Virgil and the Augustan Reception

by Richard F. Thomas

• ISBN13: 9780521782883
• ISBN10: 0521782880
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-03-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book is an examination of the ideological reception of Virgil at specific moments in the last two millennia. The author focuses on the emperor Augustus in the poetry of Virgil, detects in the poets and grammarians of antiquity alternately a collaborative oppositional reading and an attempt to suppress such reading, studies creative translation (particularly Dryden's), which reasserts the 'Augustan' Virgil, and examines naive translation which can be truer to the spirit of Virgil. Scrutiny of 'textual cleansing', philology's rewriting or excision of troubling readings, leads to readings by both supporters and opponents of fascism and National Socialism to support or subvert the latter-day Augustus. The book ends with a diachronic examination of the ways successive ages have tried to make the Aeneid conform to their upbeat expectations of this poet.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Prologue	xi
Introduction: the critical landscape	1	(24)
Virgil and Augustus	25	(30)
Virgil and the poets: Horace, Ovid and Lucan	55	(38)
Other voices in Servius: schooldust of the ages	93	(29)
Dryden's Virgil and the politics of translation	122	(32)
Dido and her translators	154	(36)
Philology and textual cleansing	190	(32)
Virgil in a cold climate: fascist reception	222	(38)
Beyond the borders of Eboli: anti-fascist reception	260	(18)
Critical end games	278	(19)
Bibliography	297	(16)
Index	313