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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... example, Trojans versus Greeks) and including some within others (as the Rutulians are part of the Italians). The Aeneid uses ethnic boundaries to organize and mold into new ideological shapes the disorderly wealth of facts ...
... example). The presence among the Italian army of Greek figures like Aventinus, Virbius, and Halaesus approximates it to the Greek army that fought against Aeneas in the Trojan War; but the Trojan army, too, includes Evander's Arcadians ...
... example, introduce overtones, at least, of blurred national identity.7 To be sure, warriors on the Trojan side may have clearly Asiatic names like Asius, Assaracus, and Thymbris (10.123–24), overflowing with Anatolian geographical and ...
... example, is slain by Thymbraeus in a foreshadowing of Octavian's victory over Antony and Cleopatra.12 But other, conflicting messages are also latent; in our discussion of Turnus we shall explore the way Oriental features—like names ...
... example, on the shield in Book 8, where Egyptian, Indian, and so on constitute a “barbarian force” opposed to Roman Italy).13 The poem aims at no “Western” identity; there is an implied “self,” assimilable to the “Roman” as the poem ...
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 |