Virgil’s Aeneid Nov. 11, 2015 “Give way, you Greeks! Something greater than the Iliad is coming...
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Transcript of Virgil’s Aeneid Nov. 11, 2015 “Give way, you Greeks! Something greater than the Iliad is coming...
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Virgil’s Aeneid
Nov. 11, 2015
“Give way, you Greeks!Something greater than the Iliad is coming to birth!”
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Etruscan,5th C BCE
Relief, 2nd C BCE
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“Aeneas flees burning Troy,” Federico Barocci, 1598
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“Creüsa spoke, and then left me there,Weeping, with many things yet to say.She vanished into thin air. Three timesI tried to put my arms around her; three timesHer wraith slipped through my hands”
(934-938)
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Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland “The Meeting of Dido and Aeneas,” 1766.
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Homer & Virgil
Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Grai!nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade
Give way, writers of Rome, give way, you Greeks!Something greater than the Iliad is coming to birth.
-Sextus Propertius
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First lines, Homer & Virgil
The Aeneid:“I sing of arms and of the man”
• points to The Iliad (arms) and The Odyssey (the epic wanderer).
The Iliad:“Rage:Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage”
The Odyssey:“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns”
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Echoes of Homer in Virgil
• Aeneid, Books 1, 3-6 (The Odyssey) Book 2 (The Iliad + The Odyssey)
• Book 2: Aeneas recounts multi-year wandering to Dido and Carthaginians, as Odysseus does when he is hosted by the Phaeacians.
• Homeric technique: embedded storytelling
Sinon’s stories
Aeneas’s story
Virgil’s story
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Virgil against Homer
• Virgil emphasizes ethnic and national difference. • War is won through deceit rather than noble combat (Ulysses’s
rather than Achilles’s war).
• The Greeks exploit and dishonor the codes of xenia.
• The Trojans (the losers) emerge as the moral winners.
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“The Ancient City Fell”
• Greek invasion as a crime against civilization
• Connection: city and “civility”Latin: civis: citizen
civilis: polite
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“May the gods treat you as you deserve For making me watch my own son’s murder And defiling with death a father’s face. Not so was Achilles, whom you falsely claim To be your father” (627-631).
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Competing Heroic Virtues (Homeric and Roman)
• Roman pietas: duty to the family, the city, the empire; selfhood subordinated to the collective good.
• Virtús (virtue)
– Vir: “man”
– manly conduct, defined by self-restraint, suppression of emotions, stoicism
• Contest between pietas and furens (fury).
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Competing Heroic Virtues (Homeric and Roman)furens vs. pietas
“Out of my mind, I took up arms—no battle plan, But my soul burned to gather a war party And storm the citadel. Rage and fury Sent my mind reeling, and my only thought Was how glorious it is to die in combat” (370-374)
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“May the gods treat you as you deserve For making me watch my own son’s murder And defiling with death a father’s face. Not so was Achilles, whom you falsely claim To be your father, in the face of Priam his foe But honored a suppliant’s rights and trust, And allowed the bloodless corpse of Hector Burial, and sent me back to my own realm” (627-634).
• Aeneas faces this kind of test at the end of the epic and fails.
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“…Although there is no heroic nameIn killing a woman, no victory,I will be praised for snuffing out evil…I was carried away by this frenzy” (683-685, 688).
• Venus intervenes to stop Aeneas in this expression of and attack on private passion.
• In the Aeneas/Dido episode, romantic love is both essential and an impediment to Aeneas’s destiny.
• He can’t win: He chooses pietas, and brings a curse on the future Rome.
Pietas vs. Private Passion
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The Aeneid as Double-Voiced
Imperial/Public Voice
• voice of the imperial encomium (poem in praise of empire)
• voice of official optimism
Private/Tragic Voice
• voice of individual desire and suffering
• unofficial voice of critique, skepticism, and melancholy.
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Prophetic History
• Focus: the final or ultimate meaning of history (for example: Augustan Rome)
• The result: the future echoes the past and the past (seemingly impossibly) echoes the future.
• Example: Aeneas—in his full or final historical importance—is descended from Augustus!
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Prophetic History“O the happy ones, whose walls are already rising!”
• Aeneas witnessing the walls of Carthage being built prefigures:
1. Aeneas building the walls of Rome.
2. Rome rebuilding Carthage.
Historical repetition or an end of history?
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Aren’t the Trojans the Greeks (the foreign invaders) in Italy?
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Aren’t the Trojans the Greeks in Italy?
-No! Virgil depicts the Trojans’ arrival in Italy not as an invasion but a homecoming. It turns out Aeneas is both from the east (Troy) and not from the east!
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Aren’t the Trojans the Greeks in Italy?
-No! Virgil depicts the Trojans’ arrival in Italy not as an invasion but a homecoming. It turns out Aeneas is both from the east (Troy) and not from the east!
But what’s the difference between arrival ata promised land and military conquest?