Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (original) (raw)

Review of "Virgil's Iliad: An Essay on Epic Narrative"

The Classical World, 1986

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Historiographic Metafiction: A Comparative Analysis of the Iliad and the Aeneid

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

Homer's The Iliad and Virgil's The Aeneid portray historical events of the Trojan War, and later the foundation of the Roman Empire. Both the Epics are works of great literary complexity that contain profound insights and a wide-ranging account of the human condition. A majority of epics and fiction written during the classical ages have been written in response to historical movements or events such as the Trojan War, and the establishment of the Roman Empire. The heroic effort to destroy Troy and get Helen back to Greece was an epic of struggle and theme covering the first half of the classical ages in Europe. Historians and literary artists have traditionally played a significant role in portraying the great wars and revolutions of the world. Not only, do they reach the minds of the people through their writings, but they also subject every institution of the society to a specific political philosophy. Herodotus and Thucydides two great historians have tried their best to write a history of their times, but Iliad and Aeneid are monumental epics that make specific use of history of the same period, painting deftly a moving saga of the whole Greek and Roman empires. The paper attempts to study the same in the light of the postmodernist theory as a work of Historiographic Metafiction in which historical sense and reality enter into the sphere of art imperceptibly.

Virgil's Aeneid and the Time of Empire

I will begin with the simple observation that almost all the texts discussed in the talks given at this conference ---and there have indeed been such an extraordinary range ---have been modern if not contemporary, involving the wars that formed and are still forming the world as we know it, the world that we know might end, and that still concern us intimately. This makes perfect sense. With the advent of total war, systematic genocide, and new technologies of destruction, the questions raised in this conference gain a new moral and political urgency.

The Clashing Island of Humanity: Virgil\u27s Aeneid as Heroic Threnody

2019

This study follows neither the paradigm of pro-or anti-Augustan nor the strict belief that the intention of the poet, like other poets of the time, is one of ambiguity open to multiple interpretations. Virgil’s Aeneid is an epic poem with a clearly woven thesis that the hospitality relationships that its hero enters both transcend and address the difficulties he faces in founding Rome. The Rome that Aeneas founds is, like Augustan Rome’s mythology, built on labors and toils. Aeneas’ labors are moral, they are intellectual, and they are searching for the relationship between the human and the divine that is true, accurate, and lasting. Rather than a support for the creation of the Roman state as such, the poem uses the environment and changes that occur in both the contemporary Roman environment and the city’s mytho-historical story to lay forth a realistic optimism that not only incites the people to believe in the potentiality of a peaceful age, but to comprehend through the ideal ...