Introduction, text and translation, detailed commentary and indices to Aeneid 2 are here offered on a scale not previously attempted and in keeping with the author's previous Virgil commentaries ...(Aeneid 3, 7 and 11); the volume is aimed primarily at scholars, rather than undergraduates.
"Legendary Rome" is the first book to offer a comparative treatment of the reinvention of Rome's origins in the poetry of Vergil, Tibullus and Propertius. It also examines the impact that the ...changing topography of Rome, as orchestrated by the emperor Augustus, had on those poets' renditions of Rome's legendary past. When the poets explore the significance of Augustus' reconstruction of the Palatine and Capitoline hills, they create new meaning and memories for the story of Rome's legendary foundations. As the tradition of Rome's mythic and legendary origins evolves through each poetic revision, the past transforms and is reinvented anew.The exploration of what constitutes a civilised landscape for each poet leads to significant conclusions about the dynamic and evolving nature of shared public memories. Written when Rome was in the process of defining a new, post-war identity, the poems studied here capture the growing tension between community and individual development, the restoration of peace versus expansion through military means, and stability and change within the city.
Love and tragedy dominate book four of Virgil’s most powerful work, building on the violent emotions invoked by the storms, battles, warring gods, and monster-plagued wanderings of the epic’s ...opening. Destined to be the founder of Roman culture, Aeneas, nudged by the gods, decides to leave his beloved Dido, causing her suicide in pursuit of his historical destiny. A dark plot, in which erotic passion culminates in sex, and sex leads to tragedy and death in the human realm, unfolds within the larger horizon of a supernatural sphere, dominated by power-conscious divinities. Dido is Aeneas’ most significant other, and in their encounter Virgil explores timeless themes of love and loyalty, fate and fortune, the justice of the gods, imperial ambition and its victims, and ethnic differences. This course book offers a portion of the original Latin text, study questions, a commentary, and interpretative essays. Designed to stretch and stimulate readers, Ingo Gildenhard’s incisive commentary will be of particular interest to students of Latin at both A2 and undergraduate level. It extends beyond detailed linguistic analysis to encourage critical engagement with Virgil’s poetry and discussion of the most recent scholarly thought.
In this collection of twelve of his essays, distinguished Virgil scholar Michael Putnam examines the Aeneid from several different interpretive angles. He identifies the themes that permeate the ...epic, provides detailed interpretations of its individual books, and analyzes the poem's influence on later writers, including Ovid, Lucan, Seneca, and Dante. In addition, a major essay on wrathful Aeneas and the tactics of Pietas is published here for the first time. Putnam first surveys the intellectual development that shaped Virgil's poetry. He then examines several of the poem's recurrent dichotomies and metaphors, including idealism and realism, the line and the circle, and piety and fury. In succeeding chapters, he examines in detail the meaning of particular books of the Aeneid and argues that a close reading of the end of the epic is crucial for understanding the poem as a whole and Virgil's goals in composing it.
Exploring the hero's journey as a metaphor for spiritual evolution, this book offers a close, original reading of three seminal works of epic poetry: the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Iliad, and ...Virgil's Aeneid. An excellent introduction to the central themes and historical development of the epic form, Somewhere I Have Never Travelled is also a compelling examination of the ways in which ancient literature can illuminate our modern lives.
One of the best books ever written on one of humanity's greatest epics, W. R. Johnson's classic study of Vergil's Aeneid challenges centuries of received wisdom. Johnson rejects the political and ...historical reading of the epic as a record of the glorious prehistory of Rome and instead foregrounds Vergil's enigmatic style and questioning of the heroic myths.With an approach to the text that is both grounded in scholarship and intensely personal, and in a style both rhetorically elegant and passionate, Johnson offers readings of specific passages that are nuanced and suggestive as he focuses on the "somber and nourishing fictions" in Vergil's poem. A timeless work of scholarship, Darkness Visible will enthrall classicists as well as students and scholars of the history of criticism—specifically the way in which politics influence modern readings of the classics—and of poetry and literature.
Quintus Ennius was once the monumental epic poet of Republican Rome and considered ‘the father of Roman poetry’. But around 150 years after his epic, Annales, first appeared, it was decisively ...replaced by Virgil’s Aeneid and now survives only in fragments. Almost a century after Eduard Norden’s primarily textual study, Ennius und Vergilius (Leipzig, 1915), this is the first book-length study since Norden’s of the relationship between Rome’s two great epic poems. Until the Aeneid appeared, the Annales had been at the heart of the Roman literary canon, embedded in the school curriculum as part of the cultural franchise you needed to have in order to become ‘Roman’ and linked with the memory of the Roman past. More than an intertextual study, therefore, this monograph investigates the key issue of the intersection between intertextuality and the appropriations of cultural memory: how, in the use of archaism, the presentation of landscape, embedded memories of the Punic Wars, and fragments of exempla, the new poem appropriates and rewrites the myths and memories which the old had enshrined in Roman epic. Not just a newer and slicker ‘New Poet’, Virgil constructs himself as an older ‘Archaic Poet’ of the deepest memories of the Roman past competing for Ennius’ ‘shaggy crown’.
