Virgil's Homer: The 'Aeneid' and its Odyssean lens (Greece, Roman Empire)

This study offers a new approach to the relationship between Virgil's "Aeneid" and Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey." By examining the ways in which Virgil bases his own epic project on the dynamic interaction between the two Homeric poems themselves, I propose a comprehensive system in which the "Aeneid" uses the "Odyssey" both as a conceptual model for writing an intertextual epic and as a powerful refracting lens for the specific interpretation of the "Iliad" and its consequences. The traditional view of the Homeric poems as static sources for the construction of distinct "Odyssean" and "Iliadic" halves of the "Aeneid" is thus supplanted by an analysis which emphasizes the active and persistent influence of the "Odyssey" as a guide to processing the major thematic concerns of the "Iliad" and exploring the multiple aftermaths of the Trojan war.; In Chapter 1, I explore the history and methodology of Virgilian intertextual criticism starting with the commentators of Late Antiquity, such as Macrobius and Servius, in order to reorient the underlying premise of bipartite, unidirectional influence of the Homeric poems on the "Aeneid."; Chapter 2 focuses on the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" themselves and reads them independently from the specific context of the "Aeneid," but still from the general Virgilian perspective. I analyze the Homeric intertextual project in terms of the Odyssean transformation of three overarching Iliadic thematic concerns: parental perspective, sorrow and recovery, and the Achillean heroic paradigm.; Chapter 3, involves an analysis of the diverse ways in which Virgil employs the "Odyssey" as an intertextual archetype while constantly competing with its claim to the Iliadic heritage. By grafting his poem onto the Trojan saga at precisely the same point as the "Odyssey," Virgil engages his predecessor in a dialogue on the consequences of the Iliad and on the poetics of transformation in general.; Finally, Chapter 4 tests my model of Virgil's Odyssean intertextuality in a series of close readings, in order to demonstrate Virgil's deep engagement with his Homeric sources not merely as repositories of material to be imitated and translated, but as active and productive partners in his own epic project.