Hello, my name's Llewelyn Morgan, and I'm going to talk

here about in Aeneid 2,

and what I'm going to start off with is just generally thinking

about the Aeneid as epic poetry.

In ancient literature, it's very important

to think about the genre of any particular

poem. It's one of the most significant things to get our

heads around. So it's very important also to appreciate

that the Aeneid is an epic, and what is entailed

by it being an epic. Now,

we know it's an epic because it's written in dactylic

hexameters. That's the meter that it's in,

so that sort of proves that it must be

an epic, but let's think about some other things about it,

that make it sort of characteristically

an epic poem, rather than

anything else. So one thing that makes it

epic is that it's populated by heroes. And by heroes

we mean kind of superior humans,

humans better they than any humans you might be familiar

with in the real world. It's also populated

by monsters,

equally unfamiliar things to our lives – like, you know,

the snakes that that kill Laocoön.

One of the things that makes

heroes

what they are,

and also one of the things that introduces monsters to the

story is the constant intervention, or the constant

likelihood of intervention, by the gods,

which kind of indicates amongst other things that there are

very important things

going on here. So, I don't about your life,

but gods don't intervene very much in my life,

so that makes this a kind of an unusual circumstance.

It may be interesting though to think momentarily about

what isn't allowed in epic, okay?

What we've been saying so far is that epic is quite a capacious

genre, which sort of stretches the bounds of our experience,

introduces

to its narrative, things that, you know,

we don't experience in our own lives.

That's one of the things that makes it special.

When we start reading epic, we kind of tacitly accept a set

of rules about what's allowed within this form. But

it's important to realize those rules have limitations as well.

We have slightly

strange things like snakes that swim across the sea and so on,

But if we think about a figure like Pyrrhus,

Neoptolemus, who we encounter towards, well,

towards the end of Troy, as it were, he

could be something very peculiar.

He could be a ten- or eleven- or twelve year old boy who's

become sort of preternaturally kind of

developed in the short time that he's been alive and is a warrior.

We have figures like that in other epic traditions – Sohrab

in the Shahnameh in Persian epic – but we don't have it

here. We don't have a kind of a strangely

young warrior or at any rate it isn't emphasized, that

aspect of him. So

epic has an expanded kind of vocabulary

of characters, but not limitlessly.

Okay, well one thing I've sort of implied there, I think,

is that epic is big.

It involves big heroes – I mean physically big heroes,

but important heroes as well – very big monsters, of course,

but it's concerned with extremely important material.

Everything that happens

is of concern to the gods and potentially has great sort of

ramifications for, you know, human history,

really sort of significant

things are happening.

It uses

unusually grand language

that's appropriate to the big people and the big events that

it's describing.

And it also,

epic, simply takes its time.

Epic is big in the sense of being long. Epic poems

take their time to roll out narratives which don't

tend to be terribly complicated in, in fact.

Not a huge amount happens

line to line in epic. Now just one example of how epic

drags things out a bit and sort of implies the importance of

things by spending so much time on them is similes.

Similes are

something that you'll be very familiar with in in Virgil's

poetry. They

essentially make us dwell upon a particular moment.

They might introduce other imagery, other symbolism,

but really what they're making us do is sort of contemplate a

particular circumstance

or person or moment, as I say, for

longer than we otherwise

would. So here is Pyrrhus

being described with a simile in the translation by Shadi Bartsch:

‘Here's Pyrrhus flashing in bronze armour, exalting with his

weapons at the entryway, like a snake fed by toxic

plants whose bloated length chill winter shields under the soil.

Come spring, he sheds his skin emerging new and shiny

coiling his sleek length upward to the sun, his three-

forked tongue darts in and out.’

Okay, so I mean

obviously there's –

we're being told things about Pyrrhus there. Pyrrhus is not,

you know, a particularly

appealing character, and that's one of the implications of

that. But,

just as importantly as the time spent on Pyrrhus – you know,

there are lines and lines on Pyrrhus, and we know that

Pyrrhus matters, that Pyrrhus is going to be associated with a very significant

event. Right, the final thing on this topic, just the

the epicness of

the Aeneid and Aeneid 2 in particular,

is

Troy.

It is epic, it is grand to talk about Troy, because the fall of

Troy is, to an ancient perspective, the greatest story

ever told. Also an event, for a Roman perspective, given

Roman mythology and Roman mythology of where Rome came

from, an event of huge ongoing significance.

I'd say though that the familiarity of the story

becomes something of a problem for people writing about it.

It's kind of interesting that Virgil doesn't start his poem

with the fall of Troy.

He starts his poem in Carthage and he comes back to

the fall of Troy in a narrative of his earlier experiences to Dido,

and his avoidance of

the topic of Troy until the appropriate moment tells us

a little bit, but we will investigate

this idea that Troy is a bit obvious,

is a bit too obvious, to treat

normally or to put in the front window

in the next talk.