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Virgil seems nearly to have come to the Augustinian insight that the Roman empire is nothing more than civil war writ large. Aeneas, the "pius" hero, has to combat "furor," which is passion, anger, rage, everything that causes disorder in the world. But during the battle scenes in the second half of the Aeneid, Aeneas is full of fury on several occasions, and he ends the epic furiously driving his sword into the chest of Turnus. This, from the founder of the people who will show clemency to the conquered?? Yet, to suggest that Virgil wrote an anti-imperial epic under the cover of imperial propaganda is too subtle by at least half. While he recognizes the costs of empire, he is pro-empire. And the furor of Aeneas seems to be a furor in the service of piety, a furor that is necessary to counter the furor that would threaten the stability of Rome's founding. As Milbank says, this is just a repetition of the ancient myths of violent foundings; cosmos is grounded in the possibility of a violence that is greater than the violence of chaos. It still takes a Christian, Augustine, to imagine a cosmos at peace, and to discern that the empire is just a perpetuation of the libido dominandi of ancient heroism and civil war.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 30, 2003 at 02:46 PM
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