Aeneas Mural
Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash
In the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid, the exiled Trojan hero Aeneas pauses before a mural immortalizing his people's suffering. The painting is a portrait of devastation, capturing the deaths of his comrades, the smoldering remains of Troy, and the divine betrayal of a city that once believed itself eternal. Confronted with this vision, Aeneas utters a line reverberating down the centuries: sunt lacrimae rerum—translated by Seamus Heaney as, “There are tears at the heart of things.”
Aeneas’s words cut deeper than lament; they acknowledge the ineradicable sorrow woven into the human condition. He is not simply weeping for Troy but for the tragic necessity of history, for the unrelenting cycle of loss and endurance that forms the architecture of civilization. Virgil tells us this is the key to understanding the legitimacy of righteous anger and the necessity of transcending it. Aeneas has every reason to let fury dictate his course. He has been wronged beyond measure: his home obliterated, his loved ones slain, and his future taken from him by forces beyond his control. Tears—not rage—become his bridge between the past and the future.
It is this moment that speaks with clarity to our own. We live in a time thick with grievances, a century rife with outrages that all but demand our fury. Whether it be the carnage of war, the erosion of democracy at the hands of demagogues, the cruelty of systemic injustice, or the casual vandalism of truth in an age of disinformation, we, like Aeneas, find ourselves staring at a mural of devastation. However, to remain paralyzed in anger is to succumb to the very destruction we seek to resist. If we are to move forward, it will not be because we have extinguished our anger but because we have refused to let it consume us.
Heaney’s translation captures what might be called the solemn music of tragedy. There is no histrionic flourish, no embellishment. Tears are at the heart of things, not just in the margins but at the core. This is the terrible wisdom Virgil offers: suffering is not incidental to life but intrinsic to it. The moral universe, as we would like to conceive of it, is not neatly calibrated to ensure that justice prevails in the short run—or any run at all. The tears Aeneas sheds are not those of helpless despair. They are the tears that temper vengeance and soften the heart just enough to allow for the endurance required of those who, however unwillingly, build a world from ruins.
To weep is not to yield. It is to acknowledge pain without surrendering to it. In a time where every new horror tempts us to reach for easy solutions—simplistic condemnations, ideological entrenchment, or outright nihilism—Virgil and Heaney offer a more difficult but ultimately more powerful path. The tears of things, far from signaling resignation, are the necessary prelude to action that is both just and enduring. The lesson of Aeneas is not that grief erases anger but that it refines it into something more than vengeance: the unshakable resolve to keep calm and carry on.