Epic, Community, and Identity

Tacitus and Virgil

Both the Agricola and the Aeneid at some level are meditations on what it means to be Roman. Virgil and Tacitus led very different lives: Tacitus, the soldier, senator, Imperial official and functionary. Virgil the rural man of letters, a poet who came to prominence and the attention of the emperor Augustus. But both were men of letters who thought deeply about Romanitas: its origin, nature, and meaning. In other words, Agricola (and to a certain extent Germania), like parts of the Aeneid is an exploration of Roman identity.

As with Virgil, duty and pietas, rather than heroism or individual charisma, define a true Roman. Tacitus describes his father in law as a man who practiced moderation in all things - hardly sounds like Achilles, or Hector. A man who "knew how to obey and had learned to combine expedience with propriety" (7) and who practiced modesty and humility; who combined virtue and morality even in the exercise of power over others: ". . . he was serious and attentive, strict but often merciful. When he had completed his official duties, he no longer wore the mask of power" (8). Most remarkable, Agricola  eschewed the sort of quotidian corruption that was part of daily administration in even the distant reaches of the empire, the ancient equivalent of the no-bid contract. He even reformed the administration of the province and made it run more efficiently. For Tacitus, the age of gods and heroes is past, and he is searching for a way to be a good man even in the age of "bad emperors," when Rome has willingly given up its former "freedom" for "stability" in the years after nearly continual civil wars. Agricola, ever duty bound, disclaimed any suspicion even on his deathbed that the emperor Domitian was responsible for his death, the suggestions of Tacitus and others notwithstanding (31).

"Those whose habit is to admire what is forbidden ought to know that there can be great men under bad emperors, and that duty and discretion, if coupled with energy and a career of action, will bring a man to no less glorious summits than are attained by perilous paths and ostenatious deaths that do not benefit the Commonwealth" (31).

Aeneid 4:". . varium et mutabile semper femina"

Woman is "a thing that is always changing, shifting like the wind." (Book 4)

It doesn’t take a genius to see a pattern emerge in the Aeneid with regard to women: The good ones (Creusa) are dead; the powerful ones become mad, enraged, irrational; the bad ones are just evil (the Harpies); the rest are open to influence, weak willed (as when the Trojan women burn the ships at the urging of the goddess).

Or is that too simplistic? Are women in the Aeneid also catalysts who actually drive the narrative, and help “unroll the scroll of fate?” After all, Aeneas would never have escaped without the urging of Venus; he would have died there trying to take as many Greeks with him as he could. Without the rage of Juno/Hera, there would be no conflict. Aeneas it seems can do nothing of himself, at least in 1-6, without a woman urging him on.

Discuss some of the possible ways of looking at gender in Book 4 - how does love change both Aeneas and Dido? What consequences their relationship have for both the Carthaginians and the Trojans (Romans)?

Further reading on Vergil; Documents from W2

Here are a few suggestions for further reading on Virgil, epic,  and on the era of Augustus.

Lucan, Pharsalia. Lucan writes an anti-Imperial epic during the reign of Nero. It didn't go over well. He locates the death of the republic at the battle of Pharsallus, where Pompey was defeated by Caesar.

Julius Caesar, Civil Wars.

I also recommend further reading in Quint, Epic and Empire.

A good place to start for background on Roman history and literature is a collection of essays edited by Oliver Taplin, Literature in the Roman World (Oxford U Press).

Notes, etc. from W2:
Download w2.zip