The Aeneid Book

TO CARTHAGE THEN I CAME, WHERE A CAULDRON OF UNHOLY LOVES
SANG IN MY EARS!
The Waste Land

THEY CONQUER WHO BELIEVE THEY CAN -
THEY CAN, BECAUSE THEY THINK THEY CAN!
The Aeneid

YOU can Conquer - now, isn't that a nifty quick analysis of how faith works? That's Virgil talking!

Faith in oneself... or Faith in a Higher Being?

Let's take a closer look...

Virgil left off writing this masterpiece a mere twenty years before the Star appeared over ancient Bethlehem.

And, of course, the Aeneid gave the worldly Romans hope for a brighter future at the same time, when their history was beginning its long, slow decline into moral chaos. It inspired them to believe that a semi-divine Trojan named Aeneas had given them ideals worth dying for!

With not much respect due to Troy's ancient conquerors - the Greeks.

Coincidence?

Sure, it was political propaganda commissioned by Augustus, through Virgil's noble mentor Maecenas.

But don't forget that many of the same Roman readers of this runaway bestseller were fathers of the first Italian Christian converts.

The domino effect was about to play its hand.

Early Christian apologists, looking for grist for their mills, would soon see in Virgil's groundbreaking ideas about a blissful afterlife in the Elysian Fields - for ordinary good people, as well as Homer's heroes - an announcement of the Lord's freely-offered - and freely-withheld - salvation.

A salvation for which Aeneas must forsake the fleshpot of Carthage...

And did I say Homer? That's another thing...

Approximately concurrent with all of this was the disastrous destruction by fire of Alexandria's priceless library - the last detailed link with the pre-Roman Greek world.

So, now, books like this one were suddenly a prime source for imaginative myth-making.

It is hard to imagine such inspired living as the Knights of the Round Table, or early books of such high-mindedness as Piers Plowman or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight existing without the nobility of the Aeneid.

(But what about the loss of higher mathematics - and calculus - of the Ottoman Empire, against whom Europe Crusaded? Enemies don't share secrets, alas.)

But how about the late medieval romances... and how much Latin magic is in the Holy Grail?

The Greeks - so sybaritic in their literature and such a springboard in their stories for the imagination - had little or no influence on our serious Medieval European ancestors.

The very dearth of Hellenic playfulness gave our ancestors their dour mindset. Perhaps in an age of starting from scratch again and rebuilding, that grim mindset was best.

So, the popular faith and imagination of the Middle Ages derived largely from books like this!

Even Aeneas' triumphant victory over Turnus was seen by clerics as a divine allegory of the victory over evil.

And who's to say they were so WRONG, though?

But, with that, Church censorship was also beginning, and Roman freedoms were eventually going to be curtailed.

But freedom has radically different restrictions as Age progresses to Age, and while we postmodernists seem to have fewer, we in fact have migrated to much less privacy.

Every age has its manner of dealing with anarchy. Ours is surveillance.

But to the Church, MORAL Anarchy was the most perilous type of chaos, thanks to Nero and Caligula. And for the future of European civilization the Church seems in hindsight to have been right.

It's like your parents weeding out any bad influences on you as you grew up - can THAT be such a bad thing? Most good parents do it - or used to. It's like pruning back your rose bushes, in the interests of their future health.

Sure, there'll be some Major adjustments for the kids later on, but if they have an active intelligence, they'll catch up in plenty of time, though the transition from naïve innocence to cosmic disappointment is vast.

And without the firm foothold of faith well nigh impossible.

And note well the conclusion to Book VI of the Aeneid, in which Virgil shows the only auspicious door out of the Underworld: the Gate of Horn, and NOT the Gate of Ivory... the former symbolizing Cosmic Disappointment.

Now, most people on this planet prefer a life of Ivory (physical riches and spiritual materialism) over a life of Horn (disappointment and penance). That's our natural and very Fallen nature.

The origin of the ancient symbol of the Horn lies in its roots in the misfortune of being cuckolded. A young buck drives away his rivals with his horn. Ever notice than when a cuckold comes onstage in a Mozart opera, his musical genius symbolized that fact by having the French Horn play a sybaritic riff? His nascent disappointment becomes comic to the audience.

Similarly, could the seed of a great religion of love and compassion have taken root without the concurrent sowing of the nobility that the Aeneid has in men's minds? And moral nobility is born in cosmic ethical disappointment.

Could Christianity have spread like wildfire throughout the fallen Empire... without it? For that's what the spoiled, self-indulgent emperors were to believers - a cosmic disappointment. But that disappointment was to Virgil the RIGHT WAY to Heaven.

Sure, I know I'm REACHING a bit to make my points.

But whatever your own views, the Aeneid is the great Medieval Desert Island Book - one of the only great ancient imaginative yarns the serious, and violent, early Middle Ages really had.

A true oasis for the souls of those who were lost and confused in that scattered moral debris before the Fall of the Colossus that was the Roman Empire:

And an ethical bedrock!

All roads lead to ROME?

Not on your life, for this sententious-sounding old guy!

So I'll just continue to walk the straight & narrow path with my old pal Virgil.