A. Powell, Virgil the Partisan: A Study in the Re-Integration of Classics

Anton Powell, Virgil the Partisan: A Study in the Re-Integration of Classics, Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2008. xi, 309 pages.  

• ISBN 9781905125210
• $69.50 

Recension par Román Facundo Espino (Universidad Nacional del Sur) dans Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2009.03.37.

Présentation de l'éditeur:

Virgil has been claimed as an ancestor by partisans of recent centuries: he has been seen as forerunner of Christianity, as a gentle `national poet' following World War II, as a kindred spirit for opponents of the Vietnam War, and recently as a critic of man's damage to the natural environment. However, most - except the young - feel that Virgil was not often concerned to express support for Octavian-Augustus. This near-consensus of literary critics rests on the tendency of political historians to skim the period between 44 and 31BC, and thus to ignore most aspects of Octavian's contemporary reputation. This book applies a historian's eye to the poetry of Virgil's work. It challenges the orthodoxy that Virgil was a faithful follower of inherited literary genre. It attends closely to his deviations from poetic tradition, and argues that - after the eclogues - those deviations form a pattern: Virgil has identified, addressed and sought to palliate, structurally and on a grand scale, the ugliest and most damaging aspects of Octavian's reputation. His Aeneas steals the clothes of Octavian's most powerful and popular opponent, a man - unlike Mark Antony - little noticed by modern historians. This study insists on the need to combine scholarly disciplines: to argue closely from Virgil's Latin, and from Greek literary genre - and to inform such arguments with a knowledge of ancient political writing and of contemporary coinage. The Virgil who emerges is a more purposive, bloodstained and courageous individual than most have wished to see. Powell's book aims to become a reference for all those who address - in whatever spirit - the question whether Virgil was deeply engaged in the politics of his time.

Anton Powell is Director of the University of Wales Institute of Classics. He is the author of Athens and Sparta (1988, 2001); as founder and (with Stephen Hodkinson) as director of the International Sparta Seminar he has edited five volumes of its proceedings. He is also (with Kathryn Welch) editor of Julius Caesar as Artful Reporter (1998) and of Sextus Pompeius (2002).

Table des matières:

Acknowledgements and Prefatory Note (ix)
Chronology (xi)
Part 1: Studying Virgil and the established partisan: the Aeneid
1. Studying Virgil: several types of circularity-and an escape (3)
2. The theft of pietas (31)
3. Recovering Sicily (87)
4. The peopling of the underworld: Aeneid 6.608-27 (133)
5. Aeneas, sex and misery (149)
Part 2: Partisan in the making: the Eclogues and Georgics
6. The Eclogues (181)
7. The Georgics: the fate of the Muses (227)
8. Conclusion (283)
9. Bibliography (291)
10. Index (301)