After Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Virgil’s Aeneid is the ancient work most illuminating for an America wrestling with the tragic costs and contradictions of political idealism and global empire. When Virgil died in 19 B.C., leaving his epic of Rome’s founding by the Trojan exile Aeneas nearly complete, Rome had finally resolved its own bloody conflict between an agrarian republicanism and the vast empire that it had gained almost by accident—“an achievement which was without parallel in human history,” as the Greek historian Polybius wrote. Yet that achievement was purchased at the price of brutal civil wars, proscriptions, riots, moral corruption, and the demise of the Roman Republic that for half a millennium had nursed the remarkable men who had made an obscure city-state master of a world now to be ruled by civilization and law rather than by force.

This tragic conjunction of successful idealism and bloody brutality is Virgil’s theme, one he works out in the context of a larger philosophical issue: the mysterious, intimate interplay of order with chaos, and the troubling dependence of our highest idealism on passion and violence, the same ideas he developed in his earlier masterpiece the Georgics. The political order of Rome, based on law, consensual government, and public virtue, brings the benefits of a higher civilization to the peoples brought under Roman rule, and hence is superior to rule by elites who monopolize resources and power in order to pursue their private ambitions and