This is mainly a reply to a reply of some time ago (I've been disrupted by my wife's death). I mentioned the reference to 'pillars decorated with gold, barbarian-style' (A II 504; following, I think, words attributed to Cassandra by Naevius and admired by Cicero) as problem illustrating V's use of 'focalisation', or as an indication of V's readiness to exploit variant focalisation - uncertainty about whose point of view certain words represent - in order to create an interesting effect. ()Is Aeneas focalising 'barbarico' so that it refers to how the Greek conquerors think or is he beginning, after seven years of exile mainly amid Greek cultural influences, to think that there was something barbaric about Troy? Commentators (Mackail for one) sometimes prefer to soften the meaning of the word, pointing out that it need mean little more than 'exotic' or 'oriental'. I've never liked the 'softening' of 'falsa insomnia' (by the same and many other scholars) at the end of Book VI and I don't think it is very plausible for 'barbarico auro' either. 'Barbarian' was surely the key term of Greek ideas of race and ethnicity. It was not wholly contemptuous or hostile but it did convey, to say the least, an idea of lower cultural and moral development. I don't see how one can keep this aspect of the word out of one's mind at the very point where Greek aggression against another race is in question. (On V's use of 'focalisation' there is much interesting material in RF Thomas 'V and the Augustan Reception' (Cambridge 01); nothing about this passage, I think.) - Martin Hughes
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