The Second Sin of the East

Why did the fifty-year-old Roman poet Virgil,
while dying in Brindisium,
have an unrelenting wish
to burn his epic The Aeneid?
In it he celebrated the escaped Trojan Aeneas
as a predecessor of his Roman kin,
as a founder of a state
which became one of the largest empires
that human kind has ever known.
Virgil had no proof of the origin of Aeneas,
but he had a deep human need
to side himself with the defeated
and to crown them with the wreath of indestruction.
In the end he must have seen
that the human need for justice
has no basis in the existence of the state.
It came out that
those who once had been devastated
devastated others in turn
instead of getting down to work
and rebuilding their Troy.