Aeneid Scholarship

Mattes

The Aeneid is a poisonous gift to Augustus

Gerry Nusbaum

Aeneas is 'the ideal Roman father figure!'

R.D. Williams

We see him as a very irresolute hero indeed

Fiachra Mac Gorain

Aeneas displays virtues that are quintessentially Roman

Richard Rutherford

Virgil ends the story abruptly and disturbingly, with violent revenge and thoughts of clemency forgotten

Hardie (1)

Like Aeneas, Dido is an outcast from her original home

Hardie (2)

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

Rutherford (2)

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

Gotoff on Aeneas’s isolation

“Aeneas is as alone in his piety as was Mezentius in his pride”

Gotoff on Aeneas’ killings

“Virgil constantly robs Aeneas of the joy of his successfully accomplished, necessary tasks”

Kirichenko

Aeneas is a Trojan horse

Servius (ancient commentator)

Jupiter is the voice of fate

Coleman

“Even to a deity the ways of Fate may at times seem whimsical”

Clausen

The Aeneid is a literary allusion to Homer.

Harrison

themes of the Aeneid are: cities, heroism, dying young, gods and violence

Lyne

“Vergil seems curiously disinclined to show Aeneas responding or relating to others”

Stahl and Williams

Aeneas represents a new kind of hero, the unheroic hero

MacKay

“Heroism, in the conventional sense, involves loss of humanity”

Bowra

Aeneas’ cruel behaviour in books 10-12 represents Augustus’ behaviour in the 40s BC

Adam Parry

“The Homeric hero, however beleaguered by fate, loves and enjoys the warmth of life, and his course of action includes a protest against the evanescence of mortality”.

Parry on the Aeneid

“Sense of emptiness in the very heart of the Vergillian mood”

Harrison on Juno

Juno is a “soap opera bitch”

Oliensis on men and women

Women act with “unruly passion” and men with “reasoned mastery”

RD Williams on Dido

“The sympathy which Vergil arouses for DIdo is so strong as to leave the reader profoundly unhappy that the Roman mission should have caused this tragedy”