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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... Italian, and Greek). In speaking of nationalities, I mean the unities that the poem may designate by the terms gens, genus, or populus, and by the myriad of ethnic groupings that it names, opposing some to others (for example, Trojans ...
... 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 to some other ...
... Italy.”5 This is as true on the level of multinational empire as it is on that of Roman politics and Italian relations with Rome. Mere difference is uninteresting; what is interesting is difference disguised as sameness. The uniformity ...
... Italian kings). But Saturn and his subjects have no direct relation to the later inhabitants apart from dwelling place. The next inhabitants of the place are Italians arriving from the south (“an Ausonian band and Sicanian peoples” [328]) ...
... Italian named Rhoeteus dies in the place of an Italian named Ilus—both bear names associated with the toponymy of Troy. At 9.344–45 the name of a Rutulian Rhoetus could be etymologized from either Trojan Rhoet- or Italian Rut ...
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 |