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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... represents (among other things) a Roman version of a specific type of Greek poetry: the ktisis or foundation myth (the word literally means the foundation of a city or colony), celebrating a ktistês or founder; and its narrative engages ...
... represented by the poem as a historical reality. It is constantly deferred to other, mediating representations of ethnicity. Rome is simply not defined by what is present. This is most crudely true on the topographical plane, where the ...
... representing Aeneas' 13 14 The trope occurs on a smaller scale at 3.297, where Helenus is Andromache's patrius maritus: “Asiatics” are one big national group, sharing an ancestry. Compare the settlement in Italy, into which the already ...
... represent either 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 ...
... represented as both the origin and immediate destination of the Trojan dynasts. In tracing Aeneas' lineage back to this place, Virgil awakens the possibility that his ancestry is Etruscan—in conformity, one might suppose, with the ...
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 |