Vergil and the Land

Annemarie de Villiers, Stephen Harrison, Grant Parker

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9783111710907
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Literature

Since ancient times, land has had a defining influence on human culture, from the political and the social to the agricultural, the metaphysical and the creative. In both Augustan Rome and contemporary Southern Africa, the land question is ever present in the art and literature which engage with the issues of the day. Throughout Vergil's oeuvre land ownership and occupation rights, but also care and love for the land and the question of belonging permeate his poetry. This collection considers all things Vergil and land, whether this relates to soil, geography or politics, and takes a variety of approaches – from ecocriticism, philosophy, nation-state theory, to translation and reception – but always with an eye on the contemporary world and the challenges faced both in Southern Africa and in the world at large at a time when conversations about land, environment and sustainability have never been more central.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Introduction: Vergil and the Land
• Lands-Cape and Memory: Virgil’s African Cartographies
• Thinking like Mantua: Vergil and Land Ethic
• Seamus Heaney’s Eclogues, Virgil, and the Land
• Reimagining Martalas’ Virgil: Colonization, Collective Amnesia, and the Land in South Africa
• ‘What about Virgil in your Letter on the Land, Mr. Grevenbroek?’ Exile, Homecoming, and the Epic Genre in 17th-century European Imaginations of Africa
• Os cruentum: Lions in Vergil’s Poetic Landscape
• Music, Poetry, and Patronage: Land Expropriation in Virgil and in Post Year-2000 Zimbabwe
• Virgil in Johannesburg
• Imagining the Land: Political Identity in the Aeneid
• Translating Virgil’s ‘Land’ Eclogues 1 and 9 in Contemporary South Africa
• Afterword: A Vergilian Epilogue from the Understory of Georgic 1
• List of Contributors
• Index Rerum et Nominum
• Index Locorum