aeneid scholarship

• Sowerby - Homer and Virgil’s epics focus on a single period of time and a single story, thus giving them unity of action
• European School of Thought - Aeneid is a "creative reinvention of the form"
• Harvard School of Thought - Argues that the triumph of the Aeneid is an “illusion”
• Servius - Argues that Book 7 opens with an invocation to Erato the Muse of love poetry because the wars to come are being fought over a woman, Lavinia
• Williams - Virgil’s poem ends with an act of savagery by Aeneas for which, however much it may be partly justified, no expiation is given
• Wiliams - “There can be no doubt that a major intention of the Aeneid was to glorify Virgil’s own country”
• Nausbaum - Aeneas is the "ideal Roman father figure"
• Mac Gorain - ‘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 - ‘neither Aeneas nor Turnus, can be plausibly regarded as model figures or ideal kings.’
• Sowerby - Dido’s funeral pyre, in which his belongings are burnt, is actually symbolic of his self-sacrifice and in that sense his spiritual death as an individual.
• Chomse - Aeneas' dressing of Pallas in Dido's robes “imprints the memory of Dido’s forbidden life and lost life onto Pallas and so identifies him as another tragic victim in his mission”
• Cowan - He is a model for the Emperor Augustus, a template for what a good Roman is expected to be in his piety
• Gibson - ‘displaying his piety in carrying his father on his shoulders away from Troy.'
• Jenkyns - Disagrees that Aeneas is a stoic hero (one who can rise above his emotions) or even a Roman one and says that in fact, his main fault is feeling too much.
• Grandsen - Aeneid is not violent or aggressive at its core
• Grandsen - “Aeneas is a complex character, pious but also a great soldier, perhaps Troy’s greatest after Hector.”
• Sowerby - Aeneas is an instrument of the gods and of a bigger mission, he at times “emerges as little more than a symbol", a "traumatised loser"
• Williams disagrees that Aeneas is unreal and puppet-like AGAINST Sowerby
• Williams - Reads the killing of Turnus as the first time Aeneas actually does what he wants to emotionally
• Grandsen - Book 6 is the pivot from the Odyssean to the Illiadic
• Sowerby - Argues Aeneas does not change after Book 6
• Williams - Aeneas is “no superhuman figure…he is very much an ordinary mortal”.
• Armstrong - Ascanius wants to be part of things but his grand destiny means he is not expendable
• Armstrong - Just as he has two names (Ascanius and Iulus), “there is something double about his personality: he is at times a young boy, only partially aware of what is going on around him, and sometimes an adolescent, impatient to be recognised as a grown man”
• Sowerby - Dido is “the innocent victim of the Roman destiny"
• Feeney - Dido is the most impassioned and eloquent speaker in the entire poem
• Reilly - Dido is initially admired for her celibacy and ability to lead a nation, but is denigrated in the reader’s eyes for succumbing to her lust for Aeneas
• Reilly - Dido is more threatening than any other woman because she represents a shared female capacity to fall in love and abandon your responsibilities
• Reilly - Positioning the scene of Penthislea’s death and defeat foreshadows Dido’s
• Hardie - Pentheus and Orestes similies refer to tragedy
• Sowerby - Dido is supposed to be perfect for Aeneas, “Aeneas and Dido seem deliberately designed by Virgil to be complementary reflections of one another”. Thus his leaving her is an act of self-sacrifice.
• Du Quesnay - If Dido is Cleopatra, Aeneas leaving shows what Virgil / Augustus think that Mark Antony should have done
• Reilly - “The Roman audience of Virgil’s day would have seen little in Dido besides Cleopatra, ready to seduce another Roman and threaten his fate.”
• Alwis - Creusa is perfect because she has given Aeneas a son, does not give him any problems or hold him back emotionally
• Llewyn Morgan - Herules and Augustus are aligned through August 13th → the day sacrifices to Hercules were made, which continued through to Aug’s day, as well as being the day of Augustus’ triple-triumph after the BoA
• Anderson - Aeneas is presented with two heroic role models, Hercules and Augustus, Aeneid 8 thus provides a turning point in the epic and in Aeneas’ characterisation, from traveller and diplomat, to warrior hero
• Cowan - Nisus and Euryalus episode "fits into a wider network for doomed youth within the Aeneid”
• McDonald - Of Turnus, ‘passion dominates him’
• Sowerby - “He is a kind of foil to Aeneas, representing an older individual heroism”
• Williams - Turnus and Dido are trampled on by the fate of Aeneas and Rome