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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... already prompt Connolly to discern a “revelation of fictionality at work,” a fragmented quality that “draws readerly attention to extratextual—which is to say political and social—efforts to make landscape whole.”2 In the later poem ...
... already has a past, intriguing to Aeneas: miratur facilisque oculos fert omnia circum Aeneas capiturque locis et singula laetus exquiritque auditque virum monimenta priorum. 3 Cf. Feeney's metaphor of the “pair of binoculars with ...
... already in the Georgics (for example, in the prooemium to Book 3). But this schema breaks down if we try to identify the self with the “West.” As geography, that would be unhelpful, since apart from Italy, western Mediterranean nations ...
... already existing Latins are. way shores demarcate Rome's future empire at 3.97 domus Aeneae cunctis dominabitur oris (“the house of Aeneas will be master of all shores”), where oris is Virgil's addition to the (tendentious, pro-Roman) ...
... already existing Latins are curiously folded, as if they originated with it) and the “elders of Alba” (literally “Alban fathers,” encompassing both the local elders of Rome's mother city and the emperor's Julian clan, which had ...
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 |