Lessons from Virgil

Cities are a manifestation of the collective vision of its people. As their people dream, so their cities grow over time. They are its grandest visions, with the potential to be great.

Comparing a silvan city like Vienna, over 2000 years old, to a neon metropolis like New York is a demonstration of how, whereas Europeans had ages to meld their minds into collective commonwealths, the United States melting pot has only begun to work. Americans are all over the place temporally and culturally, despite sharing a locality, and that has a jarring effect on the civic scenery.

To bring unity to that vision, to create a cultural narrative, is a great opportunity for any aspiring Academic, knowing that the seeds of the ideal city he plants will find fertile ground. But whereas many cities spring up, others are founded. While some develop their mythos organically, others find their beginnings steeped in bloodshed.

Whereas America had her revolution, Rome’s early legends show a city founded on rape and violence. As legend has it, Mars raped the mother or Romulus and Remus. What happens next reiterates that. From there, Romulus, after killing his brother to have the honor of founding a city, populated it with exiled criminals and the Rape of the Sabine Women. Violent beginnings give rise – to the providential eye – the opportunity to create origin myths.

A truncated history. Both Cicero and Virgil saw the opportunity in Rome’s hazy red past to root the city in the Platonic ideals essential to any good society. Plato, had led the way with his vision of the politea. Virgil saw this opportunity and rooted Rome’s history in Greece’s past. In the Aeneid, he describes a cultural founding of the city that Augustus was building, Augustus who was turning a city of brick into a city of marble.

Augustus based this vision on the one Cicero described to Julius Caesar in Pro Marcello (Virgil Lesson 2, wherein we find out whether Cicero really ordered the assasination of Julius Caesar), and we know he truly actualized this vision because we have his Res Gestae, a historical account of his many great deeds, the temples he built, etc. It is for this reason he gives a shout out in the next section I must translate.

As for how Cicero rewrote Rome’s past, his new history is recounted in my thesis.

Originally posted 2010-03-09 04:02:36. Republished by Old Post Promoter