The Aeneid Scholarship

Lyne on Augustan Propaganda

"Virgil interweaves several contradictory voices which allow the reader to construct multiple meanings"

Morwood on Augustan Propaganda

"The absence of an ideal city in the Aeneid creates a vacuum which can only be filled with a dream of Rome."

Laird on Augustan Propaganda

"the Aeneid was designed to meet a specific need: to justify Augustus' questionable regime"

Beard on Aeneas

"Augustus' mythical ancestor and clearly intended to be some reflection of him, is decidedly an unstraightforward hero"

Hardie on Aeneas

"rather than being strongly driven by an internal desire or ambition, he is forced into a mission by circumstances beyond his control"

Williams on Aeneas

"a very irresolute hero indeed, backward-looking, filled with guilt and remorse"

Mac Gorain on Aeneas

"Aeneas displays virtues that are quintessentially Roman and his character is consistent with the ideals which Augustus was keen to promote: religious, social and familial."

Rutherford on Turnus

"Orthodoxy has it that Turnus is a Homeric hero, dashing, unthinking and violent, who must give way to the new style hero, the proto-Roman Aeneas"

Harrison on Dido

"Dido is neither mad nor bad, indeed she is highly sympathetic to modern readers"

Hardie on Dido

"She has tried to play her part in the society of men and failed"

Warner on Dido

"When he relinquishes Dido for the higher purpose of empire building, the choice of Rome over Carthage signals his transformation from a Trojan into a Roman"

Jenkyns on Camilla

"one of Virgil's strangest and most original creations, both delicate and savage, both virginal and fierce"

Cowan on intertextuality

"Virgil sets about making sure that his sequel is even better than the original, even down to the pettiest details. Where Achilles chases Hector three times around the walls of Troy, Aeneas chases Turnus five times around the Latin plain"

Rutherford on intertextuality

"he was not only imitating but seeking to rival both the Homeric epics - perhaps he even dreamed of surpassing them, of conquering the genre for Latin poetry"

Cowan on Nisus and Euryalus

"we are uneasy about their brutal slaughter of sleeping men [...] a result [...] of their privileging of the personal over the public"

Cowan on youth

"Euryalus' death suggest the needless and tragic destruction of a thing of beauty by a mindless, impersonal force. The image fits into a wider network of anthems for doomed youth within the Aeneid"

Lyne on Latinus

"old king as a rounded figure deserving sympathy and regret"

Buckely on the ending

"For when Aeneas kills Turnus, Virgil employs the verb 'condere' which means not just to stab, but also to found. When Aeneas puts Turnus to the sword, he sets in motion the foundation of the Roman race."

Morgan on civil war

"Virgil is trying to persuade his readers to think differently about the civil wars." "They were ghastly, but they were necessary too, if the bright new Rome [...] was to be established"

Otis on Fate

"The Aeneid in fact is the story of the interplay between cosmic power of fate and human response to it"

Cowan on furor

"frenzy or furor is the most persuasive and destructive force in the Aeneid"

Nortwick on Aeneas and Turnus

"Achilles serves as a model for both Aeneas and Turnus right up to the end of the Aeneid"

Nortwick on the ending

"[Aeneas] has at last succumbed to the violence against which he has struggled so long"

Jenkyns on Dido

"the Gods caused Dido's love, she then chose to act upon it"

Sowerby on Turnus and Aeneas

"Turnus is a kind of foil to Aeneas, representing an older individual heroism"

Burke on Turnus

"Turnus [...] is both the noble man of action (Hector) and the selfish lover (Paris)"

Williams on Camilla

"[Camilla is] a strange mixture of the beauty of an idyllic pastoral world and the heroic world of violence and cruelty"

Gransden on Juno

"Most of the plot of the Aeneid is generated by Juno"

Morgan on Fate

"[the gods] cannot alter fate - although they are seemingly allowed to try"

Clover on War

"Virgil's whole nature was on the side of peace"

Sowerby on relationships

"The relationship between father and son is the closest bond in the poem"

Morgan on women

"[Dido and Camilla] have a license to perform in the epic for as long as they operate like men"

Reed on identity

"The Aeneid's very idea of Rome and Roman identity, it can be argued, never coheres except as a negative position against other national entities"