The Homeric Doctrine

Check out Brad DeLong and Mark Kleiman's discussion regarding which Greek hero makes the best liberal role model. I'd say that Kleiman's criticisms of Odysseus's liberal ideological purity would make an excellent launch for a case defending Aeneas, if we're able to nominate from epics outside the Greek. (Recognizing, of course, that Virgil's sociopolitical era was far closer to ours in time and resemblance than Homer's.) Virgil's Turnus, Aeneas's Etruscan enemy, is an adaptation of the complaints against Achilles that DeLong and Kleiman outline, and in defeating Turnus and rooting the long-suffering peoples of Troy, is a liberal improvement on the occasionally terrorist tendencies of Odysseus and war-mongering ways of Achilles. The family-values set really can't approve of the way Aeneas handled his outside-the-sanctity-of-marriage relationship with Dido, which only improves his liberal bonafides, right?

Liberal critics of America's noncritical support for Israel may pass on Virgil, however—Aeneas didn't exactly show up in Rome offering a two-state solution.