5. A Poet Who Lived Through Chaos and Yearned for Stability
Virgil grew up amidst the Roman Republic’s death throes. At age twenty, he experienced the civil war that began with Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon. Then came the dislocation following Caesar’s assassination; a second round of civil war as Caesar’s nephew and adopted son Octavian, allied with Mark Antony, took vengeance on Caesar’s assassins; and another round of civil war when Octavian and Mark Antony fell out, before Augustus emerged as sole ruler of the Roman world and peace descended. Hatred and fear of civil strife is prominent in Virgil’s verse. Indeed, understanding the turmoil before the Augustan peace is necessary to understand Virgil, who enthusiastically embraced Augustus’s ideal Rome, reborn and promising a bright future. In the Aeneid, Virgil set out to pen an idealized past to match the present and hoped-for future.
