#17 The Aeneid

Wednesday – 1:00 p.m.                                                    Winter Term 2009 (14 weeks)
Coordinator:  Mads Bjerre                                               Co-coordinator:  Phyllis Zasloff

Course Description
Composed towards the very end of the 1st Century BC, Virgil’s Aeneid is the third great epic poem in the European literary tradition, following Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.  It has many similarities with the earlier poems and also a great many differences, as it does with the many later works which it inspired, notably Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Like all epics the Aeneid has a central hero.  Aeneas is one of the few members of the royal family of Troy to survive the city’s destruction by the Greeks at the end of the Iliad.  Charged by the gods, or Fate, to found a new Troy in Italy, later to become Rome, he sets out on an Odyssey-like voyage that takes him to Crete, Sicily, Africa, and ultimately to the Tiber River where he fights a multitude of Italian tribes before finally prevailing.

But Virgil’s aim was much larger than telling a rollicking good story.  What he had in mind was the creation of a foundation myth to celebrate and give meaning to the nascent Roman empire and to pay tribute to Augustus, its first emperor, thus to capturing the very spirit of Rome, - the “empire without end.”

While Virgil based much of his poem on existing myths, including many that were part of the Iliad and Odyssey, he also reflected his own tumultuous time very vividly, a time that was dominated by domestic uprisings and both civil and external wars.  The mood is caught in one of his early poems:

            Right and wrong are turned into one another;
War everywhere in the world; crimes everywhere
In every way and every shape and form;
No honor at all is given to the plow;
The fields are barren and empty, the farmers gone;
The crooked sickles are turned into swords;
There’s war on the Euphrates; on the Rhine;
Neighboring cities break their mutual oaths,
Sword against sword; Mars rages everywhere.

            It’s as when from the starting line at the track
The chariots break loose.  Lap after lap,
Around and around, and the driver pulls on the reins
And it’s no use, and the chariot races on,
All out of control…*)

*) “First Georgic” in Ferry, David (translator), The Georgics of Virgil. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York, 2005.

It was this state of chaos, futility, and hopelessness that both Aeneas and Augustus were charged with ending.  The irony was that they had to achieve their goal of peace by waging war.  One of Virgil’s great achievements is his stirring description of the price a great cause exacts in terms of victimizations and sacrifices, most especially in the moving story of Dido, the African queen who falls in love with Aeneas, but whom he abandons in order to fulfill his destiny.

Our S/DG’s primary purpose is a close reading of the Aeneid itself, but we will also look at parallels with Homer’s two epics and at the poem’s political and historical context for the purpose of gaining a deeper and fuller appreciation.  To that end each presenter will be assigned a section of the poem (usually one of its twelve “books”) and a mini-topic, some of which are listed below.

Mini-Topics
1.   Rome’s turbulent early 1st Century B.C.  The Social and Servile Wars. T he rise and
fall of Julius Caesar.
2.   Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony.
3.   Life of Augustus, first emperor of Rome.
4.   The Phoenicians.  Carthage and the Carthaginian Wars.
5.   The Funeral Games for Patroclus, Iliad, XXIII
6.   Odysseus in the Underworld, Odyssey, XI
7.   Virgil’s early poems, the Eclogues and the Georgics. (David Ferry translations)
8.   The Shield of Achilles, Iliad, XVIII.  Myths of Hercules and Cybebe.
9.   The Romulus and Remus legend.  The founding of kingdom of Rome in 753 B.C.           
10. The exploits of Odysseus and Diomedes, Iliad, X. Aristeias of Hector, Iliad
XII, and of Ajax, Iliad XVI
11.  Compare the relationship between Aeneas and Pallas with that of Achilles and
Patroclus, Iliad, XVI and XVIII
12.  Compare fight between Aeneas and Turnus with Achilles and Hector, Iliad, XXII.

Bibliography:
Core Book:
Virgil, The Aeneid.  Translated by Robert Fagles.  Penguin Books, 2008.

Others:
Griffin, Jasper.  Virgil.  Oxford University Press, 1986.
Johnson, W. R.  Darkness Visible:  A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid.  U. of Calif. Press, 1976.
Perkell, Christine G.  Reading Vergil’s Aeneid.  University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.
Putnam, Michael C. J.  Virgil’s Aeneid.  University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Williams, R. D.  The Aeneid.  Allen & Unwin, London, 1987.

Pre-Meeting:  Wednesday, December 10, 2008, 1:00 p.m.