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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... (note 342 asylum). There is an emptiness at the geographic heart of identity, waiting to be—not exactly filled, but given outward shape, by a play of contrasts. In the Aeneid's version of Roman foundations, Aeneas' settlement will ...
... Note that poetic etymology and related types of wordplay are now being studied from semantic and ideological angles; see, for a recent example, the papers in Nifadopoulos 2003. 11 The “a,” short here, is long in the Ptolemaic ancestral ...
... Note O'Hara 1990:83 n. 50: “An important development in recent Vergilian scholarship has been the recognition of Vergil's ambivalence and uneasiness about the Romans' legendary Trojan heritage” (with citations). 18 Hellanicus FGrH 4 F ...
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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 |