"The Tears of Things": Suffering for a Reason in Virgil's Aeneid

Virgil’s epic poem ‘Aeneid’ suggests that from tragedy, a new, significant future may emerge

[This article originally appeared on The Epoch Times.]

We are often compelled to ask why tragedy strikes. Why is reality such that pain and suffering come to the innocent? Why are there, in Virgil’s famous phrase, “the tears of things” in our world—“lacrimae rerum”? These words are perhaps the most mysterious, evocative, and meaningful in all of Latin poetry.

They are the words of the Trojan hero and forefather of the Romans, Aeneas, as he marvels over murals depicting the fall of his home city, Troy. 

The full quotation in Robert Fagles’s translation of “The Aeneid“ runs like this: “‘Oh, Achates,’/ he cried, ‘is there anywhere, any place on earth/ not filled with our ordeals? ... even here, the world is a world of tears/ and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.’”

The lament rises from the strained chest of a man who has suffered much. Aeneas experienced the cataclysmic fall of Troy to the Greeks, buildings flaming up in the darkness of night and falling to rubble in concussive cacophony, panicked city-dwellers scrambling desperately to escape as the Greeks ravage the city after 10 years of besieging it.

“The city begins to reel with cries of grief,/ louder, stronger ... the clash of arms rings clearer, horror on the attack.” In the chaotic scene, masterfully narrated by Virgil, Aeneas attempts to lead his family to safety, holding his son by the hand and carrying his aged father on his back. But in the gloom, smoke, and glaring red eyes of flame, he loses his wife, Creusa, and she is killed.

Aeneas becomes the leader of a group of Trojan refugees, the survivors of the siege, who are now homeless and adrift. They’re a band of survivors carrying on after the end of the world—for the fall of Troy, at least in the eyes of our ancestors, was a true apocalypse. Western civilization begins, in some sense, with an ending. It is Aeneas’s vocation to turn that ending into a new beginning, through founding what will one day become the Roman empire.

The suffering doesn’t end for Aeneas and his Trojans after the collapse of their beloved city and the passing away of their old lives. Aeneas and his followers embark on a difficult, lengthy, and circuitous journey around the Mediterranean in search of a new home. There’s plenty of heartbreak along the way for Aeneas—the loss of his father, separation from a woman he comes to love, storms at sea, a journey to the underworld, and encounters with monsters such as the Cyclops.

Well might the hero weep and speak of the “tears of things” (or this “world of tears” as Fagles translates it)—though it’s an odd phrase, when you consider it. At first glance, we might expect it to be “the tears for things.” After all, Aeneas is the one weeping, and he’s weeping for the sufferings and losses he’s endured. But no, Virgil does not write “for” but rather “of,” and it is that unexpected preposition that makes the line so fascinating and poignant, for it touches an existential mystery.

A Generational Grief

We do not merely grieve over things; there is a quality of sadness in the world itself, not just in our emotions. It is as though the world sorrows over some enigmatic, long-ago grief that continues to play out in humanity’s failures, disappointments, mishaps, and losses. As literature professor Dennis Quinn writes in his book “Iris Exiled: A Synoptic History of Wonder,” “The ’lacrimae rerum' [tears of things] are an expression of the sadness and compassion that abide in things, in the very stuff of nature.” Such sorrow is weaved into the fabric of being, even into the natural world itself.

Mr. Quinn explains this idea further:

“[Aeneas] has seen at a very early age what all reflective adults see some time or other—that life really cannot be managed, try as we will. It ought to be manageable: we seem to know what we want and need to be happy, and we seem to have the means to achieve it, but it does not work. There is a flaw somewhere in things.”

Anyone who has experienced disappointment, loss, the reality of evil, the exquisite fragility of life, or its propensity to go in unexpected directions, knows how true Mr. Quinn’s words are. But Mr. Quinn—and Virgil—are far from hopeless about this reality.

Mr. Quinn continues: “This is not the tragic view, however; there is no idea of a malign fate, but, to the contrary, the idea of a benign destiny. ... We really do not know what we want or what is good for us. It may be that the worst things—the loss of the best things, the loss of everything—are for the best. Had not Troy fallen, there could have been no Rome.“

Here, Mr. Quinn raises a key point about the poetry of Virgil and how it differs from that of Homer: Heartbreaking and unaccountable though they may be, Virgil’s “tears of things” are not, ultimately, despairing. They are part of a larger, even more mysterious design to the workings of the cosmos.

There is a high and not unhopeful purpose to all that we undergo, as Aeneas learns by the end. “In [Aeneas] is the destiny of Rome and through it of the whole world,” writes Mr. Quinn. “To Dido he says simply ’Non sponte sequor’: I am not my own man. I do not follow my own path. ... There is a mingling of astonishment and understanding in [his words], resignation and regret.”

From the Roman poet’s perspective, the founding of Rome was a magnificent moment, a change in history for the better, the bringing of a golden age, and it is Aeneas’s resignation to his destiny that makes this possible.

Clear Purpose Provides Meaning

Aeneas comes to view himself as a man with a vocation, a destiny, in a way that Homer’s Achilles or Odysseus never could. In his “Preface to Paradise Lost,” C.S. Lewis distinguishes between what he calls the primary epic of Homer and the secondary epic of Virgil (secondary in terms of sequence, not quality). Homer’s heroes and their deeds do not fit into some larger plan and purpose of history; they are mere flashes of brightness, beautiful with a terrible beauty, against the dark and tumultuous background of the inscrutable flux of time, driving toward nothing.

Lewis comments: “Before any event can have that significance, history must have some degree of pattern, some design. The mere endless up and down, the constant aimless alternations of glory and misery, which make up the terrible phenomenon called a Heroic Age [of Homer], admit no such design. ... Heroism and tragedy there are in plenty, therefore good stories in plenty; but no ‘large design that brings the world out of the good to ill.’”

Virgil, the Roman heir of Homer, on the other hand, offers something different. Aeneas comes to understand that he has some special work to do that will bring about a greater good for the entire world. There is a plan in place, obscure though it may be to the Roman’s limited human intelligence, but he comes to trust in it.

“These men [in the ’Aeneid’] are not fighting for their own hand like Homeric heroes; they are men with a vocation, men on whom a burden is laid,” writes Lewis. From Virgil’s perspective, something of incomparable greatness is afoot in Aeneas’s story, something of world-historic significance. Thus, the suffering and the tears are not for nothing.

Despite Sorrow, We Hope

As all great poetry does, Virgil’s verses raise our gaze to the higher things, above the dross that blinds us in our everyday lives. The “Aeneid” is the story of a man, but it is also the story of a great nation, the story of humanity, and the story of each of us individually. Lewis writes, “In making his one legend symbolical of the destiny of Rome, he has ... symbolized the destiny of Man.”

The poem is directed to all of humanity. Through Aeneas, Virgil says to us: “My comrades, hardly strangers to pain before now,/ we all have weathered worse. Some god will grant us/ an end to this as well.” The stoic Roman, faithful to his duty, admonishes us to hold fast in hard times. There is more to our lives than we can, perhaps, understand at this point, and the “lacrimae rerum,” the lament at the heart of the world, will not, perhaps, be its final song.