Juno's Aeneid

"This book, based on the prestigious Martin Lectures, given annually at Oberlin College, offers a major new interpretation of Vergil's Aeneid. Scholars have tended to view Vergil's poem as an attempt to combine aspects of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into a single epic. Joseph Farrell argues, by contrast, that Vergil's aim is not to combine them, but instead to stage a contest to decide which Homeric hero the Aeneid will most resemble. The goddess Juno works, in the poem, to make it another Iliad - a tragedy of death and destruction - against the narrator's apparent intention to make it another Odyssey - a comedy of homecoming and marriage. Farrell begins by illustrating his method of interpretation and its advantages over previous treatments of Vergil and Homer. He then turns to what he regards as the most fruitful of interpretative possibilities. Ancient ethical philosophy treated Homer's principal heroes, Achilles in the Iliad and Odysseus in the Odyssey, as key examples of heroic or "kingly" behaviour, but also stressed their fundamental differences from one another. Achilles is an intransigent, solipsistic man of violence, Odysseus one of intelligence, perspicacity, flexibility, and self-control. Many ancient thinkers contrast the heroes in these terms, with none imagining a stable combination of the two. Farrell argues that this supports his contention that Vergil does not aim to combine them, but to stage a Homeric contest for the soul of his hero and his poem. The final chapter considers the political relevance of this contest to Rome's leader, Caesar Augustus, who counted Aeneas as the mythical founder of his own family. An ultimately Iliadic or an Odyssean Aeneid would reflect in very different ways upon the ethical legitimacy of Augustus' regime"--