Carthage in Virgil's Aeneid

Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-1-108-40418-1
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 348 Seiten, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 441 g

Reihe: Cambridge Classical Studies

Founded upon more than a century of civil bloodshed, the first imperial regime of ancient Rome, the Principate of Caesar Augustus, looked at Rome's distant and glorious past in order to justify and promote its existence under the disguise of a restoration of the old Republic. In doing so, it used and revisited the history and myth of Rome's major success against external enemies: the wars against Carthage. This book explores the ideological use of Carthage in the most authoritative of the Augustan literary texts, the Aeneid of Virgil. It analyses the ideological portrait of Carthaginians from the middle Republic and the truth-twisting involved in writing about the Punic Wars under the Principate. It also investigates the mirroring between Carthage and Rome in a poem whose primary concern was rather the traumatic memory of Civil War and the subsequent subversion of Rome's Republican institutions through the establishment of Augustus' Principate.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Giusti, Elena

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Geschichte der klassischen Antike

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: tractatio, re-tractatio, revisionist history; 1. Carthaginian constructions, since the Middle Republic; 2. Polarity and analogy in Virgil's Carthage; 3. Virgil's revisionist Epic and Livy's revisionist history; 4. Virgil's Punic/Civil Wars as unspeakable; Conclusion: all the perfumes of Arabia.

Über Autor(innen)

Giusti, Elena
Elena Giusti is Assistant Professor of Latin Literature and Language at the University of Warwick. She previously taught Classics at the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge, where she was Research Fellow in Classics at St John's College.