Topics in Latin Literature: Virgil's Ancient Readers

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This is a topics course. Course content varies. Current topic description: In this seminar, we dig deeply into the 'archaeology' of Virgil's poetry by considering how other ancient authors variously visited, inhabited, and built atop the 'eternal city' formed by the influential set of Eclogues , Georgics , and Aeneid . Among those authors must be reckoned Virgil himself, as in such intratextual material as the Georgics anticipating a turn to heroic epic-and perhaps already undermining it, in an image like that of the same poem's future farmer wondering at the bones and armor of an unidentifiable ancient warrior ... We examine variations on such metapoetic themes, often in vivid imagery, in significant examples of 'the Virgilian tradition,' including Ovid's Metamorphoses telescoping Aeneas' journey, Apuleius' Metamorphosis revisiting Virgil's mythic Underworld, and Augustine's Confessions with its fraught anticipation of Medieval visions of 'Virgil the magician.' Augustine's reading leads us to Late Antique remixes, the centos , and ultimately to the 15th-century Maffeo Vegio's feeling that the Aeneid , arguably unfinished, needed a proper ending in an added 13th book. To explore different scholarly approaches to these materials, students develop special expertise in significant publications; in connection with regular close-reading assignments, this scholarly throughline provides a context for final research papers Current topic description: