On 9/14/06, Martin Hughes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I rather like to think (which is no reason to think) that V understood, in a rational way, that the Empire was bound to receive an intellectual contribution from a certain variety of races: as indeed it was.
Virgil talks about the richness of Rome's mixed heritage at several points in the narrative. The most obvious contribution is linguistic: in bk. 12, Jupiter prophies that the Trojan conquerors will forget their own language and speak Latin (bk. 12). Certain military customs are also derived from the latini, such as naval trophies made from beaks of ships (bk. 7). Race mixing seems to be the norm everywhere. Dido comes from what is now Lebanon, Aeneas from what is now Turkey. Both are expected to marry with the local nobility, Dido in Africa, Aeneas in Italy. Pallas, we are told in book 8, has a Greek father and a Sabine mother. For Virgil, this was personal. Mantua, where he grew up, didn't get citizenship until Virgil was in his teens. That's the history. The fiction, in Virgil's epic, is that Tuscany has always been part of Rome, because its armies were allied with Aeneas. Mantua, in particular, is described as a racial melting pot, a "three-fold race" (10.202, gens...triplex), "rich in ancestry" (10.201, diues auis). ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [email protected] English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c East Carolina University Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
