Virgil’s Solitary Spheres

This chapter argues that Virgil was a poet not only of cosmos and of empire, but also of individuals. It analyzes, by turns, the solitude of figures, of language, and of literature in the Georgics and the Aeneid. It argues that the Georgics is a poem for humans, but not of them, culminating in the story of Orpheus and in the mannered circularity suggested by the Georgics’ revolutionary envoi. The chapter looks to Virgil’s adaptation of Homer’s Shield of Achilles as a touchstone for the poet’s solitary model of poetic composition and of reading, testing it against the poem’s narrative joints. From scenes of soliloquy to dream scenes, solitude, it shows, is a characteristic quality of the poem’s settings, figures, form and its poet’s persona, that last of which, the chapter argues, contributed to the biographical tradition’s Lives of Virgil from antiquity to the Renaissance.