Investigates the themes of recollection and commemoration in a new reading that engages with critical work on memory.

Investigates the themes of recollection and commemoration in a new reading that engages with critical work on memory.

Tracing the path from Troy's destruction to Rome's foundation, the Aeneid explores the transition between past and future. As the Trojans struggle to found a new city and the narrator sings of his audience's often-painful history, memory becomes intertwined with a crucial leitmotif: the challenge of being part of a group that survives violence and destruction only to face the daunting task of remembering what was lost. This book offers a new reading of the Aeneid that engages with critical work on memory and questions the prevailing view that Aeneas must forget his disastrous history in order to escape from a cycle of loss. Considering crucial scenes such as Aeneas' reconstruction of Celaeno's prophecy and his slaying of Turnus, this book demonstrates that memory in the Aeneid is a reconstructive and dynamic process, one that offers a social and narrative mechanism for integrating a traumatic past with an uncertain future.

Constructing Communities in Vergil's Aeneid: Cultural Memory, Identity, and Ideology presents a new examination of memory, ethnic identity, and politics within the fictional world of this Roman epic, drawing previously unexplored connections between Vergil’s characters, settings, and narrative and the political context of the early Roman Empire. This book investigates how the Aeneid’s fictive ethnic communities—the Trojans, Carthaginians, Latins, and Arcadians who populate its poetic world—are shown to have identities, myths, and cultural memories of their own. And much like their real-life Roman counterparts, they engage in the politics of the past in such contexts as royal iconography, diplomacy, public displays, and incitements to war. Where previous studies of identity and memory in the Aeneid have focused on the poem’s constructions of Roman identity, Constructing Communities turns the spotlight onto the characters themselves to show how the world inside the poem is replicating, as if in miniature, real forms of contemporary political and cultural discourse, reflecting an historical milieu where appeals to Roman identity were vigorously asserted in political rhetoric. The book applies this evidence to a broad literary analysis of the Aeneid, as well as a reevaluation of its engagement with Roman imperial ideology in the Age of Augustus.

Goldschmidt looks at the relationship between Rome's two great epic poems, Ennius' Annales and Virgil's Aeneid. Focusing on the intersections between intertextuality and the appropriations of cultural memory, Goldschmidt considers how Virgil's poem appropriates and re-writes the myths and memories which Ennius had enshrined in Roman epic.

Monumental epic poem tells the heroic story of Aeneas, a Trojan who escaped the burning ruins of Troy to found Lavinium, the parent city of Rome, in the west.

Investigates the representation of the Carthaginian enemy and the revisionist history of the Punic Wars in Virgil's Aeneid.