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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... Rome is simply not defined by what is present. This is most crudely true on the topographical plane, where the site of Rome in Book 8 is said to empty repeatedly between arrivals by different outsiders (Saturn, Evander, Romulus). At ...
... Rome itself. But this sense of national transition is sometimes not historical, but synchronic. At 10.337 a Rutulian Maeon—a poetic synonym for “Lydian”—bears a name elsewhere used of the “Lydian” Etruscans, his enemies. At 10.399 an ...
... Rome. Moreover,. See Reed 1998:401–403. The form Thybris may have been suggested by the name Thebris, which Varro ... Rome's future empire at 3.97 domus Aeneae 6 INTRODUCTION.
... Rome. Moreover, the Aeneid by no means consistently identifies Italy itself, the poem's most conspicuous Western land (indeed, called “Hesperia” at key moments, identified—from a Hellenophone standpoint—as “Land of the Evening Star ...
... Rome's mother city and the emperor's Julian clan, which had historical and legendary ties to Alba Longa). The latter are crucial for filling in the gap between Aeneas himself and the foundation of Rome;15 they will appear, with slight ...
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 |