The Emperor's New Poem

THE EMPEROR WAS in the market for a blockbuster epic. It would be a gripping tale of conquest in fulfillment of a glorious destiny, and he would be its hero.

Rome was at long last entering a period of peace and prosperity after decades of political tumult and civil strife, and the strongman formerly known as Octavian calculated that the time was ripe for a literary masterwork that would herald a new world order and proclaim that it was all in keeping with a divine plan. The Greeks had their Homer; now it was Rome's turn.

But "The Aeneid," the magnum opus that Publius Vergilius Maro left not quite finished when he died in 19 BC, turned out to be something rather different than Augustus had in mind -- and a lot more than he bargained for. No boilerplate martial saga or dynastic docudrama, the poem was instead a vast mythological narrative about the founding of Roman civilization, boldly tracing the origins of Latin culture back to the crucible of Troy. And the starring role didn't go to Rome's current supreme ruler; the leading man was the legendary Trojan warrior Aeneas, a favorite son of Venus who had taken to sea with his vanquished legions as their citadel was razed to ashes, in search of a new dominion to call home.

If it had been up to the poet, his decade of labor would have gone up in smoke too. By all accounts a fanatically painstaking craftsman, Virgil never completed the poem to his satisfaction and reportedly left instructions on his deathbed that the parchments be torched. Augustus, no dummy, wouldn't hear of it. The order came down to copy and circulate the text as it was, lacunae and all, and the emperor was known to be well-pleased with the final product. Rome had its monumental national epic, and two millennia later the old warhorse still isn't ready to be put out to pasture.

On the face of it, that takes some explaining. What we have here, after all, is a long and forbidding poem in a dead language, strewn with arcane allusions and extinct pagan gods -- and all constructed around an ostensible vision of imperial might and right that's tough to square with our modern democratic ideals.

Yet the buzz accompanying this month's arrival of the new translation by Robert Fagles, the emeritus Princeton professor whose translations of Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" became bestsellers in the 1990s, suggests that Virgil's problematic epic somehow still has its hooks in us for reasons that go beyond its stature as imperishable literature.

From John Dryden's 1697 version in galloping heroic couplets -- which did much to mold the sense and sensibility of an age that came to be dubbed "Augustan" -- to Robert Fitzgerald's magisterial blank-verse revamp in 1983, just about every major Anglo-American epoch has wanted to see itself implicated in Virgil's master narrative, or feels impelled to remodel his mythic edifice in its own complicit fashion. And yet, it's hard to escape the feeling that there's something about our current age of clashing civilizations that imparts a brave new vibe to this latest Englishing of "The Aeneid." Be it symptomatic of a passing phase or a full-blown complex, we all of a sudden seem to have Rome on the brain.

It's not just the retro vogue in sword-and-sandal flicks, from Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" to HBO's "Rome" -- all that costume drama as a kind of makeshift shadow play on the jittery state of the American geopolitical psyche. Academics too have lately been making heavy weather with what the Princeton historian Harold James calls "the imperial analogy." Niall Ferguson, for one, has practically made a career out of promoting that angle, and it's right there in the admonitory title of his 2004 tome, "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire." James himself has just come out with a new study called "The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire," complete with a cover caricature of George W. Bush decked out as Caesar.

So does a vetting of "The Aeneid" lend credence to these sweeping imperial parallels? Was its author the consummate apologist for empire, or something closer to its brooding voice of conscience? Readers who might be cramming for a handy take-home message are best advised to take a breather. The durable relevance of "The Aeneid" has everything to do with Virgil's profound sense of ambivalence over the wages of war and peace.

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Born in the bucolic outskirts of Mantua in 70 BC, Virgil wasn't even a Roman citizen by birthright. That came later, with plenty of strings attached. Coming of age during a protracted era of political upheaval and internecine military conflict, the young Virgil was initially a student of Epicurean philosophy. At length, however, he fell in with the literary circle cultivated by the power-broker aesthete Maecenas, a wily apparatchik who seems to have made himself indispensable to Augustus in the dual role of hardball campaign adviser and glad-handing cultural commissar.

Most commentators nonetheless agree that it would be a mistake to think of "The Aeneid" as a commissioned piece of propaganda, and it's probably safe to say that Virgil could have diplomatically wormed out of the assignment, just like his two fellow worthies, Horace and Propertius, managed to do. While we can only speculate whether he felt he was being made an offer he couldn't refuse, there's not much question that the imaginative scope and moral dimension of his narrative went leagues beyond what Augustus ever would have scripted.

Far from some elaborate piece of spin doctoring, "The Aeneid" is a virtuosic performance on a mammoth scale: tautly paced and artfully choreographed for maximum dramatic impact, and infused with a complex admixture of patriotic sentiment and introspective pathos. Mythology and patrimony, cultural history and social psychology, blood, sweat, and tears -- Virgil gets it all in, and makes it sing.

The upshot isn't just gorgeous poetry. It's also a prodigious piece of revisionist history and nationalist mythmaking, chronicling the transformation of the Trojan War's shattered losers into the presumptive masters of the universe. The poem's whole superstructure is cannily designed to set this sweeping reversal of fortune in stone: The first six books chronicle Aeneas's perilous voyage through the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, harried by the vengeful goddess Juno, while the concluding six recount his landfall in Italy and the siege against the locals that culminates with the warring sides forging a new Latin nation.

For some modern readers, that inescapable strain of triumphalism has been hard to swallow. W. H. Auden went so far as to denounce Virgil outright: "Behind your verse so masterfully made / We hear the weeping of a Muse betrayed."

A fair rap? Yes and no. True, "The Aeneid" contains passages that appear to champion the idea of manifest destiny and seem duly calculated to appease the vanity of the emperor: There's the pivotal scene when Aeneas descends to the Underworld and his father, Anchises, regales him with a mind-blowing vision of all the Roman rulers who will descend from him; and another, on the eve of battle, when he receives a custom-made shield from Vulcan's forge arrayed with depictions of the decisive turning points in future Roman history, with Augustus's victory at Actium as its centerpiece.

Yet there is also the school of thought, notably represented by T. S. Eliot in his essay "Virgil and the Christian World," that the poem's worldview constellates around a higher ideal than the rule of law and the iron fist. Aeneas may, on the surface, answer to the description of a conquering hero, but his steadfast piety and unswerving devotion to clan and country in the face of titanic hardship ultimately converts his excellent adventure into a moral education.

Taking a leaf from Dante, Eliot argues that Virgil's protagonist isn't the archetype for Augustan totalitarianism that he's sometimes cracked up to be, but rather "the prototype of the Christian hero." All the pain and suffering he endures along the way -- most famously, breaking off his torrid affair with Carthage's Queen Dido and setting sail for Italy as she immolates herself on her funeral pyre -- thus serves as a cautionary reminder of the personal sacrifice and emotional toll that conquest exacts on the victors.

What Fagles brings to the tall order of reconstituting all this sound and fury into living, breathing English is primarily a steady hand at the controls. Although he departs from the longstanding custom of clapping Virgil's rock-ribbed hexameter into uniform blank verse lines, his limber freehand take on the poem's ceremonious ground beat delivers up a vigorous simulacrum of what Tennyson called Virgil's "ocean-roll of rhythm." Otherwise, for the most part, he plays it straight and gets out of Virgil's way.

In a postscript, Fagles mainly battens down on the textual quandaries and quiddities that dog the industrious classical translator, but he doesn't entirely duck the big question: "What shall we hear when we read the Aeneid today?" The nub of his answer, which leans heavily on the scholarship of Harvard classicist Adam Parry, is that Virgil's great artistic achievement is his effort to hold two conflicting voices in suspension: a public voice of imperial triumph and a private voice of pensive rectitude.

If that's not a verdict bound to sway the braying partisans on either side of the current divide over American geopolitical hegemony, it's probably just as well. Much as it might tickle the literary fancy to imagine the Pentagon placing bulk orders of Fagles for a remedial course on the timeless verities of enlightened statecraft, the best argument for "The Aeneid" as required reading is an even tougher sell the eternal vigilance it takes to make sense of what it means to be civilized. Empires rise and fall, but the humane imperative at the heart of "The Aeneid" is anything but archaic.

David Barber is the poetry editor of The Atlantic. His new book of poems is "Wonder Cabinet."