Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Primacy of Fate
The direction and destination of Aeneas’s course are preordained, and
his various sufferings and glories in battle and at sea over the course
of the epic merely postpone this unchangeable destiny. The power
of fate stands above the power of the gods in the hierarchy of supernatural
forces. Often it is associated with the will of Jupiter, the most
powerful of the Olympians. Because Jupiter’s will trumps the wills
of all others, the interference in Aeneas’s life by the lesser gods,
who strive to advance their personal interests as much as they can
within the contours of the larger destiny, do not really affect
the overall outcome of events.
The development of individual characters in the epic
is apparent in the readiness and resistance with which they meet
the directives of fate. Juno and Turnus both fight destiny every
step of the way, and so the epic’s final resolution involves a transformation
in each of them, as a result of which they resign themselves to
fate and allow the story, at last, to arrive at its destined end.
Dido desires Aeneas, whom fate denies her, and her desire consumes
her. Aeneas preserves his sanity, as well as his own life and those
of his men, by subordinating his own anxieties and desires to the
demands of fate and the rules of piety. Fate, to Virgil’s Roman
audience, is a divine, religious principle that determines the course
of history and has culminated in the Roman Empire.
The Sufferings of Wanderers
The first half of the Aeneid tells the
story of the Trojans’ wanderings as they make their way from Troy
to Italy. Ancient culture was oriented toward familial loyalty and
geographic origin, and stressed the idea that a homeland is one’s
source of identity. Because homelessness implies instability of
both situation and identity, it is a form of suffering in and of
itself. But Virgil adds to the sufferings of the wandering Trojans
by putting them at the mercy of forces larger than themselves. On
the sea, their fleet buffeted by frequent storms, the Trojans must
repeatedly decide on a course of action in an uncertain world. The
Trojans also feel disoriented each time they land on an unknown
shore or learn where they are without knowing whether it is the
place where they belong. As an experience that, from the point of
view of the Trojans, is uncertain in every way, the long wanderings
at sea serve as a metaphor for the kind of wandering that is characteristic
of life in general. We and Virgil’s Roman audience know what fate
has in store for the Trojans, but the wandering characters themselves
do not. Because these individual human beings are not always privy
to the larger picture of destiny, they are still vulnerable to fears,
surprises, desires, and unforeseen triumphs.
The Glory of Rome
Virgil wrote the Aeneid during what is
known as the Golden Age of the Roman Empire, under the auspices
of Rome’s first emperor, Caesar Augustus. Virgil’s purpose was to
write a myth of Rome’s origins that would emphasize the grandeur
and legitimize the success of an empire that had conquered most
of the known world. The Aeneid steadily points
toward this already realized cultural pinnacle; Aeneas even justifies
his settlement in Latium in the same manner that the empire justified
its settlement in numerous other foreign territories. Virgil works
backward, connecting the political and social situation of his own
day with the inherited tradition of the Greek gods and heroes, to
show the former as historically derived from the latter. Order and
good government triumph emphatically over the Italian peoples, whose
world prior to the Trojans’ arrival is characterized as a primitive
existence of war, chaos, and emotional irrationality. By contrast,
the empire under Augustus was generally a world of peace, order,
and emotional stability.
