The contrary idea of a birth of unity from variety has a long history and the Aeneid has a significant part in it. In the poem Italy is seen as fragmentation and Rome as a prospective unity. However, it is an interesting fact that the Aeneid as the evolution of Italy / foundation of Rome poem has been less interesting to xxth century scholars than the Aeneid as a poem of imperialism vs individualism, hope vs tragedy, Arcadia vs history etc. Yet the idea that Italy has to be invented and to suffer for Rome to be born has a powerful intellectual history: it anticipates later constructions of history as a series of ends becoming means: it has links with the Christian idea that Rome had to be born only to become a host for the Church (late antique), and with Dante's influential formulation that Euryalus Camilla and Turnus all died for Italy...so that Italy could become the cradle of a much needed Empire and not just of the Church (middle age). I must stop here, because my competence on the founding fathers of the US and their reductio ad unum is dilettante.
I examine reasons why this aspect has been relatively neglected, the significant exception being the impressive work of the reactionary French anthropologist Georges Dumézil: the title of my paper is from a chapter of Mythe et Epopée where he reads the Aeneid as a poem about the process leading to 'l'uniformisation des Romains'.
I take as a test case of my paper the problem of Aeneas' war in Latium. Most recent literary interpretations have been working on the implicit assumption that the main reference is to the civil wars of triumviral Rome and the establishment of Augustan order. Previously, several historians have been insisting that the main reference must be to the early history of the kings (Dumézil's trifunctional heyday of Rome: Euryalus Turnus and Camilla dying for the triumph of Dumézil's own theory of power) or to the age of expansion in central Italy (M. Sordi).
I discard the idea that the Aeneid has a single or main reference
to an individual historical model but I take the problem of the representation
of early Italy to be a serious issue in the poem, too serious to be left
to antiquarianism. Re-examining the issue of variety vs unity, it is possible
to show that the Aeneid is
concerned with the transformations of Italy and that the approach to
future Roman history is conditioned by one more historical context (one
that in fact goes completely unmentioned in the poem), the age of the Bellum
Sociale. The coalition of Italians against Aeneas presupposes and contests
the early-first century attempt to construct an Italian unity against Rome.
The poetics of the Aeneid is involved in the problem of making sense of Italy as a pre-Rome. The polymorph gathering of Italian clans suggests the effort involved in the creation of unity and uniformity - the Aeneid itself being a significant part of this effort. (For the future of this polarisation compare Sergio Zatti's work on Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata as 'multiforme pagano' versus 'uniforme cristiano'). Traces of alphabetic order are in tension with disarray and ethnic mobility, evoking attempts to control, catalogue and describe by Republican antiquarians and Augustan census-officers. The unHomeric emphasis in the catalogue on stray adventurers, rebels, bandits, snake-charmers, the unepic landscapes like Fesceninnae acies and Saturae atra palus, all suggest a parallel between the effort to construct a Romanized Italy (cf. the enigmatic expression Romana per oppida in the Georgics) and the poetic problem of how to fashion a territory of muddy, intractable names into an epic narrative. On the other hand, the gap between antique and modern Italy, and even between antique and antiquarian Italy (for the effect of disarray and mobility presupposes, but also clashes with Roman efforts to reconstruct the past in antiquarian research) is fundamental for the Vergilian strategy of becoming a Roman Homer: it is a very precise analogue for the gap between Homer's Achaeans and historical Greece that had been explored by Hellenistic scholars and commentators of Homer.
In this light the issue of war in the poem deserves consideration: the prevailing XXth century approach has been that war in Latium is the explosion of a 'natural' impulse towards disorder, leading to civil war and the end of a golden age of innocence, and this is consistent with important trends of Hellenistic thought, but if we focus on the poem as describing the process leading to the making of Rome and remaking of Italy, it is important also to view war as a cultural phenomenon and a historical construct. In this respect war in the Aeneid is not only a prophecy but also a state of 'not yet'. It has been regular to consider war in the Aeneid as a triumph of furor, but the Roman ideology about war (cf. Ruepke) considers Bellum the result of a process of civilization: the actors of the poem, in their suffering, are experimenting and learning about 'Roman war' through trial and experience.