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. |
From inside the book
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... Oriental lineage of Inachus.1 The whole process necessarily involves Virgil's poetics of nationality in a dialogue between other Greek and Latin poets. Other paradigms of identity and alterity—those offered by gender and age, for ...
... 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 to some ...
... Oriental sphere (in these cases recalling the city Tyre and the river Orontes in the Levant). Sometimes names allegorize national transition, as when at 10.145 another Trojan warrior, Capys, is said to have given his name to “the ...
... Oriental features—like names—given to Aeneas' Italian enemies repeatedly estrange them from the land they are fighting to keep the Trojans out of. We would find a geographical opposition between East and West only partially useful. To ...
... Oriental” rather than “Eastern,” since it has more than directional connotations, and tends to lump Near Eastern, “barbarian” peoples together in opposition to Greek and Roman (as the Aeneid sometimes does; for example, on the shield in ...
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 |