Virgil and the Augustan Reception

346 Pages·2001·1.57 MB·English

by  Richard F. Thomas

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VIRGIL AND THE AUGUSTAN RECEPTION
This book is an examination of the ideological reception of Virgil at
specific moments in the last two millennia. Following Tennyson’s
evaluation of Virgil – ‘‘Thou majestic in thy sadness|at the doubtful
doom of human kind’’ – Richard Thomas first scrutinizes the Virgil
tradition for readings that refute contemporary dismissals of the puta-
tive post-Vietnam Angst of the so-called ‘‘Harvard School,’’ then de-
tects the suppression of such readings in the ‘‘Augustan’’ reception,
e¤ected through the lens of Augustus and the European successors of
Augustus who constructed Rome’s first emperor – and Virgil – for
their own political purposes. He looks at Augustus in the poetry of
Virgil, detects in the poets and grammarians of antiquity alternately a
collaborative oppositional reading and an attempt to suppress such
reading, studies creative translation (particularly Dryden’s), which re-
asserts the ‘‘Augustan’’ Virgil, and examines naive translation which
can be truer to the spirit of Virgil. Scrutiny of ‘‘textual cleansing,’’
philology’s rewriting or excision of troubling readings, leads to read-
ingsbybothsupportersandopponentsof fascismandNationalSocial-
ism to support or subvert the latter-day Augustus. The book ends
with a diachronic examination of the ways successive ages have tried
to make the Aeneid conform to their upbeat expectations of this poet.
richard thomas is Professor of Greek and Latin at Harvard Uni-
versity.Heisthe authorof Landsand PeoplesinRomanPoetry (1982),a
two-volumecommentaryonVirgil’sGeorgics(1988)andReadingVirgil
and his Texts (1999). He has also published more than fifty articles and
reviews on Hellenistic Greek and Roman poetry.

VIRGIL AND
THE AUGUSTAN
RECEPTION
Richard F. Thomas
HarvardUniversity
ab
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477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
http://www.cambridge.org
©Richard F. Thomas 2004
First published in printed format 2001
ISBN 0-511-01650-6 eBook (netLibrary)
ISBN 0-521-78288-0 hardback
For Joan, Sarah and Julia,
so often the companions of this work,
and in memory of John Wald
ibi omnis e¤usus labor

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Prologue xi
Introduction: the critical landscape 1
1 Virgil and Augustus 25
2 Virgil and the poets: Horace, Ovid and Lucan 55
3 Other voices in Servius: schooldust of the ages 93
4 Dryden’s Virgil and the politics of translation 122
5 Dido and her translators 154
6 Philology and textual cleansing 190
7 Virgil in a cold climate: fascist reception 222
8 Beyond the borders of Eboli: anti-fascist reception 260
9 Critical end games 278
Bibliography 297
Index 313
vii