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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... Greek Anthology, minus the Planudean Anthology). It is customary, when writing on the Aeneid, to own one's keen awareness of being unable to take into account more than a part of the immense and ever-increasing critical literature; I am ...
... Greek mythology, but in a city opposed to the Greeks, makes the mediation of Hellenism in any such account—and in the very form it takes—necessary but complicated. Virgil's poem, in fact, represents (among other things) a Roman version ...
... Greek, Oriental, and Italian carve out a standpoint—a persona assimilable to the Roman—so that the poem constructs the self as empty of nationality except as defined against a foil, or a series of foils. Roman identity—always reducible ...
... Greek-Italian ancestry of both Pallas and Turnus, for example). The presence among the Italian army of Greek figures like Aventinus, Virbius, and Halaesus approximates it to the Greek army that fought against Aeneas in the Trojan War ...
... Greeks). We see versions of this delineation in the picture of the Battle of Actium on Aeneas' Shield (8.675–713), and already in the Georgics (for example, in the prooemium to Book 3). But this schema breaks down if we try to identify ...
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 |