That Time The Romans Failed To Write A Propaganda Poem

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:01]September 21st, 19 BC.

[00:00:05]Our story starts in Bundesian, a Roman port city in southern Italy. The poet, Virgil, is on his deathbed. He's just returned from traveling in Greece, where he's been writing his 12book epic poem, The Emirate. It's the book that will finally give Rome its own Iliad and Odyssey. The founding story which tells of the ancestors of the Romans fleeing the ruins of Troy and sailing to Italy.

[00:00:30]It's Rome's greatest poem by Rome's greatest poet, almost complete with only a few lines left to finish. On the shores of Italy, in the city at the end of the famous road that leads to Rome, Virgil dies of fever. Legend has it that on his deathbed, Virgil gave his literary executives an extraordinary request.

[00:00:52]He told them to burn the manuscript.

[00:01:17]Let's be your ears.

[00:01:21]This is Virgil's Aniid. By the fact that we have it, it's obvious Virgil's friends didn't follow his request.

[00:01:28]Legend has it that the Emperor Augustus himself intervened and forbade the manuscript's burning. The poem lived up to all expectations.

[00:01:36]It was as elusive and complicated as any scholar could wish for, while also telling a thrilling tale. Epics often take a while to reach widespread recognition and acclaim, but almost from the moment of publication, the Anerid revolutionized Roman poetry. They started teaching it almost immediately.

[00:01:55]Virgil was Rome's greatest poet and the Anerid was their creation myth. For the Romans, the Anerid was like if the Bible had been written by Shakespeare straight after the World Wars. And Virgil's star never really dimmed. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Latin remained widely spoken by the church elite, >> which meant that he could be read everywhere, but not by everyone.

[00:02:16]>> In the words of Kenneth Clark, it was the international language of Europe, and so everyone who could read read Virgil. There was never really any rediscovery or re-evaluation of the Inid simply because there never really needed to be. It's been popular ever since it was published through till today. Well, sort of. Today, the doesn't seem that widely read or discussed. It's not topping any bestseller lists, and it often doesn't show up on lists of must-read classics, even ones with plenty of the Greek classics.

[00:02:50]I wanted to try and do an analysis of this, so I checked Good Readads. It's obviously not very objective, but that almost makes it better. It's a reflection of what random people are seeing and reading. At time of recording, a little over 7,000 people are currently reading the Aniad. The Odyssey, which is a comparable ancient epic, currently has 52,000 people reading it. Obviously, the Odyssey has a movie coming out soon. But even the Iliad has been logged by 44,000 people.

[00:03:18]And if you look at the alltime numbers, the Odyssey has 1.2 million reads, the Iliad half a million, and the near only 144,000. So, not everyone updates good readads. I mean, I don't, but it does back up my sense that the common reader is not that interested in the immate, which is strange because ancient Rome is very popular, more popular in general than ancient Greece, given how often people are allegedly thinking about it and the way that Roman stoic philosophy had its moment a few years ago. Well, if everyone loves Rome so much, why is Rome's favorite Roman book not getting more attention? My theory is that the Iniad's underappreciation is because people think it's Roman propaganda.

[00:03:59]Even if you love a culture, you're probably not that interested in reading its self-promotion.

[00:04:04]In this case, the Anerid is propaganda supporting the first Roman Emperor, Augustus, the guy who saved it from being burned.

[00:04:12]Most of the famous European epics, at least in the cases where we know anything about the author, were written by political exiles. Ovard was exiled by Augustus actually and also without finishing the last revision of his minimosis. Dante wrote the divine comedy in exile after his political party lost the fight for Florence and Milton who had been a prominent revolutionary in Cromwell's Commonwealth barely escaped with his life to compose Paradise Lost after the English monarchy was restored.

[00:04:40]If the epic is a form that tries to unify a culture, there's a certain romance to all these future culture heroes having been cast out from the polity.

[00:04:49]Virgil, on the other hand, was already the most celebrated poet in the imperial city and a personal friend of the emperor Augustus.

[00:04:57]He was also commissioned to write an epic by Augustus. And there sure is a lot in there that sounds a lot like propaganda.

[00:05:05]But is it? And if it is, can propaganda still be good art?

[00:05:17]Virgil was born in northern Italy in 70 BC. This was not a good time to be born.

[00:05:24]The Roman Republic was rumbling towards a violent collapse after which it will be reborn as the Roman Empire. This period of history is obviously too complicated to properly summarize. So, I'll just give you the hits so you can see what an absolute shitowing late republic was. The first thing to establish is that Romans didn't like kings. They'd overthrown the monarchy in 509 BC when they became a republic.

[00:05:50]There was a Senate representing the aristocracy and the wealthy and two annually elected heads of state called consils. This governmental structure was designed so that no one person could hold absolute power. But Romans were also obsessed with the glamour of the great heroic individual. It was a heavily honor-based culture and one of the great goals in life of a noble Roman was to somehow write yourself into the history books. Their favorite archetype was the statesman who would swoop in during a desperate situation, fix things, and then leave. One legendary figure, Catatus, seized control of Rome for 16 days during a war, led them to victory, then rescended leadership and returned to his plow. This was the Roman idea of a hero. The year Virgil is born, a new great man is elected console.

[00:06:39]Pompy. He's only 36, and though he's commanded armies, he's never held political office before. He swiftly becomes Rome's richest, most influential, and best beloved figure, which doesn't go down well with the Senate, who believe he holds too much power. Remember, Romans don't like kings.

[00:06:57]In 59 BC, a new console enters the villa, Julius Caesar. He's a talented writer and public speaker from a noble family called the Giuli. There are now two generational Roman egos and public office backed up by two of Rome's most powerful families. To keep everything stable, they briefly team up with a less heroic guy called Cassus and form the first triumphirate which is kind of like a political party, a way to share power.

[00:07:23]But despite their best efforts, Caesar and Pompy wind up in a violent, drawn out civil war against each other. Caesar crosses the rubric. Bumpy is assassinated in Egypt and the heroic victor is Julius Caesar. The expectation, of course, is that he'll abdicate. That's what a good Roman does, if only for the sake of their own legacy.

[00:07:43]But unfortunately, he declares himself dictator perpetu. Even more unfortunately, at least for the Senate, the Roman public adore him. Next thing you know, Caesar starts bestowing divine honors onto himself, which seems a lot like something a king would do. And so in 44 BC on the eyides of March, Caesar is assassinated in the Senate surrounded by friends who conspired to kill him.

[00:08:07]The oldest known postmortem in history reported that he had been stabbed 23 times. Casius and Brutus of Etu fame are the main conspirators and present themselves to the Roman people as liberators. But to their surprise, the Romans are not happy about Caesar being killed and the prospect of more civil war. and more civil war there is. So Pompy's dead, Caesar's dead. Brutus and Casius are on the run. Who's in charge?

[00:08:35]The current non-assinated console is Mark Anthony, friend of Caesars, who tries to restore peace. Then there's this new guy called Octavian. He's 19 and a tenuous relative of Julius Caesar.

[00:08:48]He's his great nephew, but he claims Caesar is his adoptive father. Even at this tinder age, Octaven is a master of propaganda and understands how important it is to keep the public sentiment on his side. Claiming he wants to avenge his adoptive father, he raises a private army and in 43 BC, he seizes Rome and claims consul. He and Anthony make a tentative alliance and form the second triumphirate with another guy called Lipus, who's kind of irrelevant. Don't worry about him. Meanwhile, Antony has fallen in love with Cleopatra and joins her in Egypt. and Octaven starts spreading invictive about Cleopatra.

[00:09:24]This is a cynical but clever move. The Roman public were exhausted by relentless imperial wars, a situation to which there are absolutely no parallels today. But by casting Cleopatra as an oriental witch who had Anthony under her spell, Octaven made his personal struggle with Antony seem like an existential battle between Rome and the barbarous strange East. With the public on his side, Octavian takes up arms against Antony in a long drawn out war which comes to a head at Actium. After Antony's forces are crushed, he and Cleopatra barely escape back to Egypt, where they take their own lives. This left young Octavian in 27 BC, ruler not just of Extrepublic in Rome, but of Egypt, too. Cleopatra was last in a three millennia line of pharaohs. As head of the new and improved Roman Empire, Octaven gave himself a new title, Augustus, meaning majestic or exalted in the divine sense. Rome had gone from a whirlpool of civil war to a time of peace by consolidating political power in the hands of one man.

[00:10:27]Imagine being a normal Roman during this time. One like Virgil, born just as everything started to go wrong, growing up with new wars every year and armies constantly marching on Rome. The poems that made him famous, the Eklogs and Georgix, were written as his society seemed to be crumbling around him. It's little wonder that the Romans accepted Augustus. And in the series of unsane Caesars that followed him as emperor, what they were really accepting was peace. Who cares what the boss is up to as long as he's not sending you and your children to die in foreign wars? And to make sure that the Roman people really got the message that the years of conflict hadn't been for nothing and that the peaceful reign of his august empire had been foretold since Rome's first founding. Octavian commissioned his friend Virgil, Rome's greatest poet, to write for Rome a founding epic.

[00:11:21]To understand Virgil's undertaking, we have to quickly look at the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient Greece had two founding epic poems, both written or recited or sung or compiled or edited.

[00:11:32]Let's not get into this now. Both written by the same semi- mythological author, Homer. The Iliad and Odyssey are oral poems, meaning that for the first few hundred years of their telling, they were sung by poets and were only written down centuries later. They're both part of the same much larger epic cycle, telling the story of how the United Greek tribes went to war against the city of Troy for 10 years. The Iliad takes place over about 50 days in the final year of the Trojan War, while the Greek's greatest warrior, Achilles, refuses to fight because he's been insulted by the king. The Odyssey takes place after the sack of Troy and follows the Greek warrior, Odysius's 10-year journey back to his home on the island of Ithaca. In the Iliad, there's an enemy soldier, a Trojan called Anias.

[00:12:17]His dad is a mortal called Anises, but his mom is the goddess of love, Aphroditi.

[00:12:23]He's rescued by the gods a couple of times. At one point, Aphroditi wraps him up in a cloud and whistles him away from battle. The Iliad is famous for lavishing a lot of empathy on the enemies, and Inias is no exception. He's portrayed as brave and honorable, even if his heroism is a bit undermined by constantly needing to be rescued by his mom. He does manage to pass the almost impossibly high bar Iliad sets by not dying in his first appearance on the page. Go Anias. Virgil takes the character of Anas and runs with it. The story of Anas probably predates even Homer, but Virgil gives it its most definitive telling. The Inid starts with the Trojans on a boat in the middle of a storm. The war is over. They've lost.

[00:13:05]Troy has been sacked and burned and only Anias and a few survivors remain. Worse, the goddess Juno has decided that she doesn't like the Trojans and is going to wage war on them personally since obviously they haven't suffered enough.

[00:13:19]Her husband, the Supreme God Jupiter, has other ideas. He wants the Trojans to make it to Italy, where they'll found a city which will lead to the founding of another city, which many generations later will lead to the founding of Rome.

[00:13:32]Despite Juno's best efforts to kill them, Anias and his men make it to Carthage and meet Queen Daido. Anias tells her his tragic backstory and Daido falls in love. This isn't by choice.

[00:13:44]Juno has conspired to make Daido fall in love with Anias in order to distract him from his divine mission. The god Mercury visits to give Anas a hurry up and Anias reluctantly breaks up with Daido.

[00:13:55]Furious and heartbroken, Daido kills herself while swearing vengeance on Anias's bloodline and descendants. I'm sure that will be important later. Anas continues on his travels. He visits the underworld to meet his father's ghost and is shown a vision of Rome's future, one of several in the book. When he and the Trojans finally arrive in Latium in Italy, the king, King Latinus, promises Inas his daughter Levvenia's hand in marriage. Unfortunately, Levvenia was already betrothed to a nobleman called Turnis, and Turnis doesn't take kindly to having his fiance stolen and declares war. Many such cases. The second half of the Anid chronicles the war between the Latins and the Trojans.

[00:14:35]Okay, so if this all takes place in Bronze Age times, how does Augustus feature? Where is the propaganda?

[00:14:43]Well, in Republican Rome, certain noble families would trace their lineage back to the gods. Mark Antony's family, for instance, claimed that Hercules was their ancestor. It's why Antony's often depicted with lions. Julius Caesar's family, the Jyn's Julia, trace their lineage back to the goddess Venus through, omg, Anias. So since Julius Caesar is Octavian's great nephew and more importantly his adoptive father, Anias is Augustus' great great great great greats about 100 mythical grandfather.

[00:15:13]On several occasions Anas is sure visions of Rome's future often hyperspaccific triumphs in Augustus' career. Here for instance is a description of Anas's shield. And here in the heart of the shield the bronze ships the battle of Acti. On one flank, Caesar Augustus leading Italy into battle. And opposing them comes Antony leading on the riches of the Orient, troops of every stripe. And in his retinue, Egypt and all the might of the east, and trailing in his wake, that outrage, that Egyptian wife.

[00:15:46]That's a lot of detail to see in one shield. Note how Augustus is contrasted with Antony and his troops of the Orient and his unnamed Egyptian wife. The most important war Mark Anthony lost wasn't act but the war of propaganda.

[00:16:01]Many such cases. So you can see why there's some hesitancy among modern readers to give the an Iliad is selling us on the superiority of the Greeks over the Trojans. But Homer also emphasizes the common humanity of all these poor soldiers.

[00:16:17]Dante spends the Inferno putting his political enemies through various forms of torture, but at the same time, he gives them more psychological complexity, more humanity than any author did for a few hundred years either side of him. Their sympathetic betrayals overcome their political agendas. This really is why we read them today. The Anerid, meanwhile, has a sense of Augustus breathing down your neck as you're reading. What's the value in something which was plainly written to be propaganda?

[00:16:45]Well, because it's good. I mean, it's amazing. In fact, I think a lot of people don't realize quite how great it is.

[00:16:57]The Anid is split into 12 books. Book four is by far the most famous. It's the love story of Daido and Anias, a tragedy of the gods meddling in human lives, ending with Anas sailing away to found Rome, leaving Daido to her death. Even if you can't get through the whole Iniid, I recommend just reading book four and then listening to Daido's lament from Pcel's opera. As with a lot of the Iniid, Daido's story parallels later history. Her city Carthage was famously a real life enemy of Rome. By Roman times, it was the Carthaginian Empire. From 246 to 164 BC, long before Virgil's time, the Roman Republic and the Carthaginian Empire fought a series of wars called the Punic Wars, which ended with the Romans sacking the city of Carthage and enslaving its population. This was another one of those key points on the road to Rome's empire, the defeat of their most significant territorial enemy. When Daido dies, Virgil has her curse the Romans and swear vengeance on their bloodlines, inventing a mythic origin point for the enmity between Rome and Carthage.

[00:18:01]But Daido isn't portrayed as a villain.

[00:18:04]In fact, she's a compassionate, intelligent, successful queen who won her empire through sheer ingenuity and is beloved by her people. Her love for Anias is inflicted on her by the jealous Juno, who uses her as a porn to distract the Roman from his mission. Her downfall feels unfair, and even the curse she calls down on Anias only happens after he abruptly and heartlessly abandons her. We know, of course, that Daido has to die. She's Queen of Carthage and can't be allowed to live in this jingoistically symbolic poem. Even so, this goes beyond just extending pity to an enemy as Homer does. Juno and the other gods are playing games with her.

[00:18:42]And even Anias is kind of no thoughts hit empty. Daido, perhaps the most human character in the story, is a victim not just of divine will, but divine capricciousness.

[00:18:53]It's not just sad, it's wrong.

[00:18:57]Compared to the beauty of book four, the rest of the Inad has its problems. And the main flaw is Inas. He's just not a very compelling hero. He suffers from boring main character syndrome. And the only times he's especially active is when he's joylessly carrying out the mission he's been told he needs to fulfill. Whenever he forgets his duty, he usually mopes or just hangs around and doesn't do anything. When we meet him halfway through book one, he's clinging to his ship in the middle of a storm, hoping he'll drown.

[00:19:27]The poem's glorious villain, Turnis, only appears in the second half. This is the guy who was betrothed to a woman called Levvenia, whose hand has now been promised to Anas. If Anias is a wet blanket, Turnis is a furnace of energy.

[00:19:40]He's often described with fire imagery, blazing with anger, torpedoing himself into the fray of battle, giving furious, rousing speeches. Virgil is always backshadowing to Homer, even as he's foreshadowing Augustus. And the war between Anias and Turnis is a clear parallel of the Iliad's fight between Achilles and the leader of the Trojans, Hector. Achilles spends most of the epic sulking because his honor has been insulted, while Hector is in the fray of fighting for the bulk of the epic. He's courageous and charismatic. So charismatic that a lot of readers like him more than Achilles, even though he's the enemy. This is true too of Turnis.

[00:20:18]In some ways, his association with Hector is what dooms him. He's a herriic hero in a Roman epic, reveling in warfare, while careful, prudent Anias exemplifies the glorious Roman attitude of trying very hard not to die. Turner strides onto the page in book seven and is the driving antagonistic force for the latter half of the epic, reveling extravagantly in warfare and slaughter.

[00:20:40]For his part, Anias seems glooily aware that the whole war is a waste of human life. So why does Virgil do this? He can clearly write charismatic characters, so why make Anas boring? Well, the Roman public, who were Virgil's contemporaries, had suffered through decades of some of the worst civil wars Rome had ever seen.

[00:20:59]They had seen what happens when two people who are willing to die in a blaze of charismatic glory face off against each other. Virgil was trying to construct a new kind of heroism for the imperial age, a more safe social hero whose main goal isn't just to kill as many people as possible and then die. He was trying to give Romans a kind of honor that wasn't built on bloodshed.

[00:21:21]To do this, he sets up a motif of fire.

[00:21:25]The epic starts with Troy being raised to the ground. The Trojans spend the epic fleeing their city in search of a new home. But symbolically, they're also fleeing fire, the blazing world of herriic wrath. Anytime anyone acts irrationally or against the will of heaven, they're described with fire imagery. Virgil has a word for this, furo, which can be translated as madness or rage or passion. The reason Turnis is the enemy is for the very reason he's most interesting, his fur, his internal fire. This is ultimately his tragic flaw. At the start of the poem, Inias is also making a lot of these fiery, irrational decisions. But by roundabouts books six, he's tamed his inner ribbon and has evolved into a good, dutiful servant of divine will. Again, Virgil has a word for this, Pas. It's a little like the English piety, although it's broader. It describes someone who is dutiful to the gods, to their family, their people, and in the case of Anias, to the Roman state. Furis might be more interesting that he's on the wrong side of Virgil's moralizing.

[00:22:32]So, it does make sense artistically that Anias is kind of boring. But why are Daido and Turner still so very sympathetic? A Virgil is meant to be propagandizing to us about the greatness of Rome. Why all this time spent lavishing the sympathy on characters who are stones in the wheels of the plot?

[00:22:51]I'm setting this up like there's an answer and there isn't. The question has divided classicists for a long time and has ultimately given the an edge in arguments about whether it's propaganda.

[00:23:05]If our pity for the enemy is so great that it undermines Anas's whole journey, then what does Virgil make? What are we to make of the enemies crushed under the heel of Rome? Perhaps dying to make way for a great and glorious empire gives meaning to Daido and Turnis' deaths. If that's the case, it's interesting that Virgil's characterization of the great and glorious divine mission is so dull.

[00:23:29]Those who stand against Rome are fiery individuals, the representatives of a world full of pagan charisma and personality.

[00:23:37]Those who stand for it are a largely faceless mass fighting in nameless silence behind Anias. To be an agent of the empire, you must rescend personal desire and be driven by the caprices of the gods. No wonder Anas is a wet piece of bread. In the Anid, having a zest for life is a dangerous condition.

[00:24:01]The ending of Virgil's epic is often assumed to be unfinished, but it does have enough of an ending that is spoilable. If you haven't read the epic and plan to, I'd personally recommend knowing the ending just so that you know what you're in for. But if you want to, skip ahead to this time code on screen.

[00:24:18]On a line by line level, the anid is very impressive. There's an efficiency of language that gives the poem a forcefulness paired with careful and frequent uses of double meanings which is hard to translate.

[00:24:30]It's at one at the same time simple and subtle, a difficult achievement in any language. The best example of this comes at the poem's closing lines.

[00:24:40]Anias and Tus find one another on the battlefields and prepare for a final showdown.

[00:24:46]Anias is grieving. His friend Palace has recently been killed in battle. He and Tis begin to fight and Anias, easily the superior warrior, quickly overcomes him.

[00:24:57]Realizing he's done for, Tannis begs to have his body returned to his father.

[00:25:02]Anias hesitates. He wants to spare Tannis. He knows, like us, that Turnis is fighting for the right reasons, and he's moved by the paos of Turnis' speech.

[00:25:13]But then he sees something. Turn is wearing Palace's bulk, the same one that was stripped and stolen from his body.

[00:25:21]In that moment, Anias realizes that Turnis not only killed Palace, but is wearing his belt as a spoil of war. This is typical herriic behavior, showing off your victory. But here in this Roman epic, herriic heroes are the enemy.

[00:25:38]Flaring up in a fury, blazing with wrath, Anias buries his blade in Turnis' chest. The end.

[00:25:49]What to make of this? We've seen this very dull man decline from a mildly more interesting, fiery version of himself to a passive vessel of Roman manifest destiny. And suddenly in the last lines, he kills someone for personal reasons and a blazing rage. Most people finish the inid feeling a bit stunned. Surely the epic is unfinished. Is this why Virgil wanted it burned?

[00:26:13]But a closer look at Virgil's language suggests that this ending is thematically cohesive. The verb bury in Latin is concer which has the double meaning of to bury and to found or build. Thus in burying his sword in turn, Anias is carrying out the act of symbolically founding Rome, killing the last person who stands between himself and his destiny. Before the murder, Anias has a slightly strange line. By this wound which I now give, it is palace that makes sacrifice of you.

[00:26:46]Sacrifice is an act done to show one's pas to the gods. Human sacrifice wasn't invogue even as far back as Anas's time, but the act of offering Turnis as a sacrifice suggests Anias has the gods in mind while doing it. Here, Virgil gives us our most transcendent vision of Roman exceptionalism. Herriic values bowing to Roman ends. evil's capacity to destroy itself. In the closing lines of the epic, Fura works in service of Pas.

[00:27:21]So, it seems settled just as Rome has absorbed all these other cultures and peoples in the empire. So, Virgil has found a place for un Roman values in the imperial narrative as foder for Roman glory. Daido and Tannis and all they stand for had to be sacrificed to the Augustine peace. Igno Furo had to sacrifice itself for noble Roman Pietas.

[00:27:43]But something about this resolution seems distinctly unpropagandistic.

[00:27:49]To settle this question, I want to borrow an idea from one of the first books to investigate propaganda as a whole rather than individual instances of it. In propaganda, the French scholar Jacqu Ul was trying to understand how the postwar media environment was similar to or different from the vast propaganda engines that the Allies and the Axis constructed. One of his basic conclusions was that the aim of propaganda is not, as you might think, to get you to believe something.

[00:28:17]Instead, propaganda gets you to do something or alternatively to not do something. Yes, manipulating belief is the easiest way to get someone to do something. This is why propaganda is often thought about as if it were a kind of subliminal messaging. But you don't really care why someone is voting for you or fighting for you or allowing you to rule them as long as they do it. Take a historical example of propaganda. The dropping of leaflets during the First World War trying to get enemy soldiers to surrender. What you as a propagandist care about is that their soldiers lay down arms. It's irrelevant to you whether you do this by convincing them that they can't win, by persuading them that you're in the right, by convincing them that their leaders are selling them out, or by telling them that they'll have better conditions in your prisons than in their trenches. The target is not their beliefs, but their actions.

[00:29:09]Ul doesn't distinguish between propaganda and advertising for the same reason. In each case, what matters is getting someone to do something. If it advertising gets people to buy the product, you advertise idily. If traditional values sell it, you advertise traditional values. No coincidence that the biggest consulting firms both in Illoo's time and today work for celebrities for product marketing and for presidential campaigns alike. Edelman, Bersam, and other names you haven't heard of, but who are the reason you've heard of the names you have? In all cases, propagandists don't care what you believe, only that you act and react in a certain way. An anti- capitalist book makes as much profit as a pro- capitalist one. A vote for someone to strengthen the government is as valid as a vote for someone to tear it apart. A video essay critiquing the attention economy steals just as much of your time as one defending it. This is the signature of propaganda. Convincing people to a given action through any available means up to and including self-critique.

[00:30:13]This is what distinguishes it from scholarship on the factual side or from literature on the imaginative side.

[00:30:19]Neither of which, at least in theory, cares what you do. For propaganda to work on you, you have to think your choosing of your own free will.

[00:30:30]Propaganda has to convince you of something. But it also has to do it without making you suspicious.

[00:30:36]We're a contrarian punch us humans. If something is too obviously a piece of manipulation, we're much less likely to take it seriously. If we think a beloved Roman epic poem is propaganda, we'll probably leave it on the shelf. So, the clever propagandist, and they have been a few cleverer than Augustus, is stuck in a strange bind. In order to win your trust, it is helpful to make a show of being self-aware.

[00:31:00]Today, we've reached a point where the best way for an ad to stand out from a crowd is to actively call itself out as an ad. Yeah, I'm propaganda. But hey, look, you can trust me because I'm telling you that I'm propaganda. I'm not trying to trick you. Irony is the bread and butter of contemporary propaganda because it makes the whole thing seem a bit less like manipulation.

[00:31:19]But while this works in the short term, it gradually saps the effectiveness of your propaganda, your advertising. Your faux honesty wins you customers. But as it starts to become the new normal, you need more and more disavowed to track as trustworthy. Ads start to be stupid extended jokes, usually about something completely unrelated to the product.

[00:31:40]Look how little we're manipulating you.

[00:31:42]We barely even want you to buy our product. This is just a humorous reminder that we exist. And if you happen to buy our product, it's just your excellent taste as a consumer.

[00:31:51]>> Listen, mister. Let me tell you what I really think. I use it, BUT IT TASTES CRUMMY. Listerine's got the taste people hate twice a day.

[00:31:59]>> And then something strange happens.

[00:32:01]Having resorted to increasingly tenuous links between the thing being sold and the thing being sold, the only step left is not making propaganda. The most effective way to convince someone that you're not trying to convince them is to stop trying to convince them. The only remnant of your influence becomes the fact that you've sponsored the work's creation. And you prove how trustworthy you are, not by ironically pointing out your own involvement in the text, but by disappearing from the text entirely by not even presenting things from your quote unquote side. For example, a Roman emperor sponsoring a work that presents a positive picture of the things he has vanquished. By keeping themselves out of the message of the artwork, the ruler makes the artwork itself a jewel and the imperial crown. It is no longer something they create themselves.

[00:32:51]Instead, it is a treasure that they can lay claim to. This is why the church sponsored so much pagan art after the reformation. This is why the Augustine Empire sponsored a poem praising the humanity it had conquered. It is a testament to their good taste, their neutrality, and implicitly their fitness to rule. Look, it seems to say, we won't even try to manipulate you. This then is how the Anyad's propaganda works.

[00:33:17]Certainly, it fulfills what Augustus wanted. Acceptance of a new empire from a populace very attached to the idea of a republic. The method in this case is a triumphant literary projection of Rome's imperial power, the irresistibility of history. But it also presents the costs of that empire, the good things that were lost, even the way in which an empire of Pietas could only be founded by the application of Furo. Virgil, a half-hearted cheerleader for Rome at best, turns out, for that exact reason to be its greatest propagandist. In airing the dirty laundry of imperial peace, that it is founded on destruction, that the chaos it destroys might be more worthy than the peace it institutes. He is undercutting Augustus' narrative. But in presenting this tragic vision of Rome's birth, he is investing it with the one thing that straightforward propaganda cannot. A sense of truth. An empire built on destiny and force is one thing. An empire built on these things and honest enough to critique itself, condemn itself even in its own propaganda. Well, isn't that the system you want? What more could you ask for? A version of the Aner that did not have the sense of truth would hardly be worth reading today. Even Virgil's gorgeous language wouldn't be able to enliven a full epics worth of what today are considered the boring bits. But by infusing manifest destiny with a sense of loss, a sense of cost, a sense of the difficult reconciliation of opposites, Virgil was able to write a work that would preserve the Augustine image of Roman destiny throughout the next two millennia.

[00:34:56]But once you reach this point, is it even propaganda? Virgil is not straightforwardly advertising a certain belief or action. Instead, he's giving us irony in the literary sense of the word. Today, irony means smirkingly saying one thing while implying another.

[00:35:14]But fundamentally, irony is just a disconnection between the words you're saying and what you're communicating.

[00:35:20]You can use this for rhetorical effect, like an ad trying to convince you it's not an ad. But the deeper sense of irony, the deeper use of irony is to lay out irreconcilable opposites. You say two things and you admit they're both true, even if they can't both be true.

[00:35:37]This, of course, is reflective of the way we live in the world. To capture all the ambiguities and contradictions of life, you have to allow in a certain amount of our human confusion. And this confusion does not genuinely spur one to take a definitive action. This is the confusion propaganda tries to cut through with false clarity so that you do something.

[00:36:01]So if the Aniid is propaganda, if it wants you to do something, the question ought to be asked, whose propaganda was it? Two millennia later, it seems like Virgil and not Augustus was the one who defined what the empire stood for. In some sense, Virgil defined what Rome meant. even retelling the historical fact of Octavian's career. It is Virgil's conflicted vision of violent virtue that draws us in that makes the story resonate today. To be sure, some historians study the period to work out how empires form. But most of us study it for the cast of characters, the twists and turns, the glory and disgrace, the furer, the patas. In turning over the narrative of the empire to a great poet, the emperor tied his name to something that would outlast him. But he also witted Rome to a dream that was not of his own making.

[00:36:52]So perhaps the triumph of the Anerid is that it is both a piece of propaganda and not a piece of propaganda. It wants to convince you to submit to Rome because peace is good and it wants you to escape its influence because freedom is good. It wants you to believe the story it tells and it wants you to question it. The light of this imaginative freedom may reflect well on Augustus, but then again, it may reflect badly. So much of the most ambitious art in history, the art that requires a lot of time and resources to make, has been made by artists commissioned to serve political power. But temporal power fades and the commissioning ruler becomes a footnote, a detail in the history of the artwork. The work outlives the narrative because the work was allowed to live outside the narrative altogether.

[00:37:43]The reason we read Virgil today isn't because he was a propagandist even though propaganda is always part of what we're reading. I would argue that we should read the Anered precisely for this tension, the ideological tussle underneath the gleaming golden surface of Virgil's imperial verse. The ultimate irony of Virgil's work, the ultimate irony that it grapples with, is that it simultaneously is and is not propaganda.

[00:38:09]Perhaps no other great work is so saturated with sincere imperial rhetoric, and yet at the same time so opposed to its own empire. The greatest monument to Roman civilization is also the greatest monument to its barbarism.

[00:38:24]My favorite proof of Virgil's all embracing irony is the poem's use in the ancient form of divination called biblommancy.

[00:38:32]Literally book divination. You take a sacred book, fan the pages with your eyes closed, and place your finger on a random line. If you interpret the line correctly, it tells you something about your future in the same manner as interpreting tarot cards or the lines on your palm.

[00:38:48]Biblomanscy is commonly done with the Bible, but it's also popular to use the Anid. So popular in fact that the practice has its own name, the sort of vigil. The late Roman Emperor Claudius II placed his finger on a line which read while the third summer saw his Latian reign. He interpreted this as an omen that he would only rule for three more years. In fact, he only ruled for two. He consulted the Anid as to whether his brother Quintillus should be made joint emperor and drew a line reading fate but showed this man unto the lands.

[00:39:21]Quintilus was made joint emperor and 17 days later he was dead and buried. Of all the books to be used as oracles, the anerid fits thematically. Fate hangs heavy over its characters, cogs in the machinery of a divine mission of which they're only partly aware. And on a line by line level, the inerid is meticulously composed. So that no matter what line you point to, it's some self-contained gem of meaning. But none of this would matter if it was only propaganda. If propaganda is telling you to do one thing, you can't use it for divination. You already know what it wants you to do. It's only Virgil's mixed feelings, the ironies that he weaves in and out of the story that allow the book to be interpreted in different ways. And the Yianid is even more mysterious than this. Virgil was writing in the first truly intertextual period when libraries and translations out of Greek had changed the way poetry was being written. The inid was for an educated Roman audience schooled on a curriculum of classical poetry. Many lines of the poems are illusions to works we no longer have. It's like a Wikipedia page with a million dead links. The intended reader of the no longer exists and many of those clever illusions are lost to history.

[00:40:40]The text survives, but it isn't intact.

[00:40:43]The people for which it was written, the people whom it was trying to propagandize no longer exist. The epic and its journey in reaching us tell the same story. The ironies of destruction, fire, fate. Virgil himself never got to see if his work served as propaganda or not. At the time of his death, he supposedly called for the poem to be burned. Though we don't know exactly why, our best guess is it was because it didn't meet his politic standards due to some lines still being unfinished and not for any lastminute qualms about it being propaganda. Certainly, what he saw as a lack of polish hasn't hindered its reputation over centuries. Unlike its status as propaganda, the dramatic story of Virgil's ignored deathbed request as part of the poem's own story.

[00:41:31]The inad survived the fire and furo that claimed its most interesting characters.

[00:41:36]Unlike those characters, it arrives to us strange, hard to categorize, not always easy to like, and often misinterpreted.

[00:41:45]The 911 memorial center bears a huge quote from the emir on one wall. No day shall erase you from the memory of time.

[00:41:55]In context, the line follows a setpiece where two children soldiers attack and slaughter a camp of sleeping enemies and are in turn caught and killed by a returning cavalry troop. The whole episode is a brutal bloodbath in which there are no heroes. With this line, Virgil comments serenely on the enduring power of his own writing. writing that has not only outlived the empire it was written for, but two millennia later continues to undercut Imperial monumentality with its sad irony disguised as propaganda.

[00:42:29]I don't know. I think it's pretty good.

[00:42:31]I think everyone should log it on good readads and try and knock the Odyssey off its pedestal.