The Aeneid on Its Own Terms

Abstract

Traditionally, scholars have read the Aeneid as a piece of propaganda for the Augustan empire. But in his Two Voices of the Aeneid, Parry, rejecting the historicist reading, brings attention to elements critical of the said empire, which decisively divided the interpreters into the Harvard School's pessimistic readings and those who maintain the traditional �optimistic readings� (Kallendorf). Some recent scholars have tried to seek unity between these two readings by adopting thesis similar to Parry's reading (Schmidt), which interprets the Aeneid as an artistic expression with humanistic sympathies (Parry). But their prioritization of instances of textual analysis, like the historicist they criticize, also allows isolated themes to overshadow the structural context in which each scene occurs, thus segmenting Virgil's narrative as a unified whole. In an attempt to reveal this unity, this paper prioritizes the sequence of events in interpreting the symbols within the scenes analyzed by Parry and the significance of these scenes to the whole. The paper offers a third perspective that reconstructs the idealistic social-political narrative presented in the Aeneid on its own terms.