War and Tragedy and the Fate of the Spoken: Virgil’s Secularization of Prophecy

The Aeneid, considered as a prophetic poem delivering divine revelation, changes radically in its latter half, which is devoted largely to the war of conquest. Revelation here comes no longer in visions sent from heaven; the awesome revelatory power of the poem is invested instead in dislocations, such as glaring contradictions of generally accepted ethics and ideals that are made tragically manifest in the course of history and painfully registered upon the human heart. This may seem to entail the abandonment of prophecy, but it can also be understood as a transformation and secularization of it. The poem continues to open preternatural insight into the mysterious mobiles of human action and historical events in a way that is continuous with its prophetic visions and yet undermines all attempts at rational control and comprehension of such revelations.