CLAS 353
Fall 2024
Exam 1 Key

I. Matching: 4 pts. each, 80 total

1. G
2. P
3. D
4. E
5. T
6. H
7. A
8. S
9. R
10. N
11. B
12. Q
13. C
14. F
15. I
16. J
17. K
18. L
19. M
20. O

2. Commentary: 22 pts each, 88 total
For each commentary:
(1)-(4) 2pts. each
(5) 14 pts. each

1. [Vergil, Aeneid 6.893ff.]
(1) Vergil
(2) Aeneid
(3) narrator
(4) description of Aeneas's exit from the underworld following his meeting with Anchises
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• Vergil pointedly has Aeneas exit through the visually more impressive, but deceptive gate of ivory (thus reassigning Penelope's personal dream in the Odyssesy to this marked historical moment in his epic)
• how does Vergil's choice reflect on what Anchises has just revealed to him, i.e. the parade of glorious Romans waiting to be born – in what sense is this possibly "a lying vision"?
• does Vergil's choice to send Aeneas through this deceptive gate somehow look forward to the second half of the Aeneid with skepticism? Does it reflect on the Romans' larger "civilizing" mission in the world (as they figured this in ideological terms), as this has just been revealed to Aeneas by his father?

2. [Vergil, Aeneid 9.431ff.]
(1) Vergil
(2) Aeneid
(3) narrator
(4) Euryalus & Nisus are killed during their unusual nighttime raid against the Italians
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• the passage’s marked eroticization of the pair’s death (manner of death, purple flower/poppy simile), as well as its emphasis on their mutual devotion, love, and sacrifice – their erotic relationship is portrayed is the epic's strongest
• the poet’s forecast of immortality (power of poetry/poetic memory/memorialization, expressed in Roman historical terms here), also indicative of the narrator's marked emotional intensification (cf. also the 9/11 memorial quote taken from this passage)
• an illustration of Vergil’s manner of tragically representing the deaths of young warriors in their prime more generally – as deprived of a peaceful life, marriage, procreation, etc., by the brutal tragedies of war

3. [Vergil, Aeneid 8.678ff.]
(1) Vergil
(2) Aeneid
(3) narrator
(4) description of Aeneas’s shield (forged by Vulcan)
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• Vergil’s historicizing appropriation of Homer’s very different ekphrasis of Achilles’s shield (i.e., quasi- universal human cycles vs. the particulars of Roman history featured here)
• the placement of the scene showing Augustus’s victory over Antony at Actium and the subsequent triumph of Augustus in the middle of the shield > Augustan teleology; the propagandistic representation of Antony and Cleopatra as decadent easterners/foreigners (as if Actium had not ended a civil war!), "Orientalism" & the stereotyped clash of West and East
• the depiction of Caesar Augustus with flames pouring from his forehead as a sign of the gods’ approval of him, and so again of the idea of the inevitability of Roman empire/manifest, destiny/fate

4. [Vergil, Aeneid 1.278ff.]
(1) Vergil
(2) Aeneid
(3) Jupiter
(4) Jupiter reassures Venus with an optimistic prophecy about the future Romans descended from Aeneas
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• the passage illustrates Vergil’s extensive use of prophecy to introduce Roman historical elements into the world of mythic epic (e.g., togas, closing of Temple of Janus), often optimistically so in regard to Roman destiny
• the prophesy’s contemporary propagandistic elements (e.g., the idea of Roman divinely ordained “manifest destiny” and claim to rule the world, patent glossing over of the ugliness of Augustus’s recent civil war as a vicory over the East, the teleological idea of Augustan society marking the culmination of human history)
• the idea of Trojan revenge on Greeks (cf. Phthia, Mycenae, Argos) as a model for Roman imperial conquest (the hsitorical Romans always claimed their wars were in self-defense)  

5. [Vergil, Aeneid 12.930ff.]
(1) Vergil
(2) Aeneid
(3) narrator, Turnus, Aeneas
(4) the end of the epic – Aeneas decides to kill rather than pardon Turnus
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• Turnus’s complete surrender and humiliation in public – conceding all conditions of the war – before the Italians and Trojans, as well as his powerful appeal to Aeneas’s central devotion to family and his patriarchal line (pietas), which should lead Aeneas to pardon him
• Aeneas’s hesitation and moment of rational thought followed by overwhelming fury at the sight of Pallas’s belt (with an ekphrasis of the Danaids engraved on it); this "reminder of his savage / grief" as a reflection of both his personal loss of Pallas and more generally the premature and tragic loss of many young warriors in battle (war's universal tragedy?)
• implications (historical, in regard to human behavioral tendencies, etc.) of Aeneas’s actions here when set against his father’s prescription in Aeneid 6 that he (as a “Roman”) should pardon the humbled and war down the haughty? Implications for Roman reconstruction after civil war?

6. [Vergil, Aeneid 7.750ff.]
(1) Vergil
(2) Aeneid
(3) narrator
(4) the priest Umbro is described in the catalogue of Italian warriors
(5) some possible talking points for elaboration:

• Umbro's markedly peaceful nature; a rustic priest with quasi-magical powers wearing "fertile olive" on his helmet, he is no match for his Trojan opponents
• Umbro's name ("Shade/Shadow") marks him out as pathetically destined to die, as also the narrator's ironic comment about his healing powers being useless in war (cf. Vergil's running emphasis on the Trojan invaders' victims)
• Umbro receives a powerful apostrophe as a kind of funeral epitaph in advance, with his native forests and lakes imagined as lamenting him (cf. Vergil's Italian affinities)

3. Essay, 60 pts. total 

Some possible talking points for elaboration regarding Vergil’s more public voice, the voice that (often propagandistically) extends the epic to his own times:

• the use of prophecy (see especially Jupiter’s to Venus in Aeneid 1 about Roman destiny and rule) to move beyond the epic’s mythic time-frame (post-Troy's fall) and all the way down to Augustan Rome/Vergil’s time, often to support the idea of a restored "Golden Age" under the new principate and the "rebirth" (and reconstruction of post civil-war society)
• the epic’s persistent representation of Roman rule/empire, as it descends from Aeneas and the Trojans, as something fated and sanctioned by the gods (i.e., Roman "manifest destiny"), at least Jupiter (and his messenger Mercury)
• various other glorifying allusions to Roman historical events, landmarks, and figures, as in the parade of souls in the underworld and on the shield of Aeneas (a momemnt of extreme propaganda and rewriting of recent Roman history), including Augustus and other contemporaries

Some possible talking points for elaboration of Vergil’s more private and skeptical voice regarding both Aeneas's and the Romans’ mission:

• the epic’s sympathetic & empathetic treatment of various direct or indirect victims of Aeneas and the Trojans (esp. Dido, Turnus, Camilla, Pallas, Juturna), especially when this is coupled with Aeneas’s own frequent reluctance to act decisively as an epic hero on a clear-cut mission (cf. the subtle hints that the epic's hero betrayed Troy)
• Vergil’s decision to send Aeneas through the Gate of Ivory (that of “false dreams”) immediately after a glorious vision of future Roman history has been revealed to him in the underworld, suggesting possible doubt about war and empire as “civilizing” (as imagined by Roman imperialism) and productive forces in the Mediterranean world?
• Vergil’s detailed and sympathetic depiction of the indigenous Italians as they assemble for battle (Aeneid 7) against the Trojan invaders, who together engage in a kind of (absurd?) civil war (unnecessary, as Jupiter himself points out in Book 12)
• Aeneas’s direct (and structurally pointed: cf. the ends of Aeneid 6 and 12), violation of his father’s instructions on how to treat the conquered/humbled when he slays Turnus at the epic’s end, as one vengeful strongman vs. another strongman (what does Aeneas’s choice suggest about the realistic prospects for Roman law and order, as Anchises lays these out to Aeneas as “a Roman”?)
  
  EXAM TOTAL = 228 pts. (points and grading are based on a standard percentage scale)