Virgil: Aeneid

We will read through the whole of Virgil’s Aeneid in the original Latin, raising and discussing interpretive questions that can include—but are not limited to—the poem’s political dimension and its representation of Roman identity, its relation to Augustan culture and the wider cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, its Greek and Roman models and how it changes them, its narrative and narratological style, and its reception in later cultures, including the Aeneid’s influence on European and other imperial discourses and the 20th- and 21st-century contestation of its ideological thrust.