Vergil and the Greeks

Tuesday 24 June – Saturday 28 June 2025, Villa Vergiliana, Bacoli

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (Aen. 2.49) …. However, the dona Vergil owes to Homeric and Hesiodic epic, tragedy, and the Hellenistic poetry of Apollonius, Callimachus, and Theocritus are well known.

In this edition of the Symposium Cumanum, we hope first to shine some retrospective light on the rich vein of scholarship that enhanced our understanding of these parallels. We seek to uncover further links between Vergil and texts written in Greek, including the position that the poet’s early relationship with Philodemus is fundamental to his work.

We especially encourage the submission of papers that consider lesser-studied ways in which Vergil adapted non-epic Greek texts such as archaic lyric (cf. Thomas 1998 on Pindar in Georgics 3), early elegy (Kayachev 2016), comedy (e.g., Fratantuono 2022, alongside the papers of the 2024 Symposium), historiography (cf. the plague of the Georgics in relation to that at Athens in Thucydides Book 2; see Reed 2007: 78 on Timaeus as the source for Pygmalion’s murder of Sychaeus in the Dido story), and other prose such as Attic rhetoric.

We are also keen to explore the afterlife of Vergil in Greek texts written by authors who came after him. Following the lead of recent enquiry into the resonances of Latin poetry in Greek novels (Jolowicz 2021), we find it timely to investigate how the memory of the premier Roman verse author, a school classic, was useful to later authors in the Greek diaspora (see also the essays in Carvounis, Papaioannou, and Scafoglio 2022).

And, finally, we welcome papers about Greek cultural practices and identities (such as island heritage or ritual cult) as represented by Vergil in his works (e.g. in the ‘travelogue’ of Aeneid 3), gifts to be cherished as much as feared.

Confirmed participants include Sergio Casali, Denis Feeney, Kirk Freudenburg, Emma Greensmith, Philip Hardie, Dan Jolowicz, Emily Kneebone, Jackie Murray, Damien Nelis, Lily Panoussi, Sophia Papaioannou, and Christine Walde.

Papers will be 20 minutes in length, in English, with 10 minutes each for questions.

Works Cited

Carvounis, K., Papaioannou, S., and Scafoglio, G. (eds.) 2022. Later Greek Epic and the Latin Literary Tradition. Further Explorations. Berlin and Boston.

Fratantuono, L. 2022. ‘Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Virgil’s Camilla’, Myrtia 37: 127–37.

Jolowicz, D. 2021. Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels. Oxford.

Kayachev, B. 2016. ‘Tyrtaeus in Virgil’s First Eclogue’, CQ 66: 796–9.

Reed, J. 2007. Virgil’s Gaze: Nation and Poetry in the Aeneid. Ann Arbor.

Thomas, R. F. 1998. ‘Virgil’s Pindar?’, in P.E. Knox and C. Foss (edd.), Style and Tradition: Studies in Honor of Wendell Clausen (Stuttgart, 1998), 99–120.