Memory In Vergil S Aeneid

Investigates the themes of recollection and commemoration in a new reading that engages with critical work on memory.

Tracing the path from Troy's destruction to Rome's foundation, the Aeneid explores the transition between past and future. As the Trojans struggle to found a new city and the narrator sings of his audience's often-painful history, memory becomes intertwined with a crucial leitmotif: the challenge of being part of a group that survives violence and destruction only to face the daunting task of remembering what was lost. This book offers a new reading of the Aeneid that engages with critical work on memory and questions the prevailing view that Aeneas must forget his disastrous history in order to escape from a cycle of loss. Considering crucial scenes such as Aeneas' reconstruction of Celaeno's prophecy and his slaying of Turnus, this book demonstrates that memory in the Aeneid is a reconstructive and dynamic process, one that offers a social and narrative mechanism for integrating a traumatic past with an uncertain future.

Monumental epic poem tells the heroic story of Aeneas, a Trojan who escaped the burning ruins of Troy to found Lavinium, the parent city of Rome, in the west.

One of the masterpieces of Latin and, indeed, world literature, Virgil's Aeneid was written during the Augustan "renaissance" of architecture, art, and literature that redefined the Roman world in the early years of the empire. This period was marked by a transition from the use of rhetoric as a means of public persuasion to the use of images to display imperial power. Taking a fresh approach to Virgil's epic poem, Riggs Alden Smith argues that the Aeneid fundamentally participates in the Augustan shift from rhetoric to imagery because it gives primacy to vision over speech as the principal means of gathering and conveying information as it recounts the heroic adventures of Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome. Working from the theories of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Smith characterizes Aeneas as a voyant-visible, a person who both sees and is seen and who approaches the world through the faculty of vision. Engaging in close readings of key episodes throughout the poem, Smith shows how Aeneas repeatedly acts on what he sees rather than what he hears. Smith views Aeneas' final act of slaying Turnus, a character associated with the power of oratory, as the victory of vision over rhetoric, a triumph that reflects the ascendancy of visual symbols within Augustan society. Smith's new interpretation of the predominance of vision in the Aeneid makes it plain that Virgil's epic contributes to a new visual culture and a new mythology of Imperial Rome.

A new take on the Aeneid, drawing previously unexplored connections between Vergil's fictional world and its political context

Unsurpassed in quality and utility, Pharr's acclaimed edition includes an introduction, notes, vocabulary, appendix, and fold-out of basic vocabulary. Both paperback and clothbound now contain an "Annotated Bibliography on Vergil, to Supplement Pharr's Aeneid, " by Alexander McKay, a bibliography of articles and books in English, for use in college and high school Vergil courses, for students and their teachers.

With its epic models, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid ranks among the greatest poems, not only of classical antiquity, but of all time. It tells the story of Aeneas, who leads a band of survivors from fallen Troy through wandering and war to found the city that will become imperial Rome. Fully equal to Homer in narrative sweep, dramatic power, and lyric intensity, Virgil's epic outshines its models in the passion and compassion with which its characters, even its hero's formidable opponents, are delineated: Dido, the African queen and femme fatale who would hold him back from his mission; and Turnus, the proud Italian prince he must overcome--ultimately in single combat--to fulfill it. Even the gods above are all too human. A fairy-tale? Of course; but the grandest fairy-tale of western culture, whose later literature it has fundamentally shaped. Not surprisingly, few works have been so often--or so inadequately--translated. It's not just a matter of classical Latin into modern English; in itself, that's not so hard. It's the 'aura' of the great original: its classical flavour, cultural significance, and stately poetic style have never been, perhaps never can be, captured. Yet that is what this translation sets out to do. It begins from our side of the classics, from the western literature the poem has so deeply influenced, and reflects the narrative fluency, dazzling lyricism, and distinctive dignity of Virgil's poem in a fresh and unstilted blank verse resonant with English and American tradition. The result is the most readable version ever. The problems and principles such a project involves are aired in an introduction that illuminates Virgil's great work as never before. Enjoy!