...This chapter examines Aeneas' personal desire, which is not to do what his fate and the gods require him to do, but to become a proper Homeric hero, and the Aeneid is the story of how he does so. This statement, if true, is full of implications, possibly decisive ones...

...This book offers an entirely new way of understanding the Aeneid. Many scholars regard Vergil's poem as an attempt to combine Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into a single epic. The book challenges this view, revealing how the Aeneid stages an epic contest to determine which kind of story it will tell...

...The study of Homeric imitations in Vergil has one of the longest traditions in Western culture, starting from the very moment the Aeneid was circulated. This is the first English translation of one of the most important and influential modern studies in this tradition. As a revised...

...Saint Augustine famously “wept for Dido, who killed herself by the sword,” and many later medieval schoolboys were taught to respond in similarly emotional ways to the pain of female characters in Virgil's Aeneid and other classical texts. This book takes readers into the medieval...

...This chapter deals with the attractive and doomed Dido as medieval manuscripts reveal their emphasis on her emotions, a focus illuminated by modern research on memory. It begins with Augustine's boyhood obsession with Virgil's Aeneid. While Augustine had a dismissive reaction...

...This chapter examines how Sicily stands as an emblem of empire in Vergil's Aeneid. While we are inclined to approach the Aeneid as a poem of opposites—furor versus pietas; Juno versus Jupiter; Troy (or Carthage) versus Rome...

... the complex process unfolds and at the same time measure the presence of the Homeric model as a trace of sense and aid to narration. The text under discussion is the tenth book of the Aeneid. narrative legibility fata parallelism Philodemus aristeia heroic death heroic duel conventions...

... with the triumph of Augustus depicted on the shield of Aeneas in Aeneid 8, the chronological “ending” of Virgil's poem. However, allusion equally returns both demonic acts to the beginning of the Aeneid, the storm and shipwreck off of Carthage, and suggests...

...This chapter mentions the Aeneid that opens with a brief formal proem announcing its theme and summarizing its plot. Readers have long regarded the poem's first, thematic words, “arms and a man” (arma virumque), which is as emblematic of its Iliadic and Odyssean “halves.” It refers...