N/A / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This study examines how and why Virgil makes reference to philosophy and engages with contemporary philosophical debate in the Aeneid. Each of the six chapters has a different philosophical focus, and offers literary analyses of the poem that are supported and enriched by situating it within its philosophical context. Cicero and Lucretius are our principal sources for Roman philosophy during the 1st c. BC, and Stoics, Epicureans and Academics were the most influential philosophical schools. The topics I explore include: the relationship between words, especially names, and their referents; the characterization of fate in the Aeneid as Stoic, and the meaning of F/fortuna; Virgil's engagement with Lucretius' explanation of visual perception, which I argue embodies a refutation of the materialism integral to Epicurean philosophy; and, given that Cicero and Lucretius provide the first extant references to 'free will' (libera ... voluntas Lucr. 2.256-7; voluntate libera Cic. Fat. 20) in Western literature, the articulation of this concept in the Aeneid. I conclude that Virgil's use of philosophy is both politically and poetically motivated: he shows that poetry and literature are valuable philosophical and political tools by demonstrating that our experience of reality is fundamentally mediated through language and texts.

This dissertation will explore the city wall theme in Vergil’s Aeneid, particularly in the battle scenes, using Homer’s Iliad as a lodestone to help identify significance. Aeneas’s mission is to found the moenia of a city, but he never does so within the epic—yet practically all warfare occurs in the context of fighting over walls. Looking at what walls are being fought over and by whom, an organizing principle emerges: the Trojan walled camp is analogous to the Greek walled camp from the Iliad, and, with some ambiguity, Laurentum is analogous to Troy. The role of the walls in the events is best examined by looking at what the characters themselves actually do regarding the walls. It becomes clear that from the start of the war Turnus is a Hector figure and Aeneas an Achilles figure, despite their own desires. History is to an extent replaying, but Vergil points to key differences to show how the war in Italy is different, even with the Trojan roles reversed. Chapter 1 begins with examining the wall theme throughout the early portions of the Aeneid, focusing attention on the importance of walls in the proem, the Prophecy of Jupiter, and the simile between Roma and Cybele spoken by Anchises in the Underworld. The theme that emerges is that Rome becomes an idealized concept that is represented by walls, pointing to a new ideology which can apply to all. Chapter 2 looks at the battle books through the behavior of the soldiers as a whole, comparing them to Homer’s Greeks, who are shamed into fighting to defend walls and into fighting metaphorically as walls themselves. Chapter 3 investigates how shame prevents both Turnus and Hector from fighting in ways that defend their walls and benefit their people. This comparison highlights how Turnus actually changes his sense of shame and ends up saving his walls and people. Chapter 4 shows that Aeneas is not merely an Achilles figure in the war, but that is he is closely compared to Achilles specifically in his threat to walls. The major difference is that Aeneas is also a founder figure, and thus Vergil creates a paradox by having Aeneas both threatening Laurentum but eager to preserve it. The Conclusion will place the findings in historical context, showing that Vergil’s theme and conception of Roman national identity fit with other poetry, architecture, plastic arts, and even cult worship of the Augustan period.

The purpose of this study of William Morris’s 1875 translation of Vergil’s Aeneid is to rehabilitate this translation after more than a century of almost total critical neglect. Following an introductory chapter that situates Morris within the context of emerging theories that seek to characterise the problems that are unique to classical translation activity and the nature of “retranslation” as promulgated by Laurence Venuti and others, I examine Morris’s preparation for this massive classical task, interrogating the extent and character of his classical education at Marlborough College and Oxford University in the 1850s. I then examine his “two Aeneids” – an illumination on vellum of Vergil’s epic in Latin, begun in 1874 with Edward Burne-Jones but never completed, and his subsequent unadorned translation of the Aeneid into English, which he completed in 1875 and which was published by the end of that same year – in a third chapter that engages what little criticism is available on the illuminations, before describing and interpreting them for the reader (plates are also provided as an Appendix.) My fourth chapter, the centrepiece of the dissertation, constitutes a close critical reading of Morris’s translation alongside the Latin original, and the final chapter rounds out the discussion by way of addressing the spotty critical treatment of this lengthy work of classical translation, after which I situate Morris within the history of English translations of the Roman epic by means of theory: namely, Antoine Berman’s “retranslation hypothesis”, Lawrence Venuti’s concept of “doubly-abusive fidelity”, and Siobhan Brownlie’s proposal for a post-structuralist retranslation theory. I conclude that a just interpretation of Morris’s achievement will begin with an understanding of his aesthetic, ethnic, and political motivations, and I conclude that his Aeneids are a unique and valuable contribution to late Victorian classical translation praxis.

In 1541, writing under the pseudonym Hélisenne de Crenne, the French noblewoman Marguerite Briet produced a translation of the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid that remains largely unknown. As a female author, Hélisenne provides a sixteenth-century woman’s perspective on the Aeneid, an on classical literature more generally, and the uniqueness of her translation in this respect makes her work extremely significant, particularly given the relatively recent interest in women and other marginal voices within the field of classics. This thesis contributes to an understanding of the need for a holistic approach to Classical Reception Studies, through a thorough examination of Hélisenne’s translation not only with regard to her gender but also the social, historical and literary climate in which she writes. Focussing on the mise en livre, as well as the text, my approach also stresses the need to reevaluate the relationship between the author and the text that we often assume in classics is more direct than is actually the case. Through such an examination of her Eneydes, Hélisenne emerges as a serious participant in the humanist tradition who engages with classical literature in such a way as to question masculine textual authority and the notion of an objective truth, whilst deliberately implicating herself through her translation in a web of authorities who are not to be trusted.

Virgil's Aeneid departs from his earlier pastoral poetry in featuring herdsmen as agents of violence. His Eclogues characterize herdsmen as musicians who are helpless against the violence of outsiders. In the Aeneid, in contrast, herdsmen both unwittingly catalyze and deliberately take part in acts of war; they never make music. In similes in the epic, the hero Aeneas is compared to a herdsman engaged in activities that are not typically pastoral. Partial studies of pastoral elements in the epic have focused on evaluating Aeneas in moral or political terms or on the aesthetic function of pastoral motifs in "reducing" the subject matter of heroic epic to an Alexandrian scale. I take a different approach, examining pastoral motifs in the Aeneid in relation to Greek models in epic and tragedy. The tragedians regularly use pastoral figures, language, landscapes, and music to set up ironic contrasts between peace and its violation. Identifying this tragic use of pastoral offers insight into Virgil's strategy of intensifying the shocking effect of violence by juxtaposing it with images of pastoral peace. Virgil develops the tragic ambiguity of characters, landscapes, and musical language with pastoral associations to express the underlying tragic tension between Aeneas' constructive aims as a leader and his inevitably destructive methods. / The Classics

Translation has been at the heart of Seamus Heaney's career. In his poem, "The Riverbank Field," from his latest collection, Human Chain, Heaney engages in metatranslation, "Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as / 'In a retired vale...a sequestered grove' / And I'll confound the Lethe in Moyola." Curiously, with a broad spectrum of classical works at his disposal, the poet chooses a particular moment in Virgil's Aeneid as an image for translation. What is it about this conversation between Aeneas and his dead father, Anchises, at the banks of the Lethe which makes it uniquely fitting for Heaney to explore translation? In order to fully understand Heaney's decision to translate this scene from Aeneid 6, it must be clear how Heaney perceives the classical tropes of katabasis (descent into the underworld) and nekyia (communion with the dead). Due to the particularly violent and destructive history of the 20th century from the World Wars to the Holocaust, contemporary poets tend to portray katabasis and nekyia in their works as tragic (See Falconer's Hell in Contemporary Literature). Heaney subverts this view of a tragic descent and communion with the dead in his poetry, instead opting for a journey through Hell which is more optimistic and efficacious. Heaney's rejection of the contemporary tragic katabasis and nekyia allows these classical tropes to become a metaphor for translation. I argue Heaney demonstrates how he views translation and the role of the translator through this metatranslational instance in "The Riverbank Field." For Heaney, not only can a poet descend to the underworld where spirits of the literary dead wait for translation into a new medium, but the translator actually can succeed in bringing an ancient author to a modern readership.

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Rédigé vraisemblablement à la fin du IVe siècle, à une époque où l’enseignement traditionnel des écoles romaines se maintient et où le paganisme cherche à conserver sa place face au christianisme, le commentaire de Servius à l’Énéide de Virgile, dont le livre V fait l’objet du présent travail, est une œuvre particulièrement importante. Il est destiné à ouvrir à ses auditeurs (les élèves de la classe de Servius), puis à ses lecteurs, la possibilité de mieux comprendre le texte virgilien, et il offre au spécialiste moderne de multiples traces de rites, croyances, pratiques et récits mythologiques qui, sans la richesse de ses développements, resteraient inconnus. Le commentateur laisse parfois percevoir au fil de ses remarques sa vision de l’époque de Virgile et de la sienne propre, et il livre aussi des éléments d’information concernant la réception de l’Énéide dans l’Antiquité tardive. L’intérêt de l’ouvrage est doublé du fait que s’y sont entremêlés ensuite des ajouts d’origines diverses transformant pour ainsi dire le commentaire de Servius en un second commentaire, connu sous l’appellation de « Servius Danielis », présent dans certains manuscrits médiévaux. C’est pour toutes ces raisons que nous proposons, après une introduction consacrée à ses thématiques centrales, une traduction complète de ce double commentaire servien au livre V de l’Énéide de Virgile, en accompagnant et documentant cette traduction par les notes nombreuses et détaillées que réclament la richesse et la complexité de ce travail caractéristique des savants que l’Antiquité appelait des « grammairiens ». / Most certainly written at the end of the 4th century, at a time when traditional teaching from roman school persists and when paganism tries to keep its position facing Christianity, Servius’ Commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid, whose book V is the subject of this study, is a particularly significant work. It is intended to permit the listener (Servius’ students), then the reader, to better understand Virgil’s text and offers to modern specialists many vestiges of rituals, beliefs, practices and mythology’s stories that, without the richness of its body, certainly wouldn’t be known nowadays. The commentator sometimes suggests, throughout his remarks, the vision he has of the Virgil’s time as being his own time and he also gives some information about the Aeneid’s reception in the last Antiquity. The interest of the book is doubled because the text is mixed with elements from diverse origins; it turned the commentary into a second one, known as “Servius Danielis” text and present in some manuscripts. That is why we offer, after an introduction devoted to the main themes of the book, a complete translation of this double servian commentary at the Virgil Aeneid, book 5; this translation goes with many detailed commentaries needed due to the richness and the complexity of expert’s typical work which Antiquity called “grammarian”.