Aeneid scholars

Question 1

Harrison (European school view)

Answer 1

This positive presentation of the Aeneid as a classic vindication of the European world order, happily consonant with Roman imperialism and the achievements and political settlement of Augustus

Question 2

Tarrant (Virgil - post 1950s)

Answer 2

a private lack of faith in the positive vision of Rome and its future

Question 3

Tarrant (Virgil / praise of Augustus)

Answer 3

Either the praise is genuine, and damaging to the credit of the poet or it is feigned to conceal Virgil’s true attitude of disgust or opposition

Question 4

Williams (Augustus / Aeneas)

Answer 4

Virgil is trying to depict a character upon whom Romans of his day could model themselves

Question 5

Boyle (Augustus / Aeneas)

Answer 5

Aeneas for example both is and is not Augustus

Question 6

Hardie (Aeneas - quality of character)

Answer 6

the colourless quality of Aeneas’ character is largely the result of the roles forced on him by the plot of the Aeneid

Question 7

Hardie (Dido as a wife / woman)

Answer 7

In Tyre, Dido had found fulfilment in the traditional role of ancient women, subordinate to power of her husband, Sychaeus.

Question 8

Camps (Aeneas - emotions)

Answer 8

Aeneas’ sensibility appears at every parting and loss, and in which we meet him first in a moment of terror and leave him at the end in an outburst of anger.

Question 9

Williams (Virgil and Dido)

Answer 9

he saw Dido’s rejection not from Rome’s point of view but from Dido’s

Question 10

Camps (Dido and the gods)

Answer 10

What happens to Dido is thus an accidental result of the scheming and counter-scheming among the gods (…)

Question 11

Camps (Dido’s death / Cleopatra)

Answer 11

The story of Dido’s dangerous love must inevitably have evoked for the Roman reader the memory of Cleopatra

Question 12

Quinn (Augustus)

Answer 12

Augustus commissioned the Aeneid to be an epic poem with himself as the hero

Question 13

Quinn (Dido)

Answer 13

It is impossible to escape a feeling that Dido somehow believes, or half believes, that death means restoration

Question 14

Williams (Aeneas as a human - not another Achilles)

Answer 14

It is not that Virgil has tried to create another Achilles and failed to do so; it is that he has tried to create an entirely different kind of hero

Question 15

Williams (Aeneas and sympathy)

Answer 15

Under the pressure of his own human nature he sometimes alienates, or partially alienates, our sympathy

Question 16

Williams (Aeneas - mortal)

Answer 16

Aeneas is very much an ordinary mortal

Question 17

Boyle (Aeneas’ furor)

Answer 17

[Aeneas is] a prime embodiment of the values and behaviour of the heroic world of bloodlust, violence, honour and the senseless pursuit of fame.

Question 18

Boyle (Aeneas’ behaviour - another Achilles)

Answer 18

Virgil insinuates a telling analogy with Achilles in order that the Trojan hero may be seen as a reincarnation of the very figure whose cruelty and violence he had groaned in book 1

Question 19

Morwood (Virgil - optimism and pessimism)

Answer 19

The tension between optimism and pessimism in Vigil’s work is an apt reflection of the times in which it was first written

Question 20

Williams (Augustus and Virgil - political ideas)

Answer 20

The emperor and the poet has the same ideas (…) the governmental policy of Augustus in moral social and religious ideas, not because they were Augustus’ ideas but because they were Virgil’s

Question 21

Tarrant (Virgil Context)

Answer 21

Virgil engages with contemporary political reality in a serious and sustained way

Question 22

Tarrant (Virgil and Augustus)

Answer 22

The poem’s the ironic indecision (…) can be read as a metaphor for the political situation (…) in which it was obvious that Octavian was now the most powerful figure in the state but not yet clear how he would choose to exercise that power.

Question 23

Tarrant (Virgil’s views)

Answer 23

The entire poem can be read as a troubled reflection on its historical context.

Question 24

Camps (Aeneid and the Homeric epics)

Answer 24

The Aeneid is a poem wholly different (…) from the Homeric poems. Yet it recalls them on every page

Question 25

Morwood (Structure)

Answer 25

Virgil clearly felt that in some important way the second Iliadic half of his poem was greater than the first

Question 26

Tingay and Badcock (Aeneas as the potential of Rome -Optimist school)

Answer 26

Through it’s description of the hardships, setbacks and final triumph of the good man, Aeneas, Virgil’s poem underlines the struggle and achievement of Rome itself and the great promise of her empire

Question 27

Morwood (Virgil and politics - Harvard school)

Answer 27

Virgil does not seem reluctant to raise difficult, even potentially dangerous, political issues in his poetry

Question 28

Jenkyns (Aeneid - not a praise poem)

Answer 28

He [Virgil] did not have to write a praise poem about Augustus, because if Augustus wanted a poem about his glorious deeds, he never got it.

Question 29

Morgan (imitating Homer)

Answer 29

In the cultural context that he [Virgil] occupies, imitating Homer is about the most exciting thing that a poet can do

Question 30

Morgan (Homer’s achievements and Virgil)

Answer 30

‘In the first three words, Vigil is summarising the entire achievement of Homer and saying, I sing it’
‘In those first 3 words is contained Virgil’s answer to the weight of expectation’
(Arma vinque camo = I sing of arms and the man:
Arma - the Iliad, vinum - Odysseus)

Question 31

Marshal (Influence of Roman tradition on Virgil)

Answer 31

‘We see in his [Ennius’] work a number of characterisations that you will recognise from reading Virgil’s work’
- ‘self consciousness of his place within tradition’
- ‘acknowledgement of his debt to his predecessors’

Question 32

Marshal (national achievement)

Answer 32

‘We see the celebration of national achievement but all the time with such subtlety and riotousness as to put away any strait forward reading of this text as a work of Roman propaganda’
(On links between Enneas’ works and the Aeneid)

Question 33

Sowerby (women)

Answer 33

it is a most powerful feminine protest against piety and the grand patriarchal design

Question 34

Williams (Aeneas and suffering)

Answer 34

Having seen the glorious vision of the future, he will continue through whatever additional suffering is involved

Question 35

West (Aeneas and pietas)

Answer 35

Apart from his lapse in book four, Aeneas is [pietas’] embodiment

Question 36

Powers (Aeneas’ great characteristic)

Answer 36

This virtue [pietas] will always be Aeneas’ great characteristic

Question 37

Lyne (Aeneas’ relationships)

Answer 37

it is Aeneas’ relationships that Virgil appears to neglect

Question 38

Gransden (juno)

Answer 38

The stirring up of war in Latinum, contrary not only to the will of jupiter but to that of king latinus, is Juno’s masterpiece

Question 39

Williams (Aeneas’ aim - satisfaction)

Answer 39

Aeneas is not aiming to achieve personal satisfaction

Question 40

Jenkyns (Aeneid as a praise poem)

Answer 40

The Aeneid praises Augustus for two things; the conquests of distant lands and the restoration of order. Suggests not that Virgil didn’t believe in Augustus, but that he did

Question 41

Sowerby (virgils fatalistic ideas)

Answer 41

The Aeneid is a most fatalistic poem and Virgil’s melancholy fatalism
underlies the narrative at every turn.