How Confessions drew on The Aeneid
A documented line of influence: Augustine of Hippo demonstrably engaged Virgil’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Aeneid
Virgil · 19 BCE
Ancient RomeThe influenced
Confessions
Augustine of Hippo · c. 398
Ancient RomeRelevance
8/10
On Confessions’s page
- Behind the Confessions is a Roman boy crying over the death of Dido — Augustine quotes the Aeneid he was forced to memorize
- Those schoolboy tears for Virgil's heroine become the hinge of his self-critique: how can a man grieve fiction and stay dry-eyed over his own soul?
- Reading the Aeneid first lets you feel the pull Augustine is confessing — and judging
On The Aeneid’s page
- Virgil was schoolroom scripture in the late Roman world — Augustine was made to learn the Aeneid by heart, and Confessions never forgets it
- He famously wept over the death of Dido as a boy, and decades later turns that memory into evidence against himself
- The Aeneid becomes Augustine's example of love misdirected: tears for a fiction, none for his own soul