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The permanence of Cupid's metamorphosis in the Aeneid
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Ioannis Ziogas
Published/Copyright:
April 22, 2010
Abstract
Cupid morphs into Ascanius in Aeneid 1 and I argue that this transformation invests Ascanius with erotic qualities that are essential to understanding the boy's role in the Aeneid. Vergil deliberately blurs the distinction between Ascanius and Cupid, inviting the readers to draw a parallel between Aeneas' son and Aeneas' brother. Ascanius' Cupid-like features generically enrich Vergil's epic with the language and motifs of elegiac poetry. The intrusion of Cupid, the patron deity of Roman love elegy, into Vergil's epic opens an intriguing dialogue between two genres that are supposedly mutually exclusive.
Published Online: 2010-04-22
Published in Print: 2010-April
© Walter de Gruyter 2010
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Articles in the same Issue
- The case of Book Ten and the unity of the Iliad plot in ancient scholarship
- Reading the authorial strategies in the Derveni Papyrus
- The Derveni Papyrus and the Bacchic-Orphic Epistomia
- Milk in the Gold Tablets from Pelinna
- Callimachus Ia. XIII, fr. 203+204a Pf. (P.Oxy. 1011 fol. VI): A new reading
- Theseus in the making: social psychology and the poetics of fatherlessness in Callimachus
- The permanence of Cupid's metamorphosis in the Aeneid
- ‘The (singing) game is not afoot’ – Calpurnius Siculus' sixth eclogue
- List of Contributors
