An examination of the main characters in the Aeneid - Aeneas himself, Dido and Turnus - in the light of Virgil's contemporary Augustan political and literary ideology. The characters and the plot and incident of the epic are seen as embodying and exemplifying first the ancient ideals of kingship and concord, and second the Roman self-identification as at once 'Italian' and 'Trojan', and finally as reflecting the literary self-evaluation of the Augustan age. In the literary area, Virgil's relations with contemporary Roman elegy, with early Greek lyric and, most important, with Homer, are studied and reevaluated. Virgilian scholars and students of Augustan literature in general will find this book of interest to them.

This title features a collection of 14 papers in which contributors use diverging critical methods on a selection of extracts from Vergil's epic, with the examination of political references in the work being prominent, as well as the question of the Aeneid's central meaning. Contents include: Vergil announcing the Aeneid. On Geo. 3.1-48 (Egil Kraggerud); The Peopling of the Underworld (Anton Powell); Vergil as a Republican (Eckard Lefevre); The Sword-Belt of Pallas: Moral Symbolism and Political Ideology (Stephen Harrison); The Isolation of Turnus (Richard F. Thomas) and The End and the Meaning (David West)

Investigates the representation of the Carthaginian enemy and the revisionist history of the Punic Wars in Virgil's Aeneid.

This book is an examination of the ideological reception of Virgil at specific moments in the last two millennia. The author focuses on the emperor Augustus in the poetry of Virgil, detects in the poets and grammarians of antiquity alternately a collaborative oppositional reading and an attempt to suppress such reading, studies creative translation (particularly Dryden's), which reasserts the 'Augustan' Virgil, and examines naive translation which can be truer to the spirit of Virgil. Scrutiny of 'textual cleansing', philology's rewriting or excision of troubling readings, leads to readings by both supporters and opponents of fascism and National Socialism to support or subvert the latter-day Augustus. The book ends with a diachronic examination of the ways successive ages have tried to make the Aeneid conform to their upbeat expectations of this poet.

A critically sophisticated introduction to the epic tradition of the early Roman empire.