Resumo de Aeneid Eclogues

The Eclogues are Vergil?s first major
work: each of the ten poems is about 80 lines (in dactylic hexameters) and
each poem has an extra-urban setting, with shepherds and goatherds singing
as a conventional context for the poetry. Though following this bucolic
model, Vergil mixes into his bucolic poems a personal narrative. In the first
poem, thinly disguised as a shepherd, Vergil goes to Rome to appeal the loss
of his family farm; Octavian (the future Augustus) grants the request and is
called a young god?but the poem is a dialogue with another shepherd who is
not so lucky because he must leave his land which has been allotted to a
soldier, a veteran of the Civil War. The fourth poem, the most famous because
willfully misread by medieval Christians as a prophecy of Christ, predicts the
return of a golden age after the birth of a child to Mark Antony and Octavia,
sister of Octavian. The poem is obviously Vergil?s prayer for peace during the
last years of the Civil War. The tenth and last poem is also autobiographical: it
praises a poet-friend, Cornelius Gallus, who was forced to commit suicide
after offending Augustus (in 26 BCE). In this poem, Gallus, thinly disguised as
a shepherd, loses his lover and dies of grief, but the subtext is clearly Vergil?s
grief for the doomed Gallus. Poems two, three, five, eight, and nine are
amoeban: that is, contests between country people, singing songs almost
always about their loves. Poem six contains a cosmogony sung by the god
Silenus to two boys who capture him sleeping after too much carousing with
Bacchus. And poem seven is the most Keatsian: a lush representation of a
harvest festival, clearly showing Vergil?s love for his native Mantua.

The Aeneid is Vergil?s masterwork: in twelve books with each book containing
around 800 lines?all dactylic hexameters, except for a few unfinished half-
lines. The epic begins in medias res, with Aeneas and the Trojans sailing to
Italy where it is prophesied that they will found a great civilization. The poet,
questioning how there can be such hatred in the minds of gods, represents
Juno as hating everything Trojan. So Juno raises a storm that sends Aeneas to
Carthage. There, he meets Dido, the queen; tells her of the fall of Troy, and
their wanderings; and falls in love with her. But the gods demand that Aeneas
leave Carthage. At which point, Dido kills herself and curses the Trojans (who
will be the Romans, the great adversaries of historical Carthage). After
stopping in Sicily to hold games in honor of Anchises, father of Aeneas, the
Trojans reach the Tiber. There a Latin princess, Lavinia, is affianced to the
Rutulian Turnus. But when Aeneas appears, it seems that he, Aeneas, is the
?foreign prince? that Lavinia is fated by an oracle to marry. A war ensues, with
different tribes choosing to side with either Aeneas or Turnus. A young prince
named Pallas becomes a dear friend of Aeneas and is killed and stripped by
Turnus. In the much-discussed last scene, Aeneas kills Turnus, even though
Aeneas is supposed to represent the highest virtues of Roman civilization
which include compassion. But Aeneas has seen Turnus wearing the belt of
Pallas?and buries his sword in his enemy.

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