Virgilian Vision and Voice

Abstract

This dissertation explores how vision functions not merely as a theme in Virgil’s poetry, but as a poetic method: a means of structuring narrative, shaping emotion, and producing meaning through language. Drawing on frameworks from ancient rhetorical theory, Roman visual culture, and modern narratology, I examine how acts of seeing in Virgil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid are framed, deferred, and restructured by poetic form. This project focuses not only on what characters see, but on how vision itself is staged—rhetorically, symbolically, and emotionally—and how this visual logic interacts with poetic voice. At the heart of this inquiry is the relationship between vision and voice, or more materially, between image and text. I define voice not as sound, but as focalization. In Virgil, seeing is rarely direct or complete; it is mediated by memory, grief, desire, and delay. Through close readings of poetic imagery, metaphor, and gesture, I argue that vision in Virgil is not a neutral act of perception, but a site of poetic labor—recursive, unstable, and generative. The dissertation is organized into four chapters. Chapter 1 lays the theoretical groundwork through ancient concepts of ekphrasis and enargeia, tracing how poetic vividness in Virgil complicates seeing and knowing. Chapter 2 turns to the eye itself, exploring how Latin terms like oculus, lumen, and acies function not only anatomically, but metonymically and emotionally—through tears, violence, sleep, and transformation. Chapter 3 examines visual directionality and movement in the Aeneid, from Aeneas’ seaborne departures to the rhetorical force of volvens oculos and ante oculos formulas. Chapter 4 focuses on poetic images themselves—imago and monumentum—and how vision becomes a way of remembering, mourning, and imagining. The chapter pairs scenes from Eclogue 2, Georgics 4, and Aeneid 1 with Hellenistic precedents to show how Virgil constructs a poetics of visual framing. Taken together, the chapters show that to “read with the eyes” in Virgil is not to see clearly or completely, but to engage in a process of orientation, affect, and poetic recognition. The project ultimately argues that in Virgil, vision is not simply depicted—it is performed, challenged, and reimagined as a vital mode of poetic expression.