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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... ̄cus in Book 8 and Gk. ka ̆kos, “evil” (see Servius on 8.190, O'Hara 1996:204; more generally his pp. 61–62 and Ahl 1985:56–57). 12 Reed 1998. way shores demarcate Rome's future empire at 3.97 domus Aeneae 6 INTRODUCTION.
... development in recent Vergilian scholarship has been the recognition of Vergil's ambivalence and uneasiness about the Romans' legendary Trojan heritage” (with citations). 18 Hellanicus FGrH 4 F 23, Servius Auctus on 5.167, INTRODUCTION 9.
... Servius Auctus on 5.167, Strabo 8.3.19 Inscriptional evidence may suggest that Virgil's tracing Dardanus to Italy is borrowed from an Etruscan ktistic myth; cf. Horsfall 1987:99–104, Jocelyn 1991. For a detailed account of Virgil's use ...
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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 |