The Last Trojan Hero: A Cultural History of Virgil's Aeneid
Mar 2014 · Bloomsbury Publishing
Ebook
264
Pages
About this ebook
The resonant opening lines of Virgil's Aeneid rank among the most famous and consistently recited verses to have been passed down to later ages by antiquity. And after The Odyssey and the Iliad, Virgil's masterpiece is arguably the greatest classical text in the whole of Western literature. This sinuous and richly characterised epic vitally influenced th poetry of Dante, Petrarch and Milton. The doomed love of Dido and Aeneas inspired Purcell, while for T.S. Eliot Virgil's poem was 'the classic of all Europe'. The poet's stirring tale of a refugee Trojan prince, 'torn from Libyan waves' to found a new homeland in Italy, has provided much fertile material for writings on colonialism and for discourses of ethic and national identity. The Aeneid has even been viewed as a template and source of justification for British and European imperialisms and for American nation-building. In his major and much anticipated new book Philip Hardie explores the many remarkable afterlives- ancient, medieval and modern- of the Aeneid in literature, music, politics, the visual arts and film.
The Last Trojan Hero, by one of Virgil's leading interpreters, put continually fresh and surprising perspectives on one of the outstanding works of civilization. Placing the Aeneid on a broad artistic and historical canvas, it shows with elegance, originality and creative insight how and in what ways this remarkably durable text continues so powerfully to capture the cultural imagination and why it still speaks to us over a gulf of centuries.
The Last Trojan Hero, by one of Virgil's leading interpreters, put continually fresh and surprising perspectives on one of the outstanding works of civilization. Placing the Aeneid on a broad artistic and historical canvas, it shows with elegance, originality and creative insight how and in what ways this remarkably durable text continues so powerfully to capture the cultural imagination and why it still speaks to us over a gulf of centuries.
The resonant opening lines of Virgil's Aeneid rank among the most famous and consistently recited verses to have been passed down to later ages by antiquity. And after The Odyssey and the Iliad, Virgil's masterpiece is arguably the greatest classical text in the whole of Western literature. This ...
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About the author
Philip Hardie is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge and Honorary Professor of Latin in the University of Cambridge. His many books include Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium, The Epic Successors of Virgil, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion, The Cambridge Companion to Ovid and, edited with S Gillespie, The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius.
Philip Hardie is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge and Honorary Professor of Latin in the University of Cambridge. His many books include Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium, The Epic Successors of Virgil, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion, The Cambridge Companion to Ovid and, edite...
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