Virgil’s Aeneid

Virgil: Aeneid: Book 2.1-56, 195-253

In this course, Professor Llewelyn Morgan (University of Oxford) explores lines 1-56 and 195-253 of Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid. It will be particularly useful for those reading this section of Virgil’s Aeneid for OCR Latin GCSE (J282). In the first lecture, we think about Virgil’s Aeneid as a whole, before turning in the second lecture to think about why Aeneas himself narrates Books 2-3 of the poem. In the third lecture, we think about the representation of the monstrous and the divine in this section of the Aeneid, before turning in the fourth lecture to consider the artfulness of Virgil’s composition on a line-by-line level.

Virgil’s Aeneid

In this lecture we provide an introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid as an epic poem, focusing in particular on: (i) the poem’s length, metre and content; (ii) Virgil’s interest in both the distant and recent past; (iii) the extent to which Virgil attempts to ‘take on’ Homer; and (iv) the ‘greatness’ of epic: of the characters, of the language.