When and for Whom the Poem Was Written
Virgil wrote the Aeneid in the last decade of his life, after nearly a century of civil wars in Rome. Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, and in 31 BC his adopted son, Octavian, defeated Mark Antony and the Egyptian queen Cleopatra at the battle of Actium. In 27 BC Octavian received the title of Augustus and began to rule alone, and many Romans, weary of war, welcomed the peace he promised. The poem speaks to this audience. In Book VI, Anchises implores the souls of Caesar and Pompey not to wage civil war and announces that Augustus will renew the golden age, and the parade of future Romans ends with Marcellus, Augustus's nephew and considered his successor, who died very young, in 23 BC. In Book VIII, the shield that Vulcan makes for Aeneas bears the battle of Actium engraved, with Augustus on the stern of a ship, alongside the senate and the gods of Rome.
Where the Story Came From
Aeneas existed before Virgil. He appears in the Iliad as a Trojan hero, and later traditions took him to Italy as the ancestor of the Romans, after the fall of Troy that Book II recounts. Virgil binds this material to Augustus's family: the house of Julius Caesar claimed descent from Iulus, son of Aeneas, and through him from Venus, and Augustus inherited this claim when Caesar adopted him. That is why Jupiter's prophecy in Book I culminates in a Caesar of the line of Iulus. The boys on horseback that Ascanius commands in Book V perform what the Romans called the Troy game, a spectacle that Augustus staged many times. The structure also comes from Homer: the first six books, a voyage across the sea, recall the Odyssey, and Book III takes from there the Greek Achaemenides, a companion of Ulysses left behind in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus. The last six, a war on land, recall the Iliad.
Carthage, the Great Rival
Rome and Carthage fought three wars, between 264 and 146 BC: in the second, the Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded Italy and even threatened Rome itself, and in the third Carthage was destroyed. Book IV gives this enmity an origin in the mythic past: when Dido, near death, asks that an avenger be born from her bones, commentators often see in those words an allusion to Hannibal. In Book X, Jupiter postpones the time of hatred and says that one day Carthage will attack the fortresses of Rome, and only then will it be lawful to contend and to plunder.
The Italy the Public Knew
Several places in the poem existed and could be visited. Cumae, where Aeneas consults the Sibyl in Book VI, was an ancient Greek colony near Naples, and Lake Avernus, which gives its name to the descent to the world of the dead, lies in the same region. In Book VIII, Evander tells the story of Hercules and the thief Cacus and explains that from this comes the altar of the hero, the Ara Maxima, which the Romans knew in the Forum Boarium, the city's cattle market. In Book VII, Aeneas's nurse is buried on a coast that comes to bear her name, Caieta, today Gaeta.
How the Poem Was Published and Read
Virgil died in 19 BC, in Brundisium, today Brindisi, on the return from a journey to Greece, without having completed the final revision of the poem. According to ancient tradition, he asked that the text be burned, but Augustus ordered it published, and the poet's friends, Varius and Tucca, prepared the edition by leaving standing the lines he had left unfinished. The work ends with the death of Turnus, in Book XII. Within a few decades it became a school text, and lines from the Aeneid, among them the opening line of Book I, appear scratched on the walls of Pompeii, the city buried in AD 79.