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 50
... father of Anchises (in Il. 20.239) affirms this meaning from an intertextual perspective. A later Capys, carrying on this tradition, appears as a king of Alba Longa at Aen. 6.768. we Tiber and the Trojan river Thymbris.9 Personal names ...
... fathers,” encompassing both the local elders of Rome's mother city and the emperor's Julian clan, which had historical and legendary ties to Alba Longa). The latter are crucial for filling in the gap between Aeneas himself and the ...
... father Inachus) make their way back west—following Europa—and settle in Greek lands, sometimes with conflict and ... fathers of Io and Danae. The myth figures explicitly as the argumentum ingens, the “immense narrative” of Io, on the ...
You have reached your viewing limit for this book.
You have reached your viewing limit for this book.
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 |