The story
The Aeneid is a Latin epic in twelve books and nearly 9,900 lines of hexameter verse by Publius Vergilius Maro, called Virgil. He worked on it from about 29 BCE until his death in 19 BCE, when it was still unrevised. It follows Aeneas, a Trojan prince who escapes the burning city with his father and son, wanders the Mediterranean, falls in love with Dido, queen of Carthage, descends to the underworld, and finally fights for a home in Italy against the local leader Turnus.
Virgil wrote during the reign of Augustus, after a century of civil wars, and the poem links the gods, the fall of Troy and the rise of Rome into one story of destiny. It deliberately answers Homer: the first six books echo the wanderings of the Odyssey and the last six the battles of the Iliad. Its hero is driven by duty (pietas) rather than glory, and the poem is full of loss, including the death of Dido and the death of young Pallas. Virgil reportedly asked on his deathbed for the manuscript to be burned, but Augustus ordered it preserved and published by his friends Varius and Tucca.
The Aeneid was a school text almost at once and stayed one for nearly two thousand years. In the early Christian era it was read as a book of near prophecy. Dante chose Virgil as his guide through Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy, and Milton, Dryden, Tennyson and later poets borrowed from it. Its ending, in which Aeneas kills the defeated Turnus in anger, is still argued over, with readers divided about whether the poem praises or questions empire.
Why it mattered
- Rome gained a national epic that tied its origins to Troy and gave Augustus' regime a founding story.
- Dante and Renaissance poets modeled their epics on it, and Milton's Paradise Lost owes much to its form.
- Its blend of duty, empire and personal cost set an agenda for debates about power in later political literature.
- As a standard text of Latin education it shaped the Latin and European literary canon for centuries.
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