Virgil, The Aeneid

Undergraduate / Graduate

Virgil's Aeneid is arguably the most revered work of European literature. For centuries it was the emblem in Europe of what it meant to have a civilization. The poem tells the story of the mythical foundation of Rome, and asks questions about the nature of civilization with an insight and clarity rarely equaled in literary fiction: How much suffering can be perpetuated before the project of civilization turns inside out? How much fiction is legitimate in a story of national origins? Why do we need stories of national origins in the first place? The majority of the quarter will be devoted to The Aeneid. We will conclude by reading the opening movement of Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, written during the Nazi years and published in 1944, in which his fictional Virgil reflects on his achievement in The Aeneid and asks for his poem to be destroyed.