https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-roman-empire-through-virgils-eyes/
Recently a trend on Tik-Tok had its fifteen minutes of click-fame. It seems that some women are asking their men how often they think about the Roman Empire. The usual suspect experts were consulted, and of course they conclude that this interest in Rome reflects modern males’ angst over, or nostalgia for a time when patriarchy dominated, and manly deeds defined the male sex––the original “toxic masculinity.”
There’s nothing wrong per se with thinking about ancient Rome. Since Edward Gibbon’s magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the history of Rome has been a cautionary tale of how great empires collapse. Given the abundance of empirical evidence––invasions of unvetted migrants, our geopolitical enemies’ increasing challenges, a looming fiscal apocalypse, and suicidal social and cultural corruption––our country may be experiencing Rome’s fate, making its history deserving of our attention. And one place to start is reading what one brilliant Roman thought about the then new empire.
There’s no greater witness than the poet Virgil, who came of age during the last years of the Roman Republic, a century when social disorder, civic violence, and civil wars between Roman generals and their legions were chronic. Virgil’s Aeneid (19 B.C.) tells the story of Rome’s beginnings in the invasion of Italy by Trojan refugees, and also explores the tragic costs of civilization, and the lofty idealism that some great empires have claimed to represent.
That theme is what makes Rome and its fate so significant for us Americans, who are watching a floundering foreign policy lurching between appeasement and half-hearted interventions abroad.
Virgil has several scenes that make Rome’s imperial idealism explicit. One dimension of Rome’s greatness was its virtue: not just courage, the most important virtue for every civilization, but also pietas, the duty and responsibility one owes to family, the dead, the gods, and Rome itself. Virgil’s hero Aeneas is known for this virtue, hence the honorific pius attached to his name.
