In composing theAeneid, Virgil had inherited the peculiar task of tracing the Roman nation from a group of Trojan refugees. The possibilities for an epic of national foundations are rich. Not only does the westward shift from the eastern Mediterranean world suggest self-defining contrasts with other nations (nations over which the Romans had gained dominion); an origin in the world of Greek mythology, but in a city opposed to the Greeks, makes the mediation of Hellenism in any such account—and in the very form it takes—necessary but complicated. Virgil’s poem, in fact, represents (among other things) a...

Among the dead of the last third of theAeneid, in the foundational war Aeneas must fight against the natives of Latium in order to settle in the area (and in order for Rome eventually to rise there), four stand out for the elaboration of their deaths and the emotionally peculiar descriptions of their fallen bodies: Euryalus, Lausus, Pallas, and Camilla. These figures represent both sides of the war (Euryalus and Pallas on the Trojan side, Lausus and Camilla on the Italian) and several of the nations that will help comprise the future Roman race, or will fall subject to...

It could be argued that the network of themes we have been tracing in our images naturally converges on Turnus—the one prominent fallen youth of theAeneidwho isnotgiven a sensual description at his death—and that in some sense his death at the end of the poem makes each of our fallen warriors his prototype. Turnus too is a handsome young man whose aged father and failure to produce offspring are prominent in his story. The very fact of his age is noteworthy, since it is unspecified in earlier and contemporary surviving accounts: Virgil has elaborated...

One of the sharpest ethnic boundaries drawn in theAeneidlies between the Romans, heirs of Aeneas, and the Carthaginians, heirs of Dido. The earliest lines of the epic—the beginning of the narrative, directly after the proem and invocation—introduce the opposition of Rome to Carthage (1.12–14urbs antiqua fuit,Tyrii tenuere coloni,/ Karthago,Italiam contra Tiberinaque longe / ostia), a geographical opposition, but foreshadowing the mortal struggle. With exuberant polyptoton Dido picks up this double sense in her curse at 4.628–29:litora litoribus contraria,fluctibus undas,/ imprecor,arma armis(“I pray for shore to...

We have just seen how Virgil uses earlier poetry on the fall of Troy, Roman origins, and the Punic Wars to draw a demarcation between two peoples from the East, Carthaginian and Trojan (Roman-to-be), and to communicate Aeneas’ changing sense of national identity. In the present chapter I wish to suggest that in doing so, Virgil extends a Roman tradition—evident, for example, in early Roman tragedy—of freighting intertextuality unavoidably with messages of cultural and national identity, particularly messages that include the radical perspectivity of such an identity.¹ Let us start by reading theAeneidcomparatively against the latter...

Carthage is a new city, still under construction, when it appears on our horizon, but Virgil calls it old (1.12–14):

Urbs antiqua fuit (Tyrii tenuere coloni) Karthago, Italiam contra Tiberinaque longe ostia, dives opum studiisque asperrima belli.

“There was an ancient city (colonists from Tyre possessed it): Carthage, far opposite to Italy and the mouths of the Tiber, rich in wealth and most fierce in zeal for war.”

At 1.366 Venus gives Carthage a more appropriate epithet: “and the rising citadel of new Carthage [novae Karthaginis]”; it is described asnovaalso at 1.298 and 522. At 4.670, where...

This chapter is the third that proceeds from chapter 3 in exploring the idea of Carthage as a foil for Rome in theAeneid; it also brings us back to the themes of youth, death, and desire with which we started in chapters 1, 2, and 3. Now we approach them from the other end, through their connection with national identity, benefiting from the discussion of prolepsis in chapter 5. Anchises’ prophecy in Book 6, tailored to meet Aeneas’ persisting Trojan identification and understanding of his mission, couches Roman history in terms of a recovery of Trojan empire. That is...

We could pursue our question into many other parts of theAeneid. We shall conclude by making one such extension, focusing on a figure around whom our discussion has often circled. Where does Aeneas stand? Lacking a final nationality, he most plainly embodies the desirer of the national identity that the poem aims at. His interest to us has lain in his viewership of two of our Adonis-scenes (as well as of Marcellus in Elysium), and more generally in his role as the peculiarly vague subjective focus of the epic. As we shall see, he also has something in common...