Joe Paterno, football coach, liked to talk about the Aeneid. For him Virgil’s epic poem provided in the stolid and long-suffering Aeneas the great object lessons of honor, duty, and courage. Paterno gave speeches about heroism and the Aeneid as early as the 1970s. It’s a central motif of his autobiography, Paterno: By the Book (1989), in which we learn that “Aeneas cannot choose not to found Rome; he’s destined to create it. But he has to wrestle with himself, inch by inch, hour by hour—play by play!—to figure out how to endure the struggle and torment of doing it, and take all the bad breaks along the way.” As recently as 2007, Paterno told GQ that the Aeneid has “probably had as much influence on me as anything in my life.”
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