Vergil’s Aeneid: A Poem of Grief and Love

For over a century, critics of the Aeneid have assumed that all or most of its episodes must propound something about Aeneas and his mission to find the Roman people and, through them, Rome and Augustus; whether that be their positive aspects or their brutality and destructiveness, or the contrast between the public voice of their achievements and the private voice of the suffering they cause. This study argues that this assumption is wrong: the Aeneid ‘s main purpose was to present a series of emotionally moving episodes, especially pathetic ones. It shows that the Aeneid makes more sense when regarded primarily as a series of emotion-arousing episodes than as expressing a pro-Aeneas, anti-Aeneas or two voices message, which is how it was usually regarded in the 19th century and which the ancient Greeks and Romans assumed was the main purpose of literature.