ABSTRACT
A classic case study in national history as political messaging, the Aeneid models the politics of memory not only in its external relation to the imperial regime but in its internal, fictive world, inhabited by Vergil’s characters within miniature “nations” of their own. This chapter explores these outward- and inward-looking political contexts of the poem and expands on them to consider the value of the epic’s ideological implications for its 21st-century readership. Augustan propaganda depended heavily on Roman cultural memory to craft the emperor’s image as the exemplar of a normative “national character”; this dialogue between political authority and national identity was evidently not lost on the poet Vergil, who inscribes it into the microcosm of his Aeneid in the civic landscapes inhabited by his characters. The display of Dido’s ancestral res gestae articulates a visual argument in support of political power, conveying continuity with the past and resemblance between early heroes and contemporary rule.
