Scholarship

• Aeneas had to become the ’social man’ - R.D Williams
• War has to be portrayed at least somewhat positively, as war and the making of empire was very positive for the Romans, particularly for Augustus’- W.H Semple
• ’Virgil portrays women who step outside of traditional gender roles as doomed to fail’ - Colleen Reilly
• ‘Augustus is at the heart of the poem’ - Stephen Harrison
• ‘Make way you Roman writers! Make way you Greeks, something more than the Iliad is being born’ - Propertius
• Virgil is like Tarantino. Violence is entertaining. - Stephen Harrison
• ‘Virgil associates the feminine with unruly passion, the masculine with reasoned (self) mastery’ - Ellen Oliensis
• ‘…self and anti-self’ - R.D Williams
• ‘…rather than being strongly driven by an internal desire or ambition, he is forced into a mission by circumstances beyond his control’ - W.H Semple and Philip Hardie
• ‘[Aeneas is] a man who cares about his family above all else’ - Helen Tarbet
• ‘[The Aeneid is] the literary equivalent of watching gladiatorial conflict’ ‘Virgil was not a pacifist’ - Stephen Harrison
• ‘Lavinia as the ‘proper’ Latin woman can be contrasted to the foreign ‘wilder and more chaotic’ Dido’ - Yasmin Syed
• ‘Virgil’s intention is to imitate Homer and to praise Augustus by means of his ancestors’ - Servius
• ‘The second half of the Aeneid has two voices: a public voice of celebration and a private voice of lamentation’ - Adam Parry
• ‘Aeneas enters the underworld immersed in the past, but once the shades of Dido and Deiphobus turn away from him, he fully accepts his mission’ - Brooks Otis
• ‘from the ashes of Troy will rise the phoenix of Rome’ - Gerry Nussbaum
• ‘Anchises’ death left Aeneas somewhat lacking in direction’ - Llewelyn Morgan
• Virgil uses Trojans, Latins and ‘other’/foreign cultures such as the Carthaginians and Greeks to enable the Roman reader to construct their own ‘Roman’ identity - Yasmin Syed
• ‘The uncomplicatedly virtuous women of the epic, Creusa and Lavinia, prove their virtue.. by submitting to the masculine plot of history…’ - Yasmin Syed
• Aeneas must be portrayed at least partially as ‘primeval ancestor of Rome, a prototype of the historic qualities by which many great Roman soldiers and statesmen, and especially Augustus, had consolidated their country in strength, unity and peace’ - W.H Semple
• Book 4 is like a tragedy ‘with devine messengers and interventions, with the author as the chorus, not only narrating but commenting on the action’ - K.W Gransden
• ’So powerful was Virgil’s sympathy for the defeated that it often seems to conflict with the triumph of Rome’s achievement…’ - R.D Williams and W.H Semple
• Turnus perhaps represents a barbaric and antique way of life that has no place in the new civilisation of Rome - R.D Williams
• ’.. Virgil created in Aeneas a new type of stoic hero, willing and ready to subordinate his individual will to that of destiny, the commonwealth and the future’ - K.W Gransden [thirst for glory quote]
• [Aeneas as a stoic hero] ..’reluctant to fight and not really interested in victory‘ - K.W Gransden
• We need our heroes to be human and not too great, otherwise it is not satisfying. ‘To be juman is to experience failure and suffer defeat’ - David Ross
• ‘That image of Aeneas with his father on his back and holding his son by the hand is an archetypal image of Aeneas and… embodies pietas…and that was a very important virtue it terms of how Augustus himself was perceived‘ - Catharine Edwards
• ’In antiquity…it was received as a poem that endorsed Augustus’ - Catharine Edwards
• ‘Aeneas.. is actually awfully unwilling to pursue his project, in many ways’ ‘he’s not on a mission for his own ambition’ - Catharine Edwards
• ‘Dido.. is a worthy companion and consort of Aeneas… it’s the near miss of history’ - Edith Hall
• ‘he really does love her with all his heart’ - Edith Hall (Aeneas and Dido)
• ‘He had to depict Aeneas as a worthy first ancestor of Augustus, in whose honour the poem was written’ - Aelius Donatus 4th cent AD
• ‘Everything [in Virgil’s poetry] - landscape, morning, night…every gesture, movement and image becomes a symbol of the soul’ - Viktor Pöschl
• ‘..presents what happened as what had to happen, what was to be…it creates a sense of determinism around Roman history’ - Duncan Kennedy on the effect of Jupiter’s book 1 prophecy of familiar Roman events