The Primacy of Vision in Virgil's AeneidOne of the masterpieces of Latin and, indeed, world literature, Virgil's Aeneid was written during the Augustan "renaissance" of architecture, art, and literature that redefined the Roman world in the early years of the empire. This period was marked by a transition from the use of rhetoric as a means of public persuasion to the use of images to display imperial power. Taking a fresh approach to Virgil's epic poem, Riggs Alden Smith argues that the Aeneid fundamentally participates in the Augustan shift from rhetoric to imagery because it gives primacy to vision over speech as the principal means of gathering and conveying information as it recounts the heroic adventures of Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome. Working from the theories of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Smith characterizes Aeneas as a voyant-visible, a person who both sees and is seen and who approaches the world through the faculty of vision. Engaging in close readings of key episodes throughout the poem, Smith shows how Aeneas repeatedly acts on what he sees rather than what he hears. Smith views Aeneas' final act of slaying Turnus, a character associated with the power of oratory, as the victory of vision over rhetoric, a triumph that reflects the ascendancy of visual symbols within Augustan society. Smith's new interpretation of the predominance of vision in the Aeneid makes it plain that Virgil's epic contributes to a new visual culture and a new mythology of Imperial Rome. |
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... finds rich and provocative applications of phenomenological theory.28 In classical studies, recent contributions such as those found in The Roman Gaze, edited by David Fredrick,29 have called attention to the importance of vision in ...
Riggs Alden Smith. the future as well as the act of sight. We find this dual meaning also in the Aeneid. For example, when Aeneas asks Dido, si te Karthaginis arces / Phoe- nissam Libycaeque aspectus detinet urbis, / quae tandem Ausonia ...
... finds an increased use of vision in communication and entertainment, particularly during the middle to late Republican period. As Rome waxed powerful in the late second and early first century BC, visual arts such as theater flourished ...
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Contents
1 | |
Ruse and Revelation Visions of the Divine and the Telos of Narrative | 24 |
Vision Past and Future | 60 |
Hic amor Love Vision and Destiny | 97 |
Vidi Vici Visions Victory and the Telos of Narrative | 128 |
Conclusion Ante ora parentum | 176 |
Notes | 183 |
Bibliography | 223 |
Subject Index | 237 |
Index Locorum | 247 |