Great Books #8: The Poetry of Empire
Virgil is very much the anti-Homer. The Aeneid is really a response to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Remember, Homer believes that love is the unifying force of the universe. It is a center; it is what gives you life, purpose, and hope. For Virgil, what matters is the idea of piety, or obedience to the gods and to your father.
As we've discussed, Virgil sets up a very stark contrast between love and piety, where they are competing forces. You cannot love and be pious at the same time. And piety is ultimately the main centralizing force of the universe. If you are pious, if you obey the gods, then the world will be right because the gods have a divine plan for the world. In the case of the Aeneid, it is the founding of the empire of Rome, which is Aeneas's mission and purpose.
Our role, our responsibility, our duty in life is just to follow this path of the gods, and then the world will be perfect. The Aeneid will create the Roman Empire, which will then become the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church will rule for over a thousand years—the millennium. During this thousand years, it is a time of conformity, of stagnation. And it is because in this time, what is often referred to as the Dark Ages, Virgil becomes the god of the Catholic Church, the central organizing force. Why? Because every child of the elite memorizes the Aeneid. And so every child perceives the world through the lens of the Aeneid.
What will happen is, to destroy this empire, a man will emerge to liberate the human imagination, and his name, of course, is Dante. Dante will destroy the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church with his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy. We will spend the rest of the time reading the Divine Comedy. It's not something you can read by yourself. There's absolutely no point. If I just give it to you and say, "Go read it," it will make no sense to you. We have to go through it line by line, word by word, for you to understand the Divine Comedy, because not only is it poetry, but it's philosophy.
What poets will tell you is that a poem is just truth told with as few beautiful words as possible. So it could just be a few lines, but it could take you a lifetime to fully understand the true meaning of these lines. And that is what the Divine Comedy is. It's an epic poem, but each paragraph, each line, is a truth, an eternal truth unto itself.
The Conflict: Aeneas and Dido
Where we are in the story of the Aeneid is that Aeneas gets shipwrecked and becomes a guest of Dido, the queen of Carthage. The two fall in love. Dido falls in love with the fact that Aeneas is not just a great warrior and very handsome, but also because he's a great storyteller. He tells her the story of the fall of Troy.
The two fall in love, and Dido has this burning passion for Aeneas. The gods—basically Juno—want to thwart the possibility of the rise of the Roman Empire. So she conspires to have Dido and Aeneas consummate their passion for each other, and then they get married. But then Jove, the king of the gods, finds out about this and says, "No, no, no, this is not part of the plan. Aeneas is not supposed to fall in love with Dido, stay in Carthage, and build the Carthaginian Empire. He's supposed to go to Rome." So, he sends Mercury, the messenger of the gods, down to Aeneas and tells him, "Hey man, what are you doing? This is not your duty. Do your duty."
This is where we are in the story. Let us read.
Mercury lashes out at once: “You, so now you lay foundation stones for the soaring walls of Carthage, building her gorgeous city, doting on your wife? Blind to your own realm, oblivious to your fate! The King of the Gods, whose power sways earth and sky—he is the one who sends me down from brilliant Olympus, bearing commands for you through the racing winds. What are you plotting now? Wasting time in Libya? What hope misleads you so? If such a glorious destiny cannot fire your spirit, if you will not shoulder the task for your own fame, at least remember Ascanius rising into his prime, the hopes you lodge in Iulus, your only heir. You owe him Italy’s realm, the land of Rome.”
Ascanius, of course, is Aeneas's son, also known as Iulus, who will inherit the legacy.
This order still on his lips, the god vanished from sight into empty air.
Then Aeneas was truly overwhelmed by the vision, stunned. His hackles bristled with fear, his voice choked in his throat. He yearns to be gone, to desert this land he loves, thunderstruck by the warnings, Jupiter’s command. But what can he do? What can he dare say now to the queen in all her fury and win her over? Where to begin? What opening? Thoughts racing here, there, probing his options, turning to this plan, that plan, torn in two until, at his wit’s end, this answer seems the best.
Again, Virgil is the anti-Homer. If Homer were writing this, he would emphasize how emotionally conflicted Aeneas is because he loves Dido. He does not want to go. For Homer, love is above the gods. A human is someone who aspires to love. And when we read the Divine Comedy, we will discover why: because God is love. There's an aspect of God in us, a candle that strives to return to the light, and so we seek love.
For Homer, a choice between going to Rome and founding a great empire or staying in Carthage and being with Dido—obviously, you choose Dido because that is the path to God. That's what happened in the Odyssey, where Odysseus had an opportunity to stay with Calypso and live forever, but he chooses to return to Penelope. And when he returns to Penelope, she asks him, "Will you ever leave me again?" And he says, "Never again will I leave you because this is my home. Love is where my heart is."
But the conflict in Aeneas is: "I will get the hell out of here. I've risen with fear because what I fear most is the anger of the gods. What I must do is be loyal to the gods and heed their command. So screw love. I don't need this." But there's a problem: how do I actually tell Dido? That's the conflict. Not should I leave Dido, but how do I get out of here without her bitching at me?
And so what does he decide to do? He decides, "I won't tell her." That's it. "I'll pretend this didn't happen, and then at night I will just sneak away, and then, well, who cares what happens afterwards." The thing to notice is this is not human. There's nothing human about Aeneas. He's like a walking phallus, almost. He's like James Bond, man. He goes around, does his mission, sleeps with a lot of girls, and then runs off.
He summons Mnestheus, Sergestus, brave Serestus, gives them orders: “Fit out the fleet, but not a word. Muster crews on shore, all tackle set to sail, but the cause for our new course, you keep it secret.” Yet he himself, since Dido, who means the world to him, knows nothing, never dreaming such a powerful love could be uprooted, he will try to approach her, find a moment to break the news gently, a way to soften the blow that he must leave. All shipmates snap to his command, glad to do his orders.
True, but the queen—who can delude a lover?—soon caught wind of the plot afoot, the first to sense the Trojans are on the move, she fears everything now, even with all secure. Rumor, vicious as ever, brings her word, already distraught, that Trojans are rigging out their galleys, gearing to set sail. She rages in helpless frenzy, blazing through the entire city, raving like some Maenad driven wild when the women shake the sacred emblems, when the cyclic orgies, shouts of Bacchus fire her on and Cithaeron echoes round with maddened midnight cries.
Certain things to notice: Bacchus is the god of creativity for the Greeks. There are actually two gods of creativity in the Greek world: Apollo and Dionysus/Bacchus. Apollo is the god of logical creativity, where you sit down calmly and then you write down your thoughts. Then you have Bacchus, who's the god of emotional, rapturous creativity, where you get drunk, you have a lot of sex, and then you express yourself. For the Greeks, these are two aspects of creativity that you both need in order to fully achieve your human potential. Yes, you need to be engaged in meditation, in rational analysis, but you also need to fully explore the possibilities of your emotions—to just let go, to be crazy, to be in a frenzy. What Virgil is saying is that the Bacchus aspect is actually the worst type of emotion because it leads you into madness.
At last she assails Aeneas before he’s said a word: “So, you traitor, you really believed you’d keep this a secret, this great outrage? Steal away in silence from my shores? Can nothing hold you back? Not our love? Not the pledge we sealed with our right hands? Not even the thought of Dido, doomed to a cruel death?”
This line, "Not the pledge we sealed with our right hands," is an allusion, of course, to the Odyssey, where Odysseus and Penelope meet again for the first time in 20 years. Penelope basically says to Odysseus, "Convince me that you actually are my husband." And Odysseus does, because of an ornament that Penelope gave to him. That ornament, of course, is the pledge sealed with their love for each other. This pledge, this memory, this bond is what carries them for eternity, so that even though they are a great distance from each other, their hearts are still conjoined.
And so what Dido says is, "Does this pledge mean nothing to you, Aeneas?" And Aeneas, of course, is like, "It's a word. It's nothing. What matters is your oath to the gods. What matters is your loyalty to the gods."
“Why labor to rig your fleet when the winter’s raw, to risk the deep when the north winds closing in? You cruel, heartless man! Even if you were not pursuing alien fields and unknown homes, even if ancient Troy were still standing, still, would you sail for Troy across such heaving seas? You’re running away—from me! Oh, I pray you by these tears, by the faith in your right hand—what else have I left myself in all my pain?—by our wedding vows, the marriage we began, if I deserve some decency from you now, if anything of mine has ever won your heart, pity a great house about to fall! I pray you, if prayers have any place, reject this scheme of yours. Thanks to you, the African tribes, Numidian warlords hate me. Even my own Tyrians rise against me. Thanks to you, my sense of honor is gone, my one and only pathway to the stars, the renown I once held dear. In whose hands, my guest, do you leave me here to meet my death?”
Two things to remember. First, in the Odyssey, the journey's destination is towards home, to be with Penelope again, to be a family again. That is the end of this epic journey. But in the Aeneid, it's the reverse: you start off with a relationship, with love, and then you have to abandon love in order to go on this epic journey to found the empire of Rome. So you see how it's inverse. In the Odyssey, the entire purpose of your life is to return home and to be in love. But in the Aeneid, love is what you have to abandon in order to fully fulfill your destiny.
Second, what Dido is saying is, "Thanks to you, I've lost everything." My love for you means I have to abandon my pride, my reputation, my own people. Because of my love for you, I become nothing. This is an inversion of what happened in the Odyssey, where because Odysseus sought glory and fame in war, he became traumatized with PTSD. He saw the horrors of war, where innocent people and families were destroyed, and that traumatized him. What allowed him to resurrect himself, to escape his trauma and rebuild his sense of identity, is going home and finding love again. This love is able to resurrect his worldview and give him the courage and the power to fight on. This is the opposite message of the Odyssey.
So, Dido is saying to Aeneas, "You're abandoning me. You tricked me. I fell in love with you, and now you're abandoning me." The human thing to do would be to show pity and say, "Dido, I'm really sorry for what happened, but let's go together." Or maybe, "Dido, I'll come back for you." Instead, he says the worst thing possible.
“Guest—that’s all that remains of husband now. But why do I linger on? Until my brother Pygmalion batters down my walls or Iarbas drags me off, his slave? If only you’d left a baby in my arms, our child, before you deserted me, some little Aeneas playing about our halls whose features at least would bring you back to me—in spite of all, I would not feel so totally devastated, so destroyed.”
The queen stopped. But he, warned by Jupiter now, his gaze held steady, fought to master the torment in his heart.
The torment in his heart is not sadness but anger.
At last he ventured a few words: “I—you have done me so many kindnesses, and you could count them all. I shall never deny what you deserve, my queen, never regret my memories of Dido, not while I can recall myself and draw the breath of life. I’ll state my case in a few words. I never dreamed I’d keep my flight a secret. Don’t imagine that. Nor did I once extend a bridegroom’s torch or enter into a marriage pact with you.”
What he's saying is, "We did not have a marriage pact. We're not married." This is not true. They consummated the relationship, and everyone witnessed it, so they are married. But he's saying, "We're not really married."
“If the Fates had let me live my life on my own terms and settle all my troubles according to my own free will, Troy is the city, first of all, that I’d safeguard, Troy and all that’s left of my people whom I cherish. The grand palace of Priam would stand once more. With my own hands I would fortify a second Troy to house my Trojans in defeat. But not now. Grynean Apollo’s oracle says that I must seize on Italy’s noble land, his Lycian lots say Italy. There lies my love, there lies my homeland! Now, if you, a Phoenician, fix your eyes on Carthage, a Libyan stronghold, tell me, why do you grudge the Trojans their new homes on Italian soil? What is the crime if we seek far-off kingdoms too?”
What he's saying is this: "Dido, if it were up to me, I wouldn't stay with you either. If it were up to me, I would be back in Troy, fighting and dying for what I truly love, which is the city of Troy. Now that I've lost Troy, I must build an empire. You have your own empire, Carthage. Why stop me from building my own empire in Italy?" So, what matters is not love. What matters is power. That's why we live, why we exist: to seek more power. Love gets in the way, and therefore love must be discarded. "You, Dido, I do love you, but you're in my way. Therefore, get out of my way."
Now Dido is distraught. She fell in love with Aeneas and broke her vow to her former husband, Sychaeus. She knows her people don't respect her anymore, and she knows that the neighboring warlords have contempt for her and might even attack her because she previously rebuffed their advances. But at the same time, she's still desperately in love with Aeneas and knows she cannot stop him from leaving for Italy. So she decides eventually that her only solution is suicide. She develops a very elaborate ploy to kill herself.
“And now what shall I do? Make a mockery of myself? Go back to my old suitors, tempt them to try again? Beg the Numidians, grovel, plead for a husband, though time and again I scorned to wed their like? Well then, trail the Trojan ships, bend to the Trojans’ every last demand? So pleased are they with all the help, the relief I lent them once, my memory of my service past stands firm in grateful minds! And even if I were willing, would the Trojans allow me to board their proud ships? A woman they hate. Poor lost soul, can’t you sense it, grasp it yet, the treachery of Laomedon’s breed? What now? Do I take flight alone, consorting with crews of Trojan oarsmen in their triumph? Or follow them out with all my troops of Tyrians thronging the decks? Yes, hard as it was to uproot them once from Tyre, how can I force them back to sea once more, command them to spread their sails to the winds? No, no, die. You deserve it. End your pain with the sword. You, my sister, you were the first, won over by my tears, to pile these sorrows on my shoulders, mad as I was, to throw me into my enemy’s arms. If only I’d been free to live my life, untested in marriage, free of guilt as some wild beast, untouched by pains like these! I broke the faith I swore to the ashes of Sychaeus.”
For Homer, love is what gives you strength. Love is what allows you to resurrect yourself. The metaphor is the bow of Odysseus; this bow has not been touched for 20 years, but the moment he touches it, it gives him renewed strength, and he's able to assemble it very quickly and then shoot the target. That's the power of love. But here in the Aeneid, love is the complete opposite. By falling in love, you disintegrate as a person. When we first meet Dido, she's a proud queen. Now she is a complete mess. She is emotionally falling apart, being driven into madness. She's like, "Should I go and beg the Trojans to let me on the ship and be a slave girl?" It is the complete fall of a queen, from a queen to essentially a slave girl. She's seriously considering being a slave girl if it just means being near Aeneas. Ultimately, she decides her only option is to die.
She is contemplating killing herself, and the gods know this. So what they do is they tell Aeneas in a dream, "Get out of here, because we don't want you seeing Dido kill herself."
Such terrible grief kept breaking from her heart as Aeneas slept in peace on his ship’s high stern...
Aeneas slept in peace, meaning he doesn't care. He was never in love with her. She was just a plaything.
...bent on departing now, all tackle set to sail. And now in his dreams it came again, the god, his phantom, the same features shining clear like Mercury head to foot, the voice, the glow, the golden hair, the bloom of youth on his limbs, and his voice rang out with warnings once again: “Son of the goddess, how can you sleep so soundly in such a crisis? Can’t you see the dangers closing around you now? Madman! Can’t you hear the west wind rustling to speed you on? That woman spawns her plots, mulling over some desperate outrage in her heart, lashing her surging rage, she’s bent on death. Why not flee headlong, flee headlong while you can? You’ll soon see the waves a chaos of ships, lethal torches flaring, the whole coast ablaze if a new dawn breaks and finds you still lingering on these shores. Up with you now, enough delay! Woman’s a thing that’s always changing, shifting like the wind.” With that, he vanished into the black night.
Aeneas is running away, and Dido has resolved to kill herself. This is her speech right before she does.
“You Sun, whose fires scan all works of the earth, and you, Juno, the witness, midwife to my agonies, Hecate, hailed by nightly shrieks at city crossroads, and you, you avenging Furies and gods of dying Dido! Hear me, turn your power my way, attend my sorrows. I deserve your mercy. Hear my prayers. If that curse of the earth must reach his haven, labor on to landfall—if Jove and the Fates command and the boundary stone is fixed—still, let him be plagued in war by a nation proud in arms, torn from his borders, wrenched from Iulus’ embrace. Let him grovel for help and watch his people die a shameful death. And then, once he has bowed down to an unjust peace, may he never enjoy his realm and the light he yearns for, never. Let him die before his day, unburied on some desolate beach.
That is my prayer, my final cry. I pour it out with my own lifeblood. And you, my Tyrians, harry with hatred all his line, his race to come. Make that offering to my ashes, send it down below. No love between our peoples, ever, no packs of peace! Come rising up from my bones, you avenger still unknown, to stalk those Trojan settlers, hunt with fire and iron, now or in time to come, whenever the power is yours. Shore clash with shore, sea against sea and sword against sword! This is my curse: war between all our peoples, all their children, endless war!”
Propaganda and the Curse of Carthage
The Aeneid is first and foremost political propaganda. Rome's epic war was with Carthage. Rome and Carthage fought for about 100 years for control of the Mediterranean. Ultimately, Rome would triumph over Carthage and destroy Carthage as a civilization. They would burn Carthage down, and today we have no memory of Carthage, so complete was the destruction.
Virgil is trying to explain to us why this had to happen. It had to happen because Dido put a curse on Rome and forced her people to go to war with Rome. So it's not that Rome was vicious and savage in destroying Carthage; it was that the Carthaginians had a curse. They had a mission to avenge Dido.
Let me explain how this propaganda works. In Carthage's understanding of Dido, she's the founder, the queen of Carthage. Her husband was killed in Phoenicia, so she and some refugees sought refuge in Northern Africa. They founded the city of Carthage and worked really hard to build it. She was very attractive, so she won the attention of some local warlords who demanded her hand in marriage. Her response was to kill herself. By killing herself, her sacrifice emboldened her people to build a great city, but it also won the respect of the local warlords. From then on, everyone understood the Carthaginians as a free and proud people who would rather die for their liberty than become slaves.
Here in the Aeneid, it is almost the reverse. Dido's love for Aeneas becomes a poison. It poisons her soul, and it leads her to poison her people as well. Rather than give them freedom, she enslaves them into a mission to avenge her. It's basically an inversion. That's what the Aeneid is doing: inverting Homer, but also inverting history to serve the political purposes of Rome.
The Final Battle: The Inversion of the Iliad
With the story of Dido, Virgil is inverting the story of the Odyssey. Now we come to the ending of the Aeneid, and here Virgil is going to invert the story of the Iliad.
Recall what happened in the Iliad, where Achilles tricks Patroclus into sacrificing himself, which allows Achilles an excuse to enter the battlefield against Hector. He kills Hector and believes this is the apex of his glory, but instead, it causes him to fall into a deep depression. It's really Priam's willingness to forgive him, because of his love for Hector, that frees Achilles from his guilt. The two, Achilles and Priam, cry together and become friends. The Iliad is fundamentally a story of the curse of power, the evil of power, and the ability of love to both redeem and to save. What Virgil is going to do is take the story of the Iliad and invert it.
It ends with an analogy to the battle between Achilles and Hector. In the Iliad, it's between Achilles and Hector, but here it's going to be between Aeneas and Turnus. What happened is that Aeneas lands in Italy, and the Latin tribes see him as this great hero. The king there, Latinus, marries his daughter to Aeneas. But the wife, the queen, has already promised her daughter to Turnus, who is another warlord. This starts off a war between the Trojans and Turnus, and ultimately leads to a final conflict, a great battle between Aeneas and Turnus. This is the very ending of the Aeneid.
As he hangs back, the fatal spear of Aeneas streaks on. Spotting a lucky opening, he had flung it from a distance, all his might in the main. Rocks heaved up by a catapult pounding city ramparts never stormed so loudly, never such a shattering bolt of thunder crashing forth. Like a black whirlwind churning on, that spear flies on with its freight of iron death to pierce the rim of the seven-ply shield and right at the thigh of Turnus, whizzes through. It strikes home, and the blow drops great Turnus down to the ground, brought down on his bent knee. The Rutulians spring up with a groan and the hillsides round groan back and the tall groves far and wide resound with the long-drawn moan.
Turnus, humbled, his eyes and reaching with his right hand, begged as a suppliant: “I deserve it all. No mercy, please,” Turnus pleaded. “Seize your moment now. Or if some care for a parent’s grief can touch you still, I pray you—you had such a father in old Anchises—pity Daunus in his old age and send me back to my own people or, if you would prefer, send them my dead body stripped of life. Here, the victor and vanquished, I stretch my hands to you. So the men of Latium have seen me in defeat. Lavinia is your bride. Go no further down the road of hatred.”
This is a rewriting of the battle between Hector and Achilles, but in this battle, it is Hector who wins, and Achilles is basically begging for mercy. What's really interesting is that to beg for mercy, Turnus basically uses the words of Priam from the Iliad. Remember what Priam says to Achilles: "I've kissed your hand. Have mercy for me. Look at my face. Remember your father, Achilles. Remember your father, Peleus." The same exact words: "care for a parent's grief," and "I stretch my hands to you." So basically, Virgil is plagiarizing Homer, but he's plagiarizing in a way as to invert and subvert Homer.
At this point, Aeneas is drawn to pity because his great enemy, Turnus, has submitted himself before him. In his heart, he's like, "You know what? I've defeated him. He's been destroyed. He's lost face, he's lost credibility. I can let him go. I've won." And that's what he wants to do. He just wants to let him go. But this is the very ending of the Aeneid. The ending is surprising because for many scholars, they read this and they're like, "This is not an ending. This is too abrupt." They think Virgil was not able to finish the Aeneid. But what I'll show you is that you're reading it incorrectly if you do not believe this is the full ending.
Aeneas, ferocious in armor, stood there, still, shifting his gaze, and held his sword-arm back, holding himself back too, as Turnus’ words began to sway him more and more... when all at once he caught sight of the fateful sword-belt of Pallas swept over Turnus’ shoulder, gleaming with shining studs Aeneas knew by heart.
Pallas is the version of Patroclus. Remember how Patroclus died and that enraged Achilles? Well, Pallas is a friend of Aeneas who fell in battle to Turnus, and Turnus, to celebrate his victory over Pallas, stole the sword-belt of Pallas. Aeneas recognizes this.
Young Pallas, whom Turnus had overpowered, taken down with a wound, and now his shoulder flaunted his enemy’s battle-emblem like a trophy. Aeneas, soon as his eyes drank in that plunder, keepsake of his own savage grief, flaring up in fury, terrible in his rage, he cries: “Decked in the spoils you stripped from one I loved—escape my clutches? Never! Pallas strikes this blow, Pallas sacrifices you now, makes you pay the price with your own guilty blood!”
In the same breath, blazing with wrath, he plants his iron sword hilt-deep in his enemy’s heart. Turnus’ limbs went limp in the chill of death. His life-breath fled with a groan of outrage down to the shades below.
And that's it. This is the ending of the Aeneid. Again, scholars are confused by this. How could the epic end like this? It's a very long epic, 24 books, and it ends with the death of Turnus and nothing more. It's confusing because scholars and literary critics are taught to believe that a good book has an epiphany, a catharsis, and a resolution. Basically, a character recognizes himself and changes for the better. It's almost like a death and letting go of a past.
So scholars read this and are completely confused. Where is the epiphany? Where's the catharsis? Where's the resolution? The answer is: you're misreading the Aeneid. First and foremost, it is a work of political propaganda.
The True Epiphany: Becoming the Perfect Soldier
How has Aeneas changed as a person? The change is this. Previously, whenever Aeneas has a doubt or his emotions are changing, the gods had to intervene. Do you remember how Aeneas is back in Troy and he's witnessed the killing of his king, Priam? He's really angry, and then he sees Helen and wants to kill her because he understands that Helen is the cause of all the death and destruction in Troy. And then what happens? His mother, Venus, intervenes and says, "No, Aeneas, you stop. There's a mission for you. Go complete your mission." And then he's like, "Fine, mother. I'll go home."
When he goes home and sees his son, Iulus, he wants to return and fight the Greeks because he wants to protect his city. And then there's a sign from the gods: Iulus's hair is on fire. This tells Aeneas, "No, your son is destined for great things. You must fulfill the mission." Again, when Aeneas is with Dido, he just wants to stay with her and build up Carthage. And so Jupiter has to send a messenger, Mercury, to tell him, "No, Aeneas, go to Italy." Each time that Aeneas went off mission or had his own ideas, the gods had to intervene.
What makes this an epiphany, a catharsis, a resolution, is the fact that here, when Aeneas wants mercy—when in his heart he feels, "This is a pitiful man. It gives me no pleasure to kill him. It gives me no glory and honor to kill this pathetic man"—he recognizes, "No, I must kill him because it is a duty. It is the will of the gods."
Now he has become fully pious. And that is the epiphany. "I must abandon all pity. I must abandon all emotions. I must abandon my own soul if I am to serve the gods." He is now the perfect soldier.
That's why Virgil wrote the Aeneid. It is a piece of propaganda, a piece of brainwashing, of indoctrination, where you read it and you go on the same journey as Aeneas. Step by step, you let go of everything that makes you weak: your humanity, your desire to love someone—throw it out. Your pity, your sense of decency—get rid of it. And once you do, once you have cleansed yourself of all human emotions, then you can serve the gods completely. You are now fully pious, and as such, you can now complete your mission.
That's the power of the Aeneid. You may know what's happening, but as you memorize it—because back then, the way to educate yourself was just to memorize the poetry—you became Aeneas himself. You transformed yourself from someone who was a human to someone who is now basically a robot.