TFBT: Aeneid or Critique?

“Is the Aeneid a Celebration of Empire or a Critique?” by Daniel Mendelsohn. I recently read this New Yorker piece on line.  First, I love Mendelsohns' writing style.  A while back, I think many of us read and enjoyed “An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic.” 

I was a little surprised how harsh he was on Virgil.  Poets got a sing for their supper and if they want to eat, they’d better play to the audience.  Being a mythologist, I noted he didn’t mention that the course of the Aeneid was the Will of Zeus. Aeneas death at Troy was “beyond destiny”.  He and his descendants were promised sovereignty over the surviving Trojans. 

But, I felt like missed a paragraph towards the end.  He was talking about a book on the Holocaust, interviewing survivors from a small Polish town.  He used that experience to explain Aeneas often confused behavior.  Like the Jewish survivors Mendelsohn interviewed, Aeneas was “a survivor, a person so fractured by the horrors of the past that he can hold himself together only by an unnatural effort of will.” 

 The every next paragraph he is talking about; “about a tiny band of outcasts, the survivors of a terrible persecution. It is about how these survivors—clinging to a divine assurance that an unknown and faraway land will become their new home—arduously cross the seas, determined to refashion themselves as a new people, a nation of victors rather than victims. It is about how, when they finally get there, they find their new homeland inhabited by locals who have no intention of making way for them. It is about how this geopolitical tragedy generates new wars.”  

Was Mendelsohn still talking about the Trojans and Romans?  Or is this piece a craftily coded critique of imperial ideology.