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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... particular agriculture and settled living, until Saturn, in flight from the wrath of Jupiter, arrives to rule them (8.319). He too, like Aeneas, is an exile from his kingdom (also like Metabus or Mezentius, among the poem's latter-day ...
... particular is in fact Aeneas' revealed or eventual destination; rather, according to two new prophecies (3.389–93, 8.42–48), his people will settle where he finds the omen of a nursing pig: in Latium, in the event. Rome itself, the end ...
... particular thematic trail, starting from desire (what Virgil's Latin regularly expresses by amor or cupido). We begin this theme in chapter 1 with Virgil's most elaborate—and on close inspection most peculiar—descriptions of slain ...
... particular I hope to supplement current work on how the Aeneid represents in literature a new Roman subject (I think particularly of Hardie 1986, Quint 1993, and Feeney's series of studies); it has more general affinities with Habinek's ...
... particular has pointed the way toward a reconciliation of synchronic and diachronic dimensions in Augustan poetry, in his insistence (following an especially Italian tradition) on the ideological potential of narrative viewpoint and in ...
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 |