Aeneas’s mother, the Goddess Venus, has brought him the new armour forged by her husband Vulcan, the craftsman of the Gods. Recalling a famous passage in Homer’s Iliad describing the scenes on the one made by the same God for Achilles, Virgil gives a long description of Aeneas’s new shield. He says it is “ingens” – enormous – and it must be, as it includes scenes from the entire future history of Rome, from Romulus and Remus up to and including the victory of Augustus over Antony and Cleopatra. The description is much too long to post in full, but here, slightly shortened, is the culminating passage with which Book 8 ends. In the first of two extracts, the warlike Augustus towers over his flagship (and I, as Marcus Agrippa, receive a moment in the spotlight). In the second, he receives the adulation of Rome and the tribute of subjugated peoples in the course of his triumph over his enemies.
It has been said that moderation in sycophancy is dangerous because it might seem to imply reservations. Virgil is playing very safe here. You may spot anomalies in the metre of lines 679 and 681, and this may be a passage which Virgil would have revisited had he lived to revise the poem as he planned.
See the illustrated blog post here.
To follow the story of Aeneas in sequence, use this link to the full Pantheon Poets selection of extracts from the Aeneid. See the next episode here.
To listen, press play:
