Virgil in the light of his time

Virgil's Aeneid has almost certainly generated a longer and larger tradition of commentary than any other poem in the European canon. A critic who offers to add to this enormous accretion might take as his starting point a reflection by Frank Kermode (Forms of Attention, 1985): ‘since we have no experience of a venerable text that ensures its own perpetuity, we may reasonably say that the medium in which it survives is commentary’. The Aeneid, a venerable text if ever there was one, has been subjected to a continual process of revaluation from the fourth century ad until our own time. Consequently, while remaining as it always was, it has undergone successive transformations which have had the effect of making it seem perpetually modern, and which have in a sense become part of the totality of the text as experienced by the reader. Translation, as well as critical commentary, ‘appreciation’ and interpretation, must be included in this process of transformation and accretion.

The poem's unique place as a landmark in European letters is partly owing to historical circumstances. On 2 September 31 bc Gaius Julius Octavianus, adopted son and heir of the assassinated and deified Julius Caesar, defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium – events familar to English readers from Shakespeare's play – and emerged as princeps, nominally first citizen but effectively sole ruler, of the Roman world. It was a decisive moment in history.