The Aeneid
I have just finished reading Virgil’s The Aeneid, a classical epic that was thouroughly enjoyable. I was pleased to come across this article, Joe Knows Latin, in which Joe Paterno, football coach of Penn State University (my alma mater), discusses the impact of The Aeneid on his football and on his life. He relates that one of the most significant moments of his time spent at Brooklyn Prep School in the 1940’s was at the beginning of this third year when he stepped into a Latin class taught by Father Bermingham. That year he and Father Bermingham together read The Aeneid in Latin.
The Aeneid is an epic poem composed by the Roman poet Virgil in the first century B.C. The work follows the adventures of Aeneas, a Trojan who was mentioned in Homer’s The Iliad. (By the way, it is in The Aeneid that we are told the story of the Trojan Horse.) Aeneas, among the few Trojans who escape from Troy, suffers numerous hardships before finally founding Rome.
Paterno states:
Virgil and his hero Aeneas, the founder of Rome, more than just entered my life; the adventures of Aeneas seeped into far corners of my mind, into my feelings about what is true and honorable and important. They helped shape everything I have since become. I don’t think anybody can get a handle on what makes me tick as a person, and certainly can’t get at the roots of how I coach football, without understanding what I learned from the deep relationship I formed with Virgil during those afternoons and later in my life.
After he continues to discuss the turmoil, struggle, and suffering of Aeneas as he continues on his journey, he makes this comparison between Aeneas and the heroes of Homer’s works:
To Homer—and, in fact, to most of the modern world—heroes are created through personal exploits and glorification, often through an ambitious drive for self-glorification. Heroes are superstars. The grandstands cheer them, and they throw their high fives up and slam the football down after a touchdown. Homer’s hero Achilles, in his pursuit of glory, ends up destroying his men and his cause and rotting at the end into a kind of monster.
Aeneas, as Virgil created him, was a totally new kind of epic hero. Like Homer’s heroes, he endures battles, storms, shipwrecks, and the rages of the gods. But the worst storm is the one that rages within himself. He yearns to be free of his tormenting duty, but he knows that his duty is to others, to his men. Through years of hardship and peril, Aeneas reluctantly but relentlessly heeds his fata until he founds Rome.
Aeneas is not a grandstanding superstar. He is, above all, a Trojan and a Roman. His first commitment is not to himself, for he is bugged constantly by the reminder, the fatum, “You must be a man for others.” He lives his life not for “me” and “I,” but for “us” and “we.” Aeneas is the ultimate team man. A hero of Aeneas’ kind does not wear his name on the back of his uniform. He doesn’t wear “Nittany Lions” on his helmet to claim star credit for touchdowns and tackles that were enabled by everybody doing his job. For Virgil’s kind of hero, the score belongs to the team.
I thank JoePa for his thoughts on The Aeneid and helping me to read this epic with more clarity and understanding.
