If Virgil set out in 29 BCE to compose an epic in verse to celebrate the recently victorious Octa... more If Virgil set out in 29 BCE to compose an epic in verse to celebrate the recently victorious Octavian as he proclaims was his intent in the Georgics, his Aeneid, the supposed fulfillment of that promise, presents a more complicated portrait of the younger Caesar. The Aeneid recounts the legend of how the Trojan hero Aeneas founded Rome on the shores of Italy after leading the war-racked and dispossessed survivors of Troy on a harrowing journey across the Mediterranean. But beneath the legend of Aeneas, Virgil works in themes that spoke directly to a weary Rome newly emerging from fifteen years of civil wars and social unrest that were provoked and sustained in large part by Octavian"s political ambitions in the wake of the first Caesar"s assassination in 44 BCE. This study will examine how Virgil"s Aeneid as a national epic reconsiders the history and future of Augustan Rome in light of its tumultuous transition from a people"s republic to an autocrat"s empire.
If Virgil set out in 29 BCE to compose an epic in verse to celebrate the recently victorious Octa... more If Virgil set out in 29 BCE to compose an epic in verse to celebrate the recently victorious Octavian as he proclaims was his intent in the Georgics, his Aeneid, the supposed fulfillment of that promise, presents a more complicated portrait of the younger Caesar. The Aeneid recounts the legend of how the Trojan hero Aeneas founded Rome on the shores of Italy after leading the war-racked and dispossessed survivors of Troy on a harrowing journey across the Mediterranean. But beneath the legend of Aeneas, Virgil works in themes that spoke directly to a weary Rome newly emerging from fifteen years of civil wars and social unrest that were provoked and sustained in large part by Octavian"s political ambitions in the wake of the first Caesar"s assassination in 44 BCE. This study will examine how Virgil"s Aeneid as a national epic reconsiders the history and future of Augustan Rome in light of its tumultuous transition from a people"s republic to an autocrat"s empire.
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