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• Commune sepulcrum: The ‘Catullan’ Memory of Troy in Vergil’s Aeneid

  247–260

  Péter Somfai

  Views:

  183

  In Roman literature, Troy appears as a locus memoriae on several occasions. As a locus memoriae is an image of a location’s past state, it inevitably recalls that past state’s absence in the present. Troy as a literary locus memoriae recalls its own present absence, that it is only a ruin, or – according to Lucan – even less than a ruin. In this context, a literary phenomenon, i. e. the depiction of Troy being the equivalent of the absence of/or the grief for the loss of something or somebody can later be traced in the Roman poetry. Catullus, mourning his brother’s death at Troy, calls the city the common grave (commune sepulcrum) of Asia and Europe in his carmen 68. Regarding Troy, several complex allusions can be noticed in Vergil’s Aeneid recalling both Catullus 68 and 101, the two poems that are in both thematic and intertextual connection with each other. The purpose of the present study is to examine – by means of analysing the above mentioned intertexts – what kind of special locus memoriae Troy becomes in the Aeneid. This will be of crucial importance to observe the way Troy later appears in Lucan’s Bellum Civile.

• Fathers and Sons Catullan Echoes of Remembering and Forgetting in Vergil’s Aeneid

  247-258

  Péter Somfai

  Views:

  131

  In Vergil’s Aeneid the problematics of remembering and forgetting emerge as an issue of essential importance: the Trojans – somewhat paradoxically – have to bring about both of them in order to be able to found a new native land in Italy. The matter in question emphatically occurs in two speeches of fathers given to their sons in the epic: in that of the shade of Anchises given to Aeneas in Book 5 and in that of Aeneas given to Ascanius in Book 12. These passages both recall the speech of Aegeus to Theseus in Catullus 64, in which the father aims to ‘program’ his son’s mind to remember his instructions. It will be of fundamental importance to observe the way the Catullan text presenting the failure of this kind of ‘mnemotechnical’ remembering encodes forgetting into the Vergilian passages mentioned above, by means of intertextual connections.