Vergil's Aeneid Book

This text contains contributions by international exponents of Vergil's work. It aims to allow both the specialist and the general reader to penetrate and to test many of the leading, and competing, modes of interpretation applied to the Aeneid. These range from Vergil viewed as endorsing Rome's imperial warfare, to Vergil lending his voice to the victims of Roman imperialism; from the denial of the literary critic that any application of political context is feasible, to the discovery of political implications embedded in the dramatic perspectives, characters and locales of the epic. Vergil's poem, a determinant text in the cultural history of the West, is treated by this volume as a focus for intense scholarly controversies: the ideological contribution of the artist to autocracy and war, and the very possibility of verifying political intention in a literary artifact.