Dr Stephen Heyworth will be giving a talk on ‘Aeneas the Villain’ at Sherborne Girls, Dorset, Monday 23 March

Monday 23 March at 5pm

The talk on ‘Aeneas the Villain’ begins by acknowledging that Aeneas is a hero, but tries to bring out the way in which Virgil has written his epic so that an attentive reader is enabled and at some points compelled to see the poem’s protagonist as socially inept, emotionally stunted, morally questionable, deceitful, conniving, nasty; in short, a villain.  He considers Aeneas the lover, the family man, the teller of tales, the betrayer of Troy, the wager of war.

Stephen Heyworth has been Bowra Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Wadham College since 1988; throughout this period he has taught textual criticism and Latin palaeography to undergraduates and Masters students as well as giving lectures and classes on Latin literature (especially poetry of the first century BC). Together with his Wadham colleague, James Morwood, he has published a commentary for students on Propertius 3 (Oxford, 2011). His current work concentrates on the text, manuscript tradition and contexts of Ovid’s Fasti and will lead to a commentary on Book 3 (CUP).

Attendance is free.

Please contact Rachel Allen on if you would like to come.