Virgil: Aeneid: Book 12

About this Course

About the Course

In this course, Professor Llewelyn Morgan (University of Oxford) explores Book 12 of Virgil's Aeneid, with a particular focus on lines 1-106 and 614-727. In the first three modules, we think about the figures of Turnus and Aeneas, first separately, and then together. In the fourth module, we think about some other characters in Book 12 – namely, Amata, Latinus and Lavinia – before moving on in the fifth module to think about the connected themes of fate and delay. Finally, in the sixth module, we provide close readings of five passages of Latin: (i) lines 85-86 (Turnus' charioteers prepare the horses for battle); (ii) lines 638-40 (Turnus reflects on the death of Murranus); (iii) lines 25-26 (Latinus asks Turnus to listen to him); (iv) lines 614-19 (Turnus loses vigour on the battlefield, then hears the clamour of war in the distance); and (v) lines 662-4 (Saces asks Turnus why he is not in the thick of battle).

About the Lecturer

Llewelyn Morgan is a Classicist, a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. The focus of most of his research is Roman literature and culture, and he is the author of the well-received study of Roman poetic form, Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse (Oxford, 2010).

But he also has a longstanding fascination for Afghanistan, contemporary and historical, which he traces to his discovery, at an impressionable age, of a Russian samovar inscribed “Candahar 1881”. He has made several visits to Afghanistan in recent years, and his most recent book, The Buddhas of Bamiyan (Profile Books and Harvard University Press, 2012), traces the history of these remarkable monuments from their Buddhist origins 1,400 years ago, through their celebrity in Islamic wonder literature and European travel writing, up until their destruction in 2001.

Morgan is a regular public speaker, on many aspects of Classics and Afghanistan, appears occasionally on BBC Radio 4, and writes slightly less occasionally for the Times Literary Supplement.