How Prudentian is the Aeneid?

Abstract

This essay focuses on the feature of the Psychomachia that is supposed to mark a decisive break from the tradition of classical epic, the fact that it is an allegorical epic, and ask how Virgilian, in reality, its allegorical themes and procedures may be. As a study of intertextuality, the paper further poses the question of whether reading the Psychomachia through the Aeneid also brings yields in terms of reading the Aeneid through the Psychomachia. In particular I consider two aspects of what I shall, provocatively, call Virgil’s Prudentian allegorical techniques: firstly, personification allegory, with reference to the Allecto episode in Aeneid 7 and the story of Hercules and Cacus in Aeneid 8; and secondly, the allegorical and imagistic networks that proliferate from Virgil’s programmatic storm in Aeneid 1.