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Venus and Vulcan, Venus and Aeneas, Pallas and Aeneas, Aeneas and Evander, Evander and Pallas: all of these pairs are seen embracing one another in Aeneid 8. Alongside these emotive scenes of embrace, the book is peppered with embrace-related vocabulary, imagery, and metaphor, often in surprising contexts. This article weaves together these embraces in Aeneid 8 in relation to the thematics of the book as a whole. It is proposed that, when read together, the embraces in Aeneid 8 tell a story about the possibilities of knowledge in relation to the senses. Vision is the supreme sense-modality of truth in epic, as embodied in the shield of Aeneas; and yet, in book 8, embrace emerges as a way of knowing that runs counter to optical discourses of knowledge. This leads to an exploratory reconsideration of hermeneutic principles in light of Aeneas’ much-puzzled-over response to the shield.

This review article of Joseph Farrell’s 2021 monograph on Virgil’s Aeneid (Juno’s Aeneid: A Battle for Heroic Identity, Princeton and Oxford) takes the cue from Farrell’s analysis of Virgil’s intertextuality with the Homeric epics and provides a methodological re-assessment of intertextuality in Virgilian studies and Latin literature more broadly. It attempts to retrace the theoretical history and some of the main applications of Latin intertextual studies and suggests some possible ways for Latinists to engage more profoundly with deconstructive criticism and post-critique.

This article argues that Juno’s speech in Horace’s Odes 3.3 includes a short series of programmatic allusions to Virgil’s Aeneid that assist Horace in promoting the distinct identity of his own lyric poetry. Juno’s speech asserts that Rome’s passage to greatness depends on not ‘rebuilding Troy’. Horace’s allusions identify the motif of Trojan restoration as a central theme in the Aeneid’s narrative, and, in a metapoetic sense, associate it pejoratively with the cultural performance of the epic itself in its canonical retelling of the Trojan story. In this way Horace uses Juno’s speech strategically to characterise the Aeneid as decadent and regressive; by contrast Juno promotes moral restraint as a virtue that characterises Horatian lyric.

The similes in Aeneid 10 support the main narrative by establishing a secondary plotline of their own, either through the imagery itself or through the similes' intertextual models. The first part of this chapter discusses the three scenes in Aeneid 10 featuring Turnus; it focuses on the interaction of focalization and intertextuality in the similes, and on the way in which the intertextual quality of these similes points up Turnus' misguided behaviour. The second part investigates how the storm imagery shared by many similes in the book contribute to establishing a sub-narrative that supports and mirrors the plotline of the main narrative of Aeneid 10. This chapter supplements the discussion by Harrison in the same volume.

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Human beings in epic similes often rely on forms of specialized expertise to make new things and to create order in the world around them. The ways that the similes in a given epic poem represent craft and technology convey fundamental points about the larger world view of that poem in relation to human beings and the contours of epic poetry. A simile featuring a singer or poet in particular invites the audience of a poem to draw parallels between the musical simile and the epic poem in which it appears. The single musical simile in the Aeneid, 7.699-702, creates a portrait of the limits of human agency, the nature of group identity and musical performance, and the qualities of the Aeneid as an epic poem. The themes and modes of presentation in this simile are characteristic of the ‘song’ that Vergil has created with his own Aeneid.

The narrative style of the Aeneid suggests immediacy and involves the reader, while at the same time both narrator and reader know what the outcomes of the story will be. In ‘Tenses in Vergil’s Aeneid: Narrative Style and Structure’, Suzanne Adema investigates the role of the Latin tenses in this presentational style. Adema presents a framework to analyze and describe the use of tenses in Latin narrative texts from a linguistic and narratological point of view. The framework concerns the temporal relations between a narrator and the states of affairs in his story on the sentence level, discourse modes on the global text level and narrative progression on the level of narrative and descriptive sequences.

The narrative style of the Aeneid suggests immediacy and involves the reader, while at the same time both narrator and reader know what the outcomes of the story will be. In ‘Tenses in Vergil’s Aeneid: Narrative Style and Structure’, Suzanne Adema investigates the role of the Latin tenses in this presentational style. Adema presents a framework to analyze and describe the use of tenses in Latin narrative texts from a linguistic and narratological point of view. The framework concerns the temporal relations between a narrator and the states of affairs in his story on the sentence level, discourse modes on the global text level and narrative progression on the level of narrative and descriptive sequences.

Turnus’ ballistic effort in the poem’s finale is answered by a contrapuntal simile describing Aeneas’ spear-throw as a salvo from a siege-engine: Turnus’ abortive feat, emulating an archaic epic gesture, now marks the anarcho-primitivist, while the ballista image—a conspicuous, forward-looking anachronism—pointedly plays off ‘modern’ technological rationality against a model of outdated heroics. As symbol and metonymy, this tension recapitulates aspects of the poem’s teleological design and, as such, discloses the mechanisms of the text’s own functioning: the simile of mechanized warfare echoes the theme of Jupiter’s blueprint with its defining polarities chaos/order,uis/consilium, nature/culture, and the forward march of history.

Abstract In this paper I argue that the ecphrasis of Aeneid 8 contains an extensive pattern of allusion to the Ps.-Hesiodic Shield of Heracles. Other scholars have noted several of these references, but the frequency of such echoes and the scope of this subtext have, thus far, passed largely undetected. These recollections are not isolated nor are they merely learned allusions. Rather, they should be read in connection with the use of Herculean themes and imagery as a foil for Aeneas and, by extension, Augustus elsewhere in the Aeneid. As such, they are a vital complement to the Iliadic motifs that are also present in Aeneid 8. The resulting synthesis captures the celebratory optimism of the early principate while simultaneously acknowledging the strife whence it was born.

Abstract The juxtaposition of the Catalogue of Heroes and Anchises’ presentation of the fate of souls immediately preceding it in Book 6 of the Aeneid is a meaningful one. Building on Feeney’s ‘paradox’ regarding the juxtaposition, this paper reinterprets the Catalogue by way of extrapolating from Anchises’ speech possibly profound implications regarding Rome’s future heroes. The problem is that that speech is ambiguous. Drawing on different Greek eschatological models for help in discerning the metaphysical interpretive possibilities of Anchises’ portrait, I show that the Greek rubrics do not in fact solve but contribute to the ambiguity of the passage. But they contribute in a meaningful way by rerouting the line of inquiry away from attempting either to pinpoint a singular philosophical influence or to determine once and for all what a soul’s fate is. Rather we are invited to reflect on how the very vagueness functions. This paper posits that reading Anchises’ speech through each of the philosophical models leads us to question whether Rome’s future heroes were so bright after all.

Abstract This article will show that Ovid's well-known innovations in the use of personification allegory combine closely with those of Virgil, to form a distinctive 'Augustan' phase in the development of allegory in classical literature. Both Ovid and Virgil make fictional abstractions concrete and ontologically ambiguous. Innovations common to both the Aeneid and Metamorphoses constitute an important stage in the emergence of 'compositional allegory', in the wake of the Roman adoption of Stoicising interpretative reading practices in the course of the first century BC. Both epics involve Furies as models for their major personified abstractions, both in narrative role and in concrete detail. Uniquely in and to Roman literature, Furies changed from supernatural beings into personified abstractions. This change, enabled by the semantic replacement of proper names such as Erinys or Eumenis with the word Furia ('frenzy'), produced new depth and complexity in the form and metaliterary function of personifications in Roman epic and later literary traditions.

In current commentaries and translations, the first stanza of Sappho fr. 17 is read as a prayer for Hera's presence. This understanding was created by modifying Wilamowitz's interpretation of the fragment as a dream narrative, but it depends on an improbable use of the opening word πλασιον involves an awkward third-person periphrasis for the second-person appeal, and creates insoluble difficulties of supplementation and usage in the third line. It is more fruitful to read the stanza as a deprecation of the god's anger, as in fr. 1.1-4; a suggested reading of χαλεπην ϑυελλαν (cf.Il. 21.335) gives αραταν a meaning within its normal, somewhat pejorative connotation, and allows a more plausible reconstruction of the end of line 3; attributing the source of the Atridae's distress to Hera is consistent with a number of indications of a narrative pattern in which Hera sends disruptive storms.

This chapter explores the roles that structure plays in the similes in Vergil's Aeneid from both a cognitive and an aesthetic perspective. First, it describes the forms of similes in Homeric poetry and compares these to the Aeneid, concentrating especially on the marked differences in how the end of a simile is treated and on linking these features to the compositional and performance contexts of Homeric epic and the Aeneid. The chapter examines two pairs of similes as case studies of the aesthetic possibilities that the varied structures of Aeneid similes open up for both the poet and the audience. The two similes in the expedition and death of Nisus and Euryalus in Book 9 both lack an explicit end point. Two similes describing Turnus in Books 9-12 have the same form as a Homeric simile most commonly does, even though that form is comparatively rare in the Aeneid. Keywords: Aeneid; Homeric epic; simile structure; Vergil

A discussion of Gavin Douglas's translation of Virgil into Scots, based on an examination of some much-quoted passages of the Latin. Middle Scots afforded Douglas certain resources not available to Modem English translators, and his lines compare favourably with the well-known English of Dry den, Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles.Keywords: Virgil, AEneid, translation, Middle Scots, stylistics, Older Scots.Bearing in mind Derrick McClure's numerous translations into a deep and rich Scots, it seems appropriate to offer this chapter, which is about another translator into Scots, to mark his retirement, and to celebrate his dedicated scholarship in many areas of the Scots language, including the poetic techniques of the makars, to which he brings a writer's appreciation of craft.My purpose in this chapter is to illustrate Gavin Douglas's handling of the Scots language when faced with the challenge of translating Virgil's AEneid, or Eneados. It would be possible to choose passages to show the extremes of Douglas's language - the high Chaucerian style on the one hand and, on the other, archaic vocabulary borrowed from the alliterative verse tradition (especially for scenes of war), his occasional borrowings from English grammar, his lifting of Medieval Latin words from Ascenius's commentaries on Virgil - his eclectism, in short. However, this would not represent Douglas's characteristic use of language in his translation. He does have a remarkable range and richness of vocabulary (and also of word form and grammar) but the Eneados is a very long poem, and the more recherche items are spread thinly through it. Another reason not to take this approach is that a definitive treatment of Douglas's linguistic resources exists in Bawcutt (1976).It is not possible to appreciate Douglas's achievement in his translation without considering Virgil's Latin. So instead of taking some choice passages from Douglas - for which we may turn to the selection by his brother poet Sydney Goodsir Smith (1959) - I have taken as my point of departure some much-quoted passages of Virgil. Since this is rather random with regard to Douglas's own highs and lows, it will perhaps allow us to see Douglas at his everyday work as a translator. Derrick McClure has himself quite recently written on Douglas's AEneid, so I shall avoid passages that he has discussed (McClure, 2010).Before examining some passages, however, we might consider the question: who was Douglas translating for? Who were the sixteenth-century readers who were literate - but not in Latin, in an age when education and Latin were almost synonymous, and Virgil himself was thrust upon scholars in the way that Shakespeare would later be? One thing to bear in mind is that Virgil wrote in the last century BC. A millennium and a half later, Latin had changed, and a workaday familiarity with it did not necessarily give easy and immediate access to classical Latin, even though Latin had not changed as much as Scots has over a shorter space of time. For a man who used Medieval Latin in his professional life, picking up Virgil must have been rather like somebody who knows Business English trying to read Shakespeare. Medieval Latin was used for the law, bureaucracy and theological logic chopping: it was a language of precision and fine distinctions, with a lexicon of long words, built up of prefixes and suffixes, which worked to erect partitions between concepts. Virgil, on the contrary, was a native speaker of a language much more ordinary, and he used its ambiguities and vaguenesses to poetic effect. As a reviewer of a new translation says, "typically he works by giving power and richness to very simple words" (Jenkyns 2007).Douglas, then, offered a vernacular translation of a very difficult poet. And yet when scarcely two hundred years had passed, his own work was found difficult and obscure. Ruddiman published his edition and glossary of Douglas's Eneados in 1710, a work that is recognised as the beginning of Scottish lexicography. …

Among poetic meditations on art and aesthetics, the major episodes of ecphrasis in Vergil’s Aeneid , which span the poem virtually from beginning to end, have hardly wanted for attention. Indeed, they are extremely famous passages that have been studied by more scholars and critics. Each of these ecphrases casts the hero Aeneas as the principal viewer of a work of art; and as we move through the series, the way in which Aeneas experiences works of art develops in an impressively linear fashion away from the ‘aesthetic’ towards experiencing objects as ‘spurs to action’: hence his earlier encounters read as ‘aesthetic’ experiences to a fuller extent than his later ones. However, this chapter obviously depends on how one defines ‘aesthetics’, and so, before turning to the series of ecphrases. It discusses the contradistinction to the related idea of ‘art’. In addition, the chapter offers a case study of Vergilian connoisseurship. Keywords:Aeneas; aesthetics; art; Vergil’s Aeneid ; Vergilian connoisseurship

Introduction, text and translation, detailed commentary and indices to Aeneid 2 are here offered on a scale not previously attempted and in keeping with the author's previous Virgil commentaries (Aeneid 3, 7 and 11); the volume is aimed primarily at scholars, rather than undergraduates.

The present chapter studies the intertextual relationship between Lucan and Virgil. This relationship is traditionally seen as a radical opposition: the Bellum Ciuile is an ‘anti-Aeneid.’ This chapter retraces the question by looking at Lucan’s oracular figures as complicated reduplications of the poet himself, who is particularly obsessed with the idea of repetition. Lucan’s oracular moments highlight the ways in which Lucan’s Bellum Civile exploits the contradictions already present in Virgil’s Aeneid.

The main story of the Aeneid starts when Aeneas is sailing towards Italy and ends when the hero has reached these shores and kills Turnus, thereby ending a war and paving the way for Rome’s foundation. This chapter gives an indication of the different ways in which Vergil presents his epic. These ways of presentation may be described by means of two parameters: discourse modes and the base from which the narrator chooses to use these discourse modes . The chapter discusses the characteristics of the four discourse modes occurring in the Aeneid, focusing on tense usage. Then, it explains, by means of the concept base, that the narrator does not only present his story from his own point in time, but that he also has another point in time available for his presentation, namely reference time . Finally, it considers one of these transposed modes, the directing mode , in more detail. Keywords: Aeneid ; directing mode ; discourse modes ; Vergil

This is the first comprehensive commentary on Aeneid 11. The commentary treats fully matters of linguistic and textual interpretation, metre and prosody, grammar, lexicon and idiom, of Roman behaviour, social and ritual, as well as Virgil's sources and the literary tradition. New critical approaches and developments in Virgilian studies have been taken into account with economy and fairness. The Latin text is presented with a facing English translation. The commentary is followed by an appendix on Penthesilea and the Epic Cycle and a second appendix which discusses the weaknesses of Aeneid 11. The book concludes with English and Latin indices. In approach and learning, this commentary continues Nicholas Horsfall's impressive work as a commentator and will advance our understanding of the Aeneid and the poet Virgil.

There are 22 Tabulae Iliacae, and there have been since 1989. Six of them are signed by the artist Theodorus: the epigraphic evidence leaves no doubt that that is who he was (Horsfall, IGUR 4, 96ff., JHS 1979, 27, etc.); the use of ?magic squares' to display the artist's signature may help confirm other indications of his Egyptian origins. There is nothing to support the hypothesis that Theodorus was the artist of the Tabula Iliaca Capitolina (TIC)'s equally hypothetical mosaic original. If the cultural context of the TIC was not the cool pedantry of, let us say, DH along with his friends and readers, but rather the exuberant pretensions of the semi-educated, then it becomes much easier to understand the reference to Stes. as source for the TIC.Keywords: Tabula Iliaca Capitolina (TIC); Tabulae Iliacae; Theodorus