Classics Faculty Work

Title

​Actoris Aurunci Spolium: A Virgilian Reading of Juvenal’s Second Satire

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2015

Publication Title

L’Antiquité Classique

Volume Number

84

Abstract

Juvenal’s second satire is a carefully crafted response to Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the satirist offers the reflection that the final ethnographic identity of Rome that had been decreed by Jupiter to Juno at the end of Virgil’s epic may not, in fact, be the reality that had emerged by Juvenal’s day. The Actoris Aurunci spolium or the “spoils of Auruncan Actor”, which is transferred from Virgil’s Turnus to Juvenal’s Otho becomes a symbol of how the Trojan element in Rome’s mytho-historical past may prove, ultimately, to be more resilient than the Italian element in the definition of the mores of the empire.

ISSN

0770-2817

First Page

141

Last Page

150

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