The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [449]
As the story approaches its climax, it carries echoes of the `children of Israel' arriving in the Promised Land. The main task of Aeneas and his men is to overcome the opposition of all the tribes already living there, to establish their new city. But as a token of their eventual success Aeneas has already won the support of one of the most powerful Italian tribes, by promising to marry Lavinia, their king's daughter. This is why the tutelary goddess hovering over the action in Aeneas's showdown with Turnus, the leader of the opposing tribes, is Venus. When he is finally victorious, we imagine he will go on to marry Lavinia and found his new city, and that this is to be the happy ending of the story. But we are only left to assume this. We are not shown it. The story ends simply with Turnus's death. Compare this with the resounding conclusion Homer provides to the Odyssey, and we see just how much more profoundly the Greek version succeeds in exploring the underlying archetype. One story shows its hero developing to the most complete state of personal fulfilment of which an individual human being is capable. The other in comparison is no more than a two-dimensional strip cartoon or a Hollywood film: entertaining propaganda designed to reinforce the collective self-image of the Romans just when they had established the most powerful empire the world had ever seen.
The qualities which enabled the Romans to do this were above all those masculine values of strength and order, power and organisation, with which Roman civilisation has been identified all through subsequent history. When we think of Rome, we think of Roman legions, die-straight roads carving across the landscape, superb engineering, Roman law, triumphant monuments to military conquests. We think of a highly materialistic civilisation, dedicated also to physical pleasures, hot baths and spectacular entertainments, to `bread and circuses': a civilisation which eventually decayed because it became soft within, losing the virility and unity of will which had enabled it to dominate the world and choked by that proliferating bureaucracy which was the negative side of the Roman ability to organise. But all this was still far ahead when Virgil spent the last 11 years of his life writing his great epic poem in celebration of Roman power, before his death in 19 BC.
Eight years earlier Virgil's friend Octavian, who had become de facto leader of Rome in the years of civil war which followed the assassination of his uncle Julius Caesar in 44 BC, was granted by the Senate the title of Augustus Imperator, `the most august leader. This made him the first Roman Emperor. In 12 BC, to complete his attainment of supreme earthly power, Augustus also became Pontifex Maximus, the official head of the Roman religion. Increasingly he was being revered by his millions of subjects as a semi-divine figure. On his death in 14 AD the transformation became complete, when he was officially declared to have become a god.
Other priest-kings in earlier civilisations, notably the Phaoroahs of Egypt, had been accorded divine status, because of their ceremonial closeness to the unseen supernatural beings who ruled the world. But this was the first time in history that the principle had applied the other way round: where a mere mortal had become so identified with his unprecedented earthly power that he was elevated to become a god in his own right. By that principle which Heraclitus had recognised as the tendency of everything when it reaches its extreme to produce its opposite, at that very moment in a remote village in Augustus's vast