The Lone Man Against the Mob: Reading Aeneid, Book I

Imagine Virgil but different...

This is the first of a twelve-part series that I am undertaking with my dear friend, Montana Classical College. As we did on Twitter for the Iliad and the Odyssey, we are reading aloud, bit by bit, an interesting translation of a great classical text and then, through discourse, driving jointly towards a comprehensive understanding of its meaning. We are mere enthusiasts, amateurs, lovers of the text. Now, we invite you to join us as we embark on the same journey, but this time in Mantuan Virgil’s bark, with England’s Supreme Poet, the immortal John Dryden, as our translatory pilot. The above recording is accompanied below by a short essay that outlines my most prominent thoughts on the reading. Montana is publishing his reaction on his own Substack as well. We certainly hope you will find these provisions to be enriching. As a great man once taunted, causing great devastation to his enemies: “go read a book… then discuss it.”

Imagine David Lynch, but different. Think of who he was in the early 80s, a visionary a mere glimpse of whose interior cosmology had already captivated the minds of the cognitive classes. A young artist of great renown, a filmmaker of unparalleled potential. With rabid eagerness the people anticipate his next inspired production. Imagine such a figure, but in our own day. Imagine how, in the year 2035, after languishing for ten years in obscurity since his last film, almost to point of oblivion except among his most loyal devotees, he releases his masterpiece: a five-hour epic film based on the figure of Albion, a pagan Saxon chief defeated by Charlemagne during the Saxon Wars of the 770s. His primary source of inspiration is a rare manuscript variant of the the Life of Charlemagne, committed to paper some four of five hundred years after the fact. The film follows Albion’s (perhaps imagined) naval flight from Saxony, where a mighty tempest, instigated from heaven by the Christian St. Peter, to whom Charlemagne was devoted, sweeps him off course all the way to the Yucatán Peninsula, where the city of Chichén Itzá is just beginning to be built by a beautiful princess, Citlali, also in de facto exile from her native land. The two fall in love and make fantastic plans jointly to rule the continent. But Albion soon realizes his destiny lies elsewhere, and he eventually leaves and sails north to found New York, the original capital. Heartbroken, the princess Citlali commits ritual suicide and curses Albion with eternal enmity between her people and his. This enmity is finally settled about a millennium later, in the Mexican-American War, victory in which is retroactively prophesied by the film’s narrator. Having landed in New York, Albion makes war on the natives and lays claim to the lands destined for him by divine right, and in so doing wins as his queen the beautiful daughter of a local nobleman, a descendant of the Viking explorer Leif Erikson, whose trading outposts have successfully taken root up the northeastern coast (the dating is stretched slightly to accommodate this romance). Hereafter, his descendants found what becomes the United States of America, eventually moving the capital south to Washington after a brief, little known overstay in Fort Christina, Delaware. A rustic and bellicose people with a great love and practical mastery of warfare, they conquer the entire continent, and then the world. The film is released among a small audience of Trumpian elites to unprecedented enthusiasm, despite the fact that the director, having poured his entire lifeblood into the project, is now exhausted and on the cusp of death. Seeing the work it as incomplete and unable to be completed because of his failing health, he even orders it destroyed from his deathbed. But Barron Trump, recently ascended to the imperial throne after a series of civil wars against the last of his sclerotic boomer neocon rivals, countermands the director. The film is thus preserved and widely disseminated. Over the subsequent decades, the stories concerning Christopher Columbus and exiled Puritans arriving from England are scientifically disproven by imperial scholars and superseded in the public conscience by the truer story of Albion. Inspired by this newfound narrative, America enters a Golden Age precisely as the film prophesies, expanding its borders in all directions and treating the conquered billions with most noble clemency even as they are enslaved. This is essentially the story of Virgil.

The Aeneid, which sought to do for Augustus’s Rome what the above filmmaker might do for Trump’s America, was immediately well-received, and by the second century was integral to Roman educational curricula. It directly inspired Dante, Spenser, Tasso, and others. But which tools of the craft does Virgil employ to achieve so momentous, so improbable, so remarkable an impact? In our cynical age, it seems impossible that a work of art so innocent in its obviously propagandistic aims could ever succeed. In a quasi-systematic fashion, the last century has subjected everything that exists to the scoff test—whatever sociocultural elements have not withstood ridicule and critique have been discarded or else severely weakened and rendered unlikely to survive in the long term. By what means did Virgil overcome the equivalent challenges of his own time, itself beset by civil discord and unhappiness of a degree that ought to have induced far greater cynicism than that which we now experience?

And there is not only the means to consider. The Aeneid survives as a canonical work of art that transmit past greatness through itself into future work and as an standalone achievement of uncommon poetic skill. But what of the content of the poem itself? Is it incidental to the poet’s artistic greatness and the work’s canonicity? Or is there something in it that can be recovered and set to instructive purposes in our own time? Or are we of the West beyond the hope of salvation in our recent spiritual plainness?

Let us start at the beginning as we engage these questions. Book I of the Aeneid introduces, as early as its second line, a concept that will suffuse the rest of the book and the poem: fate, or destiny, one of a particularly teleological, political, and moralized variety. This “fatum” derives from but transforms the Greek “moira” as conceptualized by Virgil’s model, Homer. Fate is that which is decreed and set forth by the Fates—three goddesses who, it may be deduced, dwell beyond time (although the literature often finds them in temporal locations). Seemingly only Zeus himself has access to them, but even he cannot induce them to alter their predetermined course. They cannot be swayed by influence whether mortal or immortal. But they do offer some built-in exceptions. The best known of these is the bifold choice given to Achilles in the Iliad: it is ultimately up to him whether to survive the war and return home to Phthia, living a long, comfortable, happy life after which his name will be forgotten, or to die gloriously while laying waste to the proud city of Troy, through which deed he will enjoy undying fame. Why Achilles is presented with such a choice—an opportunity to express his own will to a degree that would rival even those of the gods—can be deduced from his singular greatness as a man and a warrior. Whereas we witness characters such as Agamemnon, Hector, and Odysseus wrestle in an engaged manner with the realities set before them by the Fates, Achilles, by dint of his godlike ability, alone possesses the option to rise disinterestedly above it all and, in the case of the war, not participate; and, in the case of his fate, weigh two options and choose between them. At first his pride (meant here nonpejoratively) seems to incline him to the more inactive of the two options. But then his love of his friend, the slain Patroclus, moves him to action. In both cases, rage fuels his will, whether in his obstinacy or in his determined pursuit of satisfaction from Hector.

In Book I of the Aeneid, we already begin to see the structure of a similar choice forming for Aeneas, who in this Book arrives somewhat ingloriously in Dido’s newfound Carthage with his men. The choice will be between staying in Carthage—Dido almost immediately offers a most tempting deal to Aeneas and his men: that they abandon the higher destiny that awaits them in Italy and remain with her, perhaps as her personal bodyguard or the officer corps of her army—and eventually leaving for Italy. But whereas Achilles makes a choice on the basis of the principle of maximal glory, the motivations of Aeneas, at least as Jupiter would have it, have at least one further dimension, which is the need to found Rome. This will be, at least in some sense, a self-sacrifice or a self-denial for Aeneas, and as such the displacement of himself by the all-importance of Rome’s foundation needs to be moralized, or imbued with moral reasonings. Among these moral reasons, described in Jupiter’s exegesis of the Fates to his daughter Venus, is just vengeance against the Greeks, who were finally conquered by Rome (i.e. the Trojans) some 125 years before the Aeneid was completed. But more importantly, Rome is going to bring justice, order, law, and peace to the whole world, through a process that, in Virgil’s moment, is already underway in the nascent reign of Caesar Augustus. And so, much unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are rendered as essentially dispassionate retellings of “the facts” wherein the Fates appear indifferent to human foibles, the Aeneid, from the off, orients the role of fate towards a moral/political end.

In our own time, the closest notion we have to that of the Fates in the ancient epics is probably biology or physics. The Sun is destined to die in about five billion years. Perhaps an asteroid unleashed at the Big Bang that has been hurtling towards us for billions of years is destined to strike the Earth and kill us all. As for biology, heret the political implications of “fatedness” are still too dangerous to the integrity of modern regime assumptions to be discussed in polite society without causing an uncomfortable amount of pearl clutching and other even more censorious matriarchal displays. But a notion of biological determinism was the highest fashion in the decades leading up to World War II, part and parcel of the platform of the Progressivism movement that deputized itself as the political herald of scientific technocracy. While this set of beliefs was a drastic oversimplification of reality and therefore probably better left in the past, the reaction against it waged by the physically and spiritually deformed has caused a wide variety of deleterious insanities that are a topic for another time. Political ramifications notwithstanding, the notion of fate as something merely biological or physical is, above all other attributes, extremely boring in its lifelessness. We may similarly read of Calvin’s doctrine of predestination and reflect with shock on the notion that such an idea was popular and gained not only millions of followers but devotees prepared to martyr themselves for it. The shock comes from the fact that such an understanding of the fated limits on human action does not allow for the most intriguing and worthwhile human possibility: the notion that a man may, through extraordinary discipline, voluntarily decide to stride up to the outer wall of his fated limitations and push back against it to some effect. And that, in some rare moment, perhaps once every five hundred years or so, or perhaps, with the marvelous technologies and breeding techniques already in use in our time, more frequently than that, one man alone may hold the world in awe as he scales that wall and leaps down with athletic aplomb onto the untrodden ground of the far side. Undoubtedly this is what compels us in the story of Achilles, despite its relative lack of action. It must have been what inspired Alexander, who essentially abstracted this spirit and took it into himself as he conquered the world. If this is rightly understood, how amazing then that Zeus declares, as he interprets the will of the Fates to his daughter Venus, that on the Romans he has “set no limits, space or time.” In other words, the Romans are destined to be a people who will, according not to the laws of nature but to the will of the partial gods, find themselves in constant pursuit of such walls to scale, that to delight in this pursuit will constitute their own essential nature.

This leads me to the other tool I want particularly to discuss from Book I: the image of the lone man against the mob. The first epic simile of the poem involves precisely this most powerful opposition: Virgil describes Neptune (Poseidon) in the process of calming the seas set to rage by the wayward winds of Aeolus as like a man who, towering above the rest in his ability and virtue (manliness), is able, by his presence merely, to pacify an enraged mob, on the cusp of reducing themselves to subanimalistic behaviors. Dryden renders it thus:

As, when in tumults rise th’ ignoble crowd

Mad are their motions, and their tongues are loud;

And stones and brands in rattling volleys fly,

And all the rustic arms that fury can supply:

If then some grave and pious man appear,

They hush their noise, and lend a list’ning ear;

He soothes with sober words their angry mood,

And quenches their innate desire of blood: …

Please do not insult me by reading me as referring to the boomer notion of the “iNdIvIdUaL” as opposed to the collective… Yes, the “grave and pious man” in the simile opposes the collective. But he does not opposite it in his individuality. The collective is also comprised of individuals. A collective of virtuous individuals may perhaps also produce virtuous results. What distinguishes the man of the simile as well as men like Achilles and Aeneas and gives them their ability to countermand the natural passions (as above) or, in other words, compel the provision of a choice from the Fates is their supreme and majestic being. It is little wonder then that both Aeneas and Achilles are descended from the divine—and Aeneas from a doubtlessly more impressive pedigree than Achilles. A fascinating question for the rest of this series will be whether Virgil is able to convince the reader that Aeneas merits to be understood as so descended, especially in comparison to Achilles. After all, in realistic terms, the undying fame of Achilles is far greater than that of Aeneas. But then again, Rome’s as a civilization is far greater than that of Phthia, Mycenaean Greece, or even Classical Greece. And this leads me to my final highlight, also derived from this simile, of the continued theme of hero of nature vs. hero of civilization. Fascinatingly, this opening simile violates a rule consistent in Homeric similes: that the similes use nature comparatively to describe the works of men, as when a fighter is compared to a lion or the marching armies to swarms of bees. Here, an outgrowth of civilized humanity is used to describe the taming of a natural force. Whereas Achilles, who, always remember, was educated in the wilderness by a centaur, represents a perfection that embraces nature in its wildness, perfectly without principle apart from the maximization of his own glory and the love of his comrades, Aeneas will, we may only hope at this point, embody a perfection of another sort, that of which Hector could not but fall short: that of the city builder, the man who glories not exclusively in his own being but in something that extends out from it after his death: that great city onto which he projects his heroism, and which through his law and moral example may long endure.