Notes · Classical CivilisationUK · A-Levels

The World of the Hero: Virgil's Aeneid

Virgil's Aeneid is the Roman half of the compulsory World of the Hero component, studied in translation alongside a Homeric epic. This topic teaches the poem in full: Virgil and the Augustan context that produced it; the way it is built on the Homeric model, with an Odyssean first half and an Iliadic second; the new Roman heroism of pietas set against the destructive force of furor; the working of fate, the gods and Rome's destiny through Jupiter's prophecy, the parade of heroes and the shield of Aeneas; and the human cost of empire in the tragedies of Dido and Turnus, with the long-debated ambivalence of the poem's ending. Throughout it models the analytical reading - of technique, character, theme and Augustan meaning - that the examination rewards.

5 sections~27 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

T·0222 / 10

Exam profile

AO1 · Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the Aeneid, its composition and its Augustan contextAO2 · Analyse, interpret and evaluate the poem - its Homeric model, its heroism and its politics - developing a substantiated response

Operators:analyseinterpretevaluateexplaincomparediscuss

basic level

AS-Level studies the Aeneid through a defined selection of the poem; the analytical demands are the same.

higher level

The full A-Level requires command of the whole poem, sustained analysis, and secure use of the Augustan context and the Homeric model.

Depth

Text

Contents · 5 sections

The World of the Hero: Virgil's Aeneid

Virgil, the Aeneid and Augustan Rome#

FoundationOCR H408 Component 1 (Virgil's Aeneid: context)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The classical world from Troy to Augustus

Fig. 1The span the poem reaches across: from the legendary fall of Troy, through the rise of Rome, to the Augustan present in which Virgil wrote (dates before the era are BC).

The Aeneid is the great national epic of Rome, composed by Publius Vergilius Maro - Virgil - between roughly 29 and 19 BC, and left not quite finished at his death. In twelve books of dactylic hexameter it tells the legend of Aeneas, a Trojan prince and son of the goddess Venus, who escapes the sack of Troy with a band of survivors and is led by fate across the Mediterranean to Italy, where he is destined to found the race from which Rome will one day spring. Read in translation for this component, the poem is studied as literature - for its story, characters, themes and technique - and as a document of its moment, deeply shaped by the Rome in which it was written.

That moment was the reign of the first emperor, Augustus. Virgil belonged to the literary circle gathered by Maecenas, Augustus's cultural adviser, and the poem was composed as the Roman world emerged, exhausted, from a century of civil war into the new order Augustus imposed after his victory at Actium in 31 BC. The Aeneid speaks directly to this settlement: it gives Rome a glorious foundation myth reaching back to Troy and to the gods, it presents the long labour of building Rome as willed by fate and heaven, and it repeatedly looks forward to Augustus himself as the fulfilment of that destiny. To read the poem well you must hold together its ancient legendary setting and its urgent contemporary purpose.

The poem's relationship to Augustus is one of its central and most debated features, and it should be handled with care rather than as simple flattery. On its surface the Aeneid glorifies Rome's mission and Augustus's peace: Jupiter promises an empire without end, the future emperor appears in prophecy as the bringer of a golden age, and the values the poem honours - duty, self-sacrifice, order - are those the Augustan regime claimed. Yet the poem also dwells on the suffering that the mission costs, gives its defeated characters great sympathy, and ends on a disturbing note, so that many readers find a questioning, even melancholy voice beneath the celebration. This tension is a theme to analyse throughout, not a problem to explain away.

Aeneas himself is a deliberately new kind of hero, defined less by personal glory than by pietas - devotion to the gods, to his family and to his destined people (explored fully in a later section). The story turns on his subordination of his own desires to a mission he did not choose: he carries his aged father Anchises from burning Troy, he sacrifices his love for Dido to sail on to Italy, and he endures war and loss to plant the seed of Rome. Where a Homeric hero seeks his own immortal fame, Aeneas serves a future that is larger than himself and that he will not live to see - a distinctively Roman ideal of heroism as duty and endurance.

For the examination, then, approach the Aeneid on three levels at once. Read it as a superbly crafted poem, alert to its language, structure and set-pieces; read it as Rome's foundation legend, linking the city to Troy, to the gods and to the family of the Caesars; and read it as an Augustan poem, celebrating and, in more troubled passages, weighing the cost of the new imperial order. Knowing the poem in this triple way - as literature, as myth and as politics - is the foundation on which the analytical work of the component is built.

Worked example

The Aeneid as a foundation myth for Rome

Explain how the Aeneid gives Augustan Rome a foundation myth, and why that was valuable.

Trace the descent
Aeneas, son of Venus and survivor of Troy, is made the ancestor of the Roman race, linking Rome to the heroic world of Troy and to the gods themselves.
Connect to Augustus
Aeneas's son is Iulus (Ascanius), from whom the Julian family - Julius Caesar and Augustus - claimed descent, so the myth ties the ruling house to Venus and to Rome's origins.
State the ideological work
The legend presents Rome's power as destined by fate and heaven, and Augustus's rule as the fulfilment of an ancient purpose, lending the new regime dignity and legitimacy.
Note the value
After a century of civil war, a noble founding story that made peace and empire look providential was politically and culturally precious.

Result: By making Aeneas the god-descended ancestor of Rome and of the Julian house, the poem gives Rome a heroic, fated origin that dignifies the city and legitimises the Augustan settlement.

Typical mistakes

Confusing the legend with history, or thinking Aeneas founds Rome directly - he founds the race in Italy from which Rome will later come (through Alba Longa to Romulus).
Reducing the Aeneid to simple Augustan flattery, missing the poem's sympathy for the defeated and its darker undercurrents.

Active revision

Explain in a paragraph how the Aeneid served the needs of Augustan Rome, then note two places where the poem seems to question, rather than simply celebrate, the cost of Rome's mission.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

The Homeric model: Odyssean and Iliadic halves#

StandardOCR H408 Component 1 (Virgil and Homer)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The two halves of the Aeneid

Fig. 2The design of the Aeneid: an Odyssean half of wanderings answering the Odyssey, and an Iliadic half of war answering the Iliad, joined at the turn to Italy.

Virgil built the Aeneid consciously and openly on Homer, and recognising the Homeric model is central to studying the poem - especially valuable because this component pairs the Aeneid with a Homeric epic. Virgil's readers knew the Iliad and the Odyssey intimately, and Virgil wrote for that knowledge, shaping his poem so that it constantly recalls, rivals and reworks its Greek predecessors. This is not slavish imitation but aemulatio - creative emulation, the ambition to match and outdo the model - a central value of Roman literary culture. To read Virgil against Homer is to see both what he borrows and, more importantly, what he changes, and change is where his meaning often lies.

The overall design signals the debt. The Aeneid falls into two halves, and each answers one Homeric poem. The first half (Books 1-6) is Odyssean: like Odysseus, Aeneas is a wanderer driven over the sea toward a destined home, surviving a storm, telling the tale of his sufferings at a royal court, and descending at last to the world of the dead. The second half (Books 7-12) is Iliadic: it turns to war in Italy, to battle after battle between Trojans and Latins, and to a climactic single combat that decides the whole conflict. Virgil himself marks the shift, invoking the Muse afresh for a greater theme of arms as the war begins - a structural announcement that the Odyssey is behind him and the Iliad ahead.

Within this frame, Virgil reworks specific Homeric set-pieces, and comparing them is a rich source of analysis. The storm that opens Book 1 recalls the storms of the Odyssey; Aeneas's reception at Dido's Carthage echoes Odysseus among the Phaeacians; the funeral games for Anchises in Book 5 answer the games for Patroclus in Iliad 23; the descent to the Underworld in Book 6 reworks Odysseus's visit to the dead in Odyssey 11; the great shield made for Aeneas in Book 8 answers the shield of Achilles in Iliad 18; and the final duel of Aeneas and Turnus deliberately recalls Achilles and Hector. Each echo invites the reader to measure Virgil's version against Homer's and to weigh the difference.

The differences carry the meaning, and this is the key analytical move. Where Homer's shield of Achilles depicts the whole world of human life in general - cities at peace and war, farming, dancing - Virgil's shield of Aeneas depicts the specific future history of Rome, culminating in Augustus's victory at Actium: the Homeric image of universal life becomes a Roman image of national destiny. Where the Underworld of the Odyssey is a bleak place of shades, Virgil's Book 6 is organised around a moral cosmos and a prophecy of Rome's future greatness. The Homeric model gives Virgil a grand vocabulary; his transformations of it turn Greek epic to Roman and Augustan purpose.

For analysis, then, always ask two questions of a Virgilian scene with a Homeric model: what does it borrow, and what does it change? Noticing the allusion shows knowledge (AO1); interpreting the transformation is analysis (AO2). Virgil's relationship to Homer is one of deep respect and deliberate rivalry, and the poem's Roman seriousness - its weight of destiny, duty and history - emerges most clearly when its scenes are set beside their lighter or more universal Homeric originals. Reading the Aeneid as a Roman answer to Homer is one of the surest routes to strong analysis of the poem.

Worked example

The shield of Aeneas against the shield of Achilles

Analyse how Virgil transforms the Homeric shield in Book 8 to Roman purpose.

Recall the model
In Iliad 18 the god Hephaestus makes Achilles a shield depicting the whole world of human life in general - cities at peace and war, farming, marriage, dancing.
Note Virgil's version
Vulcan makes Aeneas a shield depicting not the world in general but the specific future history of Rome, which Aeneas cannot yet understand.
Read the climax
At its centre stands the Battle of Actium and Augustus's triumph, so the shield reaches from Rome's origins to Virgil's own Augustan present.
Interpret the change
The universal Homeric image becomes a national and Augustan one: Aeneas literally carries the destiny of Rome, and the poem's Homeric grandeur is bent to Roman history.

Result: Virgil keeps the Homeric motif of the god-made shield but replaces Homer's picture of universal human life with the future history of Rome down to Augustus - a transformation that turns epic into Roman destiny.

Typical mistakes

Treating Virgil's use of Homer as mere copying, rather than as aemulatio - creative rivalry in which the changes carry the meaning.
Listing the Homeric parallels without analysing what Virgil does differently and why it matters.

Active revision

Take one Virgilian set-piece with a Homeric model (the Underworld, the shield, the final duel) and analyse both the parallel and the transformation: what has Virgil changed, and to what Roman purpose?

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for classical civilisation (Department for Education)

Pietas versus furor: the Roman hero#

StandardOCR H408 Component 1 (the Aeneid: the hero and values)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The Homeric hero and the Virgilian hero

Fig. 3Two ideals of heroism: the Homeric pursuit of personal glory beside the Roman heroism of pietas and duty, sharing courage and a divine and epic frame.

The Aeneid is organised around a moral opposition that gives the poem its Roman character: pietas against furor. Pietas - the quality that earns Aeneas his standing epithet, pius Aeneas - is the central Roman virtue: a devoted, dutiful loyalty to the gods, to one's family and ancestors, and to one's country and its destiny. It is not warm feeling but active, self-denying duty, the subordination of personal desire to obligations larger than the self. Aeneas embodies it: he obeys the gods even when it costs him everything, he honours his father and the memory of his ancestors, and he shoulders the burden of founding a people he will never see flourish. Pietas is the virtue on which Rome, in the poem's vision, is built.

Its opposite is furor - rage, frenzy, ungoverned passion, the destructive madness that shatters order. Furor drives the forces that oppose Aeneas and his mission: the fury of the goddess Juno, who hates the Trojans and unleashes storm and war to thwart fate; the consuming passion of Dido, which destroys her; the war-madness of Turnus and the Latins. Furor is associated with civil strife, with the irrational, with everything that pulls against the patient work of building Rome. The poem's action can be read as a long struggle in which pietas must repeatedly master furor - order and duty striving to contain and overcome passion and chaos - a struggle with obvious resonance for a Rome just emerging from the furor of civil war.

This makes Aeneas a fundamentally different hero from those of Homer, and the contrast is one of the most productive in the whole component. The Homeric hero pursues his own kleos - personal, immortal glory - and asserts his individual honour, sometimes at his community's expense, as Achilles does. Aeneas, by contrast, is a hero of duty who suppresses his own wishes for a collective and future good: he does not fight for personal fame but carries out a mission decreed by fate for the sake of a people not yet born. His heroism is endurance, obedience and self-sacrifice rather than self-assertion, and Virgil measures him repeatedly against the Homeric model precisely to define this new, Roman ideal.

Yet pietas is costly, and Virgil never lets us forget it - this is what saves Aeneas from being a lifeless emblem of virtue. His duty demands terrible sacrifices: he must abandon Dido though he loves her, watch companions die, and set aside his own longing for rest and peace. He is often weary, grieving and reluctant, a hero who suffers his greatness rather than enjoying it. The poem asks us to admire pietas and to feel its weight, and much of its emotional power comes from the gap between the glory of the mission and the pain of the man who must carry it. Analysing Aeneas means holding both together: the exemplary Roman and the suffering human being.

The opposition is complicated, tellingly, at the very end of the poem, where furor appears not in Aeneas's enemies but in Aeneas himself. In the final scene he stands over the defeated Turnus, inclined to spare him - an act of pietas and clemency - until he sees Turnus wearing the belt stripped from the body of the young Pallas, whom Aeneas had sworn to protect; seized by fury and grief, he kills the suppliant Turnus in a blaze of rage. That the poem's champion of pietas ends in an act of furor is deeply disquieting and much debated, and it warns against reading the opposition too neatly. Pietas and furor are the poem's great moral poles, but Virgil shows how hard, and how costly, it is to keep them apart.

Worked example

Analysing the pietas of Aeneas

Explain how the flight from Troy defines Aeneas's pietas.

The image of duty
As Troy burns, Aeneas carries his aged father Anchises on his shoulders and leads his little son Ascanius by the hand, the household gods in Anchises's arms.
Read the symbolism
The image gathers all the objects of pietas at once - father, son, gods, the future of a people - literally shouldered by the hero.
Note the cost
In the confusion he loses his wife Creusa, whose ghost tells him to go on to Italy; his duty to the mission is bought with private grief.
State the definition
The scene defines Aeneas's heroism as devotion to family, gods and destiny, carried at personal cost - the essence of Roman pietas.

Result: The flight from Troy, with Aeneas bearing his father and the gods and losing his wife, is the poem's defining image of pietas: duty to family, gods and future people upheld through personal loss.

Typical mistakes

Translating pietas as modern piety (mere religiousness); it is a wider Roman devotion to gods, family and country together.
Presenting Aeneas as a flawless emblem of virtue, missing both the human cost he pays and his final, troubling surrender to furor.

Active revision

Analyse a passage in which Aeneas's pietas is tested (the flight from Troy carrying Anchises, or the departure from Dido); explain what it costs him and how it defines his Roman heroism.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

Fate, the gods and Rome's destiny#

StandardOCR H408 Component 1 (the Aeneid: fate and Rome)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

Fate and the divine machinery

Fig. 4The workings of destiny in the Aeneid: Jupiter's decree drives Aeneas's mission against Juno's opposition, toward the founding of Rome and the age of Augustus.

Fate - fatum, what is destined - is the great engine of the Aeneid, and it works differently from Homer's more variable fate. In Virgil, fate is fixed, purposeful and directed toward a single end: the founding of the Roman race and the eventual greatness of Rome. Aeneas is fated to reach Italy and plant the seed of the city, and nothing - not storm, not love, not war - can finally prevent it; obstacles can only delay. This gives the poem a sense of onward, providential momentum quite unlike the open contingency of Homeric battle, and it means that the reader, who knows Rome's future, watches the destiny unfold with a weight of dramatic irony.

The divine framework makes this destiny explicit at key moments. In Book 1, to comfort the anxious Venus, Jupiter unrolls the future and prophesies that the descendants of Aeneas will rule an empire without end (imperium sine fine), reaching down to a coming Caesar and an age of peace. The gods thus guarantee the mission from the outset. Ranged against it is Juno, the poem's divine antagonist, whose furor - her old hatred of Troy and fear for her beloved Carthage - drives much of the action, raising the storm of Book 1 and the war of the later books. But Juno can only delay fate, not defeat it; at the poem's close she is reconciled, on terms, to the destiny she has fought.

The clearest statement of Rome's destiny comes in the Underworld of Book 6, one of the poem's summits. Guided by the Sibyl, Aeneas descends to the world of the dead and meets the spirit of his father Anchises, who shows him a parade of the souls of great Romans yet to be born - a pageant of future heroes stretching down to Augustus himself. Anchises then delivers the poem's most famous statement of Roman purpose: that other peoples may excel in art, oratory and science, but Rome's own destined art is to rule the nations with law, to spare the conquered and to crush the proud. The mission is thus given a moral content: empire as the imposition of ordered peace.

This vision is embodied again on the shield of Aeneas in Book 8, where the future history of Rome is depicted in metal, culminating in Augustus's victory at Actium and his triple triumph. Aeneas shoulders the shield understanding nothing of the scenes upon it, marvelling at images of a destiny he cannot read - a poignant emblem of the whole poem, in which the hero carries a future he serves but will never see. Between Jupiter's prophecy, the parade of heroes and the shield, Virgil threads the legendary action of his poem to the real history of Rome and to the Augustan present, making the ancient story a mirror of, and a charter for, the poet's own age.

For analysis, the machinery of fate, gods and destiny should be read as the vehicle of the poem's Augustan meaning - and, in its tensions, of the poem's depth. The providential design dignifies Rome and Augustus, presenting the empire and its peace as willed by heaven and rooted in a moral mission. Yet the same design bears down on individuals with great weight: fate demands the sacrifice of Dido and the death of Turnus, and the human beings caught in destiny's path suffer for a greatness not their own. To analyse a passage of prophecy or divine action is to see how Virgil makes Rome's destiny majestic and, at the same time, quietly counts what it costs the mortals who must carry it forward.

Worked example

The parade of heroes as Augustan poetry

Analyse how the parade of future Romans in Book 6 serves the poem's Augustan purpose.

Set the scene
In the Underworld, Anchises shows Aeneas the souls of unborn Romans, a pageant of the city's future heroes down to Augustus.
Identify the climax
Augustus is presented as the bringer of a new golden age, the fulfilment toward which the whole pageant and the whole poem move.
Read the mission statement
Anchises defines Rome's destined art as ruling with law, sparing the conquered and crushing the proud - giving empire a moral purpose.
Interpret the effect
The scene binds the legendary hero to real Roman history and to Augustus, presenting the empire and its peace as the providential goal of destiny.

Result: The parade of heroes turns the Underworld into a prophecy of Rome's greatness culminating in Augustus, giving the empire a moral mission and making the legendary Aeneas the servant of a real, Augustan destiny.

Typical mistakes

Treating Virgilian fate like Homeric fate; in Virgil it is fixed and directed to a single national end, and obstacles only delay it.
Describing the prophecies as decoration rather than analysing how they bind the legend to Augustan Rome and carry the poem's politics.

Active revision

Analyse Jupiter's prophecy in Book 1 or Anchises's speech in Book 6: how does Virgil use it to define Rome's destiny and mission, and what is its effect within the poem?

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for classical civilisation (Department for Education)

Dido, Turnus and the cost of empire#

AdvancedOCR H408 Component 1 (the Aeneid: the human cost)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The tensions of the Aeneid

Fig. 5The competing pulls the poem holds together: duty against rage, Rome's glory against its cost, and the two voices readers have long heard in Virgil.

For all its celebration of Rome's destiny, the Aeneid is a profoundly sympathetic poem about those whom that destiny destroys, and its two great tragic figures - Dido and Turnus - are where the cost of empire is felt most sharply. Their stories test the reader's response, drawing sympathy toward the victims of the mission and complicating any simple approval of it. Analysing them is the surest way into the poem's emotional and moral depth, and into the long debate about whether the Aeneid is finally a poem of triumph or of sorrow.

Dido, the queen of Carthage, dominates the first movement of the poem. A strong and admirable ruler who has herself fled disaster to build a new city, she is made by the gods to fall passionately in love with Aeneas, and for a time he lingers with her. But the gods recall him to his mission, and he leaves - dutifully, and against his own feelings, but leaving her nonetheless. Dido, betrayed in love and undone by furor, curses Aeneas and his descendants (foreshadowing the future enmity of Rome and Carthage, the Punic Wars) and kills herself on a pyre as his ships sail away. Her tragedy is presented with extraordinary sympathy, and it shows the dark side of pietas: Aeneas's duty here looks like cruelty, and the reader's heart is largely with the woman he abandons.

Turnus, the young prince of the Rutulians, is the tragic figure of the poem's second half. Betrothed to Lavinia before Aeneas's arrival, he is roused to war by Juno's fury and fights to defend his homeland and his claim - in many ways a Homeric hero of the older type, brave, passionate and doomed, resisting an invader backed by fate. Virgil gives him real courage and pathos, and his cause is not simply wrong: he too is a victim of the destiny that requires Aeneas to prevail. As the war grinds on, the human losses mount - the boy-warriors Nisus and Euryalus, the young Pallas, Turnus himself - and the poem dwells on the waste and grief of it, so that the founding of Rome is shown to be paid for in blood.

All of this comes to a head in the poem's abrupt and shocking ending. In the final duel Aeneas wounds and overcomes Turnus, who, beaten, begs for his life as a suppliant; and Aeneas, moved, hesitates and seems ready to spare him - the merciful act his own mission's ideal (to spare the conquered) demands. But then he sees that Turnus is wearing the sword-belt stripped from the body of Pallas, the youth Aeneas had loved and failed to protect; and, blazing with grief and fury (furor), he plunges his sword into Turnus, whose soul flees resentful to the shades. On that dark, violent note - not a triumph but a killing in rage - the poem simply ends.

This ending has generated one of the most famous debates in classical scholarship, and it is important to be able to discuss it without pretending it can be settled. On an optimistic reading, the poem is a genuine celebration of Rome and Augustus, and the killing of Turnus is just retribution and the necessary victory of pietas over furor. On a pessimistic or ambivalent reading, the poem contains a second, quieter voice that mourns the human cost of empire and is troubled that its dutiful hero ends in an act of rage - a reading often summed up as the poem's further voices, its sympathy for the defeated pulling against its public celebration. The honest position, and the strongest for an essay, is that Virgil holds both together: the Aeneid is at once a proud epic of Rome's destiny and a deeply humane lament for what that destiny costs.

Worked example

Reading the death of Turnus

Analyse the poem's final scene and the debate it has provoked.

The moment of mercy
The defeated Turnus begs for his life, and Aeneas hesitates, apparently ready to spare him - the clemency his own mission's ideal commands.
The trigger of rage
Seeing Turnus wearing the belt of the dead Pallas, Aeneas is seized by grief and furor and kills the suppliant, and the poem ends at once.
The optimistic reading
One view sees just vengeance and the necessary victory of pietas over furor, a fitting close to Rome's founding epic.
The pessimistic reading
Another hears a troubled second voice: the champion of duty ends in rage, and the poem breaks off on cost and darkness rather than triumph - the honest essay holds both together.

Result: The abrupt killing of the suppliant Turnus lets the poem end on victory and disquiet at once, and the strongest response argues that Virgil deliberately fuses celebration of Rome with a lament for its human cost.

Typical mistakes

Treating Dido and Turnus as mere obstacles to be removed, missing the sympathy Virgil gives them and the cost they represent.
Insisting the poem is either simple propaganda or simple protest; the strongest reading holds its celebratory and questioning voices together.

Active revision

Discuss the ending of the Aeneid (the death of Turnus): how far does it celebrate the triumph of pietas, and how far does it leave the reader troubled? Reach a substantiated judgement.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

References & sources

Sources

OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)

OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification

Department for Education

GCE AS and A level subject content for classical civilisation

The World of the Hero: Virgil's Aeneid

5 sections~27 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

The World of the Hero: Virgil's Aeneid

Key points

The Aeneid as a foundation myth for Rome

Key points

The shield of Aeneas against the shield of Achilles

Key points

Analysing the pietas of Aeneas

Key points

The parade of heroes as Augustan poetry

Key points

Reading the death of Turnus

Sources

The World of the Hero: Virgil's Aeneid

Key points

The Aeneid as a foundation myth for Rome

Key points

The shield of Aeneas against the shield of Achilles

Key points

Analysing the pietas of Aeneas

Key points

The parade of heroes as Augustan poetry

Key points

Reading the death of Turnus

Sources