ABSTRACT
This chapter frames Vergil’s treatment of time in the Aeneid as an example of traumatic temporality and the reestablishment of temporal order in the wake of trauma on an individual level for Aeneas and on a collective level for Vergil’s contemporaries. It presents Aeneas’ speech to the Trojans at the beginning of Book 1 as a blueprint for integrating trauma into both personal and collective narratives that Vergil later leverages to assimilate contemporary trauma into the collective mythology of Rome. The chapter explores what Vergil communicates about trauma and its aftermath through his representation of time. Traumatic fear has the power to collapse time, making the future hard to imagine and the past impossible to remember. With Aeneas as the “embodiment of things Roman” and “the symbol of the mood existing between collapse and salvation, the chaos of the civil war and the advent of Augustan peace,” it is through his experience that Vergil remediates Rome’s collective trauma.
