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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... , the question of what figure, what stance, enforces that unity. Like much other recent work on the Aeneid, the present. 2 Connolly 2001:113. See Reed 1998:401–403. The form Thybris may have been suggested 2 INTRODUCTION.
... neatly reviews the passages where the Aeneadae's “return” to Italy is ordained, esp. as regards the question of Aeneas' increasing awareness of his destination. 26 See e.g. Barchiesi 1997, 2001, 2002. 10 INTRODUCTION.
... questions. Corythus, as a problêma, is a figure. It can be solved, and the grounds for Aeneas' mission justified, by treating it as a metaphor for Italy, another “ancient” Italian city like the ones Rome will conquer and subsume—or as a ...
... question come from different nations that will one day be absorbed into the Roman empire, while the dying-god ... questions that the poem frequently poses in connection with national identity. From a discussion of these death scenes as ...
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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 |