After the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE, Gaius Octavius, called “Augustus”, came to power. Rome was then first ruled by an emperor, and poets and artists lavished praise on this new regime which brought peace and stability.
The greatest product of the “Augustan Age” is the epic poem by Virgil, the Aeneid, which traced the foundation of Roman people to Augustus’ legendary ancestor, the Trojan prince Aeneas. It is a heroic tale of escape from burning Troy, of thwarted love affair with Dido in Carthage, to migrations across the Mediterranean (and the underworld) to the promised land of Italy where the Trojans became a new people, Romans. For two thousand years this masterpiece has been considered the greatest work of the Roman imagination and an inspiration for European thinkers and artists from Augustine and Dante to Milton, Renaissance artists and Berlioz. Virgil was even regarded by some as a precursor of Christianity and a prophet.
Virgil plundered the Homeric epics with their stories of war in Troy and the Greeks’ struggles to reach home – the warrior Achilles and the wandering Odysseus both inform the hero Aeneas. This poem is a tale of human endurance, an epic of pietas and duty, as well as a reminder of the fragility of civilization and the paramount need for compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation. T.S. Eliot called it “the Classic of all Europe.”
