De Troie à Rome

This book is based on the idea that places and objects of memory in the Aeneid function as markers of a specifically Virgilian poetics of Roman identity, at a time when defining Romanity was an essential concern within the political and social dynamics of the Augustan regime. It reveals the literary construction of a collective memory and the forging of a Roman identity still in the making in the early days of the Empire.

The analysis begins with the places featured in the epic: toponyms, buildings and cities become “places of remembrance”. In the Augustan era, each space is invested with an ideological meaning that embodies the processes through which a specifically Roman culture, identity, memory and ethnicity are constructed. The Aeneid exploits these spaces as essential narrative vectors, integrating their formative value into the fabric of the epic. The status of the places, their poetic characteristics, their role in the arrangement of the narrative, and the diversity of perspectives through which they are apprehended are all possible approaches for understanding the memorial plurality at work in the poem.

The investigation continues with several issues: which objects in the epic can be described as objects of memory and by what criteria? Do they fall into distinct categories? Are there other objects besides the weapons emphasised by the poem’s opening words? What becomes of them in the course of the narrative and how does Virgil endow them with their own memorial significance, capable of anchoring the story within a historically meaningful framework? Do these artefacts operate merely as supports for memory or instead as active vehicles of transmission, endowed with a memorial autonomy or a power exceeding their function and place in the plot?

It is on this basis that the two parts of the study are organised: a critical inquiry into memorial spaces and material markers of memory that testify to the vitality and complexity of Rome’s Greek, Trojan and Italic origins. It fell to the Romans of the first century BC to reappropriate their past; it fell to Virgil to record it for the ages.