The Aeneid Memory and The Past

In contrast to the first quotation under this theme, these lines, which follow relatively closely upon them, show that not all reflection on the past is nostalgic. Thinking about the past can also provide directions for how to act in the present – as, in this case, Aeneas reminds his men of how they met past challenges, thereby encouraging them to endure new ones. (In fact, he even imagines how, in the future, they will be able to look back on present challenges as also in the past – try wrapping your head around that!) How do you think this theme relates to the idea of the Aeneid as a whole, which can be read as a poem set in what for Virgil was the distant past, yet which also alludes to the events of what for him was the present day?

These are the first words that we hear Aeneas speak. Given that you can think about the Aeneid as divided into a first half, in which the hero is thinking about the past, and a second half, in which he is directed toward the future, it is significant that we are introduced to Aeneas as nostalgic for home – and even wishing he had died there instead of setting off on this quest.

These lines, which depict how Amor, the god of love, prepares Dido to fall in love with Aeneas, show how the past is fragile – in that we only know about it so long as it survives in our memory. Based on this passage, and its consequences later in the story, do you think Virgil views forgetting the past as a good thing or a bad thing? (In thinking about this, don't feel as if your answer has to be completely black and white.)

Here we see another way that the past can continue into the present: when something in the present serves as an echo of what has gone before. As with the second quotation under this theme, how do you think this notion relates to Virgil's project of commenting on contemporary history by writing a poem about things that (supposedly) happened a long, long time ago in a galaxy…OK, in the same galaxy?

Here, Anchises is describing the process the souls of the dead have to undergo before they can be reborn into new bodies. Because our memories are so much a part of our identity, do you think it really makes sense to think about these souls, once reincarnated, as the same people? What do you think it says about Virgil's conception of history if he sees the world as a cycle of souls continually dying and being reborn, yet never remembering their former lives?

Like the third quotation for this theme, these lines show the fragility of the past. They also connect with the fourth quotation for this theme by showing the past as vividly remembered in the present. In this case, they show how when the past is too immediately present and painful – as the death of his son Icarus is for Daedalus, the famous inventor and decorator of the gates of the Sibyl's temple – it can risk being forgotten, because it hurts too much to remember it.

In these lines, Virgil himself prays to one of the Muses (goddesses of poetic inspiration) to help him remember what happened long before his time. Do you think it still makes sense today for an historian to think about recapturing the past as an imaginative act?

This passage has the same general structure as the one quoted above: Virgil prays to the Muses to help him remember what has happened before. When Virgil talks about how we know only "faint wraiths" (i.e., ghosts) "of history," do you think he is just using a metaphor, or is he thinking of the doctrine of reincarnation as described in the sixth quotation for this theme?

Here, Virgil does another one of his sneaky time-paradox things. That's because he describes what Vulcan puts on Aeneas's shield as knowledge of the future – from the perspective of the ancient time-period in which the Aeneid takes place. But from the perspective of the time in which he was writing, these events were in the very distant past.

Although this moment might not seem like much when you read through the Aeneid for the first time, it is actually a detail of great personal significance to Virgil. Here, the ancient past that Virgil is remembering is the history of Mantua, his hometown. According to legend, when Virgil was on his deathbed, one of the things he did (aside from ordering that the unfinished manuscript of the Aeneid be burned) was to write his own epitaph. This consisted of two lines, which ran as follows: "Mantua me genuit; Calabri repuere; tenet nunc / Parthenope. Cecini pascua, rura, duces." This translates to "Mantua gave birth to me; Calabria stole me away; now Parthenope / holds me. I sang of pastures, fields, and leaders." The first line of the poem refers to the places he had lived; the second to his three poems: The Eclogues (about shepherds), The Georgics (about farming), and the Aeneid (about warfare – among other things). As you can see from this epitaph – assuming Virgil actually wrote it, though of course we can't be sure about that – Virgil was a bit homesick. This little reference to his own hometown woven into the fabric of his poem brings us full circle back to the nostalgia of Aeneas's lines in the first quotation for this theme.