Seeing as Telling

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter offers a fresh take on the temple ecphrasis of Aeneid 1, which is one the most studied passages in Latin literature and the first large-scale ecphrasis of the entire work. Through a close analysis of the visual workings of the ecphrasis, it is argued that the whole of it is presented to us as quoted sight; that is, Virgil taking us into Aeneas’ head, letting us experience how Aeneas reckons with what he sees. Not simply “what is there,” in other words, but a particular, highly motivated distortion of what is there, summoned into existence by the specific story elements that Aeneas pounces upon and agonizes over as he tours his way through the continuous narrative picture on the temple walls. Rather than the story on the temple wall, it is the story that Aeneas spins from the story on the temple wall: a selective, reactionary view of the painted frieze, as agonized over by him. By rescuing smaller worlds of pathos and defeat from the singular big triumph that the temple frieze depicts, Aeneas lets us see that there are other, opposite, in fact defiantly oppositional ways of seeing and valuing the very same thing. The chapter concludes with a look at the “match cut” transition that Virgil uses to bring Dido onto the scene at the end of the ecphrasis, comparing it to a similar “lust at first sight” transition in Catullus’ poem on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis.