Virgil: Aeneid: Book 2

About this Course

About the Course

In this course Professor Llewelyn Morgan (University of Oxford) explores Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid. In the first lecture, we think about the Aeneid as an epic poem. In the second, we explore some of the connections between Troy and Rome, before turning in the following lecture to the relationship between Virgil and Homer. In the fourth lecture, we consider Aeneas’ activities in Troy, focusing in particular on his lack of knowledge of what is required of him, while in the fifth lecture we provide a close reading (in Latin) of three moments in Book 2.

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.