Refugees by Fate, Founders by Choice
A refugee by fate …
he would continually suffer the many indignities of exile,
and yet more in war, until he could found his city.— Prologue of the Aeneid
For a nation born in war and built through decades of repeated civil strife, ancient literature can offer a refreshingly raw perspective on our own experience. In antiquity, war was perhaps the most intense expression of life itself. By contrast, modern warfare is justified only as a last resort, and our soldiers return having done a bitter but necessary task, earning our respect and appreciation but not triumphal glory. Each war is meant to be the last war.
But for the Greek and Romans, violence was essential, unending, and relentless. Egregious acts of reciprocal aggression wove together the story of history, as conflicts regularly reemerged from the past and distorted every hopeful projection for the future. These patterns of aggression and retribution find their most direct presentation in the epic poetry of Homer, where the destruction of Troy (a city archaeologists now know was frequently razed and rebuilt by invaders) became the main cultural metaphor for the persistent savagery that the Greeks found at the core of human existence.
Even the moments of victory in epic only prepare us for the next moment of strife: when Achilles seems to have won his vengeance for the death of Patroclus, he then gratuitously drags the body of Hector around the walls of Troy, and we recognize that we have been drawn into an even deeper circle of madness in whatever sympathy we may have with the tragic hero. The violence always continues.
The Aeneid, written as both a celebration of peace and a lament of war, bridges the gap between this Homeric panoply of continual terrors and our modern confidence in resolution, healing, and moral progress. Vergil’s hero Aeneas, as both a refugee from war and a conquering victor, fully experiences every role within the cycle of violence. He will see the end of his city and found a new one destined to endure across the ages, one in which his descendants should, presumably, be safe from the evils he encountered.
Yet Vergil shows that the same tragic repetition of fate complicates this apparently progressive plot arc. After being driven across the Mediterranean in a series of misfortunes, Aeneas mercilessly subjugates the once free peoples of Italy, Vergil’s own compatriots, mirroring the harsh treatment the Trojans suffered under the Greeks.
Aeneas’ continuation of the cycle of violence is especially troublesome because Aeneas seems to have a higher moral awareness than his Homeric predecessors. Vergil continually informs us that Aeneas is “devoted” (pius), and he describes him as pausing before undertaking difficult decisions. Aeneas remembers what he has suffered in vivid detail, making his more controversial actions seem all the more questionable.
Aeneas is not alone in this unique circumstance, in this afterlife extending past the death of his culture. Indeed, it may be said to be the animating spirit of the Roman empire itself, in which subjugated peoples attempted to rebuild a better world in a new Roman edifice. “Not innocent of evil, I know to aid the afflicted,” says Queen Dido, his accommodating Carthaginian host and lover, and a fellow exile from war and treachery.
On the other hand, the outraged victim still resides within the ambitious, extroverted imperialist, and motivates his expansionary behavior. Adam Parry’s 1963 article on the “two voices” in Vergil investigated this aspect of the work, finding a private voice of unresolved pain lingering alongside the public, political voice of Roman triumph.
Americans should be able to understand Aeneas’ conflict quite well, as it is one we intimately share. American history is dominated by the tension between these same two voices, between the voice of the disrespected underdog and the voice of the system, between the voice of revolutionary dissent and the voice of global hegemony. While these perspectives may be common across history, they overlap and commingle so closely only in a land where the abandoned and forsaken have suddenly assumed great prominence. To rule while still haunted by memories of oppression — this is the existential dilemma of newly empowered exiles.
Contrary to the flat style of modern political propaganda, Vergil begins his poem without asserting the superiority of the Roman people over all the world. He begins with his experience and does, rather, exactly the opposite. Our introduction to Aeneas is more therapeutic than heroic: he and his small band of Trojans are shipwrecked at sea, and this hardened proto-Roman commander does not want to go on, wishing he had died a hero’s death in his native land.
But looking forward, these Trojan leftovers carry a providential zeal, a certainty that they will carry the day in the next round of human affairs. The quiet suffering of Aeneas is expressed alongside imperial grandiosity. When Aeneas observes scenes from the Trojan war carved into a temple upon a foreign shore, there is a painful moment of memory, but also a joyous shout that every region of the world is “full of [Trojan] toils!”
Fame becomes the exile’s compensation, and inflation attempts to counteract injury. Everything and anything will be grand and wonderful and beautiful for the one who has lost everything. Though he has not yet come to know Italy in any substantial way, Aeneas abandons Dido with the passionate cry “Italy, there is my love, this is my country!” The imagination of an entirely new world overrides the near and palpable experience of human relationship.
Aeneas must blindly expand his domain in Italy because he is under the spell of a fervid dream of empire we have not yet concluded, one that is still being sold and still being questioned in the American Dream. Later, in modern times, indentured servants in England would dream of future wealth, to be extracted from native peoples at any cost. Maligned Puritans would engage in an aggressive universal evangelism. High school nerds would become tech titans. If you have been made to feel small, just grow bigger and bigger and bigger. Vergil expresses this boundless sense of expansion as Roman imperium sine fine, “power without limit,” and this fantasy shines as the glistening reward at the end of the refugee’s toil.
Given the persistent allure of this fantasy, how might we heal the wounds it has caused? Unlike the self-congratulatory and “civilizing” ideology of modern empire, Vergil demands that we equally adopt and accept the perspective of the conqueror and the conquered. By seeing the whole above the parts, he turns the underlying national pain into a point of unity, identifying a sense of loss and exile as the true common denominator among his people.
The national identity of an international empire is not ethnic or linguistic, but experiential. The Roman story begins in the emptiness of exile and alienation and ends in the horror of conquest. Romans are those people who have suffered great injustice, and, in attempting to extract themselves from this past, struggle with their capacity for committing yet more crimes, for creating more Romans in imperial overreach.
Modern Americans suspicious of national metanarratives might learn a lot from Vergil about how to construct one so subtle and truly universal. While the counter-culture of the 1960s was correct to reject the flat American mythology of the 1950s, speaking in only the “single voice” of triumph, it was wrong to assume that any such story about national history must be so insufficient. We may yet be united in the memory of bitter exile, the opening scene of every American story.
Such memories are important because they will be recalled in our ongoing attempts to begin life anew. When Aeneas lands in Italy, his dream of a pristine new realm is contradicted by the real lives of the native Italians. He is again opposed in war by Turnus, an Italian prince who challenges Aeneas’ right to marry into the kingdom of Latium and found a new people. The Trojans seem to come in peace, and desire a separate colony, but they are not exceptional. They will not escape their first crime, the abduction of Helen, as they now attempt to steal another bride.
The final scene of the Aeneid is among the most debated in all of literature, offering layers upon layers of controversy: Aeneas has defeated Turnus, and stands above him as he pleas for mercy. He seems prepared to grant a pardon to his adversary, as we remember that part of the Roman civilizing mission will be “to spare the defeated and humble the proud.” This moral awareness, presumably, is what makes Aeneas different from Achilles. It is certainly what makes him Roman, as his father Anchises presents this precept as a uniquely Roman mission.
The phrase should also feel familiar to Americans, whose foreign interventions typically involve a spirit of moral balancing: that we aid new freedom fighters, the spiritual ancestors of 1776, in their struggle against the tyrants of the world.
But as he deliberates, Aeneas sees the sword belt of Pallas, a trophy of war which Turnus stole from a young warrior entrusted to Aeneas’ protection. Aeneas slays Turnus, who exits life with the same poetic formula by which Aeneas was introduced. His “limbs go numb in a chill” as his “devalued life flees beneath the shades.” By recalling Aeneas’ initial disaster at sea, Vergil strongly implies that Aeneas injures Turnus in exactly the same way he himself had been injured.
On the surface, the death of Turnus demonstrates the callous sadism of the Roman state Aeneas founds. If the moment were captured from a police dashcam, it would bear many similarities to contemporary episodes involving the excessive use of police force — a man begging for his life is laid low by a representative of the law. Surely this choice of theme and its final resolution inflamed many fresh wounds for the original Roman audience, which still had fresh memories of civil war.
We may not agree with Aeneas’ actions, but we have an incredibly rich context through which to understand them. Just as Aeneas nearly achieves a sense of impersonal justice, marked by wisdom and mercy, he rediscovers the personal emotion and sensitivity he has numbed throughout his Stoic journey. It is the memory of Pallas, like a second son to Aeneas, which he cannot endure.
Is this violence the last echo of a vanishing self? Aeneas and the Trojans will not live on as Trojans, as this apparent victory will be the final end of Troy and the beginning of Rome. Violence and rage explode when the dream is deflated, and we realize no empire could rebuild what we have lost inside.
Yet this conclusion doesn’t seem promising from the opposing perspective, either. It is the Italians who will become the Romans, and the poem ends with the execution of Turnus, Italy’s hero. It is as if the Roman reader is supposed to also adopt the perspective of Turnus in his cultural mythology, so that the Roman story begins with another parallel memory of subjugation.
Vergil uses the wonderful adjective indignata to describe Turnus’ expiring life — undignified, disrespected, found to be worthless. Even in physical death, it is the additional feeling of being discarded, of being tossed aside, that truly stings — a feeling Turnus shares with Aeneas in that moment. Whatever it may mean to come to terms with a history of violence, it surely involves pain being shared at once by the victim and the aggressor. Violence cuts and divides, only to reveal our deeper unity.
In this age, we have lost this sense of universality and solidarity which the ancients embraced in the wake of conflict. A land of exiles continually exiles its own citizens — cut off from our homelands, we are eager to exclude each other. Brand names are displayed as a ticket of admittance to society. The prestige of universities is now measured by the large percentage of people they turn away. And across the political spectrum, people deeply fear being alienated from the American democratic project, which constantly threatens to overrun its own participants.
When Americans use the term “big” as a pejorative against some institution — government, business, academia — they are expressing the concern that they are like Turnus, being forced to efface their humanity and conform to the standards of corporate empires which often feel alien and artificial. Turnus’ resistance may be futile, but it is certainly real. We cannot live authentic lives when some distant entity can enter our lives and tell us how to live simply by virtue of its large, bullying size, yet this is the (still-ongoing) condition of imperial life Rome created and spread across the world.
The only solution may be to get “big” oneself — yet this too is only an illusion. Turnus dies rather than lose his way of life, but Aeneas will only know his Roman dream as a distant, even psychotic abstraction, continually contradicted by his authentic emotions. He will never recover Troy, or Dido, or Pallas, and he has laid the seeds for the destruction of more Troys in the aggression of the Roman empire. The prince will remain a refugee by fate, and his new city will be populated by more exiles, those whom the army has uprooted and sent off to the imperial capital (if they are so lucky).
Whatever our successes may mean, we are always less than a generation away from them disappearing in gentrification. Just as in the chaotic late Roman Republic, the illusion of a stable social order dissolves, and the accelerated pattern of history can be observed within a lifetime. Our lives as unique individuals may be suddenly discarded with little regard, as, to use the phrase of Matthew Arnold, “ignorant armies clash by night.”
In the world Vergil presents, it is clear that conquest is unavoidable. However, the question should not be which national identity group will fly its banner higher — who should conquer whom. As we war each other down, a higher, overriding principle will overcome us all, bringing us all to the same final level. In two of his most famous quotations, Vergil suggests two possible victors:
Labor omnia vicit / improbus
Wicked struggle has conquered all things. (Georgics 1)Omnia vincit amor
Love conquers all things. (Eclogues 10)
We may all be refugees by fate, but this also means that we are all free to remake our world by choice. The wisdom of the epic circle is the same for the powerful as it is for the ambitious — we will become what we allow to overcome us.
George Saad is a croquet player and classicist with a B.A. in Classics from the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and a M.A. in Classics from Dalhousie University. He is the author of Eternity Visible, an interpretation of the Aeneid as an expression of the tragic cycle of history, and also blogs at The New Antique.
