Date of Award
Spring 2019
Thesis Type
Open Access
Degree Name
Master of Liberal Studies
Department
English
Advisor(s)
Robert Vander Poppen
Second Advisor
Hannah Ewing
Abstract
This study follows neither the paradigm of pro-or anti-Augustan nor the strict belief that the intention of the poet, like other poets of the time, is one of ambiguity open to multiple interpretations. Virgil’s Aeneid is an epic poem with a clearly woven thesis that the hospitality relationships that its hero enters both transcend and address the difficulties he faces in founding Rome. The Rome that Aeneas founds is, like Augustan Rome’s mythology, built on labors and toils. Aeneas’ labors are moral, they are intellectual, and they are searching for the relationship between the human and the divine that is true, accurate, and lasting. Rather than a support for the creation of the Roman state as such, the poem uses the environment and changes that occur in both the contemporary Roman environment and the city’s mytho-historical story to lay forth a realistic optimism that not only incites the people to believe in the potentiality of a peaceful age, but to comprehend through the ideal of hospitality what it takes to both build and maintain such a stability.
Recommended Citation
Mathis, Steffen, "The Clashing Island of Humanity: Virgil's Aeneid as Heroic Threnody" (2019). Master of Liberal Studies Theses. 86.
https://scholarship.rollins.edu/mls/86
Rights Holder
Steffen Lea Mathis