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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... , the question of what figure, what stance, enforces that unity. Like much other recent work on the Aeneid, the present. 2 Connolly 2001:113. See Reed 1998:401–403. The form Thybris may have been suggested 2 INTRODUCTION.
... figure, a problêma without a single solution. The polycentrism that many have detected in the Aeneid will thus deny the reading subject a positive or definitive ethnic identity, but rather involve him or her in a play of ethnic ...
... 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 and other mainland Greeks. One is Antores, one-time ...
... figures us, that is, as Romans by an immediate prolepsis. The geographical opposition (13 contra) between the two countries makes them archenemies, even antitheses; and the epic, which mentions the Punic Wars only rarely, will ...
... figure. It can be solved, and the grounds for Aeneas' mission justified, by treating it as a metaphor for Italy, another “ancient” Italian city like the ones Rome will conquer and subsume—or as a metonymy, part of the Italian world that ...
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 |