The Aeneid Modern Scholarship

Women are collateral damage in order to prioritise the father and son relationship so important to Romans

Feminist Critique

Dido is a sympathetic figure because she is the voice behind book 4. She is the one who gives the great speeches. Creusa is the ideal Roman matron.

Jenkyns

Accuses Virgil of promoting Rome and Augustus in the work in his poem "Secondary Epic"

W.H. Auden

Women are orientated towards origins, men towards ends

Eleanor Lerensis

Points out that Camilla's death is described in precisely the same terms as that of Turnus, lending this female character an epically heroic death

Emily Pillinger

All the powerful women in the "Aeneid" die, except for Lavinia who doesn't speak!

Edith Hall

Aeneas depicted so as to be an example to Augustus not just a reflection

Griffin

Virgil has transformed the old Homeric code into something new and wholly Roman. After so many years of civil war, Juno would have been particularly horrific to Romans.

K.W. Gransden

Points out that even the great prophetic passages can be understood as muting any triumphalism or even as pessimistic. He uses the examples of the death of Marcellus as a "mournful coda" to Book 6, and the resisting Golden bough and the exit through the gate of false dreams as undermining any authoritative reading of prophetic passages as celebrating Rome's imperial destiny.

Phillip Hardie

Creusa as a kind of ideal Roman matrona who allows Aeneas to move on also sees

Virgil's characters in a positive light.

Richard Jenkyns

Images of dangerous women" remind a Roman of Cleopatra's recent threat to Rome's existence itself.

Hardie

Argues that the minor characters of Amata, Latinus, Lavinia and Juturna disappear from Book 12 in the interests of the dominant theme of Roman destiny, to be seen almost as collateral damage

Oliver Lyne

People have commented a lot on the poem's patriarchal core, with father-son relationships being key, and women regularly sacrificed to the greater mission, which is the fulfilment of men's desires, not women's.

Feminist Critique

Argues that the urge to kill is part of the heroic urge, and points out how often Virgil shows the unpleasantness of this urge, for example in Aeneas' rampage in Book 10 or his violent reactions to events in Book 2 or his angry desire to attack the city in Book 12: "it is to the hero of the poem, to Aeneas, that Virgil ascribes the

urge to kill in it ugliest form...Aeneas has surrendered to an impulse that disgraces his humanity".

Kenneth Quinn

He points out that in Carthage Aeneas doesn't have to be seen as a Mark Antony figure; Julius Caesar had also had an affair with Cleopatra, but unlike Antony, and more like Aeneas, he had ended the affair and gone back to Rome.

Quinn

Suggests reading Turnus as more of a traditional, Homeric type hero than Aeneas is. Whereas Aeneas is motivated by piety and is often reluctant to be heroic, Turnus, who is compared to Achilles, is more of the selfish, out-for-glory type of hero seen in Homer: "he is a kind of foil to Aeneas, representing an older individual heroism

Jasper Griffin

"The Aeneid is dominated by fathers and father-figures... Aeneas is called pater as often as he is called pius"

K.W. Gransden

Juno "embodies the dreaded spirit of civil strife"

K.W. Gransden

"There can be no doubt that a major intention of the Aeneid was to glorify Virgil's own country". He says that there is no doubt that it is a patriotic poem, but says that despite this general patriotism we can't see it simply as Augustan propaganda.

R.D. Williams