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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... metaphor of the “pair of binoculars with incompatible lenses” for scenes in the Aeneid where irreconcilable interpretations seem equally compelling (Feeney 1991:168). Hexter 1990:121–2 describes Virgilian inconsistency as a reflective ...
... metaphor based only on the sameness of their place, disintegrate readily into metonymy. Romulus' accomplishment will be to orchestrate a fresh convergence from various directions on the newly built Rome (note 342 asylum). There is an ...
... 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 will come under the sway of Rome. But as such it will always threaten to come apart; the ...
... metaphor for the Roman imperialism with which Anchises inculcates Aeneas. The synthetic Trojan-Italian nation of Anchises' prophecy remains unstable on its own terms: Roman identity is still radically dependent on the perspective one ...
... metaphor is the principal trope of the Aeneid: everything invites comparison and contrast with everything else, down endless chains in all directions. Not all comparisons are definitively interpretable, or even interpretable at all. The ...
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 |