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“ incredibilis fama ”: Some Remnants of Time in Virgilian Epic

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Abstract This paper reads out two very well-known moments in Books 3 and 1 of Virgil’s epic poem in order to address a Virgilian tactic, a poetic strategy, that has not been fully requited in the criticism. These are moments in which the poet chooses to foreground absurd, excessive, epiphenomenal and short-lived things that time seems to bring about. Aeneas, Virgil’s unlikely hero, struggles as much with such moments as he does with all the sworn enemies of the Trojans. He struggles especially with the temptation toward a poignant, nostalgic fixation on his tragic past. He is told that he must become devoted religiously to the greatest of Troy’s enemies, the goddess Juno. It is inside a Carthaginian temple dedicated to Juno that the hero experiences the ‘newness’ that a great work of art is always able to proffer. But Virgil knows that Carthage and Juno’s temple and the works of art themselves will all become follies of time, left in ruins by the romanitas that Aeneas has just been encouraged to prepare.

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Book
This volume presents a collection of pieces from a celebrated world-class scholar and interpreter of Latin poetry, focusing on the interpretation of Virgil's Aeneid. It forms the sequel to two widely influential earlier books on Virgil by the same author and translates and adds to a collection of papers published in Italian in 2002. Its central concern is the way in which Virgil reworks earlier poetry (especially that of Homer) at the most detailed level to produce very broad literary and emotional effects. Through detailed scholarly analysis, the book explores a central issue in Virgilian studies, that of how the Aeneid manages to create a new and effective mode of epic in a period when the genre appears to be debased or exhausted.
Article
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Article
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Article
This paper provides an analysis of Aeneas' visit to the "parva Troia" in Epirus (Vergil, "Aeneid" 3.294ff.), centered on the theme of "substitutes" and "doubles," and beginning with Andromache, the heroine of this encounter. With Helenus as a substitute for her deceased husband, Hector, Andromache is involved in a sort of levirate marriage. Moreover, she reacts to Aeneas and his companions as if they too were "substitutes," living persons who immediately evoke images of the dead, "doubles" for her lost loved ones (Hector first and foremost, and also Creusa and Astyanax). This makes Andromache perfectly at home in "parva Troia", which is itself a "double," a "substitute" for the city destroyed by the Greeks. Except that, like all "doubles," "parva Troia" is an insubstantial illusion, the effigy of something that no longer exists. This city and its landscape can only be "seen," not actually "inhabited." These Trojan exiles are thus victims of a syndrome very similar to "nostalgia" (a Greek word unknown to the ancient Greeks, dating to the early eighteenth century, and beautifully described in a remarkable passage by Chateaubriand). Helenus and his companions are "too faithful" to their vanished city; their destiny, like that of the dead, has been hopelessly fulfilled. Aeneas, however, is not allowed to become a prisoner of the past. Against his will, he must be "unfaithful" to his former city: he will not rebuild Troy. The companions of Helenus and Andromache suffer from an "excess of identity" (one way to define nostalgia). Aeneas, on the other hand, submits to the almost total loss of his own identity: except for the Penates, a highly significant, sacred part of the lost patria, which will contribute to the formation of his identity in a way similar to Helenus and Andromache's own nostalgic cult of the image of Troy.
Article
In his final masterpiece, the Aeneid, Virgil frequently uses ekphrasis-a self-contained aside, a pause to describe a work of art or other object. Virgil's ekphrases incorporate major themes of the epic, enrich the reader's understanding of its meaning, and provide metaphors for the entire poem, says Michael C. J. Putnam in this first comprehensive study of the ekphrases in the Aeneid.
Article
Aeneas' stopover at Actium has struck most readers as an Augustan interlude in the odyssey of Aeneid 3. The scene is conspicuous among the other episodes in the trip for its brevity and for the fact that it does not advance the action toward the Trojan exiles' Italian goal. Instead the accent falls on prefiguring actions of Aeneas' distinguished descendant, Octavian, after he achieved victory over Antony at the same site in 31 B.C. Where the future Augustus dedicated spoils from the battle to Actian Apollo and instituted a festival called the Actian Games, the Trojans celebrate athletic games at Actium and their leader affixes an enemy trophy to the temple of Apollo there. This last act, however, Aeneas' dedicatio, points allusively to the mythical past as well as to the Augustan future. To appreciate the full force of that complex reference, which enriches the thematics of the entire scene, hinges on our recognition of a mythological figure whose identity has been long in doubt. The narrator Aeneas reports that he hung up on Apollo's shrine ‘the bronze shield worn by great Abas’ (3.286 ‘aere cavo clipeum, magni gestamen Abantis’). Who is this Abas, and why is his mention here significant?
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