The Aeneid as Epic

About the lecture

In this lecture we think about the Aeneid as epic, focusing in particular on: (i) the importance, when reading ancient literature, of thinking about its genre; (ii) some of the key characteristics of epic poetry, including its distinctive metre (dactylic hexameter), and the presence of gods, heroes and monsters; (iii) the fact that the heroes in Roman epic are bigger and better than ordinary people, but not supernaturally so; (iv) the ‘bigness’ of epic – of its heroes, of the events which it describes, and of the very length of the poem; (v) the contribution of similes to the ‘bigness’ of epic and its characters; and (vi) the epic credentials of the city of Troy itself, and the significance of the fact that Virgil delays describing the fall of Troy until Book 2 of the Aeneid.

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.