The first words of the Augsburg Confession are, “Invictissime Imperator, Caesar Auguste, etc.”
Following the conventions of the Holy Roman Empire, the confessors here invoke an idea that first goes public following the battle of Actium in 31 BC, an idea celebrated by Virgil in his epic poem about the birth of the proto-Roman people from refugees from Troy, the Aeneid (19 BC). Caesar Augustus, Invincible Emperor. As witnessed by these words–and incidentally by the title of the Augsburg Confession itself (in Latin, it’s Confessio Augustana) –Christendom and the west more generally has followed in the steps of this idea ever since.
How much of ancient and classical history can we tie into the Aeneid, and where to begin? We might begin with Julius Caesar, leading his army across the Rubicon (49 BC). Or, for good measure, we might begin a decade earlier with Caesar’s later rival, Pompey, as he crosses another sacred boundary: in 63 BC, Jerusalem fell to the Romans, creating the Roman province of Judea, and the victorious general Pompey entered the sacred precincts of the holy Temple and invited himself behind the curtain–the selfsame curtain that would be rent asunder on Good Friday. Wherever we begin, Julius Caesar consolidated the threads of power in the Roman Republic in himself when he defeated Pompey in civil war (48 BC). Julius Caesar adopted as his son and heir his great-nephew Octavius, and after Julius fell on the Ides of March, 44 BC, to the daggers of Brutus, Cassius, et. al., this Octavius ended the competition for the legacy of Caesar when he defeated the forces of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium (31 BC). The rise of Octavius as Caesar’s successor brought an end to the Roman Republic and made permanent the Roman Empire. As Imperator, Octavius received the title Augustus, the legacy of which title is invoked at the opening of the Augustana, and under which title he himself joins us on Christmas Eve, via Luke 2, “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree, etc., etc.”
All of the above is more elegantly rehearsed in Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, or can be quickly reviewed on Wikipedia. However we access it today, for Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, d. 19 BC), the accession of Augustus brought the consummation of Roman destiny and great promise for the future. By this time, the myth was already old amongst the Romans that the true nobility of the Latin elite came to Italy, long before Romulus and Remus, from Homer’s Troy. It was also believed that the Julii, the noble family of Julius Caesar and of Augustus, descended from Iulus (more often called Ascanius), son of Aeneas, a Trojan hero of the war with the Greeks who, conveniently for everyone involved, escaped the city’s destruction. Like Odysseus, Aeneas is a secondary character in Homer’s Iliad, and his character, survival, and destiny are already sketched therein. So, as Augustus inherits the earth, Virgil picks up this scrap of Roman history hanging on a loose end in Homer and weaves the Aeneid to valorize and immortalize the nativity of Roman glory in the person of Augustus, Invictissimus Imperator, etc., etc.
In the basic outlines of the story, and in comparison to Homer, the Aeneid is not very original, nor does it intend to be. Whereas the Iliad–Odyssey begins with a land war outside a city and continues with adventures at sea, the Aeneid begins with adventures at sea and concludes with a land war. Aeneas is a Trojan hero and the son of Anchises and the goddess Venus. The poem opens as he is leading a group of Trojans, survivors of the city’s fall, through the Mediterranean toward a promised new homeland.
They seek refuge in the North African city of Carthage, where they are welcomed by the queen, Dido, and where Aeneas relates the end of Troy and their escape. Dido falls in love with Aeneas, and he somewhat with her, but he must (like Odysseus) pull away from the temptation of the affair and continue toward his destiny, to found a city that will give birth to the Romans. As the Trojans leave Carthage, Dido kills herself; her wounded rage is the ultimate source of the later Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, Virgil tells us.
Further adventures lead the Trojans to Italy. There, Aeneas is guided on a journey through the underworld, where he is given insight into the cosmic and chthonic forces working to bring about his own destiny, and the rise of the noble race of Romans. Thereafter, the Trojans find allies and enemies among the tribes of Italy. As Achilles had Hector for a rival, so Aeneas has Turnus. As Achilles has armor from Hephaestus, so Aeneas has armor from Vulcan (Vulcan being the Latin name for Hephaestus). In the end–and every good reader of Virgil is supposed to know the end before he reads–the Trojans win their destiny, found the city of Lavinium, adopt the language, customs, and gods of the Latin tribe, and thus become the Latins.
Someone who has worked his way through the Iliad and the Odyssey might fairly ask, what is the special value in covering all of this ground again? Isn’t Virgil just giving us an “expanded universe” composed of recycled Homeric plot-points to celebrate his Imperator?
A few points in response. First, Virgil himself would not be insulted by that assessment of his work; bringing Homer’s Muse to Italy, and into the Roman consciousness, is precisely the point.
Second, whereas Homer is probably best experienced as oral song (and I say “probably” because I’m relying on experts, not my own experience), Virgil is amenable to readers of books, and this has long been recognized. Robert Fagles’ is the most delightful of the translations I’ve sampled and, while of course it’s the standard text in Latin, I’ve occasionally questioned what business anyone has doing anything classical who hasn’t found joy in reading the story in English.
And that’s a third point: it is, in fact, the Aeneid, more than the Iliad and the Odyssey, that has formed the mythic-historical mind of the west, including western Christendom. At the end of the day, while our best ideas might come from the east, even we barbarians are Romans, and not the Byzantine kind; if any founding myth is a classic for us after the Bible, it should be the Aeneid.
Finally, I’ll expand on a last point to encourage readers: Virgil has an eye, an ear, and a sense for tying together grand themes, like fate or destiny, with both high human ideals, like piety and courage, and also with scenes of pathos, nostalgia, and poignancy. I will not hazard the analysis that this is different from Homer, much less better than Homer, but I will simply say that scenes and themes from the Aeneid have stuck with me in a unique way. A few examples follow.
In Book 1, as he wanders in Carthage, Aeneas finds a grand depiction of the Trojan War adorning the walls of a temple. Here, alone, he discovers that the history he lived through has already become mythic memory to adorn faraway buildings in foreign cities. Yet through these images, he has an immediate and fresh experience of the past, through which Virgil means to give us an immediate and fresh experience of the Iliad, but while standing next to a forlorn Trojan survivor. Now, the Iliad comes to you not as a memory of a poem you read, but as a memory of something you suffered together with Aeneas. How did Virgil do that?
But this is only to stir your feelings and prepare you for Book 2, in which Aeneas relates the last hours of his home city and the cruel conditions of his escape. In a sense, this is the scene Homer’s audience has been wanting for a long time. There were premonitions in the Iliad and hints in the Odyssey, but Virgil senses what we’ve been craving and delivers. It is worth pointing out that this core memory that many of us have from Greek mythology, the images in your head of how the Greeks finally entered the city of Troy, this memory never came to you from the Greek Homer, but from the Latin Virgil, and it is experienced from the perspective of the Trojans. Out of the Bronze Age Collapse comes our hero, carrying on his back the weight of the past (his father, Anchises), guiding with his hand the hope of the future (his son, Ascanius Iulus), straining toward Italy. Read, and see if you’ve remembered all this right.
Finally, if you’re looking for some meaty theme to chew on and turn over in your mind as you read the Aeneid and reflect upon it, I’d suggest you start by asking about destiny (fate) and duty, what the Romans meant by pietas, and the self-confidence of the west. Some questions: was it duty or destiny that brought Aeneas to Italy and made Octavian into Augustus? Or, better, does that question even make sense in Virgil’s poem? Perhaps destiny is duty, and the joining of these two in one human life is the pietas by which Rome was built (I say this not to give you an answer, but to pick a fight in your mind as you read). And Virgil has no doubt that things are going to be great going forward from Augustus in Rome; the proof is in Aeneas. Is that confidence warranted, or mere superstition? And where has that confidence gone, in the west? When did we lose it? Can we get it back? And would it be pious for us to pursue it today?
But to pick up a loose end I’ve left above, and if you’ll pardon the pun, the Achilles’ Heel of the western world from Augustus onward has always been this very thing that Virgil underlines in the Aeneid: all of our best western ideas, muses, confessions; all of our founders, saviors, gods, and all of our noble blood; whatever light we still have in the west, dawned not from our midst but rose upon us: from the east. Rome is that Nazareth out of which, what good can come? But to which came all good things from Ilium, Achaea, and the little town of Bethlehem.
Augustus could not have known the consequence of the decree that all the world he had won at Actium, all the world that was his birthright from Aeneas, was to be registered, each in his hometown. And Virgil did not know how to write by St. Luke’s Muse, or how to bring Him to Italy, but He would come when and where He willed, through the desolation they called the Pax Romana.1 And though they did not know the deepest secrets of heaven and earth, they did their duty and I suppose that destiny has given them–Augustus, Virgil, and even Aeneas–a small and far-off corner adjacent to every Nativity scene.
The world in which Christmas, Easter, and the Reformation took place was the world built by Augustus and converted by the Spirit of Christ, created by Virgil and recreated by the Bible. And speaking of the Bible, the last written words of Martin Luther are, “Hanc tu ne divinam Aeneida tenta, sed vestigia pronus adora.”2
Endnotes
1. So a certain Calgus alleges, “Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.” That is, “They [Romans] plunder, slaughter, steal, and falsely name it ‘Empire.’ Where they make a desolation, they call it ‘Peace.’” Translation from the Editors; see Tacitus, De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae.
2. “Do not test this divine Aeneid [the Bible], but bow down and adore its path.” Translation from the Editors.
