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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... poem invites us to understand as Roman—out of a play of contrasts between nationalities. It is intended for a broad literary audience: not only specialists in Latin poetry, but anyone who has read the Aeneid at least in translation. In ...
... poem invites us to read as Roman—through comparisons and contrasts between other nationalities (especially Trojan, Carthaginian, Italian, and Greek). In speaking of nationalities, I mean the unities that the poem may designate by the ...
... poem draws between nations demands that we attend to the coordinates under which that contrast appears. What emerges is a schema that shifts with the narratology of the poem: the ethnic affinities of a character, national group, or ...
... poem: Roman identity is an ambiguous figure, a problêma without a single solution. The polycentrism that many have detected in the Aeneid will thus deny the reading subject a positive or definitive ethnic identity, but rather involve ...
... poem's latter-day Italian kings). But Saturn and his subjects have no direct relation to the later inhabitants apart from dwelling place. The next inhabitants of the place are Italians arriving from the south (“an Ausonian band and ...
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 |