Reading Virgil

This book provides all the help that an intermediate Latin learner will need to read the first two books of the Aeneid.

Dynamic textual interplay: inherent and inherited

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.

This book is aimed primarily at English-speaking Classical Civilization students taking courses in Virgil, epic and myth at schools, colleges and universities, but will also be of interest to students reading Virgil Aeneid 2 in Latin and to the general reader. The book provides something new for those studying Virgil in translation, offering a detailed and in-depth literary analysis of a single book of the Aeneid, one of the most famous and appealing parts of the whole poem. The book provides a brief introduction to Virgil and the Aeneid in general, and Book 2 in particular. It also offers literary analysis, in order to enhance critical appreciation and plain enjoyment, making the book really come alive. At the end of each chapter exercises, topics for investigation, and references to other scholars and Classical authors are included to extend the engagement with Virgil. At the end of the book, Appendix A contains translations of other versions of the fall of Troy, and Appendix B summarizes the rest of Aeneas’ narrative in Book 3 of the Aeneid (with translation of, and comment, on key passages).

The book aims at providing a coherent guide to the entirety of Virgil's Aeneid, with analysis of every scene and, in some cases, every line of crucial passages. The book tries to provide a guide to the vast bibliography and scholarly apparatus that has grown around Virgil studies (especially over the past century), and to offer some critical study of what Virgil's purpose and intent may have been in crafting his response to Augustus' political ascendancy in Rome, Rome's history of near-constant civil strife, and the myths of Rome's origins and their conflicting Trojan, Greek, and native Italian origins.

These books are intended to make Virgil's Latin accessible even to those with a fairly rudimentary knowledge of the language. There is a departure here from the format of the electronic books, with short sections generally being presented on single, or double, pages and endnotes entirely avoided. A limited number of additional footnotes is included, but only what is felt necessary for a basic understanding of the story and the grammar. Some more detailed footnotes have been taken from Conington's edition of the Aeneid.

Aeneas appears in The Illiad in vague snatches and starts as a traveling warrior of great piety who was loosely connected to the foundation of Rome. Virgil weaves these fragments into a powerful myth about the founding of Rome in The Aeneid. Aeneas travels from his native Troy to Italy then wages victorious war upon the Latins.

This study in reception develops close readings of English literature as means of interrogating Virgil's texts. Through four case studies, bookended by wide-ranging introductory and concluding chapters, this book shows how interpreting the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid through modern responses can serve to focus on aspects of Virgil that would otherwise be differently perceived or else escape notice altogether. Juan Christian Pellicer probes our perceptions of the three Virgilian genres (pastoral, georgic, and epic) and analyzes the ways in which modern reconfigurations of these genres can inform our readings of Virgil's works, as well as help us realize how our own ideas about Virgil reflect the literary receptions through which we approach his texts. This book offers a practical demonstration of classical reception and its value as a critical procedure. By testing the value of modern responses to Virgil as means by which to read his texts, Pellicer critically examines a central tenet of reception studies of classical authors, namely that our understanding of their work can benefit from the receptions through which we perceive them. The reader will find Virgil's texts reconfigured in challenging new ways and will find new appreciations of the classical traditions that inform key texts in the English canon.