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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... kings). But Saturn and his subjects have no direct relation to the later inhabitants apart from dwelling place. The ... king Mezentius, fighting on the Latin side), famously “looks to heaven and, dying, remembers sweet Argos” (10.781–82 ...
... 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 connected INTRODUCTION 5.
... king named Thybris. One message here is that these peoples belong together: the near-homonymies allegorize an identification that lies in the future—and attest one that lies in the past, when remember that the poem makes Dardanus ...
... kings (not precisely the elders—senators or quasi-senators—that are implied by patres), direct descendants of Aeneas, prophesied at 1.272 and 6.760–70. The trouble Aeneas and his people underwent to achieve this aim, we are told, was ...
... king Mezentius kills a Trojan named Palmus, whose name echoes a Lydian word for king, palmus (cf. Janko 1992:143 on Il. 13.792): we have the conceit of one “Lydian” king killing another. Dionysius of Halicarnassus A.R. 1.26.1. Upheld by ...
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 |