SOURCE: "Morality, Mortality, and the Public Life: Aeneas the Politician," in The Antioch Review, Vol. 32, No. 4, Fall/Winter, 1973, pp. 649–64.

[In the following essay, Stewart emphasizes the political didacticism of the Aeneid, claiming the "essential subject" of the poem "is the 'education ' of a political leader."]

In his 1961 lectures from the Oxford Chair of Poetry Robert Graves labeled Virgil the "anti-poet"—in Graves-peak, roughly, the Anti-Christ—and denounced him for "pliability … subservience … narrowness; his denial of the stubborn imaginative freedom that the true poets who preceded him had valued; his lack of originality, courage, humour, or even animal spirits…. " Graves' performance, long awaited as the most spectacular clash of humors in a generation, was really rather tame, if not conventional. Most students of Virgil had heard that litany before, based as it is on the almost cliché image of the poet in the modern era, a shaggy rebel touchy to the point of oaths or tears at society's supposed attempts either to curb or ignore his personal feelings. How very different Virgil's role as a court poet, living on state funds and writing, on commission from Caesar Augustus, an epic poem that was not about the feelings of anybody in particular, but the destiny of a supra-national empire. The case against Virgil is just too simple: a toady, a propagandist, a man afraid of conflict and direct statement. That of course is the trouble: the case is too easy, simply because a 15-year-old could make it. After reading Graves once, I found myself wondering what Virgil might have to say, if he were elected Oxford Professor of Poetry, about our modern poets (and critics). One thing I am sure he would stress is the deplorable political naivete of poets who seldom seem to know the first thing about politics, and rarely have exercised their "stubborn imaginative freedom" to explore the inner nature of institutions and the complex fate of men who are called upon to manage them.

There is nothing wrong with the literature of personal experience and the feelings; that indeed is what most literature has always concerned itself with. And it is difficult for a writer to come to grips imaginatively with the political element in life. Finally, institutions may well be both corrupt and corrupting. But none of these considerations proves a priori that literature cannot tackle a political subject, or that it cannot be successful, which is to say convincing to the reader, in doing so. And the task Virgil set for himself in the Aeneid was to write literature about institutions and the political vocation. He did not try to write imitation Homeric epic, or second-rate Apollonian romance, or philosophical cryptograms based on Stoic matter in Lucretian forms. Whatever Augustus was expecting from Virgil, one thing he certainly did not get was a patriotic hymn of praise for Rome, nor indeed is Rome the specific subject of the poem. Much less did he get simple propaganda favoring his own regime. The essential subject of the Aeneid is the "education" of a political leader.

As we shall see presently in greater detail, the most persuasive boast Roman culture could make was that it had objectified and codified the conditions of creating political leadership, which gave it title to rule the world. That being the claim, Virgil determined to produce in full detail a dry-eyed study of how that process occurs, using the persona of Rome's legendary founder, the Trojan hero Aeneas. Virgil's first insight was relatively simple, if hard for emotional people to absorb: that a politician, normally, is neither a gangster nor a hero, but a frequently puzzled player of a fiendishly complicated game most of the rules of which change by the hour. A typical politician may find this fascinating or heartening, but to others a politician at work must seem a dull fellow, because most of his "adventures" are infinitesimal mental acts of deduction, appraisal and equivocation, seldom even verbalized, or not candidly so. The knowing or threatening look, the muffled conversation, the equivocal speech are perhaps the politician's most typical outward expressions of his feelings and functions, hardly comparable to the sweeping gestures or lofty oratory of an epic hero. In Homer, especially in the Iliad, heroism is for the human characters; politics is for the gods. Though the heroes have technical political roles as chiefs and kings, they seldom remember to fulfill them—except perhaps Agamemnon, who fills his incompetently, as Thersites reminds everyone. Making a politician out of Aeneas, who began his "career" as a Homeric hero, required the displacement, if not the disappearance, of Aeneas' epic personality, because a politician has very little time for a private set of feelings. To state this perspective would not of course make Robert Graves any happier with Virgil, because Graves like so many others limits the focus of real poetry ("true poets") to the personal realm; but all one can say in reply is that Virgil understood much better than his detractors what kind of poetry he had chosen not to write and how and where the Aeneid had to differ from the poetry of personal life.

The Aeneid is a study of the preternatural strains and anxieties a political vocation brings to mere natural man, and the ultimate surd presented to us when we consider the problem of political leadership: is such a thing possible at all; can one be both a human being and a leader; and will it not turn out that the claims of nature and politics will be mutually contradictory? Poetry of the more usual pattern, with its involvement in the fate and aspirations of the individual, stands at a great distance from politics, whose concern is the fate of groups—and indirectly the fate of individuals who act as their agents—and Virgil understood this better than anyone else. Eventually, it may be, poetry with its "higher" morality must come to judge even politics. But the right word is eventually. Not too quickly or too rashly, as is usually the case. And Virgil understood this too.

One source of the impatience even subtle readers experience with Virgil and all Latin literature is a curious system of retreat and apology that threads its way through the works of most Roman writers. They all seem so terribly conscious of having come, collectively, upon Greek literary themes and forms late in the day, arrivistes blundering in upon a cultural dialogue that had been going on a long time without them, as though the subjects of discussion, though old in fact, are new to them. They also seem embarrassed and distinctly modest about any contribution they could possibly make to the discussion already well under way. The poet Horace in one poem stakes his claim to immortality on his ability to make the rude Latin language dance in Greek meters, a very modest claim indeed, and probably not even an honest one, but that is all he dares to say, because no one would believe anything more. Lucretius grumbles about the egestas, the poverty of Latin for discussions of philosophy, and claims to be doing no more than versifying the ideas of Epicurus (though that too is probably false). Sallust apologizes for the absence of respectable Roman historiography by arguing that in Rome men competent in public affairs took part in them rather than wrote about them, unlike Greece where, if anything, the political genius of a writer like Thucydides exceeded the magnitude of the events he had to write about. Even Ovid, though evidently troubled and annoyed by the cautious, imitative tone of his fellow writers, found no better means of asserting his own originality than by farcical imitation of the imitators. The most famous of these apologetic texts—or so it is usually interpreted—is the great prophecy of Anchises in Aeneid VI. In lines 847–853 Anchises (actually his ghost) foretells to Aeneas just which of the civilized arts it will be granted to Rome itself to practice, once Rome takes its ordained place on the world stage, and which must be conceded to subject peoples like the Greeks. The lines appear to acquiesce in a straight trade-off between Greek and Roman skills: let the Greeks (called simply, "the others") seek fame and excellence in the fine arts and the like, provided only that the Romans understand that their own fame will be secured through the exercise of the arts of legislation, politics and at least a modified form of imperial warfare:

excudent alii spirantia mollius aera
(credo equidem), vivos ducent de marmore vultus
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus
describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.
[847–853]

(Others, I dare say, will hammer out breathing bronzes more subtly, and draw living faces out of the marble; they will speak more eloquently, map the course of the heavens with instruments and predict the comings and goings of the stars. But you, a Roman, remember how to rule nations. These will be your arts: to enforce the habit of peace, to spare the conquered, but war down the proud.)

It is remarkable how much Virgil gives away here. I call attention to the phrases "breathing bronzes" (spirantia aera) and "living faces out of marble" (vivos … de marmore vultus). With more than a touch of the true artist's sadness he is admitting that by the turn of the fates the Greeks have been selectively and abundantly blessed with the ability to create an approximation of life from that which is naturally non-living (spirantia and vivos are key words here and much stronger than Virgil's usual metaphors), and that is the program and aspiration of all art, one may say.

This passage, as noted, is part of a pattern that frequently earns all of Latin literature the scorn of critics and scholars as a second-rate and "derivative" historical phenomenon. But this passage in particular has had a more specific, unbalancing effect on Virgil's individual reputation, because it has been used to call into question his respect for his own art, or even his attentiveness to what he was doing. Supposing it agreed that a Horace or a Sallust were but second-raters—at least they worked earnestly and believingly to the best of their ability. These lines have sometimes been taken to mean that Virgil had no stomach for his project, and it has even been thought that they amount to a moody, half-conscious resignation of the spirit from the whole enterprise. This interpretation is especially tempting to over-eager critics who read more than is there into the first half of the "bargain" conceding preeminence in the arts to the Greeks, and have seen much less than is there in the second half claiming political preeminence for the Romans. This in turn is intimately linked with the essential issue of what kind of poetry Virgil thought he was trying to write.

First of all, one may note that in the catalogue of Greek superiorities Virgil omits mention of poetry, his own medium. Yet poetry was obviously the supreme accomplishment of the Greeks. This omission can be given several explanations, all of them correct in their way. First, Virgil did not need to praise Greek poetry, since he was in the very act of imitating it, the highest form of praise. Second, and more important, no matter how humble one may feel, it would not do in the middle of a Latin poem to say too explicitly that the Greeks win all the prizes for poetry, too. It would simply jar the poetic frame too crudely, and the poem one was writing would perish in the saying of it. And third, though Virgil was in some ways a shy and self-critical man, I doubt he really failed to understand his own gifts. And surely he hoped by means of his own poem to render the case between Greek and Latin poetry not so entirely one-sided as it was before his coming.

But there is yet another way to explain this omission, and it brings us back to the opening question: what sort of poetry can one write about material that is, in the judgment of most people, so unpoetic so as to seem positively anti-poetic? And how is it to be made credible, given this very suspicion? Virgil's complex answer to this puzzle grows out of this passage. The first step is to admit that by and large, poetry and politics are antithetical and then to write poetry that portrays just why this is generally true.

Virgil says in the prophecy of Anchises that the Roman genius best expresses itself in the arts of politics. He also states, in effect, that politics is essentially alien to the whole realm of the arts. He omits any mention of poetry here because he realizes that he has undertaken an almost impossible task in the Aeneid, to celebrate and justify a political quest and a political event, and to do it within the rules of art itself, not those of politics. Having accepted responsibility for this hybrid enterprise, Virgil—if not the world's greatest poet then surely its most tactful poet—immediately understood that to intrude the quarrel between poetry and politics just here would be to spoil the effect and reduce the results to a conundrum about his own personal position on politics and the Augustan settlement. As we have seen, Virgil did not escape posterity's inquisition on this subject, though the questions have normally been posed with un-Virgilian crudity: Was Virgil sincere? Was he hostile to his political assignment? And so on. So put, they are simply beneath intellectual consideration because Virgil himself obviously understood them, found the means to escape the false dilemma they posed, and passed on to his real work. The real question for us is: How did Virgil so manage his efforts that he could speak truth about his theme, politics, without foisting on it the often irrelevant petulancies of the artist, and without at the same time letting the expediencies of the politician (Augustus, or the whole herd collectively) make him descend indecently to propaganda. It was at once a terrifying exercise in restraint and an extravagantly ambitious program.

In practical terms this program meant that Aeneas, who begins as just one more epic "hero," must be conducted by the poet through a series of brain washings until he has developed into something totally different, a political leader, who is no hero at all. This, however, will entail a progressive estrangement of the poet from the hero, a loss of contact between the increasingly political figure of Aeneas and the mechanisms easily available to a poet for assessing character and penetrating the psyche.

Politics is very difficult for literature to portray, for except at extreme moments of either heroism or tyranny it displays very little of the sharp features of individual personality, which are what literature wants to find in life. Politics usually takes a little from the personalities of many people, and not much from the personality of any one man. On the other hand, it gives very little scope to the personality of any one man, or offers little room for the development of the individual personality. I think Virgil grasped this frustating state of affairs very early on, yet determined grimly to follow its implications to the end. The Aeneid, as a result, is perhaps the one really success ful, though unappreciated, literary portrait of a politician's life and education.

Politics, sadly, is quite mute at its real center, the heart of the politician, the structure of his loves and cares. Literature, the carrier of fame and thus of historical approbation—at least as all poets believe—has rarely if ever solved the problem of handling quotidian politics with insight and conviction. If we look to Shakespeare we find that to make politics artistically tolerable he was forced to reduce it to mere crime (Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Richard III) or to gross quarrels over succession (Richard II, Hamlet, Lear)—the coup d'état in its various manifestations. These models are negative and suggest that politics can provide literature only with pathological material … which is largely true. Literature normally can only deal effectively with the boundary moments between regimes, the assassination, the coup—or with certain types of tyranny, because tyranny, as Tacitus made clear, treats all events as real or potential boundary moments. It is only when politics disguises itself as the individual concern of life-or-death that literature can normally get it in clear focus. Yet Virgil is probably the one clear exception to this rule: he really taught himself to understand politics in its standard operations, and created the epic of a political man—an agent, not a hero.

The typical politician does not spend his time thinking about assassination, coup d'état or tyranny. He enjoys most what we call "administration," i.e., the marshalling of usually reluctant forces and factors—men, materials and money—into concerted action to produce a permanent and visible result, a "fixture" of some sort, that will survive on the landscape, both as a permanent addition to society's collection of amenities (or vanities) and as a witness to the fact that the politician responsible did not live entirely in vain. (Power comes in as a means to this end.) In other words, most politicians do not consciously think of power per se but of serviceable memorials to their skill at creation. Here is where the politician gains his immortality. Any Roman reading the prophecy of Anchises would instantly have understood that the background assumption of the passage was one of vicarious immortality gained through political achievement.

But fame requires a repository, a reliquary, an object in which it resides. Works of art are their own reliquaries and works of thought repose in written documents, books and treatises, verbal continuities speaking for themselves. The most obvious object a politician leaves behind him is the public building, the great monument in stone and steel. This is why politicians have engaged in an ages-long love affair with the construction industry. True, some politicians have believed that constitutional reform in the broad sense, a re-integration of a people's needs with their public law, is as good as, or better than, a building program. But they have not been in the majority, and even they have never entirely scorned the importance of buildings. For example, in the year 1800 one would have to say that the two shrewdest politicians living were Jefferson and Napoleon. Both effected massive changes in the political thought and basic law of their nations—both were thought of as law-givers—yet both men also with their left hands, as it were, were avid builders and possessed an almost professional eye for architectural style and proportion. It is probably only with Bentham that the idea began to grow that institutional re-design is more important than buildings, both pro bono publico and for trie political leader's reputation. (Although, as I shall note shortly, even here Virgil may have anticipated history.)

Virgil, I suggest, having agreed to write an "epic" about a political leader, did the responsible thing: he studied political leaders to see how they really operated. He learned, if he had not known before, much of what I have been discussing: the typical politician is not really on easy terms with the poet; his ideals and aims are elsewhere. Despite the claims of ancient poets that politicians desire their attention because poetry alone confers immortality, in their actions politicians prove that they think otherwise. Politicians may be happy to hire the services of poets—in modern terms, journalists—to celebrate the regime for short-term public-relations purposes, but when the question is true immortality, politicians instinctively vote with the other side: a building or a program beats the poet's faint praise (or the historian's awe) every time. Thus Virgil set himself the chore of writing about a "hero" who would himself have very little use for, or interest in, the services of a poet like Virgil. The Aeneid then begins to sound very much like a series of long-distance telephone calls between a distracted central character and an intelligent poet whose fidelity to truth makes him understand why it is increasingly difficult to keep Aeneas on the line.

At the 31st line of the first book of the Aeneid Virgil, in his own voice, utters a remarkably quotable and intuitive line, Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem. "Such struggle would be needed to found the Roman nation." Tantae molis, to be sure, does mean "such struggle," and the line is a Stoicized expression of the extreme demands that duty will impose upon Aeneas as, like Hercules, he goes about his largely unpleasant labors. But molis, before it acquired the ethical sense of "struggle" had the primary physical meaning of "building stone" or another very large and heavy object solid and immovable enough to serve as the foundation of an enduring public building. And, appearing with the verb condere, "to lay down" or "fix" (in the ground), it makes a pretty clear case that the dominant image in Virgil's mind was that of building on a monumental scale.

I dwelt above on the fact that Roman culture contained a large admixture of defensive maneuvers whereby the supremacy of Greek culture was admitted, while spokesmen for Roman culture agree to compete only for secondary honors, those of re-doing Greek achievement in Latin phrases. Virgil, obviously, subscribed to this view, but only to a degree. Quite apart from his own self-respect, he realized that he had a different problem here—in fact one diametrically opposed to that accepted by most Roman writers: he was not trying to domesticate Greek ideas in Roman terms, but to discover the essence of Roman ideas and feelings and naturalize them in the Greek style, i.e., in a verse form, the epic, that was foreign to Roman culture. (The older Roman "epics" of Naevius and Ennius were fabulized "annals" or history, not especially mythic.) I think he understood his own capacity to do just this, while also realizing, perhaps, just what the cost would be in critical incomprehension. Virgil, in contrast to other poets who never seemed to question the fact that they were educated in Greek terms to think like Greeks, deliberately reversed the pattern and successfully internalized true-to-character Roman enthusiasms and then sought to create freely with them in a Greek medium. This he largely succeeded in doing. The dominant ideal in the minds of upper-class Romans was the desire to appear in history as important and creative politically, and the surest token of political creativity is long-lasting public construction, as the careers of the great Roman magnates, from Appius Claudius Pulcher to Augustus himself make clear. As recorded in Suetonius (Vita Divi Augusti, 28) Augustus boasted that he found Rome brick and left it marble, and in his own record of his reign (Res Gestae, 19–21) Augustus gloats over the long list of buildings begun, finished and repaired in his reign, though he makes no mention of having sponsored the greatest of all Latin poems—as I have noted, when it comes down to cases politicians vote with the contractor and the architect, not with the poet. It just happened that this particular poet, Virgil, shrewdly noted this very fact and proceeded to elaborate his epic upon this basic understanding of the ways of politics.

The poem opens and wastes no time in lodging in the reader's mind the dominant image of construction, the heavier the better, the romance of public buildings, the most essential Roman image that could be set forth. The point is obviously to suggest to the perceptive reader that nearly all of the epic, and hence Greek-style, "adventures" of the story are a throwaway: they are never crucial. And in fact the most important passages in the Aeneid are those times when the poem reneges on pursuing an "epic" story to an epic conclusion, such as Aeneas' headlong flight from Dido (with nothing like Odysseus' doubts or complaints about Calypso) or his dropping out of action just when there is the chance to make the great epic speech. Even though the Aeneid is modeled, superficially, on both Iliad and Odyssey, at a deeper level, follows the Odyssey in being the story of a man forced to introspection in order to find out who he is through the agency of his experience, in the last analysis it is not much like any "epic" before or since.

I have said that Aeneas began his heroic "career" in Homer's Iliad. I used that odd word "career" for a purpose, to imply that for him heroism was not to be a way of being, but simply a profession for a time. And that profession is aborted in Aeneid II (606 ff.): in a desultory skirmish with a band of Greek looters on the night Troy is taken, Aeneas is suddenly commanded by his mother Venus to break off the engagement and flee, because he has other work to do: "do not fear the commands of your mother, nor refuse to obey my orders" (tu ne qua parentis / iussa time, neu praeceptis parère recusa …, words which will never read quite the same to me after Portnoy's Complaint). Aeneas obeys instantly. He is no Achilles proclaiming to his mother his resolve to follow the heroic code until it kills him. Nor is Venus a Thetis: she simply will not stand by wringing her hands to see her boy killed for no purpose: he is destined to a political career as the founder of a new state, and she is determined that he will have it. The tone suddenly drops in this passage to the practical, if not the bourgeois. Epic assumptions are destroyed and Aeneas is propelled by his mother—playing a Roman matron on the model of the great political matriarchs like Cornelia—into the new world of policy, calculation, and caution. From here on he is searching for a new role to assume, and by the time he reaches Carthage he is already half a politician. At the sight of the rising walls of Carthage he bursts out to Achates: O fortunati quorum iam moenia surgunt (I, 437). Walls, structures, are now of primary concern to him because they are the surest tokens of social reality and continuity. Real epic heroes are not interested in buildings but in deeds of the moment. In her speech to Aeneas prevailing on him to abandon Troy, Venus had dwelt on the horror of seeing mightly buildings destroyed (II, 608–612) and implied that this was even worse than the destruction of people. She was teaching him a lesson about the permanence of society as represented by its buildings—buildings as a prerequisite for all civilized life, and even for life itself. And through his subsequent experience Aeneas will be forced to learn at first hand the malaise of an unhoused, non-political existence, to the extent that he quickly becomes an almost fantatical apostle of the civic life and the concrete artifacts upon which it depends.

Aeneas' ejaculation O fortunati came as he was gazing on the temple of Juno, his arch-enemy, and on the frescoes adorning its walls which told the story of the destruction of Troy! Sunt lacrimae rerum and all that. But none of this matters to him at this moment. Here is the most positive civic achievement known to him, the erection of great public buildings which somehow protect a people while encouraging them to believe in their own survival despite any challenge time may hurl upon them.

But a politicians is more than a builder. He is a leader of people (not, as the phrase usually has it, a leader of men—readers often forget that Aeneas led a band of men and women from Troy). And a leader, except in the simplified terms of warfare—another boundary situation—is no hero. He is simply one who organizes other people's energies. He leads (often) by pretending that a given common aim is both realizable and beneficial, though he personally may doubt the first and not even understand the second. Those who have searched the Aeneid for a second Achilles and found only the "priest" of Yeats' story, have simply misunderstood the arena in which this "hero" is operating. All those flat, dull speeches of encouragement, all that weariness, that general hangover quality Aeneas both experiences

and communicates when he looks out upon the world, are the politician's special burden. He must pretend to enthusiasms he does not feel, repress emotions he does feel, and generally behave not as a free individual but as the incorporation of a society's needs, a trust-officer for other people's future. The heraldic badge of the Aeneid is the vignette of Aeneas carrying his lame father and leading his small son away from the ruins of Troy. It sums up precisely the fate and role of Aeneas: go-between, maker or agent of continuity, link between past and future, doubly burdened by both. And finally of course the politician has the misfortune—and the wretchedness—of accepting responsibility for the actions of his subordinates. Aeneas must face the grim results of his son's ill-timed hunting expedition, and of the foolish bravado of Nisus and Euryalus. This is a world totally different from that of Achilles, whose sense of role is so personal as to be infantile: he quarrels with a superior, retires from action, delegates command to an inferior, and then reacts to the inferior's defeat only in terms that reflect his personal feeling of outrage and loss. A real leader, a politician, has no time for the ego-cultivation of an Achilles (Virgil might say); he is just a center around which effective historical action may take place. That is, if he's lucky, if he can hang on, hope for the best, and keep his power intact for as long as possible.

For such reasons as these Aeneas the politician is always on the point of escaping from the status of a literary character under his creator's control, into another world where the poet cannot easily follow. Again and again he turns his back on the kinds of action and self-expression that literature can normally take into its forms. His abandonment of Dido is the prime case in point. Virgil, and Aeneas, have been attacked a thousand times because Virgil has Aeneas, after one warning from Mercury, drop Dido with no complaints and no arguments, and certainly with no dramatic expressions of his passion or the loss he is incurring. Thus Aeneas is cold and calculating, a cad, a jellyfish, without backbone or balls—so the indictments run. But they are not to the point. Any politician with a capacity for introspection would instantly understand even this as simply an extreme case of what politics always demands from its practitioners, a readiness to deny and ignore the promptings of mere nature when policy, the duty of role-playing, the communal purpose demand it. True, the average politician suffers little more than the loss of regular dinners with his family, but the possibility of greater sacrifice is always there, as the fateful careers of two Kennedys have instructed us. The Dido story is a metaphor for what any politician must be prepared to do: to sacrifice every last personal tie, if necessary, to help keep the political enterprise going, to maintain the quest. Literature has never found this sort of thing very palatable, either because it is devoted to exploring the private passions of man, or because it holds an implicit ethics denying the validity, if not the reality, of the abstruse and probably corrupt doings of politics. Literature may be right, and politics wrong, in the final judgment. But insofar as politics exists and there are politicians to observe, Virgil is saying, it is proper to present what politics really is like and how a politician lives, since that is what Aeneas was.

I suggested above that Virgil anticipated the modern conviction that social programs, intangible institutional reforms (e.g., Social Security), are even more significant monuments to a political career than memorials in stone. As evidence, consider the prophecy of Anchises in Book VI, already cited to make a narrower point. What Anchises declares, in effect, is not just how Greek and Roman cultures should compose their differences in a viable scheme that carries on the best of both; he also enunciates a new constitutional principle: parcere victis et debellare superbos, "spare the conquered and war down the proud." This, if finally understood, would accomplish the total conversion of Aeneas from a bloodletting epic hero to a wise philosopher-king. For it says that warfare, that plaything of epic heroes, is to be conducted solely under the guidance of cold-eyed impersonal policy. To a large extent Aeneas' own character manages to conform itself to this principle even though the following of principle so intently tends to obliterate and bury that character, which is only "rescued" by a horrid paradox at the end. It is noticeable that Aeneas begins to curtail all instinctive, natural reactions and replace them with political calculation, in the better sense. And for this the poet rewards him by switching from the epithet pius—which implied, in the first six books, his subjection to paternal and ancestral control, that of both Anchises and Venus—to the epithet pater, father, indicating his acceptance of, and title to, full responsibility and political authority in the last six books. Likewise, Aeneas ages significantly in the last six books: we can no longer imagine him appearing as a lover. In the words of Professor Clausen: "We see him, middle-aged and a widower, bound to pursue his reluctant way from Troy to Italy, from a past he has lost to a future he will never possess." The last phrase sums up a politician's vocation about as well as anything can. Aeneas becomes cautious and stiff; he develops a resistance to emotional appeals, whether to fear or vanity. And he becomes caught in the categorical imperative of politics: preservation of the leader's person is inextricably involved with the accomplishment of his purposes, to an extent that even he can grasp only in rare moments.

The Aeneid ends with the murder of Turnus. It is a murder precisely because it would have been a piece of behavior perfectly normal for an epic hero on the Homeric model. But it comes long after Aeneas has been taught, and has accepted, the new constitutional principle which subjects war, and all other behavior, to the demands of a rational, and humanitarian politics: parcere victis, "spare the conquered." Critics hostile to Virgil seem to blame this atrocity on the poet himself. Yet Aeneas does no more than what Achilles does to Hector, and Hector is admirable while Turnus most certainly is not. Yet a charge must be made: Aeneas is wrong. His act is one of excess. And worse, it is a personal act.

Political leaders cannot afford to act on personal grounds. Aeneas is no Achilles; he does not occupy that primitive sphere in the shame culture which countenances a permanent adolescence forever clamoring for attention and given to smashing the furniture if it does not get it. Aeneas is simply subject to different and higher standards, standards to which he with at least partial understanding, has lent himself. It is not even an excuse that he has considerable human grounds for his act. Turnus is a narrow, violent, and rather stupid egomaniac (he is an Achilles), and he had savagely killed the most unoffending and ideal human type who appears in the Aeneid, Pallas, the saintly son of Evander. The disparity between their characters can hardly be measured. Moreover Virgil supplies an extra irony. Pallas is clearly portrayed as a cadet-leader from the younger generation, possessing all the qualities of incipient leadership that would make him Aeneas' ideal successor. And any half-competent politician spends at least half his time worrying about the problem of capable and acceptable successors. In politics continuity is always the problem. It may be that Aeneas saw Pallas, rather than his own son Ascanius, at least for a few hopeful moments, as his own successor, via the procedure of adoption. This procedure was common among the great political families of Rome. Augustus was the adopted son of Julius Caesar. The saintly Marcellus was, likewise, the adoptive heir of Augustus, and the untimely and horrid death of Pallas at the hands of Turnus is perhaps a literary parallel with the untimely and regrettable death of Marcellus. Yet even this does not excuse a political failure, which is what the murder of Turnus is. Aeneas has multiple motives, but a multiplicity of motives does not constitute a reason for political action, not for a politician. The new constitutional order demands that he restrain himself—even as he had been restrained by Venus from killing Helen in Book II—and that he substitute policy for spontaneous, natural human action.

Aeneas fails the final political test, yet, paradoxically, he reasserts his humanity at the same time. Why? The answer is not that Virgil is an obtuse and disoriented writer. Rather he is a poet who is also a shrewd and reliable witness of the real world. Aeneas is shown in the last six books growing in political consequence and command. Meanwhile his personality deteriorates and fades. His motives are less and less subject to scrutiny as those of a simple human being. Yet in the end he fails as a politician because human nature finally breaks through. But it is too late, and the wrong moment. His world and his vocation have changed, but at the last moment he himself betrays the new system he has instituted. Virgil shows us that the tension between natural man and civic man will probably never be fully resolved. This point is given excruciating prominence in Book VI, near the end of Anchises' prophetic vision of the panorama of Rome's history. Of Brutus, the first consul after the overthrow of the Etruscan kings, Virgil writes:

consults imperium hie primus saevasque securis
accipiet, natosque pater nova bella moventis
ad poenam pulchra pro libertate vocabit,
infelix, utcumque ferent ea facta minores.
[819–822]

(He first will receive the power of the consulate and the dread axes, and he, as father, will call his sons, plotting revolution, to due punishment, for the sake of dear liberty—a wretched man—or so lesser men will think who retell these things.)

The phrase "wretched man, or so lesser men will think … " is the exact description of the terrible paradox of the political leader, the sensitivities of natural man meeting the leader's self-imposed duties to his society rather than to his blood and feelings. It is a tragedy, and tragedy quite beyond the matter of individual griefs, that political leadership, though indispensable, so often seems to end up in a situation in which a leader, having systematically educated himself to reject the promptings of mere nature, will either go a step too far and use policy in such an unnatural way that he disgusts other men, even if they appear to benefit from his acts, or else he will suffer a momentary lapse and abandon policy for a natural act at precisely the wrong point. The former was the fate of the first Brutus, who horrified the ancient Romans quite as much as the second Brutus horrified Plutarch and Shakespeare by killing Caesar; the latter is the fate of Aeneas. Virgil has planned the moment carefully: he has brought back personal motivation at the point where it is at one and the same time politically unacceptable, but artistically necessary and conclusive.

The politician is yet always a human being, even if the unique pressures of his profession tend to persuade him that this is not true. He cannot always see every problem presented to him as though it were a simple theorem in the geometry of power and of responsibility for the community. Usually his own humanity and weaknesses will at some point invade his behavior and this, though acceptable to art, will be disastrous for politics. It is not always the general dehumanization of politics that makes our collective social life especially dangerous, but sometimes its sudden re-humanization at the worst possible moment on an unpredictable schedule. The politician's existential risk is twofold, and probably intolerable for complete mental health: either he will lose his humanity entirely and become a robot or a fanatic, or he will reassert it at precisely the wrong moment, as Aeneas does, only to put everything wrong.

The ambiguity of critics and criticism when facing the Aeneid is simply a copy of the ambiguity an observer like Virgil must have felt in studying the careers of successful Roman politicians like Scipio, Sulla, Julius Caesar or Augustus. How can one do justice to a man who is both an individual and the embodiment of the res publical It really can't be done. Virtually no one can stand the strain, ultimately, of both roles. Virgil's alleged and much-discussed demurrer against the Augustan system, if it exists, is not to be found at some superficial level like distrust of imperialism or autocracy. He is hardly interested in such abstractions. His entry into the political problem of Aeneas is effected at a much deeper point: he sees the acceptance of political leadership as a crucial denial of natural human feelings, which in the long run will probably rebel, and the eventuating crisis will destroy the characters of all but the strongest. Leadership is a necessary good—or evil, perhaps—but hardly ever can it provide ethical or personal satisfaction for the chosen vehicle. Fata dederunt: Aeneas often silences grumblers with such a phrase, but it only quiets lesser folk. For him all it means is that he personally has no escape and no prospect of contentment. What the fates have really granted is his own unwilled yoking to an enterprise that systematically overrules the feelings, or else guarantees that expression of natural life and feeling will bring him only gigantic troubles and endanger his civic aims. This honest and sympathetic account of the politician's dilemma in no sense makes the Aeneid an artistic failure. Far from it: it makes the poem a perfect portrayal of one of mankind's most serious and besetting problems, which no other literary work I know has expressed so convincingly.