Vergil's Aeneid and the Roman Self: Subject and Nation in Literary Discourse

Introduction

If there is any literary work that embodied and defined a cultural identity for the readers of its time, it is Vergil's Aeneid. When I started writing this book I wanted to understand more fully how the poem's Roman readers thought about themselves as Romans and how this poem affected their conceptions of Roman identity. The time was ripe for an analysis of this kind. Recent classical scholarship has shown an increasing interest in ancient conceptions of identity, subjectivity, and the self Scholars have approached these issues from a variety ofcontexts and with a number oftheoretical frameworks. Studies of gender and ethnicity in the ancient world are as much a part of an exploration of ancient conceptions of identity as are studies concerned with the construction of the self in literary texts. Much work has been done, for instance, on ancient conceptualizations of sexuality and gender.I In the area of Roman literature there are numerous studies concerned with gender and sexuality.2 There is also an increased interest in questions of ethnic identity in antiquity.3 This renewed interest in the ancient self is the result of modern concerns such as contemporary interest in the issues ofgender, ethnicity, and identity in general, as well as modern theories of the self, such as psychoanalysis. For several reasons, Vergil's Aeneid is an important text for the study of the history of the ancient self. The self-consciously new national epic of the Roman Empire, written at perhaps the most significant political turning point in Rome's development from republic to autocracy, the poem stands at a historical and cultural watershed. Culturally, the Augustan Age is an interesting time in the history ofthe ancient selfbecause it is situated 2 Vergil's Aeneid and the Roman Self at the end of the Hellenistic period in which ancient conceptions of the self underwent a gradual transformation from a more socially determined model relevant for the polis culture of Classical Greece to one determined more by internal experience in the Roman imperial period. What is interesting about the Aeneid is that it fuses an interest in the inner workings of the self with an articulation of the individual's place within the social structure. Like a Janus-headed hybrid in the history of the ancient self, the Aeneidlooks both backward and forward in time: back to earlier conceptualizations of the self within the structures ofpolis and respublica, and forward to the later rising interest in the interiority of the self, as we see it, for instance, in Augustine. Both modes ofconceptualization of the self are important to the Aeneid, and both are analyzed in this book. An analysis of the Aeneid adds to our understanding of the history of the ancient self in two significant ways. First, since the Aeneid belongs to a period of transition in the history of the ancient self, it allows us to observe more closely how this shift took place. Secondly, as a work that speaks to the imagination, the Aeneid provides an important supplement to discussions based on philosophical and other theoretical texts, which discuss the ancient self more explicitly than literary texts. The disadvantage of focusing exclusively on ancient philosophical texts is that they are interested primarily in a prescriptive definition of the ancient subject, that is, in the question of how one should govern oneself But poetry and mythology should form a vital part of the study ofancient subjectivity, because mythology was omnipresent even to the illiterate, and because some works ofpoetry (such as the Homeric epics and the Aeneid) were so central a part ofancient education that knowledge of them was almost equivalent to literacy. Looking at mythology and epic poetry, therefore , provides us access to the stories that formed a sense of self for large sections of the population of the ancient world. An analysis of how such stories influenced the Romans' sense of self adds to more theoretical and therefore more prescriptive definitions of the subject a more descriptive one, less determined by precepts and more focused on the imagination. The present study ofVergil's Aeneidis a contribution to the study ofthe Roman self as it is articulated in this influential poem. I argue that the Aeneid had a significant impact on its Roman readers' sense of self as Romans and that the poem articulated Roman identity for them through the reader's identification with and differentiation from its fictional characters. The identity articulated in the poem for the reader is...