"Fury itself supplies arms"
About this Quote
Anger, Virgil implies, is not just a feeling but a logistics network. "Fury itself supplies arms" compresses an entire theory of escalation into five words: once rage is lit, it starts manufacturing the very tools it needs to keep burning. The line has the cold elegance of an epic poet watching human beings become resources for their own destruction.
Virgil is writing out of a Roman imagination obsessed with causality and consequence, where violence rarely arrives as an isolated act and almost never stays contained. In the world of the Aeneid, passion is contagious and strategic at the same time; the gods may strike the match, but people stack the kindling. "Supplies" is the telling verb. Fury doesn't merely incite; it provisions. It organizes. It turns neighbors into militias, insults into pretexts, fear into policy. The subtext is a warning about how quickly moral restraint gets outcompeted once conflict becomes self-sustaining.
There is also a Roman political edge. Virgil is composing during Augustus's consolidation after decades of civil war. The empire wants a story in which order is hard-won and chaos is a temptation always nearby. This line serves that agenda without sounding like propaganda: it frames fury as an engine that produces both justification and weaponry, making peace not a mood but an achievement.
The brilliance is its fatalism. No heroic speech, no lofty ideal. Just the grim recognition that the most reliable armory is inside the human nervous system.
Virgil is writing out of a Roman imagination obsessed with causality and consequence, where violence rarely arrives as an isolated act and almost never stays contained. In the world of the Aeneid, passion is contagious and strategic at the same time; the gods may strike the match, but people stack the kindling. "Supplies" is the telling verb. Fury doesn't merely incite; it provisions. It organizes. It turns neighbors into militias, insults into pretexts, fear into policy. The subtext is a warning about how quickly moral restraint gets outcompeted once conflict becomes self-sustaining.
There is also a Roman political edge. Virgil is composing during Augustus's consolidation after decades of civil war. The empire wants a story in which order is hard-won and chaos is a temptation always nearby. This line serves that agenda without sounding like propaganda: it frames fury as an engine that produces both justification and weaponry, making peace not a mood but an achievement.
The brilliance is its fatalism. No heroic speech, no lofty ideal. Just the grim recognition that the most reliable armory is inside the human nervous system.
Quote Details
| Topic | Anger |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Virgil. (2026, January 17). Fury itself supplies arms. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/fury-itself-supplies-arms-24588/
Chicago Style
Virgil. "Fury itself supplies arms." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/fury-itself-supplies-arms-24588/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Fury itself supplies arms." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/fury-itself-supplies-arms-24588/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
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