Virgil’s Aeneid

About the lecture

In this lecture we provide a broad introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid as a whole, and to Book 6 in particular, focusing in particular on: (i) what happens in the Aeneid: Aeneas’ mission to found the city of Lavinium (a precursor to Rome) following the destruction of his home city, Troy; (ii) the division of Aeneid into twelve books, which can broadly divided into two halves: Aeneas’s travels from Troy to Italy (Books 1-6), Aeneas in Italy (Books 7-12); (iii) the extent to which Book 6 serves as a transition from the first half of the poem to the second; (iv) the extent to which Aeneas is aware of his destiny as the founder of Rome, and the extent to which this knowledge is sharpened by his visit to the Underworld; (v) the importance of Aeneas’ father, Anchises, in guiding Aeneas on his mission, and the problems faced by Aeneas after the death of Anchises at end of Book 3; (vi) the advice that Aeneas receives from his (now dead) father in the Underworld in Book 6; (vii) the political context for Virgil’s Aeneid: the political stability provided by Augustus following decades of civil war; (viii) the extent to which Virgil engages with his literary predecessors, especially Homer and Ennius; (ix) the influence of Aeneas’ descent to the Underworld on later authors, including Dante Alighieri, Rick Riordan, Philip Pullman, and John Milton.

About the lecturer

Llewelyn Morgan is a Classicist, a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. The focus of most of his research is Roman literature and culture, and he is the author of the well-received study of Roman poetic form, Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse (Oxford, 2010).

But he also has a longstanding fascination for Afghanistan, contemporary and historical, which he traces to his discovery, at an impressionable age, of a Russian samovar inscribed “Candahar 1881”. He has made several visits to Afghanistan in recent years, and his most recent book, The Buddhas of Bamiyan (Profile Books and Harvard University Press, 2012), traces the history of these remarkable monuments from their Buddhist origins 1,400 years ago, through their celebrity in Islamic wonder literature and European travel writing, up until their destruction in 2001.

Morgan is a regular public speaker, on many aspects of Classics and Afghanistan, appears occasionally on BBC Radio 4, and writes slightly less occasionally for the Times Literary Supplement.