Virgil and the Conquest of Chaos

Abstract

The hunt for Virgil’s sources has been, by unspoken agreement among Latinists, largely abandoned. This regrettable development may in part have been a by-product of the justifiable revulsion against the excesses of Quellenforschung as practised c. 1880-c. 1930 (everyone read Posidonius and Varro; no-one else was read), in part by the opening of alluring new vistas in Virgilian studies, where apparent progress might be made without the need of painstaking consultation of HRR,GRF,FGH,FHG and similar collections. It has therefore escaped notice that just as the detailed examination of Virgil’s use of Homer (Knauer, Die Aeneis und Homer) or even of the Homer scholia (Schlunk, Virgil and the Homeric Scholia) can lead to immensely valuable advances in our understanding of the poet’s compositional techniques, so the survey of Virgil’s prose sources and the analysis of how he handles the material available to him can be employed to precisely comparable ends. It is the purpose of this paper to indicate some ways in which such a survey may be put into effect.