A Companion To Vergil S Aeneid And Its Tradition

A Companion to Vergil’s Aeneid and its Tradition presents a collection of original interpretive essays that represent an innovative addition to the body of Vergil scholarship. Provides fresh approaches to traditional Vergil scholarship and new insights into unfamiliar aspects of Vergil's textual history Features contributions by an international team of the most distinguished scholars Represents a distinctively original approach to Vergil scholarship

Virgil became a school author in his own lifetime and the centre of the Western canon for the next 1800 years, exerting a major influence on European literature, art, and politics. This Companion is designed as an indispensable guide for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of an author critical to so many disciplines. It consists of essays by seventeen scholars from Britain, the USA, Ireland and Italy which offer a range of different perspectives both traditional and innovative on Virgil's works, and a renewed sense of why Virgil matters today. The Companion is divided into four main sections, focussing on reception, genre, context, and form. This ground-breaking book not only provides a wealth of material for an informed reading but also offers sophisticated insights which point to the shape of Virgilian scholarship and criticism to come.

"A Companion to the Study of Virgil" is not yet another introduction to Virgil's poetry, nor is it the thinking man's version of the bibliographies in ANRW. The editor and three outside contributors offer a guide both to the key problems and to the most intelligent discussions. They do not offer 'solutions' to all the difficulties, but are not frightened to admit that "this" we do not know, that "that" is a mess, and that "there" more work is to be done. The book is aimed at graduate students and university teachers. Many of the issues are difficult and artificial simplifications seem to offer no advantages. Apart from ample discussion of the poems and the main issues they raise, the book offers chapters on the life of Virgil (Horsfall), his style (Horsfall), his influence on later Latin epic (W.R. Barnes), on Latin life and culture (Horsfall), and on his MS tradition (Geymonat).

Vergil's Aeneid has been considered a classic, if not the classic, of Western literature for two thousand years. In recent decades this famous poem has become the subject of fresh and searching controversy. What is the poem's fundamental meaning? Does it endorse or undermine values of empire and patriarchy? Is its world view comic or tragic? Many studies of the poem have focused primarily on selected books. The approach here is comprehensive. An introduction by editor Christine Perkell discusses the poem's historical background, its reception from antiquity to the present, and its most important themes. The book-by-book readings that follow both explicate the text and offer a variety of interpretations. Concluding topic chapters focus on the Aeneid as foundation story, the influence of Apollonius' Argonautica, the poem's female figures, and English translations of the Aeneid. Written in an accessible style and providing translations of all Latin passages, this volume will be of particular value to teachers and students of humanities courses as well as to specialists.

"Fitzgerald's [translation] is so decisively the best modern Aeneid that it is unthinkable that anyone will want to use any other version for a long time to come." —New York Review of Books Virgil's great epic transforms the Homeric tradition into a triumphal statement of the Roman civilizing mission—translated by Robert Fitzgerald.

Written by eminent scholar David O. Ross, this guide helps readers to engage with the poetry, thought, and background of Virgil’s great epic, suggesting both the depth and the beauty of Virgil’s poetic images and the mental images with which the Romans lived. Guides readers through the complexity of Virgil’s poetic style and imagery All extracts are translated, with original Latin given when necessary Provides useful historical and social context in which to understand the poem as it was viewed in its time Includes short introductions to important topics such as Roman religion and the Roman concept of ‘character’ Features a helpful appendix which clarifies how to read and hear the poem's Latin hexameter

A major new interpretation of Vergil's epic poem as a struggle between two incompatible versions of the Homeric hero This compelling book offers an entirely new way of understanding the Aeneid. Many scholars regard Vergil's poem as an attempt to combine Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into a single epic. Joseph Farrell challenges this view, revealing how the Aeneid stages an epic contest to determine which kind of story it will tell—and what kind of hero Aeneas will be. Farrell shows how this contest is provoked by the transgressive goddess Juno, who challenges Vergil for the soul of his hero and poem. Her goal is to transform the poem into an Iliad of continuous Trojan persecution instead of an Odyssey of successful homecoming. Farrell discusses how ancient critics considered the flexible Odysseus the model of a good leader but censured the hero of the Iliad, the intransigent Achilles, as a bad one. He describes how the battle over which kind of leader Aeneas will prove to be continues throughout the poem, and explores how this struggle reflects in very different ways on the ethical legitimacy of Rome’s emperor, Caesar Augustus. By reframing the Aeneid in this way, Farrell demonstrates how the purpose of the poem is to confront the reader with an urgent decision between incompatible possibilities and provoke uncertainty about whether the poem is a celebration of Augustus or a melancholy reflection on the discontents of a troubled age.

Presents stimulating chapters on Virgil and his reception, offering an authoritative overview of the current state of Virgilian studies.