Virgil's Experience: Nature and History: Times, Names, and Places

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Clarendon Press, Nov 26, 1998 - Literary Criticism - 726 pages
This book studies Virgil's ideas of nature, history, sense of nation, and sense of identity. It is exact and patient in its probing for nuance and detail, but also bold, wide, and original in its scope. It combines the study of Virgil with the study of attitudes to nature throughout antiquity. Blending literature with history, and in the case of Lucretius, philosophy, it offers a vision and an interpretation of the culture of the 1st century BC as a whole. It argues that Lucretius and Virgil affected a revolution in Western sensibility; claiming that a book about poetry should be a book about life, it combines scholarship and precision with a sense of the importance of literature and its capacity to enhance our understanding of our past and of ourselves.

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Contents

Landscape in Greek Poetry
21
A Transpadanes Experience
73
The Neoteric Experience
131
Energy and Delight
211
The Conquest of Death
252
Earth and Country
297
Land and Nation
341
The Wanderings of Aeneas
389
Latinus Kingdom
463
Evanders Kingdom
515
The Later Aeneid
564
Virgil and the Poets
593
Virgil Augustus and the Future
631
Labor Improbus
678
Index of Passages Cited
685
Index of Greek and Latin Words
704

The Underworld
445

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