‘Eastern’ Elegy and ‘Western’ Epic: reading ‘orientalism’ in Propertius 4 and Virgil’s Aeneid

Abstract

This paper was first delivered as 'L'epos "occidentale" nell'elegia "orientale" e vice versa: Elena, Didone, e Cleopatra in Properzio e Virgilio' at a conference on Orientalismo Romano held at Sapienza Università di Roma; a subsequent version was aired at NUI Maynooth. I gratefully acknowledge the input of both audiences, of Anna Chahoud, Jacqueline Fabre-Serris, Giacomo Peru, and of Dictynna's anonymous reviewers. This research was conducted during tenure of postdoctoral fellowships from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and, latterly, the British Academy. Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions ; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient ; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious "Western" imperialist plot to hold down the "Oriental" world. It is, rather, a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts ; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of "interests" which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains ; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world. i 'Eastern' Elegy and 'Western' Epic: reading 'orientalism' in Propertius 4 and...