Chapter Themes of The Aeneid - Study Guide by Virgil

underpins the Aeneid and it is no surprise that Aeneas, and, to an extent, Augustus also, are continually compared to Hercules, the great Stoic civiliser.

6. Structure

The essential structure of the Aeneid can be seen in two ways. Firstly, it can be seen as distilling the structures of the two Homeric epics into one poem. Thus we have the first six books which imitate the Odyssey, in that they relate the tales of Aeneas' wanderings after the fall of Troy, replete with characters from the Odyssey, such as the Cyclops and Scylla and Charybdis. The second six books then imitate the Iliad, in that they relate the war in Latium, which echoes the Trojan War. Secondly, the Aeneid can be seen as divided into three parts, the first of which (Books 1-4) details the tragedy of Dido, the second of which (Books 5-8) relates to the final search for the promised land and Aeneas' time at the future site of Rome, and the third of which (Books 9-12) describes the tragedy of Turnus.

There are also internal parallels between the two halves. Juno's anger is emphasised at the start of both Book 1 and Book 7; Book 2 sees Aeneas' final departure from Troy, while Book 8 sees his arrival at the future site of Rome; the pathos of the death of Dido in Book 4 is echoed by the pathos of the death Pallas in Book 10; and the disquieting end to the first half of the poem, where the death of Marcellus is foretold, is reprised by the disquieting end to the whole Aeneid with the death of Turnus.

7. Language

The quality of Virgil's language has been praised since antiquity, even at times when the ethical, political and aesthetic aspects of his work have been heavily criticised, for example during the Victorian period. Apart from the beauty of the sound created by recitation of his hexameters, he was innovative in two areas.

Firstly, he used the difference between ictus and accent to aesthetic advantage more than any other Latin poet. The ictus is the first metrical beat of each of the six feet of a hexameter line. The accent is the natural stress that one puts on particular syllables when one recites or reads a line. Evidently, the ictus and accent can occur on the same syllables in a line, or on different ones. If they are in harmony, then the line flows naturally and peacefully; if they clash, then the effect can be unpleasant, awkward or simply difficult to say. Virgil harnessed this fact to his advantage, such that the accord or clash of ictus and accent is often representative of the sense of the line.

Secondly, he utilised the difference between line endings and sentence or sense endings more than any of his predecessors. By not necessarily completing a sentence at the end of a line, he was able to produce greater aesthetic variation in his poetry. Sentences could be as long or short as he wished, depending on what sense they were intended to convey, while he was free to use devices such as enjambement to much greater effect than anyone previously. Thus, we find that in Virgil the language used, its sound and its application, is extremely important to the understanding of the meaning it carries.