Virgil's Aeneid Cosmos and Imperium

Philip R. Hardie, Senior Research Fellow and Honorary Professor of Latin Literature Philip Hardie — 1986

This book explores Virgil's poetic and mythical transformation of Roman imperialist ideology. The Romans saw an analogy between the ordered workings of the natural universe and the proper functioning of their own expanding empire; between orbis and urbs. In combining this cosmic imperialism with the military and panegyrical themes proper to epic, Virgil draws on a number of traditions: the notion that the ideal poet is a cosmologer; the use of allegory to extract natural-philosophical truths from mythology and poetry (especially Homer); the poetic use of hyperbole and the 'universal expression'. Virgil's imagination is dominated by the cosmological poem of Lucretius; the "Aeneid", like the "De rerum natura", is a poem about the universe and how man should live in it, but Virgil's constant inversion of Lucretian values makes of him an anti-Lucretius. Recent criticism has tended to stress the pessimistic and private sides of the "Aeneid"; but any easy conclusion that the poet was at heart anti-Augustan is precluded by the depth and detail with which he develops the imperialist themes discussed in this book.