Essays on The Aeneid

‘I sing of arms and of the man, fated to be an exile’, begins Virgil, and it is on precisely the issue of this man of arms that critical debate in recent years has tended to centre. Scholars continue to disagree on whether or not...

In 1362, Renaissance scholar Giovanni Boccaccio wrote Famous Women, in which he analyzed female characters from Classical texts. Other Italian scholars at the time devoted their efforts to studying male heroes and gods, but Boccaccio brought attention to these women who oftentimes existed solely to...

This passage from Vergil’s Aeneid comes from Aeneas’ tale to Dido, as the Trojan leader describes his city and comrades on the night when Sinon released the Greeks from the Trojan Horse and opened the gate for the Greek armies on the beach. Aeneas did...

While many scholars are of the belief that Vergil penned the Aeneid to provide the Roman people with a propagandized epic glamorizing their own history, there is great evidence for Vergil’s intending the Aeneid to be something vastly more valuable: a parable on the powers...

In Book IV of Virgil’s epic The Aeneid, the gods’ messenger Mercury advises the hero Aeneas that “An ever uncertain and inconstant thing is woman” (IV.768-7). As Aeneas makes his journey from the ruins of Troy to the potential glory of Latium, he discovers just...

An important recurring image throughout Virgil’s Aeneid is that of the serpent, which appears both realistically and metaphorically. The serpent icon is a harbinger of death and a symbol of deception. These two elements represented by the snake are important to the whole epic, but...

Throughout The Aeneid, Virgil details the fated trajectory of Aeneas, who follows his preordained path from the ashy ruins of destroyed Troy to the high ramparts of incipient Rome. In the convoluted framework of the epic poem, these two cities appear as among the few...

Virgil borrows many stories and themes from the Homeric epics and revises them for the Roman tradition in the Aeneid. Aeneas’ journey in search of the Latium shores parallels Odysseus’ journey to Ithaca, except the latter knows what home he is going to. The war...

In the government of any civilization, virtue is not only a preferable characteristic of the ruler or rulers, but a necessary one. Of the virtues, perhaps the two most intrinsically necessary for political decisions are justice and clemency. These virtues are significant to a government...

In the political hierarchy depicted by Milton and Virgil, power rightly belongs in the hands of a man, not a woman. During the times when men are the sole leaders of the nation, a woman’s possession of power and influence is viewed as unnatural and...

Virgil’s Aeneid details the trials and tribulations of Aeneas and the Trojan people en route to Italy from Troy. The journey parallels the epic adventures of the Homeric hero Odysseus. Virgil borrows Homer’s narrative style and frames a story that pays homage to the founding...

The Aeneid by the Roman author Virgil is an epic poem that tells the tale of the Trojan prince Aeneas’ journey to Italy and the eventual founding of Rome following the events of the Trojan War. This epic is often compared with two well-known predecessors,...

As a modern reader approaching the epics, one inevitably brings certain expectations and standards formed throughout the course of our experiences; one’s literary appetite is accustomed to a certain kind of satisfaction, and one of the most valuable rewards in reading these ancient works is...

Virgil and Livy were the authors of two substantially different works; one a propagandist epic in the style of Homer, the other an informed account of Rome’s history. This said, it is interesting to note Virgil’s inclusion of short historical narratives within the fictional tale,...

Elizabeth Smith Professor Colin Dickey Eng 640 22 October, 2006 Surrey’s Innovations and Achievements in His Aeneid Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, is credited as the inventor of English blank verse. In addition to this, he translated books II and IV of Virgil’s1 Latin epic...

Throughout the ages, the theme of impossible love in literature has prevailed. Impossible love is an overall broad theme; generally speaking, it is a love that is forbidden, unrequired, or unable to flourish. Somewhere between 29 and 19 B.C. the legendary Roman author Virgil wrote...

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” This popular saying, paraphrased from William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride, was written nearly 1600 years after Vergil’s Aeneid. Even so, the quote speaks to the Aeneid’s exploration of the relationship between female characters and the emotion of...

In lines 2.730-2.742 of Virgil’s Aeneid Aeneas is describing the terror that hefelt when he finally realized that Troy was falling to the Greeks. In these ten linesVirgil uses careful diction to create an image of a solitary Aeneas pausing for a briefmoment to observe...

Euryalus’s mother always stood out among the others. She left the other mothers behind to stay with her son while most of the women decided to live in Sicily instead of traveling this arduous journey. She also was highlighted in the battle in which her...