Sowing the Seeds of War: The Aeneid's Prehistory of Interpretive Contestation and Appropriation

Long before the Harvard School, the earliest audiences of Vergil's Aeneid were conditioned to hear "two voices" in the epic. Vergil's Eclogues had already illustrated and evoked dialogic interpretations; the epic's ekphrases, including the Trojan War frieze at Carthage, show the subjective nature of all aesthetic response; and the ancient vita tradition framed the text of the Aeneid, like Pallas' baldric, as an object of political contestation. In tying the epic's publication to the death of its author, the Aeneid's object history continues to implicate all readers, from Augustus to the designers of the 9/11 Memorial in New York, in a struggle for interpretive control.