Friday, September 28, 2012
Ivory Gate
So, Augustus commissioned Virgil to write the Aeneid as a propaganda piece for Augustus' new empire. In the Aeneid Virgil compliments Augustus and says he will lead Rome into a new Golden Age. But Mr. Williams was talking about how Aeneas leaves the underworld through the ivory gates, which means everything he just heard was a lie. So does that mean that Virgil does not think Augustus will bring them to a new and better era, but is only disguising the work as a propaganda because Augustus commissioned it?
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I just researched what scholars think about Virgil's opinion on Rome and Augustus, and I learned that they are very evenly split between two opinions: one is that Virgil was celebrating the Roman culture, and the other is that Virgil was extremely pessimistic. It really is just a matter of opinion. You can interpret it either way, but I think that Virgil, for some reason, did not particularly like Octavian, so he used his free reign in writing the epic to voice his opinions. You could also say that in order to avoid seeming biased, he had to include some negative things.
You would think that after writing all these great things about Augustus' reign, then basically saying it was all a lie, Virgil would have gotten in some sort of trouble. If the poem was written as propaganda, it doesn't exactly support its commissioner very well. I just looked it up (I heart Wikipedia) and apparently, Virgil wished that the poem be burned in the event of his death, but Augustus ordered that it be published with as few edits and changes as possible. It seems that Virgil wrote parts of the Aeneid very passive-aggressively and was against Augustus, so maybe (if it's considered propaganda) the lack of editing let Virgil's true views of Augustus slip?
I completely agree with you Lindsay. Augustus was probably not the brightest bulb in the shed when it came to intellectuality and literature. He also probably did not catch the difference between the Ivory and Horn gates. Also, I don't even know if Augustus would have read it. Do you? I think he just paid Virgil on the whim and belief that he would put something nice about him and Rome in the epic poem because he told him to. I too did some research like Tyler and believe that Virgil did indeed display pessimism to the Roman Empire through his writings and Aeneas passing through the Ivory gates is an example of his pessimistic attitude towards Rome.
Either Augustus didn't read it, or had someone read it to him skipping the parts that might defame him, or maybe he didn't care. I wouldn't be suprised if the Roman dictator, who believed he was a demigod, and commissioned an author to write a book about him was too egotistical to notice the bad parts. Or maybe he was level headed and wanted an acurate portrayal of his personality...who knows? I dont think this question of whether the Aneid was a work of propaganda can be fully answered because there is not enough evidence to determine it. Or maybe because the gods were mostly on his side and he succesfully fufills his destiny, the readers are also supposed to side with him.
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