A couple weeks ago I asked my epic students why Virgil asked Erato (sometimes identified as the muse of love poetry) to preside over the second half of the Aeneid. We came up with the usual answer (Turnus is fighting in order to obtain Lavinia as his bride), but I'm still not entirely satisfied on this point.
Having said that, it seems to me there's an even more important, and more obvious, question to be asked on this subject: why does is Venus (of all people, I mean, goddesses) so prominent in the Aeneid? Some explanations: - Julius Caesar thought he had a special relationship with Venus, as did Rome. - She is Aeneas's mother; there's not much Virgil can do to change this Still, why does she have to show up so often in the poem? After all, Virgil deviates from the historical tradition in lots of other places. Wouldn't Apollo (Octavian's patron deity) have been more appropriate? One explanation which occurred to me while I was reading an old article on Botticelli's Venus (as she appears in Primavera) is that Virgil's Venus is the goddess of concord and propagation addressed by Lucretius at the beginning of De rerum natura. I tried this out in class, and got what I took to be a positive response, but then they're mostly English majors; as such they're TRAINED to look for connections. And of course no one wants to say the teacher's idea is stupid. So I bring the question to you: what think the mantovani? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, &c. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
