartarus or those who hated their brothers in life or struck a parent or contrived to default a client or who crouched alone over riches they'd made without setting aside any for their kin their crowd is largest so so so you can see in there already what some of the roman values are here by kind of seeing who's getting punished and who's being punished in hell in terms of um not uh being thoughtful of your family but or doing other kinds of fraud right without setting aside any further kin okay it said that one those who were killed for adultery or who pursued civil war not fearing to break their pledges to their masters shut in they see their punishment don't ask to know that punishment or what kind of suffering drowns them some roll huge stones or hang spread edel spread eagled or on wheel spokes wretched theseus sits still and will sit for eternity uh phlegias the most unfortunate warns them all and bears witness in a loud voice among the shades learn justice be warned and don't despise the gods so these are mythic figures from greek mythology the latter here is a little known guy but anyway flageas is a guy who was mad at apollo for um allowing his daughter to be killed and he went and burned apollo's temple down and then apollo cursed him to hell for forever and so that's a figure like that theseus uh we think of him as being a you know hero the guy who defeated the minotaur but he did a lot a lot of stuff like for example uh went to hell to um steal uh haiti's wife persephone and things like that so he did a lot of different things so you can imagine he's not popular down here and so maybe that's why he's being punished so the idea of it is we're seeing famous people in the afterlife and specifically virgil is placing some people in hell and some people in paradise in his story here so he goes on with some of the other kinds of things that they're being punished for here's one who sold his country for gold this is maybe something that virgil's thinking about as crimes that have been occurring in the civil war right and set up a despotic lord one who made law and remade it for a price he entered his daughter's bed and a forbidden marriage all of them dared monstrous sin and did what they dared so this is really then a direct model for dante's inferno and we'll have a lecture on this later too but it's not only um just kind of like it it's the direct model right and so um uh dante is very aware of virgil and indeed virgil becomes dante dante's guide as he's going through the christianized version of the afterlife and when he's visiting the areas of purgatory and hell it's virgil who is his guide to those places and several of the kind of figures that we've already seen in uh virgil's afterlife are you know similarly placed in dante's afterlife okay one of the things though that we do while we're down there and this is where we get to that propaganda value so when he comes to his father's shade and kisses and kisses gives him this vision of what's to come why are you he has had to sacrifice all this stuff to kind of keep on going uh in order to found the city so why is he doing it well turn your two eyes this way and see this people your own romans here is caesar and of all the line of euless you know which is to say your son ascanius euless he all shall one day pass under the dome of the great sky this is the man this one of whom so often you have heard the promise caesar augustus son of the deified son of julius caesar who shall be uh who shall bring once again the age of gold to latime uh to the land where saturn reigned in early times so we're seeing right here a vision a prophecy that's not only will you know uh your son euless you know there'll be a line that goes all the way down until you get to uh the later romans of whom the lead the best is going to be caesar the divine and then his his son augustus who will renew you know this kind of golden age that um has been so lacking lately right okay finally we'll just look at aeneas's uh romance with dido which is the most famous episode and we'll talk about the question you have had post uh and so and actually the most of the renaissance paintings that we have are ineos and taito so this is obviously the the story that has taken the most hold so carthage has been rome's traditional rival in the western mediterranean but by the time virgil's writing it's been destroyed so there were two punic wars that were important and then finally there is a a war that is that cato the censor urges where he continuously says de lenda s cartago you know and which is to say carthage must be destroyed in other words rome will never be great unless we take this city that's really been you know prostrate and isn't anything anymore and conquer it and sow salt and it will never rise again right and so that's already happened so one of the things that happens at the very beginning of the aeneid a storm forces aeneas and all the other trojan exiles to take refuge in carthage where he meets dido the city's founded queen founding queen she is portrayed though as a very strong wise leader in her own right and after he tells all of his stories of the trojan war the trojan horse and everything like that she's loving the stories she's loving how he's telling them and and what a great noble catch he is compared to she's a widow and her she doesn't have any other phoenician princes to marry and she doesn't want to marry any of the local north african guys and so therefore um uh her sister anyway says you really should be marrying to this guy um and one of the things that happens in the story is it doesn't hurt that when you're having you know like you're going after love affairs if your mother's venus and it turns out then your half brother is cupid right so anyway so anyway so his half brother is cupid and his mother has dressed cupid up to be ascanius or euless that little boy and so ascanius doesn't even make it to carthage or whatever because cupid's dressed up pretending to be him and he's hanging out through that whole time and so you can imagine uh that what he's doing you know in terms of you know having love happen right anyway so um they too they fall in love they have an affair which dido probably quite rightly regards as a common-law marriage you know since they've consummated the marriage and then um she's imagining that he's going to stay and be king of carthage with her or rule jointly with her but at that point mercury jupiter's herald comes and reminds him uh you know the remember the duty thing that whole destiny prophecy thing the whole reason poseidon saved you was because you got to go found a city of your own and there's only then he was probably quite content on his own to just go ahead and live there but he decides to leave and so um we'll just look at uh the love affair before he leaves so now she dido leads aeneas with her around the walls showing her cydonian which is a word for phoenician here right punic carthaginian wealth sidonian wealth and the city she's built she begins to speak and stops in mid-flow now she longs for the banquet again as the day wanes yearning madly to hear about the trojan adventures once more and hangs once more on the speaker's lips and then when they have departed and the moon in turn has quenched her light and the setting constellations urge sleep she grieves alone in the empty hall and lies on the couch sheila he left so she's pretty star struck her love struck right at first right so this is love at first sight and she's well cupid's been there doing this right all right so absent from uh absent she hears him i'm sorry absent she hears him absent sees him or hugs a scanias on her lap taken with this image of his father so as to deceive her silent passion the towers she started no longer rise the young men no longer carry out their drill or work on the harbor and the battlements for defencing war the interrupted work is left hanging the huge threatening walls the sky reaching cranes so she's just doesn't care about being queen at this point she just likes this guy right and so that's how love if all russian love uh this character has fallen dido all right nevertheless aeneas we're being reminded of his uh duty by the gods to leave he sneaks out of town um uh leaving her in her grief and so she determines that her only course of action is suicide which is an honorable thing in the in as romans understood it and so um uh that's what she does and so she says as she's now um about to kill herself she has some time to curse adius for um you know following making her fall in love and then leaving and he says and as her curse to aeneas is if it must be that the accursed one and he is should reach the harbor and sail to the shore if job's destiny for him requires it there his goal still troubled in war by the armies of a proud race exiled from his territories torn from euless embrace let him beg help and watch the shameful death of his people then when he has surrendered to a peace without justice may he not enjoy his kingdom or the days he longed for but let him die before his time lie on buried on the sand this i pray these last words i pour out with my own blood that's about as bad and as you could have happened or she's at least longing for he doesn't quite have all those things happen to him but she does um also then give one last kind of plea to her own descendants then oh tyrions eu carthaginians in other words pursue my hatred against his whole line and the race to come which is to say the romans so carthaginians here and offer it as a tribute to my ashes let there be no love or treaties between our people rise some unknown avenger from my dust who will preserve i'm sorry who would pursue the trojan colonists with fire and sword now or in time to come whenever there is strength i'm sorry whenever the strength is granted him i pray that sure be opposed to shore way water to wave weapon to weapon let them fight them and their descendants so this is a um an explanation of the the death match between carthage and rome but why is it important and why uh why uh to your question is it um dido's such a sympathetic character and why does it have to be you know they could have had any number of villainous carthaginians that could have um spurned kind of this this and so i'm going to propose here that the immediate reason that virgil has for demonizing a tempting foreign queen is because his patrons master augustus has had as his rival entity right and anthony's dalliance with affair with common law marriage to cleopatra this queen of the hellenistic east and so even though we're talking about this historic rival carthage that doesn't exist anymore a lot of times what happens is you're there's the echo of the contemporary political situation that you were either inspired by or commenting on right and so um the irony though is that uh even though he may have been kind of writing it that way and writing dido to be you know this kind of seductress and uh and and and maybe an echo of cleopatra what ends up happening is is that the character is so compelling and so compelling for example in contrast to aeneas who is just always having to be kind of a stoic roman uh guy who is relatively passionless and upright and who follows his duty i mean we don't read the story today and say well he was told by the gods that he had to do his duty and think oh well that's very sympathetic rather um what's happened throughout history as this story has been read yeah is that he's the son of a as as libya says and dido's the one who's been um i think felt uh very sympathetic to right that this tragedy and so anyway as a result maybe not we we you know when you're writing stuff you don't always know what's going to be the thing that you're known for at the end right and so in this particular case it may be ironic that this is what gets pulled out of it that this is not actually what virgil necessarily wanted yeah i'm just wondering um what moral stature might a woman's emotional uh subtext irrational uh demands on a man have held versus a man's duty to his country right yeah so that's a good point so no so i agree so so that's i think that's a very good contrast so as from what virgil i think was wanting to show i think he is actually showing that someone who has has fallen madly in love you know there's whether it's because of cupid being there directly doing it you know but that love is a madness and what did that what happened so she had been this strong queen that was busily producing carthage and everything like that but as soon as she's fallen in love she's sitting in the couch pining she's wishing he would come back and tell stories again and it says directly you know that none of her city is getting built anymore nobody's working on the cranes or anything like that because she's not there um doing that kind of a thing and so so um yeah so it is on the one hand the good old roman sexism of denigrating women in the first place that women are going to fall prey to this kind of thing more but i think that virgil is probably what he wanted to show was that that kind of you know giving into your passions that way is probably bad compared to the guy who is thinking about feeling piety his destiny his duty and all those kind of things it's just that upon reflection for the last 2000 years not everybody's agreed with him you know so okay so so with that um what i wanna you know what i think we've seen and we've seen you know kind of anyway with a little bit of a picture i emphasized a lot more kind of the background the context where the story comes from what virgil was working on then the content itself although i kind of showed you what the whole structure is so i kind of want to leave that with you and urge you that that's a good story it holds up you may want to read the text with this kind of an introductory background but we also may be in doing it and we see uh when we look at how virgil is affecting myths that the romans are taking very seriously and yet you can kind of see we kind of are a little maybe jaded about it because he does obviously you know creating a lot of the details or making stuff up is what we'd think about it and indeed um kind of heavy hand on bringing some of the propaganda in even right and yet this is still at the center of roman identity in roman religion and so we should also be looking at this i think with different eyes in terms of how we look at any ancient text any ancient scripture and how those are being composed by those authors who are creating identity stories whether it's biblical or any any of the other kind of ancient texts that we maybe read somewhat naively as if people you know are thinking of it as history when it's being written i have a question but and and i also wanted to mention a book that maybe maybe some of us maybe more people have read than they have read the aeneid and that is watership down which i think is very much based on the aeneid here are these people they're rabbits but they're people they flee from a city that's about to fall oh they cross country meeting dangers of various sorts they come to what looks like a haven uh where there's plenty of food and the other rabbits are fat and they seem to be living a good life but they discover there's a price to be paid the food has been put out by the local farmer and the prices he puts out snares and every so often a rabbit vanishes having been killed and taken for food and then they carry on and they found their own city there and one of the rabbits is he's a seer but he's not like cassandra the other rabbits do believe what he says and they dig themselves a new warren and all is well but their leader realizes there's something missing they have no does not even one oh dear no does means no kittens and no kittens means in a few years no warren what's it do well they go to another warren and uh eventually they do come home with a bunch of does but the other warren is there is is ruled by a chief rabbit who is very warlike and very possessive he doesn't want anybody leaving and uh and he when when these people do with these rabbits do go home with a bunch of does then their uh the this leader of the warren they came from comes to make war on them to try to destroy them and take the does back and by means of a trick they defeat him and it ends up with everybody living happily not ever after because rabbits don't live forever but happily i see i i guess so i have not read it i mean i i remember when i was you have a treat coming yeah i have to read it i mean i was when i was seven i saw a cartoon of it but i just remember mean rabbit but anyway so yeah but it does sound like so like for example you're talking but part of that story there is like the rape of the saving women right yes so after the after the um it's not you know after the the trojans here or whatever the early these early actually the romulans uh after romulus is around and they founded rome they find that same problem they don't have you know romney mars needs women right rome needs women and so they go to the sabians yeah and the question i had is this that traditionally among even the strictest uh most puritanical christians uh who have who who abhor and shun uh non-christian literature of any kind they make an exception for virgil oh do you know why do you know anything about that well so there's a lot of um so throughout throughout um you know anyway the time time period from jerome and everybody onward augustine there is a there's there's definitely been a um exception that christians have made in terms of a lot of the classics and virgil's right at the top of the list and so what augustine called that uh using a biblical analogy is that when the children of israel left egypt they despoiled the egyptians and so they didn't take they didn't take all the egyptian gold idols um and and bring them and worship them but they took the gold you know and so the idea of it is the analogy that augustine has is the classics are filled with uh you know all of this amazing stuff uh lessons knowledge uh other other kinds of things we can take that with us as christians uh going forward but we don't have to but we can't we're not taking for example belief in venus as a as a goddess or any of those kind of things but rather we're taking though um for example how great an author cicero is so that we can learn how to do our latin well and so several of the um let's say early latin fathers you know were accused of loving cicero more than you know the bible and things like that and so that was always a danger but essentially because the um the language of the church and christianity and science and everything like that throughout the middle ages was latin and all of the all the grammar everything all the texts that they studied were the original classic texts and those were all preserved and that's why we have them all right because the christian monks copied them so otherwise we wouldn't have them another question um is the fact that the people that we used to call gypsies call themselves roma has what has that got to do with rome it does yeah it's unrelated so the wrong their their own uh name for themselves aroma is not related to our the word rome um and then why we call them gypsies is a because we was because english people thought they were from egypt which they are not and so anyway so egypt it means egypt disease right so anyway but that's um one of the places that many different um people thought they were from yeah yeah just uh back to uh elizabeth's point on dante it's telling that even though there was some um uh let's say uh admiration for the the great uh greek epics you know on the part of the christians nonetheless and dante's vision all the greek greats are in hell nonetheless they're all pagans and so but but there's a couple there's a couple people that do i think a couple of people like make it into purgatory but almost everybody's in the first circle which is pretty nice so so he tries to make it like in other words there's lots of circles of hell and the first one is where all the good pagans are you know and so you're like oh it's okay but i think it's not that hot there yeah yeah but i was gonna make a comment just uh you know another instance of um yeah of borrowing a a greek epic for um for the for uh modern like pop uh sir entertainment is or well watership down isn't pop but but for modern uh entertainment is uh the coen brothers movie uh oh brother where are thou starring george clooney i don't know if anybody's seen it but george clooney basically is odysseus so if anybody has a chance to see that movie it's wonderful okay yeah we should watch that yeah uh just a quick comment is that the early christians were also known for kind of claiming these virtuous pagans as christians right like there's the myth that aristotle converted right before he threw himself into the tides of the europas which probably did not actually happen right um i i just wanted to point out an interesting parallel that you may want to comment on which is um as far as claiming dissent from a mythological figure this was something that the habsburgs actually did later with emperor maximilian the holy roman emperor who claimed descent through genealogists from hector and that was of course considered a successor state to rome or at least so they wanted it to be so it's really interesting that that kind of is an ongoing thing throughout history this harkening back to the mythological figure yeah i wasn't aware of the habsburg genealogy tracing all the way back to hector that's very interesting well he he wanted them to be traced back to hector so he got his court genealogist to kind of work on that yeah yeah yeah yeah they um the so that the mayor of indians had this um this legend already that they were descended from i don't know the hector but anyways descended from prime via by this guy francis you know but but they didn't make enough general they didn't make enough uh anywhere near enough uh uh generations in order to get there so it's actually they weren't sophisticated enough to do it but by the time you get to the um the 17th the 18th and 19th century especially the royal genealogists like you say you know we're much better at creating a whole bunch of names in order in order to get you all the way back so there's another can we get can i can you hand him the mic i'm sorry yeah i have never heard of genealogy that old normally kind of they stopped the julius caesar somewhere okay therefore it's some roman emperor and century got it rolled uh they traced you all the way back to adam and so those those 19th century genealogists will will make you get you to adam um and i know i for example because my mom is a genealogist she's president of the minnesota genealogy society so we have i have um she's traced a line that gets to charlemagne and so once you get to charlemagne then you can get all the react to adam according to the the fake 19th century genealogies anyway right and so it's not it's not real but anyway that's that's how it's been around for a couple hundred years anyway in terms of in terms of that they don't have that level of it back in the ancient sources though they weren't as caring about making there's a big beget list in the bible but they don't have that you don't have that for the greeks and romans okay folks that was a long lecture so we will just say thank you [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Centre Place

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Id: QH6tVkxeGM8

Length: 98min 41sec (5921 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021