Virgils Aeneid as Roman Propaganda Essay - 2064 Words

Virgils Aeneid as Roman Propaganda Rome was experiencing a great deal of internal turmoil during the period when Virgil wrote the Aeneid. There was somewhat of an identity crisis in Rome as it had no definitive leader, or history. With the ascension of Augustus to the throne, Rome was unified again. Still, it had no great book. The Greeks had their Odyssey, giving them a sense of history and of continuity through time. A commonly held view is that the Aeneid attempts to provide the Romans with this sense of continuity or roots. There is a great deal of textual evidence to support this interpretation. Virgil makes numerous references to the greatness of Rome through ancient prophecies. Clearly, the entire poem is an account of†¦show more content†¦These two methods allow Virgil to connect his Rome very closely to the story of Aeneas, and give the Aeneid a great deal of historical credibility in the eyes of his contemporaries. It was very critical to Virgil that a believable sense of history be achieved in his writing. At the beginning of Book VI, the story of Daedalus and his son Icarus is introduced when the Trojans see it carved into the temple doors (lines 21-50). There is a second time in the text that such a reference to the past is made in a similar fashion. This occurs in Book I when Aeneas observes the carvings on the walls of Juno’s temple at Carthage (lines 619-762). In these two incidents, the same technique of recalling history is employed. Virgil seems to imply that the best way that he can describe history is to tell it with the help of the gods, which in this case that would be the Muse that he has called upon in Book I to assist him (line 13). At the time, the knowledge of the Muses was considered to be the objective truth while the knowledge of the mortals was considered to be secondhand and imperfect. The distinction between the two is made with the story of Daedalus. Virgil gives an elaborate account of what he knows of the event, and then omits the ending which he does not know: Twice your father tried to shape your fall in gold, but twice his hands dropped. (Book VI, lines 49-50) By wording the story so that Daedalus does not describe his own son’sShow MoreRelatedThe Aeneid By Virgil Aeneid1689 Words   |  7 PagesVirgil’s Aeneid was written in a time of political and social transition in Rome, which influenced the epic poem in a political way. Aeneid was written only a couple years after the civil war where a lot of people had started to lose faith in the greatness of Rome. Virgil’s intensely political poem concentrates on the theme of Rome’s greatness and particularly with the reign of the new emperor Augustus Caesar as the re-founder of glorious Rome. 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