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9 results

  • Chapter 1 - Local Dwelling and Pastoral Place in Vergil’s Eclogues

  • Erik Pugh Fredericksen
  • Book:
    The Environmental Poetry of Augustan Rome
    Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024, pp 20-59

  • Summary

    Chapter 1 examines how locality matters to the Eclogues, and how the poetry collection conceptualizes and constructs local place. In Eclogues 1 and 9, Vergil stresses the importance of local dwelling, representing multifaceted place attachments between individuals and their familiar homes. At the same time, in dramatizing the effects of land confiscations, Vergil probes the highly contingent nature of place, defined by unstable boundaries and through power relations. In addition to providing new readings of these particular poems, this chapter lays the foundation for the rest of the book by exploring the concept of local place and showing how a multifaceted examination of place making and place attachment offers a more nuanced and fuller reading than a focus on landscape, nature, or an opposition between town and country. The chapter then turns to an apparent problem with this place-based reading of the Eclogues: the poems’ ambiguous settings. Drawing on Theocritus and Cicero, it shows that the Eclogues are interested in the many intersections and cross-fertilizations between actual and fictional places. The poems construct local places, even if they cannot be located.

The Environmental Poetry of Augustan Rome
  • Erik Pugh Fredericksen
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024
  • This book reveals central texts of Augustan poetry-Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics, and Horace's Odes-to be environmental poetry. In contrast to readings that assume forms of nature poetry are mere Romantic projections, that suggest Roman authors did not care about the environment, or that relegate place to the status of background and setting, it uses both ecocritical theory and close, contextualized readings to show how Horace and Vergil make issues of place, environment, and ecology central to their poetry. As the book argues, each work also creates a distinctive environmental poetics, in which the nonhuman world and particular local environments help shape the specific qualities of its poetry. By attending to the environmental and place-based poetics of these works, the book generates new readings of Vergil and Horace while deepening and complicating how we understand the traditions and concepts of environmental literature.

  • (Un)Seeing Augustus: Libertas, Divinisation, and the Iuvenis of Virgil's First Eclogue

  • Bobby Xinyue
  • Journal:
    The Journal of Roman Studies / Volume 111 / November 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    20 August 2021, pp. 31-48
    Print publication:
    November 2021
    • Article
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  • This article argues that Virgil's First Eclogue naturalises the power discourse of the future Augustan Principate. Throughout the poem, Virgil not only presents the iuvenis as a libertas-restoring benefactor who is treated as a god by his beneficiaries, but even imagines his elevated status as crucial to maintaining social cohesion and civic stability, and idealises the beneficiaries’ dependence on his efficacious authority. The poem thus produces the grammar of the discourse of authoritarianism, subtly articulating what will eventually become the central tenets of Augustan ideology. I suggest that it is precisely this process of naturalisation which has led readers since antiquity to identify the iuvenis of Virgil's First Eclogue as the future Augustus. However, in this paper I am interested in transcending this question of individual identification to focus instead on how Virgil's poetic anonymisation is no simple pastoral obfuscation, but rather does the hard graft of ‘soft launching’ a new political system.

  • Chapter 2 - Dante Alighieri, Poet without a City

  • David G. Lummus, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book:
    The City of Poetry
    Published online:
    03 December 2020
    Print publication:
    17 December 2020, pp 63-111

  • Summary

    The second chapter addresses Dante’s representation of himself as a poet in relation to the civic sphere. In a detailed analysis of the Egloghe, four Latin poems that make up Dante’s correspondence from Ravenna with Bolognese professor and poet Giovanni del Virgilio, the chapter shows how Dante measures himself against a humanist paradigm for the role of the poet in the city. In his rejection of this role, he asserts himself as the poet of exile, who stands without a city. Yet, through the pastoral imaginary, he also figures a space for poetry in the historical world, marginal though it may be. The chapter concludes by applying this reading of Dante’s humanism to the Paradiso. First, in a reading of Paradiso 15–17, it establishes that the human community of which Dante is poet is figured as a utopia somewhere between Cacciaguida’s Florence of the past and an imaginary Florence of the future. Then, in a reading of Paradiso 22–27, it shows how Dante asserts himself as a poet-theologian and poet laureate.

  • Patronage, Poetic Lineage, and Wordplay: A New Dedicatory Acronym in Vergil's Sixth Eclogue

  • Frances M. Bernstein
  • Journal:
    Antichthon / Volume 54 / 2020
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    10 December 2020, pp. 32-53
    Print publication:
    2020

  • This article identifies and defends a previously unobserved dedicatory acronym to Maecenas in the second half of Ecl. 6.69 (MAEC- in reverse: Calamos, En Accipe, Musae) and contextualizes the specific linguistic choices and central themes of that acronym within a broader network of Vergilian word games. I argue that the dedicatory acronym in Ecl. 6.69 shares linguistic and thematic features with numerous previously identified Vergilian word games, and that from this network of wordplay emerges a common discourse on poetic lineage, genre, and patronage. An awareness of this network of wordplay in Vergil's corpus provides a starting point for a more comprehensive and nuanced interpretation both of individual Vergilian word games and of Vergilian wordplay as a general phenomenon. On a literary level, the conclusions I draw from the MAEC- acronym and the relationship between wordplay and various thematic issues inform a clearer picture of generic shifts and expectations in Eclogue 6, the Eclogues in general, and Vergil's corpus more broadly, and contribute to an understanding of the subtle ways in which Vergil negotiates issues of patronage in his first collection.

Virgil's Fourth Eclogue in the Italian Renaissance
  • L. B. T. Houghton
  • Published online:
    02 September 2019
    Print publication:
    19 September 2019
  • Virgil's fourth Eclogue is one of the most quoted, adapted and discussed works of classical literature. This study traces the fortunes of Eclogue 4 in the literature and art of the Italian Renaissance. It sheds new light on some of the most canonical works of Western art and literature, as well as introducing a large number of other, lesser-known items, some of which have not appeared in print since their original publication, while others are extant only in manuscript. Individual chapters are devoted to the uses made of the fourth Eclogue in the political panegyric of Medici Florence, the Venetian Republic and the Renaissance papacy, and to religious appropriations of the Virgilian text in the genres of epic and pastoral poetry. The book also investigates the appearance of quotations from the poem in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century fresco cycles representing the prophetic Sibyls in Italian churches.

  • 16 - Theocritus and Virgil

  • from PART IV - THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 301-319

  • Summary

    Theocritus of Syracuse, who invented the pastoral, was a Hellenistic poet, a contemporary of Callimachus and Apollonius. A proud claim, made with all the delicate force of which pastoral rhetoric is capable: the claim, that is, of being the first Latin poet to imitate Theocritean pastoral; and made at the beginning of an eclogue which owes little or nothing overtly to Theocritus. Virgil's imitation of Theocritus is restricted mainly, and not surprisingly, to the pastoral Idylls, with the notable exception of Idyll, Simaetha's incantation, a most unpastoral song which Virgil managed to translate into a pastoral setting. The publication of the Book of Eclogues is an epoch in Latin poetry. Virgil's Eclogue may be taken as a personal expression of a public attitude. Time is a relation of experience, and much had happened in the few urgent years during which Virgil was meditating his book.