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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... Trojan refugees. The possibilities for an epic of national foundations are rich. Not only does the westward shift from the eastern Mediterranean world suggest self-defining contrasts with other nations (nations over which the Romans had ...
... Trojan War; but the Trojan army, too, includes Evander's Arcadians and other mainland Greeks. One is Antores, one-time companion of Hercules, who, felled by an “alien” wound (that is, by the Etruscan king Mezentius, fighting on the ...
... Trojan and Latin, but as forged out of cross-cultural exchanges from many sides. The ethnic presences they bring to a cumulative Roman identity, I suggest, prevent that identity from ever being fixed or independent of the multiple ...
... Trojan Thymbraeus (12.458); there is also a Trojan Thymbris (10.124). And Evander at 8.330–32 reports that the Tiber took its Trojan-sounding name from a local king named Thybris. One message here is that these peoples belong together ...
... Trojan refugee who brought his ancestral deities to Italy and founded the nation that was to become Rome (1.1–7): Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit litora, multum ille et terris ...
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 |