Vergil’s Aeneid, Book VII

<p>Now that Aeneas and the Trojans have successfully landed in Italy, the narrative switches from one a journey to one of founding and colonizing. As such, Vergil switches from using the <em>Odyssey</em> as the text on which his own epic is structured to using the other great Homeric poet, the <em>Iliad. </em>This switch causes a new set of questions to take center stage. We begin by considering the use of the goddess Juno in Book VII. She has long been the Trojans’ antagonist, and here she again intervenes to try and bring them to ruin. She does so, however, while acknowledging that she is ultimately powerless to prevent Aeneas from founding Rome, since this is Jove’s will, and in accordance with fate. All she can do is make this founding as difficult and bloody as possible. What is the meaning of Juno’s action here? Is she meant to symbolize something about nature or society that resists change, or fate, or imperial power?</p> <p>This leads us to ask a series of larger questions about the meaning of Rome’s self-conception as the divinely ordained, glorious, and just rulers of the world. How does the founding myth Vergil is creating for Rome work with – and possibly work against – this grandiose self-conception? And what is the meaning of Love in this book? There is a lot of talk about Love, and home, and hearth, but how those words are being used, and how Vergil understood them, is far from clear.</p>