Is This the End of the Aeneid?

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2025

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's time to talk about the shocking, the dramatic, the THRILLING and also, the kind of confusing end of Virgil's Aeneid. What a journey it's been! The story is never truly over, but as we leave Aeneas behind we have to ask--did Virgil mean for it to end this way? With Turnus' blood spilled ruthlessly on the ground and after that, the dark? Some say no--this is an incomplete ending that would have horrified the Emperor Augustus. I say yes--and Augustus would have been delighted. What do you say?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is it, guys. It's been a long time coming. It's been a heck of a journey. But this is finally the end of the Aeneid.
0:11.2	Or is it?
0:17.0	Okay. This is going to be our last episode on Virgil's Aeneid. What a delight it has been to go through this poem with you. I feel like I've rediscovered it myself. I said when we started out that I loved this poem in high school.
0:38.3	It was one of the first things I ever read in the original Latin.
0:41.3	It just swept me away and I was so passionately involved in it.
0:47.3	And then as I went to grad school, I became more of what they call a Hellenist.
0:51.3	That is, I was working on more Greek subjects, and I just fell more and more
0:55.4	deeply in love with Homer, and I sort of got seduced by the old narrative that Homer was the
1:01.7	truly great epic poet, and Virgil was just kind of copying down his notes. And I basically left
1:09.2	Virgil behind. So coming back to Virgil in this way and re-appreciating and rediscovering how magnificent
1:16.1	this poem is, what a sublime work of art, what a carefully crafted work of art and commentary
1:21.3	on the specific moment of Augustine Rome, all of that has been just a joy to me to rediscover, and I hope you've
1:29.7	enjoyed it too and gotten something out of this as well. But all good things must come to an end.
1:35.4	So we will be concluding our series on the Aeneid today, but the big question is still going to be,
1:44.0	are we concluding the Aeneid as it was meant to be
1:47.5	concluded? Or did Virgil die before he could finish the story? Does this thing cut off so
1:53.2	abruptly that we have to conclude Virgil meant for there to be something more? We do know that
1:58.2	he left the poem unfinished. And this is a very weird, unsettling ending to this war between the Ritulians and the Trojans that will ultimately cinch the victory for Aeneas and for the future of Rome.
2:14.0	Last time we left it in a bit of a cliffhanger moment and we weren't sure what was going to happen.
2:19.6	Now we are going to find out that in fact, Aeneas is going to be victorious, but we're still going to be left with a little bit of a cliffhanger feeling.
2:29.4	And so one of the things that people have been debating for a long, long time is whether the poem was
2:35.1	supposed to end this way. And it gets folded up into the more modern debate about whether
	...

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