In Speech and Thought in Latin War Narratives Suzanne Adema presents linguistic and narratological tools to analyse and interpret speech and thought representations in Latin narratives. Close ...readings show how speech and thought representations convey attitudes towards war in works of Caesar and Vergil.
As the most widely read Roman poem in antiquity, the Aeneid was indelibly burned into the memories of generations of Roman school children. In her new book, Yasmin Syed analyzes the formative ...influence the poem exerted on its broad audience of educated Romans. Syed analyzes Roman pedagogy and reading practices as well as ancient beliefs about the powerful influence of poetry. Her study considers these cultural components together with the aspects of identity that define the Aeneid's characters. By doing so, Syed shows how Vergil's ancient audiences saw themselves—their experiences, goals, and values—reflected in the poem and guided by it. In particular, Syed's treatment of gender and ethnicity brings to light the key role of Vergil's poem in the formation of Romanity.
When can word order be considered expressive? And what we do mean by "expressiveness"? This work, based upon a statistical and stylistical enquiry into Virgil's Aeneid as well of other hexametric ...poetry, aims to answer these questions from an appropriate perspective. Through offering a detailed analysis of selected passages, the author stresses the evident recurrence of the same figures in similar contexts and with the same stylistic effects. In this view, a rare word order as well as a relevant metrical and syntactical pattern appear to constitute a deviation from the norm stylistically motivated, that can highlight significant words or iconically stress the semantics of a passage. By combining the main notes on style from the Aeneid commentaries and the stylistic readings also applied to modern texts, the author, with a clear approach, systematically discusses the various structures of Latin hexameter–enjambement, synaloepha, hiatus, four- word lines, name-lines, relevant juxtapositions etc. – in terms of "effects", showing how they interact and converge in the text. This introduction to Virgil's expressiveness aims to be an effective tool for a stylistic reading of any Latin hexametric text.
This book examines the ways that Classical and Renaissance epic poems often work against their expressed moral and political values. It combines a formal and tropological analysis that stresses ...difference and disjunction with a political analysis of the epic's figurative economy. It offers an interpretation of three epic poems - Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, and Spencer's Faerie Queene - that focuses on the way these texts make apparent the aesthetic, moral, and political difference that constitutes them, and sketches, in conclusion, two alternative resolutions of such division in Milton's Paradise Lost and Cervantes' Don Quixote, an 'epic' in prose. The book outlines a theory of how and why epic narrative may be said to subvert certain of its constitutive claims while articulating a cultural argument of which it becomes the contradictory paradigm. The author focuses on the aesthetic and ideological work accomplished by poetic figure in these narratives, and understands ideology as a figurative, substitutive system that resembles and uses the system of tropes. She defines the ideological function of tropes in narrative and the often contradictory way in which narratives acknowledge and seek to efface the transformative functions of ideology. Beginning with what it describes as a dual tendency within the epic simile (toward metaphor in the transformations of ideology; toward metonymy as it maintains a structure of difference), the book defines the politics of the simile in epic narrative and identifies metalepsis as the defining trope of ideology. It demonstrates the political and poetic costs of the structural reliance of allegorical narrative on catachresis and shows how the narrator's use of prosopopoeia to assert political authority reshapes the figurative economy of the epic. The book is particularly innovative in being the first to apply to the epic the set of questions posed by the linking of the theory of rhetoric and the theory of ideology. It argues that historical pressures on a text are often best seen as a dialectic in which ideology shapes poetic process while poetry counters, resists, figures, or generates the tropes of ideology itself.
Finding Italyexplores the journey of the Romans' ancestor Aeneas and his fellow Trojans from their old home, Troy, to their new country, Italy, narrated in Vergil's epic poemAeneid. K. F. B. Fletcher ...argues that a main narrative theme is patriotism, specifically the problem of how one comes to love one's new country. The various directions Aeneas receives throughout the first half of the poem are meant to create this love, explaining both to Aeneas and to Vergil's readers how they should respond to the new, unified Italy synonymous with Rome. These directions come from the gods, or from people close to Aeneas who have divine connections, and they all serve to instill an emotional connection to the land, creating a mental image of Italy that tells him far more about his destination than merely its location, and ultimately making him fall in love with Italy enough to fight for it soon after his arrival. The poem thus dramatizes the birth of nationalism, as Italy is only a concept to Aeneas throughout his trip; these directions do not describe Italy as it is at the time of Aeneas' journey, but as an ideal to be realized by Aeneas and his descendants, reaching its final, perfect form under Augustus Caesar.
Finding Italyprovides a very detailed reading of the directions Aeneas receives by situating them within their relevant contexts: ancient geography, Greek colonization narratives, prophecy, and ancient views of wandering. Vergil draws on all of these concepts to craft instructions that create in Aeneas an attachment to Italy before he ever arrives, a process that dramatizes a key emotional problem in the late first century BCE in the wake of the Social and Civil Wars: how to balance the love of one's modest birthplace with the love of Rome, the larger city that now encompasses it.
In this book, conceived as a sort of Prolegomena to his two Teubner editions, Conte gives account of his choices in editing his Virgilian text. Engaging in a passionate debate with his predecessors ...and critics, he guides the reader in a fascinating journey in the history of transmission and interpretation of Georgics and Aeneidand shows how lively textual criticism can be.
"A dead boy (Pallas) and the death of a girl (Camilla) loom over the opening and the closing part of the eleventh book of the Aeneid. Following the savage slaughter in Aeneid 10, the book opens in a ...mournful mood as the warring parties revisit yesterday’s killing fields to attend to their dead. One casualty in particular commands attention: Aeneas’ protégé Pallas, killed and despoiled by Turnus in the previous book. His death plunges his father Evander and his surrogate father Aeneas into heart-rending despair – and helps set up the foundational act of sacrificial brutality that caps the poem, when Aeneas seeks to avenge Pallas by slaying Turnus in wrathful fury. Turnus’ departure from the living is prefigured by that of his ally Camilla, a maiden schooled in the martial arts, who sets the mold for warrior princesses such as Xena and Wonder Woman. In the final third of Aeneid 11, she wreaks havoc not just on the battlefield but on gender stereotypes and the conventions of the epic genre, before she too succumbs to a premature death. In the portions of the book selected for discussion here, Virgil offers some of his most emotive (and disturbing) meditations on the tragic nature of human existence – but also knows how to lighten the mood with a bit of drag. This course book offers the original Latin text, vocabulary aids, study questions, and an extensive commentary. Designed to stretch and stimulate readers, Ingo Gildenhard’s volume will be of particular interest to students of Latin studying for A-Level or on undergraduate courses. It extends beyond detailed linguistic analysis to encourage critical engagement with Virgil’s poetry and the most recent scholarly thought. King's College, Cambridge, has generously contributed to this publication."
In dem folgenden Beitrag wird das Thema des "Orientalismo Romano" nicht motivisch, sondern radikalphilologisch behandelt. Ausgehend von der Hypothese, daß die Sicherheit der neuen, augusteischen ...Weltordnung ein zugleich souveränes und phantastisches Denken der Grenze ermöglicht, wird der Anfang der Vergilischen Aeneis als das Paradigma einer poetischen Geschichtsdarstellung gelesen, in der das Abenteuer der Stadtgründung als das perpetuum mobile einer Traditionsbildung erscheint, die den Gegensatz, der sie hervorgebracht hat, sprachlich und denkerisch immer neu zur Geltung bringen muß. Während Catull noch, in dezidierter Umkehrung der odysseischen Fahrtrichtung, im Osten die Pathogenese seines römisch-modernen Dichtersubjekts erfährt, liefert Vergil das Erfolgsmodell einer hochgradig assimilationsfähigen "obliquen Originalität". In Horaz' späten Oden werden die überlieferten stereotypen Wahrnehmungen des Ostens zu präzisen Formeln ihrer inneren Unwahrheit. Nicht um die Fortschreibung einer allein an der Logik feindlicher Auseinandersetzung orientierten Wahrnehmung des Ostens geht es, sondern um die poetische Dokumentation und Kodifikation jener widerstreitenden Momente der Staatsräson, die ein nur juristisch-formales Denken nicht angemessen beschreiben könnte. Die augusteische Dichtung erreicht gerade in der Fragmentierung der ideologischen Totale eine Objektivität, die die Architektur des römischen Herrschaftsgedankens mit all ihren Rissen und Widersprüchen zur Darstellung bringen kann.
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