Memory in Vergil's Aeneid : Creating the Past

Memory was a powerful concept in Augustan Rome, pervading art, literature, religion, and social and political life. Considering crucial scenes in the Aeneid, this distinctive new reading finds memory to be a dynamic process, one that offers a mechanism for integrating a traumatic past with an uncertain future.

Tracing the path from Troy''s destruction to Rome''s foundation, the Aeneid explores the transition between past and future. As the Trojans struggle to found a new city and the narrator sings of his audience''s often-painful history, memory becomes intertwined with a crucial leitmotif: the challenge of being part of a group that survives violence and destruction only to face the daunting task of remembering what was lost. This book offers a new reading of the Aeneid that engages with critical work on memory and questions the prevailing view that Aeneas must forget his disastrous history in order to escape from a cycle of loss. Considering crucial scenes such as Aeneas'' reconstruction of Celaeno''s prophecy and his slaying of Turnus, this book demonstrates that memory in the Aeneid is a reconstructive and dynamic process, one that offers a social and narrative mechanism for integrating a traumatic past with an uncertain future.