How does the Aeneid support Augustan Empire and Authority

There are so many books and articles written about Vergil and Augustan Nationalism, but I'll recycle a (brief) post I made earlier.

At its heart the Aeneid is a poignant, tragic epic about nation-building.

Aeneas doesn't get a "happily-ever-after" after his trials and tribulations, like Hercules who achieves apotheosis. This entire epic carries strong tones of tragedy. Aeneas does not get to go home, like Odysseus. His wife is dead. His father is dead. His Carthaginian lover -- whom he did love, make no mistake -- is dead. The very first thing he says when we see him in book 1 is:

"o terque quaterque beati, / quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub moenibus altis / contigit oppetere! o Danaum fortissime gentis / Tydide! mene Iliacis occumbere campis / non potuisse tuaque animam hanc effundere dextra, / saeuus ubi Aeacidae telo iacet Hector, ubi ingens / Sarpedon, ubi tot Simois correpta sub undis / scuta uirum galeasque et fortia corpora uoluit!" (Ver. Aen. 1.94-101).

"Three and four times blessed were those who happened to perish before the faces of their fathers beneath the high walls of Troy! O Diomedes, strongest of the Greeks! Alas that I could not meet my death on the plains of Ilium and give up my life by your right hand, where fierce Hector, slain by the sword of Achilles, lies, where the sprawling Sarpedon, where Simois rolls and sweeps so many shields, helmets and brave bodies of men beneath its waves!"

Those are some heartbreaking opening lines from our hero. Not really the type of words to inspire, for Aeneas is not the inspiring hero of the Homeric epic. He is in no way as lustrous as Achilles or as cunning as Odysseus. Indeed the ideal Roman epic hero -- which Aeneas is -- is coloured with restraint, his virtus tempered in a mien very different from the Greek arete. Time and time again we see Aeneas lamenting his fate and those of his people. But what he does is endure. He is a dutiful man, loyal to a fault to gods, country and family. Where others would waver, he pushes through. Not for himself. Never for himself.

This outstanding trait of Aeneas, this repeated piety, the restrained virtus, is the reason behind Aeneas' eponymity. The loss of his people in the previous war is more a symbol of rebirth than of pessimism, carried on Aeneas' shoulders to a new land and a new life, a journey rife with tragedy but theirs all the same. Even at the end, when Aeneas plants his sword into Turnus' chest, the use of the word condere ("to found" e.g. a city) is explicit. J.W. Hunt says on the subject, "Before the city can be built, the sword is buried in the heart of its opponent: building and burial are curiously fused in the closing scene" (Forms of Glory, 5). This symbol of rebirth, this strange bougonia -- the proliferation of life in the very body of death -- is instrumental to the nation-building focus of the Aeneid.

Later in book 1, Aeneas sees the Tyrians eagerly constructing their city and likened to bees (Ver. Aen. 1.418 - 1.439), juxtaposed just afterwards by the temple in Carthage carved with a frieze of the fall of Troy (Ver. Aen. 1.464-1.493). He is at once in awe and torn with sorrow. Here in the same place is a city such as the one he wishes for his people, as well as the reminder that Troy is rubble. Troy is the bloated corpse and the Carthaginians are the bees brimming with industry.

So too the Roman race, who were destined to rise, to endure, to forge for themselves a new legacy, a new identity, a new nation.

(PS: if you want to use book 6 for your prompt, take a closer look at Anchises pointing out to Aeneas all the great people who are to come. Vergil takes contemporary figures and plonks them right into the text -- like Marcellus. It would also be a good paper to compare a bougonia to the "founding by sword" and that sort of imagery -- life from the body of death, life waiting to spring forth from the Underworld. That sort of thing).