Madness Unchained

Book excerpt: The book aims at providing a coherent guide to the entirety of Virgil's Aeneid, with analysis of every scene and, in some cases, every line of crucial passages. The book tries to provide a guide to the vast bibliography and scholarly apparatus that has grown around Virgil studies (especially over the past century), and to offer some critical study of what Virgil's purpose and intent may have been in crafting his response to Augustus' political ascendancy in Rome, Rome's history of near-constant civil strife, and the myths of Rome's origins and their conflicting Trojan, Greek, and native Italian origins.