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Here James O'Hara shows how the deceptive nature of prophecy in the Aeneid complicates assessment of the poem's attitude toward its hero's achievement and toward the future of Rome under Augustus Caesar. This close study of the language and rhetorical context of the prophecies reveals that they regularly suppress discouraging material: the gods send promising messages to Aeneas and others to spur them on in their struggles, but these struggles often lead to untimely deaths or other disasters only darkly hinted at by the prophecies. O'Hara finds in these prophecies a persistent subtext that both stresses the human cost of Aeneas' mission and casts doubt on Jupiter's promise to Venus of an "endless empire" for the Romans. O'Hara considers the major prophecies that look confidently toward Augustus' Rome from the standpoint of Vergil's readers, who, like the characters within the poem, must struggle with the possibility that the optimism of the prophecies of Rome is undercut by darker material partially suppressed. The study shows that Vergil links the deception of his characters to the deceptiveness of Roman oratory, politics, and religion, and to the artifice of poetry itself. In response to recent debates about whether the Aeneid is optimistic or pessimistic, O'Hara argues that Vergil expresses both the Romans' hope for the peace of a Golden Age under Augustus and their fear that this hope might be illusory. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
frustrated by grimmer reality.
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.
How should we react as readers and as critics when two passages in a literary work contradict one another? Classicists once assumed that all inconsistencies in ancient texts needed to be amended, explained away, or lamented. Building on recent work on both Greek and Roman authors, this book explores the possibility of interpreting inconsistencies in Roman epic. After a chapter surveying Greek background material including Homer, tragedy, Plato and the Alexandrians, five chapters argue that comparative study of the literary use of inconsistencies can shed light on major problems in Catullus' Peleus and Thetis, Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, Vergil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Lucan's Bellum Civile. Not all inconsistencies can or should be interpreted thematically, but numerous details in these poems, and some ancient and modern theorists, suggest that we can be better readers if we consider how inconsistencies may be functioning in Greek and Roman texts.
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.
Virgil became a school author in his own lifetime and the centre of the Western canon for the next 1800 years, exerting a major influence on European literature, art, and politics. This Companion is designed as an indispensable guide for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of an author critical to so many disciplines. It consists of essays by seventeen scholars from Britain, the USA, Ireland and Italy which offer a range of different perspectives both traditional and innovative on Virgil's works, and a renewed sense of why Virgil matters today. The Companion is divided into four main sections, focussing on reception, genre, context, and form. This ground-breaking book not only provides a wealth of material for an informed reading but also offers sophisticated insights which point to the shape of Virgilian scholarship and criticism to come.
In this classic study, Brooks Otis presents Virgil as a radically different poet from any of his Greek or Roman predecessors. Virgil molded the ancient epic tradition to his own Roman contemporary aims and succeeded in making mythical and legendary figures meaningful to a sophisticated, unmythical age. Otis begins and ends his study with the Aeneid and includes chapters on the Bucolics and the Georgics. A new foreword by Ward W. Briggs, Jr., places Otis’s groundbreaking achievement in the context of past and present Virgilian scholarship.
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.
This book explores Virgil's poetic and mythical transformation of Roman imperialist ideology. The Romans saw an analogy between the ordered workings of the natural universe and the proper functioning of their own expanding empire; between orbis and urbs. In combining this cosmic imperialism with the military and panegyrical themes proper to epic, Virgil draws on a number of traditions: the notion that the ideal poet is a cosmologer; the use of allegory to extract natural-philosophical truths from mythology and poetry (especially Homer); the poetic use of hyperbole and the 'universal expression'. Virgil's imagination is dominated by the cosmological poem of Lucretius; the Aeneid, like the De Rerum Natura, is a poem about the universe and how man should live in it, but Virgil's constant inversion of Lucretian values makes of him an anti-Lucretius. Recent criticism has tended to stress the pessimistic and private sides of the Aeneid; but any easy conclusion that the poet was at heart anti-Augustan is precluded by the depth and detail with which he develops the imperialist themes discussed in this book.