Juno's Aeneid

"This book, based on the prestigious Martin Lectures, given annually at Oberlin College, offers a major new interpretation of Vergil's Aeneid. Scholars have tended to view Vergil's poem as an attempt to combine aspects of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into a single epic. Joseph Farrell argues, by contrast, that Vergil's aim is not to combine them, but instead to stage a contest to decide which Homeric hero the Aeneid will most resemble. The goddess Juno works, in the poem, to make it another Iliad - a tragedy of death and destruction - against the narrator's apparent intention to make it another Odyssey - a comedy of homecoming and marriage. Farrell begins by illustrating his method of interpretation and its advantages over previous treatments of Vergil and Homer. He then turns to what he regards as the most fruitful of interpretative possibilities. Ancient ethical philosophy treated Homer's principal heroes, Achilles in the Iliad and Odysseus in the Odyssey, as key examples of heroic or "kingly" behaviour, but also stressed their fundamental differences from one another. Achilles is an intransigent, solipsistic man of violence, Odysseus one of intelligence, perspicacity, flexibility,