Martin Gramling:
The Aeneid, not the Odyssey, is surely the American classical epic: a well-funded, highly anticipated blockbuster, with a screenwriter hand-picked by the emperor himself; self-conscious, wholesome propaganda wrapped in delicious popular entertainment, designed to unify, enculturate, and civilize a vulgar but cosmopolitan hegemon at the dawn of its imperial age. Like so much popular American art, the Aeneid is a derivative but transgressive sequel. It has all the best bits from Homer, but inverts the good guys and the bad. That hollow horse was a dirty trick—we all believe that now, don’t we? Surely, the Trojans should inherit the earth.
And compared to Virgil, doesn’t Homer seem a little . . . European? Agamemnon and Achilles lounge dyspeptically on the beach, prissily arguing over honor and status and women—a continental scene, worthy of a bosquet at Versailles. Odysseus, that attractive rogue, that man of splendid wickedness, traps his enemies and reminds his exotic paramour, night after night, how virtuous his wife is—an English Guards officer; like James Bond but the son of an earl.
But Aeneas is an American hero. He does not seek his irrecoverable home, or pine for the family he left behind; he carries home with him—his boy at his knees, his father on his very back, and his wife conveniently dead—forward toward his heaven-ordained dominion. His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono; imperium sine fine dedi: “On them I set no limits in space or time; I give them empire without end.” No limits! That’s what a properly American god would say.