Reading 'duritia' in Vergil: Primitivism and contestatory characterisation in 'Aeneid' 6-9

This seminar will be held in person and online via Zoom. Advance booking is essential for online attendance and strongly encouraged for in-person attendance.

Following after the Lucretian Kulturenstehungslehre (DRN 5.925-1457), it needs but little justification that the soft-hard contrast forms a significant way in engendering the primitive past of human civilisation. Whereas the process of civilising is commonly seen as a softening trajectory, it also pushes us to think hard about what duritia means in the trajectory account for civilisational growth. In Vergil’s Aeneid, we may find a rather inconsistent view in the primitive past of the Italians: on the one hand, Vergil presents us with the soft-primitivistic envisage of a Saturnian golden in Evander’s tour of future Rome in Aeneid 8; whereas the very idea of duritia turns out to be the leitmotif of the primitive Latins in Books 7 and 9, a genus that can trace its origin back to Saturn. Existing scholarship has well identified the inconsistency in Vergil’s depiction of primitive Latins, but can we find any strand of coherency in Vergil’s account; or, in a broader sense, does the Vergilian version of the golden age have to exclude the quality of duritia? This paper approaches these two questions from a narratological perspective and argues that Vergil’s employment of the idea of duritia is itself contestatory in shaping the different moral/ethical qualities between the Trojans and the Latins. I will first argue that duritia is a positive quality in moral characterisation and I will explore how Vergil qualifies the primitive Latins with this peculiar concept. By focussing on the recurrence of genus durum and other related expressions in Aeneid 6-9, I will also argue that Vergil’s employment of duritia echoes the Lucretian pattern of universal history and sheds critical light onto Vergil’s depiction of primitive golden age.

Xiyuan Meng is currently a DPhil candidate in Classics from the University of St Andrews. She received her first degree in World History from Peking University (2020) and subsequently an MLitt in Classics from St Andrews (with distinction, 2021). Her main research interest lies in the field of Latin literature and her DPhil thesis explores the relationship between the literary representation of the golden age and the narrative of moral decline in Latin poetry. Xiyuan is the Chinese translator of Donna Zuckerberg’s Not All Dead White Men, which has just come out this April.