(see entire post series on Virgil's Aeneid here)
Be with me, Muse of all Desire, Erato
While I call up the kings, the early times...
Immortal one, bring all in memory to the singer's mind
For I must tell of wars to chill the blood...
A greater history opens before my eyes,
A greater task awaits me.
VII.47
Virgil invokes a new Muse at the beginning of book VII. This new invocation serves to let us know that there will be a new direction in the poem. There is a shift in the poet's task, and in the tasks of Aeneas as well. Remember that by the end of book VI (the underworld) Virgil has given us a vision of the ideal of Rome as the eternal city: to rule the world by rational principle of law. This was the fate revealed to Aeneas in his journey to the underworld.
Now Virgil is faced with a "greater task". Why exactly is the bloody history of combat and kingship greater than all that has come before this point in the Aeneid? Well, to borrow from Christian terminology, it is the problem of the "word made flesh". It is a greater task for Aeneas to take the idea of Rome and make it a reality in time and space. This is why he needs to invoke a new muse, and this is the greater task ahead of him. This particular problem is one of the great difficulties of ancient thought. How can Plato take the ideals of the philosopher king and make them a reality in the Republic, in the actual lives of citizens? Of course, Plato tells us that his Republic will fall - the ideal will not always be reflected in the events of time and space, in the actual history. What Virgil is attempting is a vision of a city which can be truly everlasting: a city in which the ideal (fate - fatum) is worked out in the practical affairs (fortune - fortuna). If those two principles can be wedded, then there would be no reason why Rome should not continue forever. The ideal and the practical must meet together. This is the greater task. To have either side without the other is inadequate, as all of us see in our own contemporary experience. An ideal which can never find flesh in the world, unconnected to actual events and human history, will be impotent. It will remain unconnected from our lives. On the other side, mere "activity" is insufficient, without the divine destiny or fate to guide it. It will be unstable, unsustainable, and will eventually just return to a chaos of "doing things" without knowing why. Human activity must be guided by the Divine; only then will it have eternal meaning. And so in this second half of the poem, Virgil wishes to give us his vision of how these two sides can be united.
There are many introductions in book VII. We get a cast of characters for the second half of the Aeneid. We meet Turnus, Latinus, Lavinia, and a few more beside. Juno (represting fortuna as opposed to fate) pops in again.I will look more closely at each one of these in turn. But for now, the stage is being set for the action of the rest of the poem.
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