Book 11/12

About the lecture

In this module, we think about how the character of Book 11 relates to its position within the epic as a whole. In particular, we think of Aeneas’ dedication of the arms of Mezentius as a kind of spolia opima ritual (and what this implies about Mezentius), the idea of Camilla as an (inadequate) substitute for Turnus, and the sense that there are still some important ethical issues to be sorted out before the poem can come to a satisfactory close.

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.