Aeneid - SCHOLARSHIP

Jenkins - Characterisation of Aeneas

• “It is the constant awareness of duty and responsibility that makes Aeneas a new kind of epic hero”

Perkell - Creusa

• “Aeneas failed Creusa, he has much more care for his son and father”

Desmond M - Characterisation of Dido

• “Dido’s change from good to a bad queen occurs because her activities as a lover explicitly compromise her status as a good queen”

Jenkyns - Characterisation of Creusa

• “Creusa’s main concern is not to heighten emotions; rather she tries to dampen it down”

Williams - Augustan Values

• “The Aeneid reflects the governmental policy of Augustus in moral, social and religious ideas” - because they were Virgil’s ideas, not Augustus’ - “both men saw things the same way”

Camps - Homeric Influence

• “Invention finds much of its raw material in the reminiscence of the Homeric poems: the final product is always distinctively his own”

Camps - Fate and Free Will

• “His will is free and his decisions his own that distinguishes his situation from other characters”

Feeney - Death of Turnus

• “The explosive release with which the poem ends has been massively prepared for, and gives the ending its own peculiar sense of adequacy”

Buckley - Death of Turnus

• “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.”

Buckley - Death of Turnus

• “In the event, it seems that Aeneas makes no active choice at all: overcome by mad passions, he slaughters Turnus”

Nusbaum - Fall of Troy

• “The end of Troy becomes, in Virgil, the beginning of Rome; from the ashes of Troy will rise the Phoenix of Rome”

Harrison - Battle Scenes

• “The shorter battle scenes are more like gladiator fights, this makes them more appealing to a Roman audience”

Gransden - Book 4 as Tragedy

• Book 4 is like a tragedy, where the author is a chorus, not only narrating, but commenting on the action - “with scenes between the protagonists, divine messengers and interventions, with the author as chorus not only narrating but commenting on the action”

Cox - Heroic Values

• “Aeneas leaving Troy symbolises a departure from Homeric values”

Jenkyns - Aeneas Characterisation

• “The contradictions in Aeneas’ actions make him difficult to like, but certainly make him human”

Williams - Roman Heroism

• “Virgil’s problem was to present a character appropriate to be called a hero in a time which was no longer ‘heroic’ - as he was the first Roman he has to foreshadow the qualities of a different civilisation”

Williams - Greek vs Roman Hero

• “The Homeric heroes are great individuals, but Aeneas has to be the social man not aiming to achieve personal satisfaction but to use his qualities in order to achieve their success”

Nelis - Dido (Book 4)

• “Book 4 seems to give us the story of Dido where Aeneas has a secondary role”

Williams - Similarities of Dido and Turnus

• “Turnus in many essentials resembles Dido as an obstacle to the divine which must be overcome, yet when he is overcome there is a powerful sympathy for him and a feeling of injustice”

Gale - Turnus v Aeneas

• “The crucial difference between Turnus and Aeneas is a distinction between personal glory and impersonal duty, private desires and public pietas”

Cowan - Death of Euryalus

• “The death of love and Euryalus’ death suggests 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”

Cowan - Nisus and Euryalus

• “We feel sympathy and even admiration for Nisus and Euryalus yet we are uneasy about their brutal slaughter of sleeping men, their desire for glory and spoils”

Cowan - Aeneas and Augustan Values

• “Pius Aeneas, respectful of his duty to god, man, country and family - He is a model for the Emperor Augustus, a template for what a good Roman is expected to be”

Rutherford - Turnus

• “Turnus is a ‘Homeric’ hero, dashing, unthinking and violent, who must give way to the new style hero, the proto-Roman Aeneas”

Nelis - Dido

• “Dido is beautiful, generous and kind”

Quesnay - Dido

• “Dido is certainly a victim of circumstances and the gods”

Hardie - Dido

• “As modern readers Dido evokes our sincerest sympathy”

Rutherford - Allecto and Turnus

• “Virgil, through Alecto and Turnus as elsewhere, shows a deeper and more alarming awareness of the power of evil in the world, and of the powerlessness of man in the face of such irrational forces”

Burke - Turnus

• “Turnus is both the noble man of action (Hector) and the selfish lover (Paris)”

Williams - Aeneas and Augustus

• “It is a great mistake to think that Aeneas is modelled on by Augustus, it is rather the case that Virgil is trying to depict a character upon whom the Romans of his day could model themselves”

Williams - Parade of Heroes

• “The pageant of unborn Roman heroes which Anchises describes is the most powerful patriotic message in the whole poem”

Harrison - Juno

• “Juno is a typical soap opera bitch”

Camps - the Gods

• “The gods are depicted in a human shape with human attributes”

Rutherford - Role of the Gods

• “Women and everyone else, are powerless under the forces of the gods”

Williams - Fate

• “in Virgil, fate has its plan for hundreds and thousands of years ahead. In a paradoxical way, it requires the cooperation of man for its fulfilment”

Braund - Juno

• “The Aeneid can also be read as a story about the wrath of Juno” - starts with an invocation to the Muse and Juno’s anger, like the Iliad with Achilles

Cowan - Father/son Bond

• “Father-son relationships and suffering are central to the plot”

Quesnay - Dido and the gods

• “The unhappiness which leads to her suicide is the result of the intervention of the gods”

Quesnay - Dido and Aeneas

• “It is too easy to focus on the sufferings of Dido and to ignore those of Aeneas or even blame him for Dido’s death”

Jenkyns - Camilla

• “She is one of Virgil’s strangest and most original creations, both delicate and savage, both virginal and fierce”

Jenkyns - Diversity of the epic

• “His poetry has room for a wide range of men and women, because after all, he is interested in the diversity of the world and the diversity of the people that it contains”

Nelis - Doe metaphor (Dido)

• “Dido’s wound is internal at the beginning of the book, but real by the end”

Gildenhard and Henderson - Camilla

• “Camilla is an androgynous monstrosity”

Burke - Role of Amata

• “Amata shares with Turnus the guilt of the war and by her death, removes it from the Latin people”

Olliensis - Role of Women

• “The effortlessly virtuous women of the epic prove their virtue precisely by submitting to the masculine plot of history”

Cowan - Augustan Rome

• “This poem is ‘really’ about the contemporary political situation at Rome”

Gransden - The Gods

• “In the Aeneid the gods work through human wills and desires”

Hardie - Aeneas’ Role

• “What is often perceived as the colourless quality of Aeneas’ character is largely the result of the roles forced on him by the plot of the Aeneid: rather than being strongly driven by an internal desire or ambition, he is forced into a mission beyond his control”

Gildenhard - Dido (Contemporary)

• “The issues raised by the Dido episode - sexual ethics, the use and abuse of power, interaction with the other, imperialism, personal choice and historical necessity… continue to matter”

Mackie - Aeneas and Fate

• “Aeneas’ general concern to facilitate fate is the cornerstone of his pietas”