The New Hero of Aeneas

The New Hero of Aeneas

Can myopia afflict an individual with so severe a malady to the extreme of proclaiming, "If you take from Vergilius his diction and metre, what do you leave him"? Unless we take this statement as a neophyte joke, we may not be able to continue. The objective of this essay is to clean the bifocals of those whom I presumed after reading the Aeneid as a botched-up replica of the Iliad and the Odyssey conclude that it is indeed so and go about perpetuating such calumny. Hence, to answer the obvious, if we strip Vergilius of his diction and metre, we leave him a new type of hero. Well, actually he leaves us a new type of hero, a hero that is foreign to the golden age of Homer. He presents a new ideal of heroism and shows us in what fields it can be exercised. Unlike Homer, the essence of his conception is that a man's virtus is shown less in combat and physical danger than in the defeat of his own weaknesses. Aeneas sees his chief obstacles within himself and his greater victories are when he triumphs over them whereas the Homerian hero relies much more on physical gifts than in moral strength to overcome his trials in the battlefield. Homer believed that a man owed great actions to the ideal of manhood and that in his short span of life he must do all that he can to show that he is really a man. Conversely, Aeneas performs his duty, because the gods have laid it upon it despite the fact that such faithful obedience is hardly to his advantage.

First, a new vision of human nature and heroic virtue is presented in Vergilius' poetry. He is concerned with the Roman spirit as a whole whereas Homer concentrates on individuals and their destinies. The dooms of Achilles and Hector dominate his design; ...

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...s' immediate and lasting success was due to his having found an answer to the spiritual needs of his time. In the vision of Rome, he presented an ideal strong enough to win the devotion of his contemporaries, and in his belief in sacrifice and suffering he prepared the way across the centuries to those like Marcus Aurelius who asked that men should live and die for an ideal city greater and more truly universal than Rome. Once Vergilius had opened up a new vision of human worth and recast the heroic ideal in a new mold, he set an example that later poets could not but follow. We might not accept his interpretation of human destiny in all its details, but we might feel that he had marked out the main lines for epic poetry and that any new heroic ideal must take account of what 'he' says and does.

Bibliography:

THE ILIAD BY HOMER

THE AENEID BY VIGIL