VIRTUES I The hero who survived the Trojan War was for the Romans a symbol of 'pietas'.

In 20 B.C., the emperor Augustus began the construction of the place that would tell the world, and Rome, battered by almost a century of civil wars, the great origins of the city of the Tiber and that was going to relate it to the most famous city of ancient Greece, Troy. The forum of Augustus, whose remains are still moving today, simply set in stone the great epic of the Romans that, a few years earlier, the poet Virgil had begun to compose at the request of the man who, in Caesar's will, appeared as his adopted son, Augustus himself.

That epic, the Aeneid, told in twelve books the vicissitudes of the return journey - the nóstos, as the Greeks knew this subject of tales of erratic and eventful journeys - of a Trojan, Aeneas, survivor of the destruction of Troy around 1100 BC in a war that had inspired the best verses of classical epic, the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. And, in that great place of propaganda and civic administration of the new and initially peaceful time of Augustus that was the forum built by him, Aeneas had a prominent place and a leading role. His statue presented him armed, fleeing from Troy to the degree program, holding his son Ascanius by the hand and in his arms his elderly father, Anchises, while barely carrying the Palladion, a wooden statue representing the patriarchal gods, the gods of Troy.

The departure of Aeneas from Troy was not easy. In the evacuation of the city that, considered invincible, the Achaeans took through the well-known ruse of the horse, Aeneas lost his wife Creusa whom he sought in the flames of Troy and whose spirit was commissioned to undertake a journey that would give Troy a new and eternal future. And that adventure, which took Aeneas to different locations in the Mediterranean, including Carthage, where, by Juno's ruse, he fell in love with Queen Dido, would end in Latium where, welcomed by King Latinus, he would end up marrying his daughter Lavinia and founding Lavinium somewhat before Ascanius, Aeneas' son, founded the city of Alba Longa from whose lineage Romulus and Remus would be born and, therefore, Rome.

For the Romans in general, and for Augustus in particular, Aeneas represented the virtues of individual leadership at the service of a collective business . But, above all, Aeneas was the symbol of pietas, the virtue that, for the Romans, synthesized devotion to the gods - who guide his journey through the mare nostrum and in whose oracles and advice he abandons himself -, to his family - whom he financial aid leave the city and whose memory he always reveres -, and to his homeland, which he abandons but whose report he tries to save by leading it, in fact, through Rome, to an unimagined perpetuity. In one of his dreams, Aeneas glimpses that having mercy on those who surrender, but being implacable with the proud will be the weapons that will make great the most extensive and enduring Empire of all times, the Roman Empire.

Aeneas, in his wanderings in the Mediterranean, also gives an example of resilience, and when, at his father's request, he leave to visit him in Avernus, where he receives the oracle of eternal government mentioned above, he reminds us that generosity and audacity are always award and that great visions are born of a firm determination to achieve one's goals.

It is said that in 27 B.C., as soon as the composition of the Aeneid began, when Augustus received the sacred degree scroll with which he is still known today, the Senate gave him a marble shield, the clipeus uirtutis, on which were inscribed the emperor's virtues, clementia - magnanimity, which is not incompatible with exigency -, iustitia - to give and recognize to each his own according to his merits - and pietas, which, for a Roman, had body and face in the figure of Aeneas. It is no coincidence that these Augustan virtues were exactly the same ones that Aeneas personified in the Aeneid whose verses, which two thousand years ago legitimized the government that Rome exercised over the world, continue today to inspire leadership lessons apt for those who know and want to discover them.

Altar with Aeneas and Ascanius [Bardo Museum, Tunis]. source