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
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... later poem, too, with its grander scale and vaster sense of a national self, a unity that one perspective asserts will only beg, from another perspective, the question of what figure, what stance, enforces that unity. Like much other ...
... later inhabitants apart from dwelling place. The next inhabitants of the place are Italians arriving from the south (“an Ausonian band and Sicanian peoples” [328]), who themselves yield to Evander's “Greek city” (as the Sibyl ...
... ) 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.
... later her descendants (the Inachids, so called from Io's father Inachus) make their way back west—following Europa—and settle in Greek lands, sometimes with conflict and bloodshed. Hellenistic Greek poets—Apollonius, Euphorion ...
... later Latin epic, which problematizes Romanness not only in terms borrowed from the Aeneid, but in agonistic response to the Aeneid. Methodologically I hope for the book to operate at an intersection of different lines of recent ...
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 |