James Uden | The Politics of Pathos in Virgil’s Aeneid
Virgil’s particular attention to human suffering has long been identified as a defining aspect of his poetry, but critics have had widely different views on the politics of Virgilian pathos. Is empathy for the defeated in the Aeneid a way of undermining the triumphalist claims of Augustus (e.g. Putnam 1965)? Or does the poem’s famous...