Virgil's Aeneid. A Critical Description. - QUINN, K,

KORTE INHOUD

'Quinn assumes that the 'Aeneid' was intended to have contemporary reference, that it was designed not only to celebrate the victory of Actium but also to supply a comment on the civil wars that had come to an end with that victory. According to his interpretation, though superficially a work of propaganda it is essentially an anti-militarist poem, one which shows the dehumanising effects of war and the way in which it 'can corrupt the character and motives of even the most high-minded of leaders.' (...) 'The Aeneas of Book xii,' to quote Quinn again, 'points clearly to Augustus; and the portrait is hardly a flattering one.' This seems to imply an intended, though surreptitious, attack on the 'princeps'which, so far as we know, was unrecognised by contemporaries, including its victim, who took a keen interest in the progress of the work and was responsible for its publication. This is not easy to believe. Quinn is perhaps too ready to read into Virgil's text the sentiments of the mid-twentieth century. (...) ...
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1968Uitgever: Routledge & Kegan Paul