Virgil's Experience Nature and History: Times, Names, and Places

by Jenkyns, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780198140337
• ISBN10: 0198140339
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-02-18
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

This book studies Virgil's ideas of nature, history, sense of nation, and sense of identity. It is exact and patient in its probing for nuance and detail, but also bold, wide, and original in its scope. It combines the study of Virgil with the study of attitudes to nature throughoutantiquity. Blending literature with history, and in the case of Lucretius, philosophy, it offers a vision and an interpretation of the culture of the 1st century BC as a whole. It argues that Lucretius and Virgil affected a revolution in Western sensibility; claiming that a book about poetry shouldbe a book about life, it combines scholarship and precision with a sense of the importance of literature and its capacity to enhance our understanding of our past and of ourselves.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	xii
PART ONE: Before Virgil	1	(128)
1 Introduction	3	(18)
2 A Reader's Experience: Landscape in Greek Poetry	21	(52)
3 A Transpadane's Experience	73	(56)
PART TWO: The Eclogues	129	(80)
4 The Neoteric Experience	131	(78)
PART THREE: Lucretius	209	(86)
5 A Conversion Experience: Energy and Delight	211	(41)
6 A Conversion Experience: The Conquest of Death and the Pleasures of Life	252	(43)
PART FOUR: The Georgics	295	(92)
7 An Italian's Experience: Earth and Country	297	(44)
8 An Italian's Experience: Land and Nation	341	(46)
PART FIVE: The Aeneid	387	(204)
9 A Trojan's Experience: The Wanderings of Aeneas	389	(56)
10 Beyond Experience: The Underworld	445	(18)
11 A Trojan in Italy: Latinus' Kingdom	463	(52)
12 A Trojan in Italy: Evander's Kingdom	515	(49)
13 A Trojan in Italy: The Later Aeneid	564	(27)
PART SIX: After Virgil	591	(87)
14 The Latin Experience: Virgil and the Poets	593	(38)
15 A Roman Experience: Virgil, Augustus, and the Future	631	(47)
Appendix: Labor Improbus	678	(7)
Index of Passages Cited	685	(19)
Index of Greek and Latin Words	704	(2)
General Index	706