Virgil and his Afterlife

More Latian Anagrams (Aen. 8.314-36)

The “Ascanius problem” is a much-debated and increasingly researched topic in Aeneid scholarship and reception. For a figure so emblematic of Vergilian themes of pietas and family, and one who directly reflects Augustus’ emphasis on succession, he is often conspicuously absent from the narrative – an absence that persists in Vergilian reception, where Ascanius is a negligible presence at best.

In his Phaedra, Seneca draws on passages from Vergil’s Georgics that explore the struggle between ratio and furor, more pervasively than has been previously noted (Trinacty, Coffey and Mayer). He weaves these Vergilian intertexts into a genre rich in dialogism in order to explore contrasting approaches to Stoicism and the consequences of a life lived without philosophy’s stabilizing force, reveling in the kind of decline Stephen Hinds argued that imperial poets embraced.

This paper focuses on the content and significance of the terms Italus and Italia in Aeneid 7-12, and their rhetorical deployment by Turnus and his lieutenants during the war against the Trojans. The landscape of Vergil’s primeval Italy is populated by a wide array of distinct ethnic and cultural groups that inhabit politically autonomous cities. Prior to Turnus’ mobilization of resistance to the Trojans, there appears to have been little sense of unity and solidarity as “Italians” between the individual communities.