Denis Feeney compares the Aeneid's power to impose its meaning upon history to the power of which figure?

Denis Feeney compares the Aeneid's power to impose its meaning upon history to the power of which figure?

• A. Julius Caesar
• B. Nero
• C. Augustus
• D. Trajan

Answer: (C)

Feeney argues that the Aeneid functions as a vehicle for the Augustan project—a literary means of shaping Rome’s past to fit the present regime. The epic presents Rome’s origins, its divine favor, and its destined mission as ordered toward the Pax and empire that Augustus proclaims and promotes. By aligning Aeneas’s piety, duty, and fate with the Augustan program, Virgil’s poem gives history a teleological meaning that reinforces Augustus’s legitimacy and the idea that the new order is a restoration of Rome’s rightful destiny. The other figures don’t fit this particular dynamic as cleanly: Julius Caesar is linked to republican upheaval and personal power rather than the founding mythologizing and legitimizing project central to Augustus; Nero is associated with tyranny and decay; Trajan represents later expansion rather than the Augustan founding narrative that Diovinal sanction and a restored peace are meant to underwrite.

Feeney argues that the Aeneid functions as a vehicle for the Augustan project—a literary means of shaping Rome’s past to fit the present regime. The epic presents Rome’s origins, its divine favor, and its destined mission as ordered toward the Pax and empire that Augustus proclaims and promotes. By aligning Aeneas’s piety, duty, and fate with the Augustan program, Virgil’s poem gives history a teleological meaning that reinforces Augustus’s legitimacy and the idea that the new order is a restoration of Rome’s rightful destiny. The other figures don’t fit this particular dynamic as cleanly: Julius Caesar is linked to republican upheaval and personal power rather than the founding mythologizing and legitimizing project central to Augustus; Nero is associated with tyranny and decay; Trajan represents later expansion rather than the Augustan founding narrative that Diovinal sanction and a restored peace are meant to underwrite.