The Meaning of the Aeneid: A Critical Inquiry: Part I Empire and the Individual: An Examination of the Aeneid's Major Theme

Abstract

It is a commonplace of literary criticism that the criteria to be used in the understanding of a poem are internal. What counts as evidential in respect of poetic intent and meaning is what the poet actually says in the poem, and the only methodology worth serious attention is a careful, detailed and critical analysis of the poem itself. Despite this platitude biographical assumptions and postulates have exerted, and are still exerting, a disconcerting influence upon the criticism of ancient literature, most notoriously, perhaps, in the case of Virgil's epic, the Aeneid. All too frequently Virgil's life has been taken as the datum, the fact, to which his epic has had to be accommodated. This is not the occasion to take up arms against the biographical approach to Roman poets; I wish only to assert that, while it is important to place a poem such as the Aeneid in its historical context, it is equally important (indeed, more important) not to allow the historical context to dictate the interpretation of the poem. The poem, after all, is not a postulate; it is a determinate thing, present in a way in which a historical context is not. It must be given primacy, and any attempt to supplant this primacy with biographical hypotheses about the working of a poet's mind during the third decade B.C. based upon ambiguous external criteria would be the antithesis of the procedures of serious (that is to say, intelligent and relevant) criticism.

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