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One of the masterpieces of Latin and, indeed, world literature, Virgil's Aeneid was written during the Augustan "renaissance" of architecture, art, and literature that redefined the Roman world in the early years of the empire. This period was marked by a transition from the use of rhetoric as a means of public persuasion to the use of images to display imperial power. Taking a fresh approach to Virgil's epic poem, Riggs Alden Smith argues that the Aeneid fundamentally participates in the Augustan shift from rhetoric to imagery because it gives primacy to vision over speech as the principal means of gathering and conveying information as it recounts the heroic adventures of Aeneas, the legen...
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.
Here James O'Hara shows how the deceptive nature of prophecy in the Aeneid complicates assessment of the poem's attitude toward its hero's achievement and toward the future of Rome under Augustus Caesar. This close study of the language and rhetorical context of the prophecies reveals that they regularly suppress discouraging material: the gods send promising messages to Aeneas and others to spur them on in their struggles, but these struggles often lead to untimely deaths or other disasters only darkly hinted at by the prophecies. O'Hara finds in these prophecies a persistent subtext that both stresses the human cost of Aeneas' mission and casts doubt on Jupiter's promise to Venus of an "en...
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This commentary was begun in 1967, but most of the period from 1971 to 1996 was spent on work that was in some sense an essential preliminary to a detailed study of Aeneid 7. The work will serve as a guide to recent (and future) work on Virgilian language, grammar, syntax and style. Recent approaches to the text have been, where possible, taken into account, with sympathy but without jargon. Virgil's sources, in verse and prose, have been studied with special care and the commentary presents a coherent approach to Virgil's view of Italian religion, antiquities and topography. Unusually full indexing is intended to further the book's use as a guide to many aspects of Augustan poetic idiom. There is a text independent of recent editions and a precise, prose translation.
Vergil's Aeneid has been considered a classic, if not the classic, of Western literature for two thousand years. In recent decades this famous poem has become the subject of fresh and searching controversy. What is the poem's fundamental meaning? Does it endorse or undermine values of empire and patriarchy? Is its world view comic or tragic? Many studies of the poem have focused primarily on selected books. The approach here is comprehensive. An introduction by editor Christine Perkell discusses the poem's historical background, its reception from antiquity to the present, and its most important themes. The book-by-book readings that follow both explicate the text and offer a variety of interpretations. Concluding topic chapters focus on the Aeneid as foundation story, the influence of Apollonius' Argonautica, the poem's female figures, and English translations of the Aeneid. Written in an accessible style and providing translations of all Latin passages, this volume will be of particular value to teachers and students of humanities courses as well as to specialists.