Virgil's Gaze: Nation and Poetry in the AeneidVirgil's Aeneid invites its reader to identify with the Roman nation whose origins and destiny it celebrates. But, as J. D. Reed argues in Virgil's Gaze, the great Roman epic satisfies this identification only indirectly--if at all. In retelling the story of Aeneas' foundational journey from Troy to Italy, Virgil defines Roman national identity only provisionally, through oppositions to other ethnic identities--especially Trojan, Carthaginian, Italian, and Greek--oppositions that shift with the shifting perspective of the narrative. Roman identity emerges as multivalent and constantly changing rather than unitary and stable. The Roman self that the poem gives us is capacious--adaptable to a universal nationality, potentially an imperial force--but empty at its heart. However, the incongruities that produce this emptiness are also what make the Aeneid endlessly readable, since they forestall a single perspective and a single notion of the Roman. |
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... Aeneas' settlement will include not only Trojan colonists and Latin indigens, but representatives of other peoples: Cretans whom Aeneas' men married during their sojourn on that island (3.136; the slave Pholoe, awarded as a prize at ...
... Aeneas' transition.14 Before arriving at Rome, the teleology runs through the Latin race (representing Aeneas' 13 14 The trope occurs on a smaller scale at 3.297, where Helenus is Andromache's patrius maritus: “Asiatics” are one big ...
... Aeneas himself and the foundation of Rome;15 they will appear, with slight but significant slippage, as the Alban kings (not precisely the elders—senators or quasi-senators—that are implied by patres), direct descendants of Aeneas ...
... Aeneas. Dido and Turnus are chief examples: the first is descended from Belus (1.729–30), great-grandson of Io in Greek tradition; the second, according to Amata, is a descendant of Inachus and Acrisius (7.372), the fathers of Io and ...
... Aeneas' quest for alliances even to “the furthest cities of Corythus and the Etruscan forces” (extremas Corythi penetravit ad urbes, / Lydorumque manum). The place referred to by the Penates, Latinus, and Iris is represented as both the ...
Contents
1 | |
Euryalus | 16 |
Turnus | 44 |
Dido | 73 |
Andromache | 101 |
Ancient Cities | 129 |
Marcellus | 148 |
Aeneas | 173 |
BIBLIOGRAPHY | 203 |
INDEX OF TEXTS CITED | 211 |
GENERAL INDEX | 223 |