Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid: Staging the Enemy Under Augustus (Cambridge Classical Studies)

Synopsis

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.

Provides a new literary and historicist reading of Virgil's Aeneid and its Augustan context.

Investigates afresh the ideology of Caesar Augustus in relation to the wider history of ideologies and autocratic regimes.

Engages in a range of approaches of great current interest, such as the representation of the other and the erasure of subalterns from classical texts.

Copyright:

2018

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9781108266086

Related ISBNs:

9781108416801, 9781108416801

Publisher:

Cambridge University Press

Date of Addition:

06/15/18

Copyrighted By:

Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Poetry, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.