Lire le chant VIII de l’Énéide avec les commentateurs : le regard de Tiberius Claudius Donat

It is always useful, when we read a text, to pay attention to its commentaries, ancient as well as modern. It is not always easy to grasp the interpretations that underlie most of these commentaries. Even ancient commentaries are somewhat tendentious and Tiberius Claudius Donatus’ commentary on the Aeneid (the Interpretationes Vergilianae) well demonstrates this fact, its basic thesis being that Virgil’s poem is rather a laudatory speech. Now Donatus’ interpretation can bring us a lot, because it invites us to pay more attention to details that we would not have read in a laudatory perspective or that we would not have examined at all. He is prone to weighing up every single word used by Virgil and the way he looks at the text can sharpen our own attention. His commentary on the eight book of the Aeneid counts many examples of this tendency, and besides, the attention Donatus pays to some major themes (sc. themes that he identifies as major in this book, as he does in others) is worthy of interest. Among these themes, poverty appears to be the most important. In fact, Donatus resists apparently to the valorization of humility – he himself denies that true poverty is addressed in the episode at Pallanteum – and rather preserves Aeneas’greatness.