From antiquity to the eve of the modern era, rulers of Western empires inspired hero worship by proclaiming their divine origins. In this fascinating original study, Marie Tanner presents the history of the emperor's mythic image and its continuing influence on Western political thought. She shows that these pretensions to divinity were based on the Trojan legend and the myth of Rome as developed in Vergil's Aeneid and that later Christian emperors expanded these claims by tracing their lineage not only to the pagan gods but also to the priest-kings of the Old Testament. Through this amalgam of heritages each successive Holy Roman emperor proclaimed that he was the last descendant of Aeneas, destined to yield the terrestrial rule of Rome to Christ and thereby inaugurate millennial peace. By examining a wide range of literary, artistic, and historical sources plus a corpus of new illustrations, Tanner discovers remarkable chains of evidence for this process, one that culminates with the Renaissance Hapsburgs who imbued the holiest symbols of the faith with dynastic meaning as they attempted to consolidate all priestly and secular powers in their grip. On these foundations Philip II of Spain, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the first monarch to rule the four known continents, created a new concept of absolute monarchy that shaped the principles of modern statecraft and determined the dominant form of government in Europe for the next two centuries.

Reproduction of the original.

Offers a fresh interpretation of Virgil's Aeneid via a detailed study of its child hero, Ascanius, young son of Aeneas.

The Other Virgil tells the story of how a classic like the Aeneid can say different things to different people. As a school text it was generally taught to support the values and ideals of a succession of postclassical societies, but between 1500 and 1800 a number of unusually sensitive readers responded to cues in the text that call into question what the poem appears to be supporting. This book focuses on the literary works written by these readers, to show how they used the Aeneid as a model for poems that probed and challenged the dominant values of their society, just as Virgil had done centuries before. Some of these poems are not as well known today as they should be, but others, like Milton's Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's The Tempest, are; in the latter case, the poems can be understood in new ways once their relationship to the 'other Virgil' is made clear.

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.

In The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic, Andrea Moudarres examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. In Dante’s Divina Commedia, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, enmity is portrayed as internal, taking the form of tyranny, betrayal, and civil discord. Moudarres reads these works in the context of historical and political patterns, demonstrating that there was little distinction between public and private spheres in Renaissance Italy and, thus, little differentiation between personal and political enemies. Distributed for the University of Delaware Press

A Companion to Ancient Epic presents for the first time a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of ancient Near Eastern, Greek and Roman epic. It offers a multi-disciplinary discussion of both longstanding ideas and newer perspectives. A Companion to the Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman epic traditions Considers the interrelation between these different traditions Provides a balanced overview of longstanding ideas and newer perspectives in the study of epic Shows how scholarship over the last forty years has transformed the ways that we conceive of and understand the genre Covers recently introduced topics, such as the role of women, the history of reception, and comparison with living analogues from oral tradition The editor and contributors are leading scholars in the field Includes a detailed index of poems, poets, technical terms, and important figures and events