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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... given outward shape, by a play of contrasts. In the Aeneid's version of Roman foundations, Aeneas' settlement will include not only Trojan colonists and Latin indigens, but representatives of other peoples: Cretans whom Aeneas' men ...
... given his name to “the Campanian city” (Capua). This old etymology not only recapitulates the ethnic trajectory from Troy to Italy, but, in this poem, etiologizes the dominion of the Romans over Campania in central Italy (specifically ...
... given to Aeneas' Italian enemies repeatedly estrange them from the land they are fighting to keep the Trojans out of. We would find a geographical opposition between East and West only partially useful. To be sure, “East” suggests the ...
... given passages thematize youth, death, and desire in the poem, but to read them as giving us readers a standpoint in the narrative and a relationship to the characters, as well as to the narrative voice and its literary precursors (it ...
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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 |