Spring Offerings

We will spend the entire semester reading Vergil’s Aeneid, sometimes called ‘The’ epic of the west, which adapts themes of war, heroism, and the reestablishement of civilization from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to Roman civilization. It was written from 30-19 BC at the request of Augustus to portray the passions that led to a century of civil war, and the kind of man necessary to reestablish the republic on a firm foundation. It is thus an allegory of Roman history. The Harvard school interprets Aeneid as a criticism of tyrannical tendencies in Augustus.  We will be approaching the work from a new hypothesis that it was an imitation of Plato’s Republic and its analysis of the fall of the Athenian democracy. We will read exerpts from Republic and Aeneid side by side to explore Vergil’s epic as a work of political philosophy.