Virgil`s Aeneid in the Western Imagination A Literary and Cultural

Virgil’s Aeneid in the Western Imagination
A Literary and Cultural History
A Series of Six Lectures by Philip Hardie, Trinity College, Cambridge
Virgil is ‘the classic of all Europe’, T. S. Eliot famously stated. Eliot’s claim sounds a little dated today, and
is itself a part of the history of the reception of Virgil at a particular moment of the twentieth century. But
from any point of view Virgil, and in particular his Aeneid, has been central to western literary culture of
the last two millennia. So long as epic retained its status as the supreme poetic genre, every attempt to
write a canonical poetic masterpiece for a new age or a national literature challenges Virgil, or Homerplus-Virgil (Dante Commedia, Petrarch Africa, Camões Lusiads, Tasso Gerusalemme Liberata, Milton Paradise
Lost). A Virgilian afterlife continues after the novel replaces epic as a preferred form of narrative, as in
Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil or Michel Butor’s La Modification). Moreover, the Aeneid has been
central to the construction of myths of new political and cultural beginnings, first under the emperor
Augustus, and then recycled with each proclamation of a Golden Age restored by a new monarchical or
imperial regime. On the other hand, Virgil’s status as a master of the secrets of the universe, and his
enlistment as a Christian avant la lettre lend him and his major poem a more than literary authority, and he
has continued to attract the attention of mystics and hermetists down to recent times. The Aeneid has also
had a rich reception in opera (many on the Dido and Aeneas episode), and in the visual arts.
A synthesis of the reception of Virgil’s central work thus amounts to a cultural history of Europe.
The renowned Virgilian specialist and Cambridge professor Philip Hardie will tackle this vast and complex
subject in a series of six lectures to be held at the University of Amsterdam.
Philip Hardie is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, Honorary Professor of Latin Literature in
the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was awarded the 2012 ‘Premio Vergilius’ by
the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana di Mantova. Formerly he was Corpus Christi Professor of the Latin Language
and Literature in the University of Oxford. He has published extensively on Virgil and other Latin poets, and also
works on the classical tradition. As well as of many articles and chapters, he is the author of Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos
and Imperium (1986), The Epic Successors of Virgil (1993), Ovid's poetics of illusion (2002), Lucretian receptions. History, the
sublime, knowledge (2009), Rumour and renown. Representations of Fama in western literature (2012).
Programme
Thursday December 6, 1500-1700, Doelenzaal, UB: ‘Mutabile semper femina: Dido’
Friday, December 7, 1500-1700, Doelenzaal, UB: ‘The Many Faces of Aeneas’
Monday, December 10, 15.00-17.00, Leiden University, LIPSIUS 147: ‘The Afterlife of the
Virgilian Underworld’
Tuesday, December 11, 15.00-17.00, Doelenzaal, UB: ‘The Aeneid and Christianity’
Thursday, December 13, 15.00-17.00, Doelenzaal, UB: ‘Imperialism and Nationalisms’
Friday, December 14, 15.00-17.00, VOC Zaal, Oost-Indië Huis: ‘Aeneas in the New World’
(reception afterwards).

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