Vergilian Cities

Abstract

It is well known that the city of Rome figures largely in Vergil's poetry. Study of this topic has tended to focus on its historical aspects, and special attention has been paid to the fact that the Aeneid is a foundation epic. As far as actual descriptions of the city are concerned, most scholars have inevitably been drawn to the famous promenade of Aeneas and Evander through the site of Rome in book 8. In this paper I would like to take a slightly different approach to Vergil's Rome, by looking at a number of passages which offer glimpses of clearly defined urban spaces, arguing that Vergil has a particular interest in depicting cityscapes throughout his career. Right from the first Eclogue, and again in the Georgics, the depiction of Rome as a physical space is clearly a matter of considerable literary importance for Vergil. Ironically, when one turns to the Aeneid, Carthage and Troy receive more direct attention than Rome, but the destinies of all three cities are clearly intertwined. Evocations of the cityscape of Carthage as it is being built by Dido and of Troy as it is being destroyed by the Greeks interact with Vergil's handling of the fate of Rome, and study of the poet's handling of urban space helps to reveal some interesting aspects of his epic technique. Vergil's Aeneid combines the story of a character from Homer's Iliad with the history of Rome. 2 Even before its actual publication around 19 BCE, Propertius (2,34,61-6, c. 25 BCE) could characterize it as a poem about the Battle of Actium and immediately go on to compare it directly to the Iliad. Servius, in the preface to his commentary on the Aeneid, shows his awareness of essential strands in the epic's make-up when he states that Vergil's intention was to imitate Homer and praise Augustus (Homerum imitari et Augustum laudare a parentibus). Modern scholarship has explored extensively the ways in which the 1 Sincere thanks are due to Th. Fuhrer, F. Mundt and J. Stenger for their invitation to speak at the splendid conference in Berlin that gave rise to this volume, and also to Bettina Bergmann, Laurent Brassous and Manuel Royo for expert bibliographical guidance. 2 The bibliography on this broad topic is so vast that it is hard to know where to start; see,