The Primacy of Vision in Virgil's AeneidOne of the masterpieces of Latin and, indeed, world literature, Virgil's Aeneid was written during the Augustan "renaissance" of architecture, art, and literature that redefined the Roman world in the early years of the empire. This period was marked by a transition from the use of rhetoric as a means of public persuasion to the use of images to display imperial power. Taking a fresh approach to Virgil's epic poem, Riggs Alden Smith argues that the Aeneid fundamentally participates in the Augustan shift from rhetoric to imagery because it gives primacy to vision over speech as the principal means of gathering and conveying information as it recounts the heroic adventures of Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome. Working from the theories of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Smith characterizes Aeneas as a voyant-visible, a person who both sees and is seen and who approaches the world through the faculty of vision. Engaging in close readings of key episodes throughout the poem, Smith shows how Aeneas repeatedly acts on what he sees rather than what he hears. Smith views Aeneas' final act of slaying Turnus, a character associated with the power of oratory, as the victory of vision over rhetoric, a triumph that reflects the ascendancy of visual symbols within Augustan society. Smith's new interpretation of the predominance of vision in the Aeneid makes it plain that Virgil's epic contributes to a new visual culture and a new mythology of Imperial Rome. |
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... Augustan culture. Zanker notes that images primarily serve the creation of a new mythology of Rome.16 Galinsky furthers this discussion by showing how the use of images during the Augustan ''renaissance'' of art and literature reflected ...
... Augustan period. Images were not merely in the service of the state but were also part and parcel of domestic and public life. My application of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is not the sole basis of my methodological approach tothis ...
... vision, Virgil's characters communicate through visual signals. Such visual communication was a crucial aspect of Augustan society. In that society, a number of cultural icons were being 7 Prophaenomena ad Vergilium Theoria.
... Augustan period, for example, could walk from the Forum Romanum, an areasymbolized bythe old rostrum, to thecuria, where many a debate had raged, to the nearby comitium, where pivotal votes of the Republic had been cast, to Julius ...
... Augustan Rome.The establishment of that city is the telos of Virgil's poem, in which vision's emergence as the dominant form of perception affirms, or at least reflects, the visual supremacy of Augustan society. In general terms ...
Contents
1 | |
Ruse and Revelation Visions of the Divine and the Telos of Narrative | 24 |
Vision Past and Future | 60 |
Hic amor Love Vision and Destiny | 97 |
Vidi Vici Visions Victory and the Telos of Narrative | 128 |
Conclusion Ante ora parentum | 176 |
Notes | 183 |
Bibliography | 223 |
Subject Index | 237 |
Index Locorum | 247 |