 The Aeneid by Publius Virgilius Mero. You'll notice that his middle name is how we remember the author of the Aeneid, Virgil. And you'll also notice that it's spelled with an E in Latin. Sometimes, depending on the translation of the edition you get, it may be that Virgil is spelled V-E-R-G-I-L or it may be spelled V-I-R-G-I-L according to our modern, anglicized spelling of that name. Virgil lived between 70 and 19 BCE. This is during the transition of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. During the time of Julius Caesar and more importantly, his nephew Octavian who would later become known as Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome. Because this time period was highly influential, if you've already read books one through six of the Aeneid, you realize that there's a lot of Roman history that gets added in, whether it's the prophecies made by Jupiter to Venus in book one, or the prophecy made by Ancyces in the underworld as he reviews all the souls of the future Romans in book six. You see that Virgil has a lot of Roman history in a narrative that tells a story about things that happened centuries before Rome ever existed. So Virgil's time period in historical context are gonna be very important. They're always gonna be important to any text we read, but in this case, you see this sort of deliberate inclusion of later history, anachronistic history into a story. So to put this in our contextual timeline, remember that the Trojan War, if there was a historical Trojan War, there were a series of events around the city of Elius, or Willusa, this Western Hittite city that was destroyed by an earthquake around 1250, and it was destroyed by invasion around 1180, 1175. So somewhere between 1250 and 1175, we have what could have been a historical Trojan War. So this would have been the time, and this was the time that later 5th century Greeks attributed the Trojan War. So the historical events would have taken place around this time. And anything we know about the figures that fought this war comes from the writings of Homer or the poetry that gets redacted into the Iliad and the Odyssey, written sometime during the 8th or 7th century BCE. So sometime between 750 and 600 is when we have the works of the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. That means that seven centuries have passed between the time Homer writes the Iliad and the Odyssey and the time Virgil writes the Aeneid. He's writing this between 29 BCE and up to his death in 19 BCE. And so between these two time periods, a lot has happened. In these seven centuries, it's not just a span of time that has passed, but the entire empire of Rome has emerged and risen to power in that intervening time period. So right about the same time that Homer is writing or redacting or compiling the Iliad and the Odyssey, according to legend, this is the time when the city of Rome was actually founded. And that city will exist as a kingdom up until about 509 when through a series of abuses of power by the kings at the time and a reaction against that abuse of power. The kings will be killed off and they'll be replaced by the Senate and consuls in a sort of limited, more democratic form of government. Not entirely democratic in the modern sense and not even democratic in the sense that the Greek city-states were democratic, but something more democratic. There was this, the Roman Republic emerges as a reaction against the abuses of tyrannical kings. And it will continue to grow in influence. And then around, between 264 and 146 BCE, they will come into conflict with the city of Carthage on the opposite side of the Mediterranean, on the southern coast of the Mediterranean, the northern end of Africa. And during these wars, Rome and Carthage will compete for control of the Mediterranean and ultimately Rome will be victorious. And about the same time Rome will defeat Carthage and the Greek city-states that are under the control of the Macedonian kings, that is the descendants of Alexander the Great. And at that time in 146, Rome will come to control pretty much the entire Mediterranean. The areas of Roman history we're probably most familiar with is the time of Julius Caesar, who around 49 BCE crosses the Rubicon River with his army, and this is something that military generals were not allowed to do. They were not allowed to bring their military too close to the city of Rome because there was a fear of a military coup. And that's exactly what Caesar seems to have been thinking. He leads his entire, leads his legions across the Rubicon River into Rome so that he can take sole power. And because of this transgression, because of the threat of a military dictatorship that he poses in 44 BCE, he's assassinated. Although that assassination does not have the desired effect, it does not return Rome to a republic ruled over by the Senate. In fact, after several civil wars, his nephew Octavian will defeat his rivals to become the first emperor of Rome, the first sole ruler who exercises individual control over the entire Roman Empire. And it's during Octavian's reign, or Octavian aftere, he takes the name of Augustus Caesar. It's during this time period that Virgil is composing the Aeneid. And so to understand a lot of the elements that are new in Virgil that were not in Homer or any of the other accounts we've read or any of the other versions of the Trojan War, to understand that, we have to understand the history, the anachronistic history, what happens after the Trojan War and after Homer and yet is relevant to the narrative that Virgil wants to communicate. So as I said, according to legend, around the year 753 BCE, Roman legend tells us that the city itself was founded by two brothers named Romulus and Remus. They were the sons of Mars who, the Roman name for the Greek god Ares and the human queen, Aurea Sylvia, or she was a Latin princess of Albolonga. Albolonga is the city that's eventually going to be founded by Eulus, Rhescanius, if you read the second half of the Aeneid. But it's important to recognize that at the end of the Aeneid, Rome is still not been founded. It won't be founded for several more centuries. But the city of Albolonga exists and Aeneus's line is going to come to rule over that city. And their descendant is going to be Aeneuses and Ankaices and Ascanius's descendant, Rhescanius Sylvia is according to legend, raped by the god Mars and she gives birth to these two twin brothers. And her uncle tries to take over the kingdom of Albolonga and in order to do so, he has to get rid of these two boys, these two babies. And so he instructs that they be removed, that they be executed. But instead of being executed, they're taken to the bank of the River Tiber in the site that eventually will become the city of Rome. And they're left there and they're nursed, according to the legend, they're nursed by this wolf mother. And this is why you frequently see on the standard of the coat of arms of the city of Rome, you'll see this image of these two infants being nursed by a mother wolf. And eventually they're taken in by a farmer, they grew up to retake the kingdom for their grandfather and take over or return the rule of Albolonga to their grandfather. But then they themselves want to set up a city of their own. So they go back to the place where they were abandoned on the river banks of the Tiber and decide to found a new city there. But they disagree about how and where to found that city. And the disagreement escalates into a fight in which Romulus kills his brother Remus and he names the city Rome after himself. And, but then he has to get a population for that city. So he takes in fugitive criminals and runaway slaves and exiled foreigners, not the best people to found a city to be the initial population of the city, perhaps. And the fact that these were all vagabonds, these were all runaways and fugitives means that they were primarily male. So they have to, if they're going to have a sustainable population, they need females too. So they try to make proposals with people in nearby cities to arrange weddings between the first generation of Romans and the daughters of these nearby cities. But obviously if you have a population of mostly escaped criminals, then that's probably not gonna be very marriageable material. So they can't get these marriages arranged. So they fake a festival, a religious festival and they invite the citizens of nearby cities to this festival. And at a pre-arranged signal, the Roman men come out and attack the people who were there for this festival. They take away all the single women of marriageable age and keep them as basically prisoners and wives. So the first generation of Roman men are criminals and runaway slaves. And the first generation of Roman women are these captured, abducted women. And this event is frequently referred to as the rape of the Sabine women, the Sabine provinces being the areas around the city of Rome or nearby the city of Rome. So this origin story before Virgil comes along and develops the Aeneid, the story of Aeneas as a founding epic or even a founding myth. The founding myth of Rome was this, this not a very edifying legend to ground the identity of a population that's going to try to expand across the known world and supposedly bring justice and peace and all this. You need, you can see that this founding legend probably would not lend itself to the sort of noble ideals that Rome would later aspire to. However Rome was founded, the historical landscape that we're looking at at this time, between the eighth and the sixth centuries BCE, so if this was 573 BCE, the historical world around Rome at the time looked something like this. On this map you see in red these individual colonies, almost all coastal colonies are Greek colonies. So the Greek civilization, even before the golden age of Greece, before the fifth century time, Greece had expanded across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and established trading port cities and colonies across the Northern Mediterranean as well as the Black Sea. Now the yellow colonies you see, these are Carthaginian or Phoenician cities. Now I should make the distinction now it's gonna be very important when we talk about Daito. Phoenicia is this area on the Mediterranean coast on the very eastern end of the Mediterranean, north of Judah and Israel, the modern nations of Lebanon and Syria. These cities like the city of Beblos, which you'll remember from discussing the Bible, this is where the word Bible comes from because this is where books came from, this city of Beblos. Tyre and Sidon are mentioned in the Bible as well, but this city of Tyre especially is where Daito is coming from. But it's also where this maritime culture, these sailors who were able to trade across the Mediterranean in a geographic area that's even more expansive than that of the Greeks. They are the sort of competitors with the Greeks, not necessarily militarily, although there will be occasional fights over individual ports. But when it comes to trade, they have their areas and the Greeks have their areas. But notice that the Romans, Rome isn't even a power yet, and these gray cities in Northern Italy that you see, these are Latin or Etruscan or other native Italian groups, but even on the peninsula of Italy, there are way more Greek port cities than there are cities run by the native population. And so it's at this time that Rome is founded when the Mediterranean is pretty well divided up between Phoenician and Greek colonies. But that's going to change as Rome starts to expand across the Italian peninsula, starts to fight with the Greeks over Greek colonies that are located there. And by the year 264, Rome has taken over the Italian peninsula as well as the island of Sicily and Corsica and Sardinia. And this means that not only are they in consistent conflict with the Greeks who by this time are controlled by the Macedonians, that is the descendants of Alexander the Great, but also it's going to bring them into conflict with the Phoenicians, specifically the Phoenicians that have set up a primary city at Carthage on the North African coast. And it's at this time that the Romans are going to come into conflict with the Carthaginian general Hannibal, Hannibal Barca during these three wars which are described as the Punic Wars. The word Punic comes from Puneos, which is a Latin version of Phoenician. So you can see as the word Phoenician gets repeated from actual Phoenician language to Greek and then from Greek to Latin, Phoenician becomes Punic. So even when they're in this war with Carthage, they're describing them as the Phoenicians. So the Romans come into conflict with the Carthaginians and this Carthaginian general Hannibal is the one who is most famous for leading his army across the Straits of Gibraltar and marching up through Spain in modern day France, then over the Alps and down into Italy. He had famously these war elephants with him, although they didn't do very well in the crossing the Pyrenees and the Alps and didn't survive to really take part in much conflict on the Italian peninsula. But Hannibal was able to ride across the Italian peninsula causing massive defeats for the Romans. And most famously at the Battle of Cannae, the Carthaginians under Hannibal defeated and killed an army of about 30,000 Romans. And the way they did this was this sort of pincher movement where they surrounded the Romans who were marching straight forward in the phallic positions. By taking both of their flanks, they were able to sort of close in and sort of crush the Romans in this battlefield press. And this is the basis if you've, I believe it's season six or maybe five of the show Game of Thrones when there's this battle between the Boltons and the army of Jon Snow. This, the screenwriters in interviews, the screenwriters say they directly modeled that battle on the Battle of Cannae because this sort of shield wall was built around the Romans. And the Carthaginians with their shields just move closer and closer and closer, pack the Romans into where they can't move enough to fight. And through tactics like this, Hannibal shows that he has outmatched the Romans on the battlefield. And so what happens is the Romans just basically locked themselves up in their cities and Hannibal is not prepared to besiege a city. So he can't take a city by siege. He can defeat anybody on the battlefield with the Romans basically just lock their doors and say, okay, fine, right around the peninsula, but there's really nothing more Hannibal can do. So eventually he's not able to take Rome or any other city. So he controls the field. The Romans are still well protected behind their walls. So they're at a stalemate and Hannibal is eventually recalled to Carthage. And it's only later that the Romans decide we can actually take the battle to him. We can first challenge their supremacy in the Iberian Peninsula, modern day Spain, where they're able to defeat him and his brother and then they're able to move all the way back over to Carthage and completely destroy the city of Carthage to the extent that they salt the fields where the Carthaginians can no longer grow the food resources that they need. And at this time, the Romans, by winning these Punic Wars, the Romans have basically annexed the other half of the Mediterranean. They now go from being a local power on the Italian Peninsula to becoming a world power as the world was then defined. And it's at the same time in the year 146 that they're able to defeat the Greeks as well because the Macedonian kings of Greece allied themselves with Hannibal. The Romans were able to gather allies that wanted to fight against the Greeks. And then in 146, at the same time they defeated the Carthaginians for control. They also defeated the Greeks to take over the sort of maritime control of the Mediterranean. And for about a century, the Roman Republic is able to prosper, becomes more and more powerful, it builds up more and more client states, more colonies around the Mediterranean. And then with the military exploits of Julius Caesar, Gaius Julius Caesar, the Romans are able to expand their empire into reaches of Northern and Western Europe. And because Caesar has so many victories on the battlefield in Gaul, modern day France and other areas of Western Europe, he becomes extremely influential within the city of Rome itself, but also especially with the legions that he is commanding. And so when he leads these legions back into Rome, it's very quickly seen probably more or less accurately as an attempt at a military coup, where he has soldiers that are more loyal to him than they are to the Senate and people of Rome, then he is positioned to become a military dictator. And this is the very thing that leads to his assassination. Some people, even his friends and allies, see what a threat he is to the Roman way of life, to the Roman Republic. And he's assassinated on the Ides of March, March 15th in 44 BCE. But his assassination does not have the outcome of protecting the Republic, the rule by the Senate, that his assassins had hoped that it would. In fact, the people who carried out that assassination were hunted down and defeated by a combination of those loyal to Caesar, namely Marcus Antonius, who we remember as Mark Antony from the Shakespeare play, Julius Caesar. Mark Antony and Octavian, the nephew of Julius Caesar, who Caesar had chosen to be his heir. After Mark Antony and Octavian defeat the people that had been aligned against Julius Caesar, then they turned against each other. And this becomes extremely important for our perspective when we're reading Virgil, because with Mark Antony, we have a Roman who allies himself with an African queen, that is Cleopatra, who was a descendant of the Macedonian kings because Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt and he had left his, one of his generals named Ptolemy in charge of Egypt and after he died, Ptolemy's descendants ruled over northern Egypt. And Cleopatra was one of those descendants. In fact, her name is Greek. It means the kleos of the father. So it's a female name, but she is carrying on the kleos, the glory of the Ptolemaic kings. But the fact that she is an African queen rather than a Roman citizen, this leads the people of Rome to be very suspicious of Mark Antony. They think this African queen is actually trying to take over Rome by seducing Mark Antony, the way she had allegedly seduced Julius Caesar before that. And so she's perceived as a threat and there's gonna be some echo of her in Virgil's character of Dido, this implication that this African queen could jeopardize a Roman general's loyalty to the Senate and the people of Rome, his loyalty to his patria, his fatherland. Octavian at this point is able to muster an army, pursue Antony and Cleopatra to the city of Actium, which is in Greece, on the northern end of the Peloponnes. And at the battle of Actium, Antony and Cleopatra are defeated and at that point Octavian becomes the sole power in Rome. And he changes his name to Augustus Caesar. He takes on Julius Caesar's name, but he also takes it on not just as a name, but as a title. So it's very important to recognize here that Julius Caesar was never an emperor. He was a consul, he was a military dictator, but he never actually had this official title of emperor-imperator. But Augustus does, he becomes the first Roman emperor. And it's during the time of Augustus that Virgil is writing his Aeneid. And by the time that this happens, notice that Rome has taken over all the yellow areas on this map are the Roman territories that Rome had after they defeated Carthage and Greece at the end of the Punic Wars. But when they defeat Cleopatra, they also take over the green area here, which was controlled by the Ptolemaic kings of Greece. So they now have complete control of the Mediterranean with the small exception of a few areas in Thrace and Southern Anatolia and Mauritania on the North African coast. They control nearly every coastline in the Mediterranean Sea. And this is the world that Virgil lives in. This is nothing like the world that Aeneas, this is nothing like the Mediterranean world that Aeneas will cross, but Virgil cannot help but project his modern world back into this description of the founding of Rome. So when Virgil is writing his Aeneid, he is writing a story not just of what has happened in the distant past in the time of Aeneas, but he's writing about Aeneas as bringing Troy to Rome as a prelude, as a prologue to the reign of Augustus Caesar or Octavian. So in this sense, Virgil is writing, not only a national epic, but he's writing an etiology. This is a story of the origin of Rome, even though, as I mentioned, Aeneas is not ever gonna actually set foot in Rome. The city of Rome will not be founded until at least 753. But it's an origin story, and as an origin story, it consistently refers back to an anachronistic present, the time in which Virgil is actually writing, even though within the story itself, those places and references would not be relevant. So as Aeneas flees Troy, founds one city, and I'll talk about why Virgil has to include this city of Aeneidae or in your translation, Aeneas, because that was a city that according to legend, he had founded, but Virgil doesn't want him to stop there. Virgil wants him to make his way all the way to Rome. And on the way there, you'll see that there are a lot of connections with the Odyssey of Homer, which I'll talk about in the next lecture. But also notice that there is this stopover at Actium, even though this is more than 1,000 years before the actual battle of Actium, Virgil calls attention to this place and shows that the Trojans stopped there on their way to found Rome and performed sacrifices. And the implication is that later the Roman victory or the victory of Augustus at Actium has somehow benefited from this ancient sacrifice that these Trojans made. So as we read the Aeneid, we have to keep a distinct eye on two things that are going on. Remember the difference between a narrative and a story. The narrative is what the author is describing, but the story is what's going on within that. The thing being described is the story. And we can make a lot of inferences ourselves as readers about what is going on in the story because we can figure out, we can use theory of mind to figure out what characters would be thinking, even if it's not, that doesn't exactly connect with what the author says they were thinking. You may notice a lot of what we might call plot holes in modern parlance. You may have wondered, why does Aeneas, when he's carrying his father on his shoulders to escape Troy, he's leading his son, Ascanius, by the hand, why does he tell his wife, Crayusa, just follow a little bit behind me? It seems that he's setting her up to get lost and end up dying in Troy, which is what happens. From the character's perspective, as an audience, we're reconstructing the story and that doesn't seem to make much sense. That seems to be complete disregard for his wife. He doesn't seem to be at all concerned about his wife's welfare. We're told that he is distraught when he realizes he's left or behind, but we can't help but wonder why did you tell her to follow at a distance in the first place? Well, we can see that within the narrative, if Virgil is trying to set up Aeneas as one of the ancestors of the Romans, he has to have Aeneas arrive and marry someone else. He has to marry this native Latin queen. Well, he can't do that if he's still married to Crayusa. And if we're going to have the story of Daito in book four, well, there's not going to be a story about Daito and Aeneas falling in love if Aeneas arrives with his wife, Crayusa. So, Virgil's goal is to get rid of Crayusa in some way. So the story, as we reconstructed, is derived from the characters pursuing their own goals with their own particular strategies, having their own individual feelings that the reader can reconstruct based on what we're told in the narrative. But the narrative, what the author focuses on, what the author calls our attention to, and also what purposes and thoughts that the author ascribes to the characters, that is determined by the writer's goal, what the writer is trying to get us to derive from this description. So we can understand the motives of the characters without a lot of help from the narrator. But we also see Virgil trying to shape and direct our interpretations, our inferences through the descriptions that he gives, through the narration. And so, because he's writing this etiology of Rome, because this is his primary goal, his primary goal is not to tell us an interesting story about the aftermath of the Trojan War and about the adventures of Aeneas. His goal is to tell us where Rome came from and to connect Rome and history with something more noble, more honorable than the story of Romulus and Remus. This brother who murders his brother founds a city with criminals and these criminals build families by kidnapping women from neighboring cities. Virgil wants to push past that and connect Rome's origin with the Trojan War with Aeneas with these very respectable characters that we know from Homer. So the way he's going to tell this story is going to be determined by that goal more than just conveying information for its own sake or conveying a narrative for its own sake.