Reading the Aeneid on Christmas

[Valin]

Real Clear Religion:

Robert Barron

12/24/13

 

Like many other students of Latin over the past two thousand years, I struggled as a young man to understand Virgil's great epic poem the Aeneid. I have vivid memories of my wonderful Latin teacher, Fr. John Cerf, 80 at the time he taught me, eloquently holding forth on the splendid rhythms and cadences of the poem and trying, with only mild success, to get me to translate it into passable English.

 

One of the four or five greatest masterpieces in the western literary tradition, the Aeneid tells the story of Aeneas, a heroic Trojan warrior and son of the goddess Venus, who managed to escape with his family from the burning ruins of his native city. After many adventures, Aeneas arrived in Latium, the area around what would develop as the city of Rome, and established there the beginnings of a new civilization, grounded in the best of the Trojan virtues.

 

Virgil, the author of this complex and deeply moving poem, was friend to the emperor Augustus, and the Aeneid is generally regarded as a sublime piece of political propaganda: what had begun under Aeneas's aegis was coming to full flourishing under Augustus's benign rule. We recall that Augustus was, like Aeneas, the son of a divinity, for Augustus's adoptive father, Julius Caesar, had been declared a god after his death.

 

(Snip)