AMSTERDAM VIRGIL LECTURES
At the University of Amsterdam
THE HUMAESS OF CREATIO
Six Lectures on the Ending of the Aeneid
by
Michael C.J. Putnam
Emeritus W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics
Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature, Brown University
From November 30 to December 11, the celebrated Virgilian scholar Michael C.J.
Putnam, invited by the University of Amsterdam, will deliver six lectures on the ending
of the Aeneid, thus recapitulating a life-time of outstanding scholarship devoted to Latin
poetry in general and Virgil in particular. The lectures will address the problems raised
by the notoriously controversial last pages of the most influential epic of the Western
literary tradition. Focusing on human values, emotions and contingency, the lectures will
be of interest not only to Latinists, literary scholars and students, but also to the general
public. The texts treated will be submitted in translation so as to enable the non-specialist
to attend.
Programme
Monday November 30
Tuesday December 1
Thursday December 3
Friday December 4
16.00-17.00
16.00-17.00
16.00-17.00
16.30-17.30
Tuesday December 8 12.00-14.00
Thursday December 10 16.15-18.00
Friday December 11
17.00-19.00
First lecture (UB, Doelenzaal)
Second lecture (UB, Doelenzaal)
Third Lecture (UB, Doelenzaal)
Fourth Lecture (UB, Doelenzaal)
Workshop discussion with lunch (P.C. Hoofthuis)
Fifth Lecture (University of Leiden)
Final lecture, reception (Spui 25)
Synopsis
The main theme of the lectures will be to trace the development of Aeneas from an
apparently stoical, self-effacing individual, burdened by destiny with the founding
of Rome, to the fury-driven, angry, vengeful person who kills his humbled
opponent at the conclusion of the epic. This ending and its possible meaning or
meanings will be our primary focus. One lecture will be devoted to the authority
given Turnus in the epic’s finale. Another will trace the ironic association of
Aeneas with the literal, or figurative, destruction of cities throughout the poem’s
narrative time. But chiefly we will watch how Virgil asks his reader to examine the
various means by which earlier books of the poem anticipate and sustain the force
of its ending. The anger of Juno against Aeneas at the start is recreated in the
emotions of her earlier victim at the end, but already in book 2 we watch wrathful
Aeneas prepare to kill a suppliant Helen. We will also examine in detail the
rampage on which Aeneas embarks in book 10 after the killing of Pallas, a bout of
fury far disproportionate to the event that it is supposedly avenging. Virgil’s words
there anticipate the final human sacrifice perpetrated in the epic’s last moments.
Aeneas has been told by his father to spare the prideful once they have become
suppliants, but the conscience of the poet asks us to concentrate on the humanness
of his creation and to his emotionality. In so doing we return cyclically not only to
the epic’s initial books but also to the beginning of the Iliad and the wrath of
Achilles. Virgil thus has us unite two of antiquity’s greatest epics by means of the
same theme. The hero who suffered the loss of Troy, when he is at last in control of
his destiny, with his defeated opponent pleading for forbearance, becomes a figure
not for some imagined future statesman but for the man who initiated his city’s ruin
and whose son, Pyrrhus, kills its king.
Michael Putnam’s primary interest is Latin literature and its influence. Books include The Poetry of the
Aeneid (1965); Virgil's Pastoral Art (1970); Tibullus (1973); Virgil's Poem of the Earth (1979); Essays on
Latin Lyric, Elegy, and Epic (1982); Artifices of Eternity (1986); Virgil's Aeneid (1995); Virgil's Epic
Designs (1998); Horace's Carmen Saeculare (2000); Maffeo Vegio: Short Epics (2004); Poetic Interplay
(2006); The Vergilian Tradition, coedited with Jan Ziolkowski (2008) and Jacopo Sannazaro: Poetry
(2009). Putnam joined the Brown faculty in 1960 after teaching for a year at Smith College. He was Acting
Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies 1961-62 and served as one of its Senior Fellows from 1971 to
1986. In 1963-64 he held a Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome where he was later
a Resident (1970) and Mellon Professor in Charge of the Classical School (1989-91). Since 1991 he has
been a Trustee. He was elected a director of the American Philological Association in 1972 and has since
served the Association as President (1982),Financial Trustee (1997-2004) and as a member of its
Development Committee (1995-). He received the Association's Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit in
1971. In 1985 he was Townsend Professor at Cornell University and inaugurated the Townsend Lectures.
For 1987-88 he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study and for 1994-95 a Visiting Scholar for
Phi Beta Kappa. During the spring of 2004 he gave the Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College. He is
a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the American Philosophical
Society, and has received Guggenheim, ACLS and NEH Fellowships. He is a member of Italy's Accademia
Nazionale Virgiliana. In 2009 he received the centennial medal of the American Academy at Rome for
devoted and distinguished service to the arts and humanities, promotion of understanding between nations
of their common cultural heritage and exceptional contributions as a scholar, professor, and mentor.
For further information: David Rijser, University of Amsterdam, [email protected]