Virgil and The Poetry of Explanations

Abstract

The indebtedness of theAeneidto Homer in terms of plot and structure has been analysed in minute detail, and the hunt is indeed by no means at an end. Here and there, notably but not exclusively inAeneid4, long narrative sequences have been followed back to Apollonius Rhodius. Isolated episodes have been identified as owing much to Greek tragedy. But the pursuit of Virgil's principal narrative sources, already undertaken with furious critical acerbity in antiquity, is perhaps too heavily committed to a limited quantity of likely literary models and to certain patterns of enquiry, though these last have changed a good deal in recent years. If I seem to grumble about a narrowness of outlook that becomes at times oppressive and about the danger of conclusions ever more forced and improbable if we continue barking up the same few trees, it is because (i) I have worked on and off for nearly twenty-five years onAeneid7, where Virgil's sources are as mixed, complex and anomalous as they ever become and because (ii) I published recently a study (Vergilius35 (1989), 8–27) of narrative sequences inAeneid, which seemed to point strongly towards Virgil's attentive reading of Greek colonization stories. This is not the place to continue my one-man pursuit of Herodotus and Pindar in theAeneid?but it is high time that we looked at certain large narrative structures in the epic and asked whether we have really been framing the right questions about them.