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  Vergil's Aeneid. Augustan epic and political context
edited by Hans-Peter Stahl
ISBN 978-1-905125-33-3, paperback, xxxiii+324 pp., 2009,
 

The editor: Hans-Peter Stahl is the author of Propertius: 'Love' and 'War'. Individual and State under Augustus.

The Aeneid may be considered a test case for diverging modern methods of criticism. Does the epic stand for the subordination of the individual in a hierarchically structured state, or is there below the imperial surface a cross-current of wider human appeal? Does the poet skillfully channel his readers' sympathies in directions helpful to the political authorities of his time, or did he devise human messages which are all-embracing and non-partisan? Is it misguided even to seek to discover the intentions of the poet in his work? The contributors to this volume were chosen both for their scholarship and as representing diverse critical methods. Each has selected a passage of the Aeneid to demonstrate his or her general approach. The examination of political references is to the fore. And each contributor uses their chosen passage to address the question of the Aeneid's message.
 

CONTENTS
List of Contributors and Chapter Summaries
Preface
Editor's introduction
1. Vergil Announcing the Aeneid. On Georg. 3.1-48 - Egil Kraggerud
2. Religion in the Politics of Augustus (Aen. 1.278-91; 8.714-23; 12.791-842) - Gunther Gottlieb
3. Political Stop-overs on a Mythological Travel Route: from Battling Harpies to the Battle of Actium (Aen. 3.268-93) - Hans-Peter Stahl
4. The Peopling of the Underworld (Aen. 6.608-27) - Anton Powell
5. Vergil as a Republican (Aen. 6. 815-35) - Eckard Lefèvre
6. The Show Must Go on: the Death of Marcellus and the Future of the Augustan Principate (Aen. 6.860-86) - Reinhold F. Glei
7. Allecto's First Victim: a Study of Vergil's Amata (Aen. 7.341-405 and 12.1-80) - Elaine Fantham
8. Opening the Gates of War (Aen. 7.601-40) - Don Fowler
9. Assimilation and Civil War: Hercules and Cacus (Aen. 8.185-267) - Llewelyn Morgan
10. Non enarrabile textum? The Shield of Aeneas and the Triple Triumph in 29 BC (Aen. 8.630-728) - Alexander G. McKay
11. The Sword-Belt of Pallas: Moral Symbolism and Political Ideology (Aen. 10.495-505) - Stephen Harrison
12. Fame and Defamation in the Aeneid: the Council of Latins (Aen. 11.225-467) - Philip Hardie
13. The Isolation of Turnus (Aeneid, Book 12) - Richard F. Thomas
14. The End and the Meaning Aen. 12.791-842) - David West
Index

 
 

Classical Review 2003, 100-2.

"This book confronts the perennial question of the ideological stance(s) of the Aeneid in a novel fashion, bringing together fourteen scholars to examine it through close study of particular passages. The book succeeds essentially by itself embodying the complexity of the Aeneid's ideology in its different chapter" A.M. Bowie, Journal of Roman Studies 2001, 237-8. "As noted above, some of the individual chapters are interesting, and all of them could have been published in reputable periodicals. But somehow the book comes to be less than a sum of its parts, and thus accomplishes something rather unusual: a substantial contribution to Virgilian studies which confirms the critical orthodoxy." Andrew Laird,