Birth, death and survival: sources of political renewal in the work of Hannah Arendt and Virgil’s Aeneid

Does death provide a generative force in politics? The great theorist of political founding, Hannah Arendt, insisted that birth, not death, equipped us for the task of beginning, and pointed to Virgil’s Aeneid as a work that best understood this process. But the Aeneid is a work primarily concerned with sacrifice, suffering and death, and it highlights the losses that must be endured, the disorientation to be overcome, before renewal arrives. …