Extract

I sing of arms and the man.

A city burns on the horizon and a man carries his father on his back through the flames, leading his young son by the hand, losing his wife to the smoke and ruin of Troy. Virgil spent the last decade of his life composing this epic, commissioned by Augustus but never reduced to mere propaganda, and on his deathbed in 19 BC he begged that the manuscript be destroyed. It survived, and Western literature is unthinkable without it. Aeneas is a new kind of hero, defined not by rage like Achilles but by duty, by pietas, the willingness to subordinate personal desire to a destiny he did not choose. The poem's deepest music lives in its sadness, in the tears of things, the lacrimae rerum that Aeneas finds everywhere he turns.