In the most famous passage of “The Aeneid,” Joe Paterno’s favorite book, its venerable hero Aeneas surveys the hopelessness of his situation and pauses to consider his options.

With Troy in flames and Greek warriors mercilessly slaughtering its citizens, Aeneas confronts his epic choice: He can either go down in glory, fighting and dying nobly like Hector, or he can suppress his desire for personal fame and devote himself to the salvation of his family and the shattered remnants of his wounded tribe. With guidance from the gods, Aeneas chooses the latter course and ultimately saves his people from ignoble extinction.

This passage has haunted Paterno his entire life. Having read “The Aeneid” as a young man in a Jesuit preparatory school, Paterno clearly understood the poem’s ethical lessons and tried to fashion his life around the models of piety, dignity and gravitas he found within its pages. And for decades, Paterno unquestionably displayed those principles in abundance.

On the football field, he forbade his players to wear their names on their jerseys. He refused to run up the score on soundly beaten opponents. Time and again, the coach stressed to his players that individual achievement within the context of team failure was meaningless.

In the long Paterno era, Penn State produced only one Heisman Trophy winner, John Cappelletti, who, in a moving acceptance speech, revealed the depth of his coach’s impact when the bruising tailback broke into tears as he dedicated the trophy to his younger brother, who was dying of cancer.

While Paterno’s on-field actions were indeed commendable, his multiple off-field actions truly exemplified his ethics. Married for more than 50 years, Joe and his wife, Sue, dedicated their lives to worthy causes. They donated $3.5 million to build a new library wing. They contributed another million to the expansion of a local hospital and donated seed money for a safe-haven spiritual center open to all members of the university community.

By himself, Paterno vigorously advocated the “student-athlete,” dismantling that oxymoron by upholding an unwavering belief that football was not an end in itself, but a means toward one acquiring a solid education.

How, then, does one reconcile Paterno’s many good works with a scandal so heinous as to belie comprehension? The simple answer is that the university, like the Catholic Church, sought to protect its reputation and fortune by burying the investigation in the poorly locked vault of unsubstantiated rumor.

Perhaps the more terrifying reason, however, is that Paterno became so imbued with his own success that he betrayed the very virtues that had guided his life for so many years and thus lost all moral perspective. In hindsight, evidence for this betrayal seems blatantly obvious.

When losses started mounting, for example, and his teams struggled in 2003-04, Paterno refused to resign his position, though such an act might have been in the best interests of his team. The coach neither objected to nor uttered a single phrase of embarrassment when the university erected a statue of his likeness outside the gates of Beaver Stadium. He kept his son, Jay, in perpetual apprenticeship as an assistant coach. He spurned the Office of Student Affairs, negotiating punishments that privileged his players over the larger student body.

He gratefully accepted multiple awards with remarkable, if not feigned, modesty, even as he pursued his individual records with the ferocity of a Penn State linebacker. Even his most recent offer to resign his position at the end of the season seemed less an act of altruism than it did a last-ditch effort to salvage his ruined career.

Though the fall of the House of Paterno seems so shocking and sudden, the seeds of its demise were in fact planted years ago when its patriarch failed to report an eyewitness account of a brutal crime to the proper police authorities. In a single moment of flawed judgment, a decision saturated in pride and subsequently repeated again and again for almost a decade, Paterno consciously turned his back on the most vulnerable among us.

Though once inconceivable, with the program suddenly bereft of moral leadership, it was only a matter of time before the truth would emerge and this once noble house would fall into ruin.

The ensuing student riots, though deplorable, were thus not wholly inexplicable. For a generation that cut its teeth on Columbine and 9/11, “JoePa” was the most tangible symbol of all that was good in the world. To the students, he was an anachronism, their grandfather, a throwback to a mythical time when the boundaries between right and wrong were clear and seldom violated.

As the news of Paterno’s demise spread quickly through campus, and with no clear leader left to placate the mob, the riots escalated. Though roundly condemned by the media, the riots were not simply a manifestation of misplaced anger. They were a collective cry of despair for the brutalized victims and a lamentation for a fallen hero who had failed miserably and could never be replaced.

This story, then, is not a story about football, but about the oldest of human dilemmas. It is not possessed of epic nobility; rather, it bears all the hallmarks of Greek tragedy. Its plot is the familiar tale of a good man, in the final act of his life, whose fallibility and fear of mortality cause him to fall prey to the pitfalls of vanity and ambition. It is also a jeremiad against moral negligence, a sordid tale of how unconstrained evil can permeate a community and shatter countless lives.

Finally, it is the story of us all. If Joe Paterno, a good and honorable man who once embodied our notion of virtue, can err so egregiously and fall so far, so can any of us. This is a tough lesson, one of the toughest, in fact, these Penn State students will ever learn.

Robert Bernard Hass, of Meadville, is a Penn State alumnus and professor of English and theater arts at Edinboro University. Readers may write to him at rhass@edinboro.edu.