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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... 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 gained dominion); an origin in the world ...
... Epic of National Identity,” “was not made to express any simple partisanship, but precisely to deter partisan splintering from hindering its dream of ideological unity and ethical endeavor for the whole of Roman Italy.”5 This is as true ...
... epic, which mentions the Punic Wars only rarely, will implicitly set up the struggle between them as the defining event in Roman. 15 This historical expediency is found as early as Fabius Pictor FGrH 809 F 2 and Cato fr. 13 Peter, around ...
... epic, which problematizes Romanness not only in terms borrowed from the Aeneid, but in agonistic response to the Aeneid. Methodologically I hope for the book to operate at an intersection of different lines of recent criticism ...
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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 |