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
Results 1-5 of 54
... come a people widely sovereign and proud in war: the goddesses of fate so unwound their tale. More shores, marking out further ethnic oppositions. The wording sets us on the Latin shore at the mouth of the Tiber, Aeneas' eventual ...
... come into conflict. The justification that the Aeneid offers for this schema and this migration furnishes a concrete example of the way the poem avoids the positive sense of a national identity—indeed, the overarching and primordially ...
... come from Corythus. But perhaps Dardanus was a native Italian, sprung from autochthons before the Etruscans' ancestors arrived from Lydia or the Pelasgians from Greece. In that case we arrive all the sooner at the fundamental ...
... come under the sway of Rome. But as such it will always threaten to come apart; the discrepancy within the identity is always near to hand.24 More fundamentally, on the level of narrative, metaphor is reduced to metonymy: what on the ...
... come from different nations that will one day be absorbed into the Roman empire, while the dying-god imagery that suffuses them is mythologically bound to the Orient, whence the people of Aeneas have traveled toward their Italian ...
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 |