What is wrong with the second half of the Aeneid? Why does nobody read or teach it?

Maybe it seems too much like a fairy tale. It’s no surprise that the best modern retelling of Aeneid 7–12, Ursula Le Guin’s 2009 novel Lavinia, was written by a master of fantasy fiction.

I suspect, however, the problem is how we translate its story into modern terms. Scholars tend to compare it to Italian fascism, Nazism, colonialism, or the Vietnam War. No wonder students’ eyes glaze over. For many of them these political movements are as good as ancient history, and worse, none of the parallels provide all that close a fit.

I would like to suggest a better way of understanding what’s at stake in the Aeneid. This parallel is a real-life scenario unfolding before our eyes, and it’s one that generates such strong feelings — sometimes violent feelings — that it ought to carry a trigger warning.

Why is that? Recall the situation of Virgil’s Trojans. After the Greeks destroyed their city and murdered all the inhabitants they could, there was nowhere to go. It was too dangerous for survivors to stay, so they banded together and set sail for another continent. Apollo has told them to head to Italy, and nowhere else, because Italy was their ancestral homeland of long ago. But they got there only to find that other people were already living in it, and these natives weren’t about to surrender or quit their land just because a bunch of ragtag refugees have come along claiming divine title to it. War, terrorism, and atrocities follow, intractably and inevitably so.

That is the stuff of Aeneid 7–12, but the amazing thing is that it just as easily describes the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the biggest hot-button issues today. Looking at the Aeneid through the lens of the ongoing violence in the Middle East might help bring the little-read second half of the Aeneid alive for our students. And, if we’re lucky, Virgil may be able to teach us something about the modern conflict, too.

Why do I say the second half of the poem recapitulates what we are seeing in the modern Middle East? Because the Trojan experience in the Aeneid matches the harried Jewish experience since World War II, from the Holocaust in Europe to its struggle for statehood and acceptance in Palestine.

Jewish resettlement in Palestine precedes the foundation of Israel in 1948 by over fifty years, of course, but the Holocaust made plain a new justification for the Zionist dream. In the three years between the end of the war and Israel’s declaration of statehood, Jewish immigration — which was illegal and risky under the then-ruling British authority — increased significantly. It is that desperate wave of immigration from 1945–1948 — known as Aliyah Bet — as well as the moral justification that Zionism provided it, that parallels Aeneid 7–12.

Why? A foundational axiom of Zionism — and an axiom that makes Israel unique among the countries of the world — is that Jewish settlement in Palestine in modern times marks a latter-day return of Jews, and not an immigration or colonization (because there’s no metropolis), to their ancestral homeland. Resettlement thus rests on a historical claim.

A second axiom holds that it is God’s will that Jews resettle in Palestine — a belief so powerful it prompted early Zionists to reject offers for settlement in other lands, such as Uganda, where life might have proven easier. Resettlement thus rests also on a religious claim, a second claim that is without parallel in the modern world.

Amazingly, however, both axioms are matched exactly by the Trojans’ stance in the Aeneid. As Ilioneus, the Trojan ambassador, explains to King Latinus, it is no accident that Trojans have come looking to make their homes in his realm (7.239–242, which here and throughout I cite in the translation of Frederick M. Ahl, occasionally modified):

God-declared destiny, though, drove us to come looking for your lands
By its commands. Here Dardanus started; he’s calling us back here.
Powerful orders Apollo once gave force us on to the Tuscan
Tiber…

The background to this point, about “God-declared destiny” and Dardanus coming from Italy, is found in book 3 — another book most readers skip. In it, according to Aeneas, the Trojans’ Penates — relaying the will of Apollo — explain that Italy is their ancestral homeland (3.167–171):

That is our proper home (propriae sedes): where Dardanus came from, and also
Father Iasius. They are the ultimate source of our bloodlines (genus).
Come on, get up! And report what we’ve said to your elderly father
Joyfully. It’s beyond doubt! Let him seek out Corythus, seek out
Lands in Ausonia…

Aeneas is sixth in descent from Dardanus, founder of the Trojan bloodline — which is to say, the Trojan “return” is long past living memory.

Of course, the Trojans didn’t just come to Italy because they got sick of living in Troy. They’ve arrived because they are the last remnant of a holocaust perpetrated on their people — a holocaust cast in explicitly racial terms. When Juno spots the Trojans disembarking in Latium, she exclaims (7.293–6):

Oh! Damn this detestable race (stirpem invisam), and damn the Phrygians’ future,
Blocking the future as I had it planned! Could they not die on Sigeum’s
Plains (campis), stayed captured when captured? Of course not! When Troy was a bonfire
Didn’t she cremate (cremavit) her menfolk? Oh no! They discovered a pathway,
Right through the thick of the front and the fires (ignis).

Juno sees the Trojan remnant not as individual humans perhaps worthy of compassion but as representatives of an evil collective. She hates the whole cunning race. Replace Phrygians, Sigeum’s, and Troy with Jews, Europe’s, and Auschwitz and Juno starts to sound like an embittered S.S.-man witnessing the birth of Israel rising from the ashes of the Holocaust, three years after Germany’s defeat. Her words even evoke — albeit coincidentally — the camps and the crematoria.

Aeneas, too, sees the Trojan destruction as genocide. In 3.1–2 he says:

After the powers on high had approved the destruction of Priam’s
innocent race (evertere gentem)…

And he begins book 2 by telling Dido (2.3–5),

Words can’t express, my queen, what you bid me relive, all the rueful
Pain: telling how the Danaans rooted out (eruerint) Troy’s wealth and domains
Makes for a dirge of lament.

As before, swapping Germans and the Jews’ for Danaans and Troy’s puts the survivor’s perspective into familiar terms.

It is from this background of extermination, survival, regrouping, and departure for a new homeland that we come to events in Aeneid 7–12 that echo the headlines we see daily from the Middle East. The Trojans’ arrival in Latium is met with split sentiment among the native population, a population that played no part in the Trojans’ misfortunes. Some welcome the newcomers but others are suspicious of their intentions, with one even declaring that — despite there being no metropolis — the Trojans are really engaged in a colonialist project. In 7.421–2 Allecto, a fury disguised as an elderly maidservant, goads Turnus:

Turnus, will you let all of your labor’s sweat run for nothing,
And let the scepter that’s yours be signed over to colonist (colonis) Dardans?

It isn’t logical but it works; in 11.484 Turnus himself calls Aeneas a bandit (praedo) — that is, one who has come not to settle and start a new life in peace but to plunder resources from hapless natives.

On the other hand, Turnus does have a point, because the first thing the Trojans do upon landing in Latium is to occupy territory and begin building illegal settlements on it. In 7.157–9,

Aeneas plows a shallow trench that will outline his city’s
Bounds, starts work on the site, and encloses their first coastal dwellings,
Just like an army encampment, with crenellate walls and a rampart.

As Frederick Ahl comments (p. 385), “One usually consulted local peoples before setting up a colony — as the Phoenician settlers at Carthage had done. Aeneas seizes territory as an enemy invader would and forces the Latins either to accept him or fight him.”

The Trojan-Latin conflict devolves into hardening politics, reciprocal provocations, mounting atrocities, and spiraling cycles of violence — just as in the Middle East. And the parallels don’t end there. Some are downright eerie, such as the settlers’ uprooting of an ancient olive tree (12.766–71):

Here, so it chanced, a wild olive had stood, consecrated to Faunus.
Sailors had honored it once (though its bitter leaves marked it for firewood).
They made a practice, when saved from the seas, of fixing upon it
Gifts for the Laurentine god, and of hanging up garments as offerings.
Teucrians, wanting to fight on a plain free of any obstruction
Made no exceptions and hacked this sacred plant to a low stump.

The equations I have been listing are obvious to me. They illustrate the aptness of a remark made in 1949 by Arthur Koestler (1905–1983), the Hungarian journalist who began his career in the service of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, father of Revisionist Zionism. “Whatever else the State of Israel may be,” wrote Koestler, weeks after witnessing its violent birth firsthand, “it has come to signify to me a country more transparent than any other to the basic archetypes of human conflict and experience. For Israel is merely reproducing today a very old drama in modern costume….” (p. ix)

But the equations are lost on scholars and the conflicting parties alike. It is not surprising that average Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs are oblivious to them, but the similarities escaped even Shlomo Dykman (1917–1965), who published a Hebrew translation of the Aeneid in Jerusalem in 1962. To celebrate his translation Dykman included a dedication of his devising. The Latin is clumsy but the author’s patriotism and pride come through clearly:

Hos tibi, posteritas, versus nunc pectore ab imo
quos legis ut noris laetusque in saecula sacro!
Percipe, sancta Sion, siquid mea carmina possunt,
auribus ipsa tuis, qualis fuit hostis acerbus,
olim qui magnis legionibus imperitarit!
Discite nunc, pueri, qualis fuit ille Romanus,
qui regere imperio populos terramque paternam
iussus erat — qualis fuerat Latina potestas!
Non eadem est aetas, non gens… Obadia noster
vicit Vergilium et voluntas omnipotentis
has evertit opes stravitque a culmine Idumen.
Posuit ecce Deus finem atque tempora Romae…
Sic placitum est: Sion, devicta — nunc reviviscis!
Salve, sancta parens frugum, carissima tellus,
sancta virum! Tibi res antiquae laudis et artem
ingredior versus ausus renovare Maronis,
Hebraeumque cano rediviva per oppida carmen!
(Hierosolymis. Anno XIII a patria recreata)

You must know, posterity, that it is to you that I dedicate the verses
you’re reading. I do so eternally glad and with all my heart.
Lend an ear, o hallowed Zion! If my poem but can,
hear the manner of our bitter foe,
that foe who once wielded mighty legions!
Now, children, behold the manner of the Roman,
of him commanded to control the gentiles and the Land
of our ancestors — behold what Latium’s power had once been!
Our age and race are not what they were; our prophet Obadiah
outdid Virgil: the Almighty’s will did destroy
all that we had, and did annihilate Idumea.
But look! God did put an end, a limit, to Rome!
Such was His pleasure. Zion, you who lost — you are coming to life again!
Hail, blessed mother of earth’s fruits, blessed mother of men,
our beloved Land! For you I am engaging the stuff and style of venerable praise,
as I presume to refashion Maro’s verses anew,
and through towns that live once more, I am singing a Hebrew song.
(Jerusalem, in the 13th year since the restoration of my country)

It is easy to share Dykman’s awe at the miraculous fulfillment of the Zionist dream. It is hard to condone, however, his failure to identify the tensions and passions generated by that dream in any way with the tensions on display in Virgil’s epic. Much as Sigmund Freud admired the Carthaginian general Hannibal as a “Semitic avenger” of the Romans (whom he associated with the Catholic Church), so Dykman identifies the Zionist movement entirely with the Jews of antiquity. He sees Virgil’s mythical pre-Romans as those historical Romans who, under Titus, destroyed Jerusalem’s Second Temple in 70 C.E.

Contemporary authors fare no better. A review last year of Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel is titled “Israel’s Virgil.” It is easy to agree in general with the reviewer that “The distinction between Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid sheds much light on the way that Ari Shavit’s new, much discussed book aims to change our perceptions and discussions about Israel.” Yet the obvious parallels elude him. “But war is so terrible,” he writes, “causing enormous bloodshed and destruction, thousands to flee into exile, families to be sacrificed, that it should be contained and avoided wherever possible (in his [Virgil’s] view, through a Pax Romana).” I doubt the reviewer meant to imply that Israel should impose a Pax Israelitica — a Rome-like empire without limit — across the Middle East. The Palestinian plight does not figure into the equation.

What a missed opportunity! If, as the cliché goes, literature is “good to think with,” readers could benefit from pondering the Aeneid through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian problem, beginning with why anyone came up with Zionism in the first place.

The goddess Juno’s implacable hatred of the Trojans, for example, is one of the hardest elements of Virgil’s story to translate into real-world concerns today. Her hatred is brooding, eternal, and it has a litany of causes. It seems mythical or artificial, and hence remote — yet for those same reasons, it is remarkably comparable to European anti-Semitism. Juno’s hatred transcends space and history, and it readily makes enemies of neutrals, friends, and neighbors. On a whim it moves men to murder and — what is most relevant — it is rooted in race. Juno calls the Trojans a stirps invisa, a hated race, and, if she only could, she would perdere gentem — annihilate the race (7.304). Mirroring this language exactly — and later, becoming justification for anti-Semitism in Christian times, in Histories 5.3 Tacitus calls Jews “a race the gods hate” (genus hominum…invisum deis).

Or better, How does the rhetoric of the Israeli Proclamation of Independence mirror the rhetoric of Ilioneus’s speech in Aeneid 7? I quoted a snippet above, but here is more of how the Trojan diplomat justifies to Latinus his people’s presence in Latium (7.222–5, 228–30, 239–242):

How huge a hurricane rolled out of savage Mycenae all over
Ida’s plains, what forces of destiny drove into conflict
Europe and Asia, two distinct spheres: there’s a tale that the whole world’s
Heard….

Out of that primal flood, men borne over so many vast seas
Ask, for our fathers’ gods, just a tiny home, just a harmless
Haven, and water and air, which are nobody’s private possessions….

God-declared destiny, though, drove us to come looking for your lands
By its commands. Here Dardanus started; he’s calling us back here.
Powerful orders Apollo once gave force us on to the Tuscan
Tiber…

Just so, the 1948 State of Israel Proclamation of Independence justifies its need for statehood (translation from the Israeli government website):

ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) — the Land of Israel, Palestine] was the birthplace of the Jewish people [sc. after the Second Temple Period, in antiquity]. …

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people — the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe — was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State…

Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel [sc. 1945–8, Aliyah Bet], undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

The parallels are startling — Holocaust, national homeland, a return.

But founding stories, true or otherwise, aren’t the only reason for reading the Aeneid in the light of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There’s another inescapable dimension to all this, and it’s the biggest of all.

Homer’s Iliad is a war between equals, but Virgil’s conflict between Trojans and Latins is a clash of civilizations. At stake are not just land and resources but core values and ways of life. One value is religious, a dispute over details within the same basic theological system. The Latins worship Saturn. The Trojans worship His son, Jupiter. Just so Jews worship Yahweh, while Palestinians worship Allah or Yahweh’s son, Jesus. And just as Jews came to bring their God into Palestine, but without missionary purposes, so too the Trojans have come to bring their gods — the Penates — into Latium, but without missionary purposes.

A more salient problem, however, is the disparity in modes of life. The Trojans are cosmopolitans, chased from their homes and now rootless but formerly urban, refined, and united in purpose. The indigenous Latins are primitive and pastoral, most of them peasants. Their land, Latium, is somnolescent and underdeveloped. It is semifeudal, ruled by clans and kept in check by strong men or wealthy landowners. Accordingly, it is a balkanized patchwork of baffling disputes among neighboring tribes.

Virgil presents Latium’s masses as peaceful and politically passive, but easily and instantly fanaticized. When Ascanius accidentally shoots a deer, for example, the cry of the bugle that sets the Latin peasants rioting conjures up Hollywood portrayals of the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, that blares from Arab minarets (7.519–521):

Off men speed for the source of the sound, where the grimly demonic
Bugle has signaled. These farmers who’ve never been tamed grab for weapons
Everywhere.

And inevitably, of course, when the indigenous population takes up arms it is made to seem like a replay of the original enemy. We hear regularly of a “second Hitler.” Just so Turnus is called an alius Achilles, another Achilles (6.89). It is all so depressingly familiar.

Strife in the Middle East shows no sign of abating but at some point it will have to end. How so? Many are eager for two separate states, one for each party, but a growing minority is clamoring for a single, binational state to absorb both groups. Those of us who don’t live there might be tempted to ask some powerful agency — the U.S., say, or the U.N. — to impose a solution, perhaps by dictating terms such as these:

· Palestine’s people will keep both native language and culture.
· Further, their name will remain as it is. Intermarriage will thin out what’s left of Israelis: namely, their blood. We shall add rituals and customs.
· And we shall ensure that they’ll all be collectively known as “the Arabs.”
· Out of this blend with Palestinian blood you will see a new nation
Rise, and surpass all men and the gods in its righteous devotion.

Of course, this solution would horrify the majority of Jews, Israelis, Arabs and Palestinians that prefer two states. Perhaps it horrifies you too. Either way, it does translate into familiar, real-world terms the resolution of the conflict announced in the Aeneid. As the poem nears its end, Jupiter imposes this very one-state solution upon the Trojan-Latin conflict (12.834–9):

Italy’s people will keep both native language and culture.
Further, their name will remain as it is. Intermarriage will thin out
What’s left of Teucrians: namely, their blood. I’ll add rituals and customs,
And I’ll ensure that they’ll all be collectively known as “the Latins.”
Out of this blend with Ausonian blood you will see a new nation
Rise, and surpass all men and the gods in its righteous devotion….

What is the point of comparing Rome and Israel, of comparing the Palatine with Palestine?

Of all modern mass movements — national, religious, cultural, colonial — and ancient literature about mass movements, only do Virgil’s Aeneid and Zionism invoke a latter-day return to an ancestral homeland, a claim doubly premised on history and religious revelation. In both cases the claim is preceded by war, holocaust, and the survival of displaced persons who vow to live on, despite the existence of a transcendent racial animus that follows them everywhere, and in both cases it meets with native rejection, accusations of colonialism, terrorism, and reciprocal violence seemingly without end.

Some parallels between the ancient and modern worlds are superficial or procrustean. Not here. Virgil’s Aeneid and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict mirror each other fundamentally. We can learn from both of them, and with a double benefit. The modern events illuminate Virgil’s poem, and Virgil’s poem helps us better understand the basic archetypes of human conflict and experience that fill the daily newscasts.

Michael Fontaine is Associate Professor of Classics and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Cornell University, where he teaches courses on Latin literature and Roman society. His newest book is Joannes Burmeister: Aulularia and Other Inversions of Plautus. Read more of his work here.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.