ABSTRACT
Putnam’s chapter first meditates on the difference between Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and the Georgics of Virgil as types of didactic poetry. The earlier poet, Lucretius, tends toward epic grandeur and the later, Virgil, toward a version of pastoral. Putnam’s focus then turns to Virgil’s Aeneid. He examines in particular the phrase frigidus sanguis. It occurs in Georgics 2 to characterize the Virgilian speaker’s shyness when confronting nature’s grandiose gestures such as the imminence of death. Its only repetition by the poet, however, is in Aeneid 10 at an especially poignant moment, the killing of Pallas. For Virgil death is always with us, always inexplicable.
