Epic tales: the surprising search for identity and origins in Virgil and Dante
At times of trouble and transition, communities will often find a story that brings them together. From the Iliad to the Shahnahmeh, from ʿAntar to Beowulf, epic tales take familiar ideas about the past and weave them into new narratives to find a way forward. The nationalist movements from the nineteenth century onwards usually focused on constructing simplified, narrow collective identities, drawing borders around memories and mythologies in the hope that this would produce more homogenous societies. So powerful were many of these nineteenth century stories that it is now easy to forget just how much messier and more complex the past really was.
As it happens, two of the most famous historical epics demonstrate this perfectly. Both Virgil and Dante wrote poems that changed how people saw themselves and they remain household names centuries later. Even a brief exploration of the ideas and people they used to do that can tell us a lot about how they and their contemporaries saw the world.
As ancient Rome changed from republican rule to a single figure, the man most responsible for the transition asked one of the best poets of the day, Virgil, to write a unifying tale about Rome’s origins. He wrote the Aeneid, which presents the earliest Romans as descendants of Aeneas, a Trojan prince fleeing the most famous war of antiquity. To a modern audience, this claim can seem quite striking, even extraordinary. The Trojans, fierce enemies of the ancient Greeks? The people who lost the war in Homer’s great epic? Troy, the orientalised city in modern day Turkey?
In the ancient Mediterranean, however, the idea that different peoples were connected, even entangled, was perhaps as common as the idea that they were foreign and strange – even groups of people that frequently found themselves in opposition to each other (some ancient Greek city states claimed legendary founders from Persia or Scythia, for example). In the version of the story most familiar to both a Roman audience and a modern one, Homer’s Iliad, the Trojans are shown as very similar to their Greek opponents. They even honour the same gods. Their enmity is one created through the machinations of those gods, not a civilisational divide. Moreover, legend had it that Troy had been a glamorous, wealthy capital city of a great empire for centuries. And, of course, Aeneas was the son of Venus – not too coincidentally, the same goddess that the first Roman emperors claimed descent from. It was an obvious choice, not a strange one.
This held true for more than a millennium: the Trojans inspired origin stories across Christian Europe until the early modern period. This trend had faded in most places by the end of the fifteenth century but it remained fashionable in others: Elizabeth I was frequently described as a descendent of Paris, the Trojan prince, and the idea of a shared Trojan heritage was part of diplomatic exchanges with the Ottomans during Elizabeth’s reign. In part, Troy’s popularity was perpetuated by the epics of Homer and Virgil (and the many spin-off tales they generated). It was also, of course, about the ongoing cultural caché of ancient Rome – if it was good enough for Augustus, it was good enough for anyone. But it is also a reminder that there is never a simple, single line that runs through history to the present, even if we can sometimes see many threads coming together for a time, or weave them into a pattern that appeals.
We can see the threads being woven together in such a way in Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia, finished around 1321, which consciously drew on ancient Roman poets. Dante was from the Republic of Florence, a city state that, throughout his life, navigated between two major regional powers: the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Papacy. His work helped articulate and popularise an emerging sense of regional, Italian identity and it has become a staple of ‘Western’ literature.
And yet, despite its Christian context and later ‘Western’ reputation, Dante’s fourteenth century epic has a surprising cast list. Figures from Greek, Persian, Roman, and Trojan history were combined with famous Christians, Jews, and Muslims to explore scientific and theological ideas. Ibn Sina (Latinised as Avicenna) features alongside Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Saladin is encountered as well as Julius Caesar and Hector, Muhammad is mentioned as well as Jesus and Solomon. Dante expected his thirteenth century audience to recognise them all – whether the association was positive or negative – and he knew such references would demonstrate how cultured and learned he was. It worked: seven centuries later, his epic poem is still read and studied, debated and discussed, just like Virgil’s Aeneid or Homer’s Iliad.
Getting to know the stories people like Virgil and Dante told about their communities in the past is endlessly fascinating – and perhaps it also helps us to understand the stories we tell ourselves in the present.
Rhiannon Garth Jones is the author of All Roads Lead to Rome, published by Aurum and available now.
