Virgil
To move towards the shape of an earlier narrative will almost invariably lead to the deliberate suppression of little details or large-scale modifications that one knows to be one's own. It is not easy to suppress part of oneself: traces of the effort to do so will always remain. Virgil's response to Homer is of this self-suppressive kind. He repeatedly intensifies the affective force of episodes in the Homeric poems that do not advance the purpose of the main plot. In this, he is following a dynamic established by the Homeric poems themselves: digressions into the past, or away from the overall goal of the narrative, carry a much greater emotional weight in the Odyssey than they do in the Iliad.
Keywords: narrative, Virgil, Homer, episodes, Homeric poems, Odyssey, Iliad, suppression
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