1. The poetics of empire: Virgil’s Aeneid
Politics and Poetics 3
The poetics of empire:
Virgil’s Aeneid

2. The politics of form/narrative: EPIC
Competing/interacting media: writing and song
Epic projects cultural prestige, power, authority: does the genre therefore tend to (re)produce political conservatism?
Callimacheanism vs classicism: the non- purity of genre

3. The politics of content
E.g.:
the unification of Italy and Rome (bks 7-12); the Punic wars (bk 4); the battle of Actium (bks 1, 8); the prophecy of Anchises (bk 6); the shield of Aeneas (bk 8)…
Bear in mind:
Augustus as an ‘idea’
Power as diffuse
Literature as performative/productive rather than simply ‘representative’ of politics
The nature of poetic language
The politics of the Aeneid as inseparable from the politics of reading the poem, and from the politics of its reception.

4. The future in the past

5. Aeneid
Look at how the poet highlights both difference and continuity between past and present.
What might an ‘optimistic’ and a ‘pessimistic’ reading of this passage look like?