Patterns Of Action In The Aeneid

This book, an attempt to isolate and examine one aspect of Vergil's poetic technique in the Aeneid, is a result of pondering for several years with undergraduates and graduate students Rome's greatest epic. -- Preface.

This book, an attempt to isolate and examine one aspect of Vergil's poetic technique in the Aeneid, is a result of pondering for several years with undergraduates and graduate students Rome's greatest epic. -- Preface.

Narrative summary of Virgil's epic poem.

This book by one of the preeminent Virgil scholars of our day is the first comprehensive study of ekphrasis in Virgil's final masterpiece, the Aeneid. Virgil uses ekphrasis--a self-contained aside that generates a pause in the narrative to describe a work of art or other object--to tell us something about the grander text in which it is embedded, says Michael C. J. Putnam. Individually and as a group, Virgil's ekphrases enrich the reader's understanding of the meaning of the epic. Putnam shows how the descriptions of works of art, and of people, places, and even animals, provide metaphors for the entire poem and reinforce its powerful ambiguities. Putnam offers insightful analyses of the most extensive and famous ekphrases in the Aeneid--the paintings in Juno's temples in Carthage, the Daedalus frieze, and the shield of Aeneas. He also considers shorter and less well known examples--the stories of Ganymede, the Trojan shepherd swept into the sky by an amorous Jupiter; the fifty daughters of Danaus, ordered by their father to kill their husbands on their wedding night; and Virgil's original tale of a domesticated wild stag whose killing sparks a war between Trojans and Italians. These ekphrases incorporate major themes of the Aeneid, an enduring formative text of the Western tradition, and provide a rich variety of interpretive perspectives on the poem.

The message of Virgil's Aeneid once seemed straightforward enough: the epic poem returned to Aeneas and the mythical beginnings of Rome in order to celebrate the city's present world power and to praise its new master, Augustus Caesar. Things changed when late twentieth-century readers saw the ancient poem expressing their own misgivings about empire and one-man rule. In this timely book, David Quint depicts a Virgil who consciously builds contradiction into the Aeneid. The literary trope of chiasmus, reversing and collapsing distinctions, returns as an organizing signature in Virgil's writing: a double cross for the reader inside the Aeneid's story of nation, empire, and Caesarism. Uncovering verbal designs and allusions, layers of artfulness and connections to Roman history, Quint's accessible readings of the poem's famous episodes--the fall of Troy, the story of Dido, the trip to the Underworld, and the troubling killing of Turnus—disclose unsustainable distinctions between foreign war/civil war, Greek/Roman, enemy/lover, nature/culture, and victor/victim. The poem's form, Quint shows, imparts meanings it will not say directly. The Aeneid's life-and-death issues—about how power represents itself in grand narratives, about the experience of the defeated and displaced, and about the ironies and revenges of history—resonate deeply in the twenty-first century. This new account of Virgil's masterpiece reveals how the Aeneid conveys an ambivalence and complexity that speak to past and present.

In his Preface, Robert Morse states that both Vergil and Tolkien present myth as an aspect of an historical continuum. For these authors, myth does not seem to represent a falsehood, but rather it seems to narrate a record of experience from which humanity learns. Thus, myth is...a form of memory. In Evocation of Vergil in Tolkien's Art, Robert Morse asks the question: does this syncretism of myth and history serve a similar purpose in each author?

Madness Unchained is a comprehensive introduction to and study of Virgil's Aeneid. The book moves through Virgil's epic scene by scene and offers a detailed explication of not only all the major (and many minor) difficulties of interpretation, but also provides a cohesive argument that explores Virgil's point in writing this epic of Roman mythology and Augustan propaganda: the role of fury or madness in Rome's national identity. There have been other books that have attempted to present a complete guide to the Aeneid, but this is the first to address every episode in the poem, omitting nothing, and aiming itself at an audience that ranges from the Advanced Placement Virgil student in secondary school to the professional Virgilian and everyone in-between, both Latinists and the Latin-less. Individual chapters correspond to the books of the poem; unlike some volumes that prejudice the reader's interpretation of the work by rearranging the order of episodes in order to influence their impact on the audience, this book moves in the order Virgil intended, and also gives rather fuller exposition to the second half of the poem, Virgil's self-proclaimed 'greater work' (maius opus).

An anthology of 43 classic essays and poems on the Roman poet. Quinn's position is that his work continues to be compelling and flexible enough to support a wide range of interpretations and perspectives. In addition to a bibliography, she provides a lengthy introduction and conclusion that tackle the question of the book's title, Why Vergil? Further, she juxtaposes the first few lines of the Aeneid in its original Latin with five translations, and includes a synopsis of it and a list of dates for quick reference. She has not indexed the volume.