On Virgil's Peace, and Ours

With the latest news from Baghdad still stinging my ears, I dipped into The Aenead this morning and was struck by the passage where Jupiter assures Venus that her beloved Trojans, now beset by adversity, will one day know peace:

The gruesome gates
of war, with tightly welded iron plates,
shall be shut fast. Within, unholy Rage
shall sit on his ferocious weapons, bound
behind his back by a hundred knots of brass;
he shall groan horribly with bloody lips.

I would rather be able to think of Peace as a thing in itself, a kind of center to which we might find our way. But there is undeniable truth in Virgil’s “gruesome” image of Peace as the absence, or rather containment, of an “unholy Rage” that is always straining at its bonds. And the image is even more disturbing when we give up the comforting personification of Rage as some creature apart and realize that it comes from within ourselves, from each of us but also all us, with a terrible cumulative power. Where exactly does this rage come from? Why are we so susceptible to it? What can we do about it? I suppose it “comes from” our evolutionary past and the story of primal struggle, of us against them, that lies behind the founding of every civilization. As for what we can do about it, the answer of the evolutionary biologists might very well be “nothing,” since those evolutionary conditions shaped our very beings—our likes and dislikes, our propensities and predispositions—over many millennia. So what exactly are the limits of the power of choice within the framework of such a “given”? That’s a question for a new philosophy.