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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... origin in the world of Greek mythology, but in a city opposed to the Greeks, makes the mediation of Hellenism in any such account—and in the very form it takes—necessary but complicated. Virgil's poem, in fact, represents (among other ...
... origin that exclusively authorizes Romanness. One recalls the Eclogues, where the literal, geographic boundaries of the Italian landscape, scumbled and shadowy, already prompt Connolly to discern a “revelation of fictionality at work ...
... origin, inserted with the passing mention of a name like that of Antores, make Italy a sink of many peoples, a destination not only for Aeneas and his followers.6 6 On the uses of these foundation myths cf. Bickerman 1952, Malkin 1998 ...
... origins or a past existence, now abandoned and assimilable to such aliens as Carthaginians and Egyptians; Italians can represent either the homeland Virgil had exalted in the Georgics or hostile neighbors to be subdued. And Greeks—who ...
... origin onto Evander, whose connection with the foundation of Rome is more tangential).18 In Italy Dardanids and Inachids—two dynasties tracing their origins back to Jupiter—come into conflict. The justification that the Aeneid offers ...
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 |