Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time
Sophocles,
Oedipus the King
(Trans.)
The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy
Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater
Essays Ancient and Modern
The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics
The Norton Book of Classical Literature
(Ed.)
Backing Into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal

VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

An extract from Book Two (under the title “The Death of Priam”) and two extracts from Book Six (“Dido in the Underworld” and “Aeneas and His Father’s Ghost”) originally appeared in
The Kenyon Review
, Fall 2006.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

“Secondary Epic” from
Collected Poems
by W. H. Auden. Copyright © 1960 by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

The Georgics
by Virgil, translated with an introduction and notes by L. P. Wilkinson (Penguin Classics, 1982). Copyright © L. P. Wilkinson, 1982. Used by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Illustrations by David Cain. Copyright © David Cain, 2006.

eISBN: 9781101371619

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For Lynne

tendimus in Latium

INTRODUCTION

ROME

When Publius Vergilius Maro—Virgil in common usage—was born in 70 B.C., the Roman Republic was in its last days. In 71 it had just finished suppressing the three-year-long revolt of the slaves in Italy, who, organized by Spartacus, a gladiator, had defeated four Roman armies but were finally crushed by Marcus Crassus. Crassus celebrated his victory by crucifying six thousand captured slaves along the Appian Way, the road that ran south from Rome to the Bay of Naples and from there on to Brundisium. In 67 B.C. Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) was given an extraordinary, wide command to clear the Mediterranean, which the Romans claimed was “our sea”—
mare nostrum
—of the pirates who made commerce and travel dangerous. (The young Julius Caesar was captured by pirates and held for ransom around 70 B.C.; he paid it but came back at once with an armed force and crucified them all.) In 65 B.C. Catiline conspired against the Republic but was suppressed in 63 through the action of the consul, Cicero. From 58 to 51 B.C. Julius Caesar added what are now Switzerland, France, and Belgium to the Roman Empire, creating in the course of these campaigns a superb army loyal to him rather than to the Republic, while in 53 B.C. Crassus invaded Parthia, a part of modern-day Iraq, but was killed at Carrhae, where many of his soldiers were taken prisoner and the legions’ standards displayed as trophies of the Parthian victory. From 49 to 45 B.C. there was civil war as Caesar crossed the Rubicon River into Italy with his victorious army, which defeated Pompey’s forces in Greece at Pharsalus in 48 B.C. Pompey escaped by sea and took refuge on the shore of Egypt, the only country on the Mediterranean not yet part of the Roman Empire, but he was killed by the Alexandrians and his head taken to Alexandria to be given to Caesar when he arrived. Caesar went on to defeat another republican army in Africa at Thapsus, and in the next year vanquished the last republican army at Munda in Spain. Back in Rome he appointed himself dictator, a position that had always been held for a short term in an emergency, for ten years.

But on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., Caesar was assassinated in the Senate House by conspirators led by Brutus and Cassius. However, Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony), Caesar’s right-hand man in Gaul as in Rome, and young Octavian, great-nephew and adopted son of Caesar, soon drove the republicans to Greece and defeated the republican army at Philippi. Brutus and Cassius subsequently committed suicide. Antony took over the pacification of the eastern half of the Empire, making Alexandria, where he became the lover of the Hellenistic queen Cleopatra, his base, while Octavian, making Rome his headquarters, dealt with problems in Spain and the west.

Tension between Antony and Octavian grew steadily over time, in spite of attempts at reconciliation, and in 31 B.C. Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet was defeated by Octavian and his admiral, Agrippa, off the Greek promontory of Actium. Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide in Alexandria rather than walk to execution in Rome in Octavian’s triumph, and Egypt became a Roman province. Virgil died in 19 B.C. Octavian, who assumed the title of Augustus in 27 B.C., ruled what was now the Roman Empire until his death in A.D. 14, when he was succeeded peacefully by Tiberius.

In his comparatively short life Virgil became the supreme Roman poet; his work overshadowed that of his successors, and his epic poem, the
Aeneid,
gave Homeric luster to the story of Rome’s origins and its achievement—the creation of an empire that gave peace and the rule of law to all the territory surrounding the Mediterranean, to what are now Switzerland, France, and Belgium, and later to England. Yet when Virgil was born in the village of Andes, near Mantua (Mantova), he, like all the other Italians living north of the Po River, was not a Roman citizen.

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