Cubiculum and Cosmos: Vesta and the Sacred Topography of Virgil's Troy and Augustus' Rome
(2020) Invited Lecturer, Faculty of Classics, Cambridge — Location: Cambridge, UK
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- Abstract
- This paper addresses broad questions concerning the relationship of ritual to literature in Rome by attacking two related problems connected with the goddess Vesta in the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid. The first such problem stems from Aeneas’ dream, alone within his father’s suburban house, of Hector as Troy burns under the Horse’s shadow, the second from what is known, depending on one’s view of its authorship, as either the ‘Helen Episode’ or ‘Helen Supplement’, as Aeneas looks down in symmetrical solitude from the ruined roof of Priam’s regal pile. In solving these puzzles, we shall have to come to grips with elements in the vast archive concerning the cult of Vesta in Italy and Rome, and in the innovations to that cult in the late 1st century BCE, culminating in Augustus’ establishment of a cult of Vesta publica populi Romani Quiritum adjoining his Palatine house. Through this, we will be able to look into the Aeneid’s coordination of Troy and Rome’s sacred geography, as well as their chronography—as we shall see, looking to Vesta may help us understand the resonance of the time-frame Virgil’s poem imagines for its fall of Troy. This will help us, in turn, understand the nature of Virgil and Augustus’ Rome as a cosmic polity that unites the public, the private, and the solitary spheres in the person of the princeps
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Trinity Cambridge
Citations
Kachuck, A. (2020). Cubiculum and Cosmos: Vesta and the Sacred Topography of Virgil’s Troy and Augustus’ Rome. Invited Lecturer, Faculty of Classics, Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100977