Whatever Virgil may have thought about his work while he lay on his deathbed, others quickly recognized that the Aeneid was a masterpiece. Romans loved the poem. It gave them an impressive cultural history and justified the proud expectation that they were destined to rule the world. Yet even after the Roman Empire fell, people continued to read and admire the Aeneid.
During the Middle Ages, many Europeans believed that Virgil had been a magician and the Aeneid had magical properties. This could be Because the story contained so many omens, or mystical signs of events to come. People would read passages from the work and search for hidden meanings or predictions about the future. So admired was Virgil that the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, who wrote during the late 1200s and early 1300s, made him a central character in his own religious epic, The Divine Comedy. In Dante’s work, Virgil guides the narrator through hell and purgatory, but he is not able to enter heaven because he was not a Christian.
The Aeneid influenced English literature as well. Poets Edmund Spenser and John Milton wrote epics that reflect the work’s influence. Poet John Dryden was one of many who translated the Aeneid, and his 1697 version is one of the best English translations. By contrast, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron disliked Virgil’s work, perhaps because it celebrates social order, religious duty, and national glory over the Romantic qualities that they favored: passion, rebellion, and self-determination.
The Aeneid has inspired musical composers as well as writers, and many operas have been based on Virgil’s work. Among the best known are Dido and Aeneas (1690), by English composer Henry Purcell, and The Trojans (1858), by the French composer Hector Berlioz.
World History
