THE Friends of the ANU Classics Museum invite you to a talk by Dr Anne Rogerson, Charles Tesoriero Lecturer in Latin, University of Sydney, at 8 pm, Thursday 26 February 2015, in the Haydon-Allen Lecture Theatre (The Tank) ANU.

The topic is “Children and the Future in Virgil’s Aeneid”.

Virgil’s Aeneid is an epic about a journey towards a glorious future. Telling the story of a hero’s long travels from the smoking ruins of Troy in quest of a destiny promised by the gods, it looks forward to hard-won, world domination. Yet the poem is also a personal one, a tale of loss and sacrifice, and despite its agenda, Virgil’s characters are not hard-bitten warriors with their gaze fixed implacably on the glittering prize and promised power. This talk will focus on the children of the Aeneid, and how their depiction helps to shape the image of the future presented in Rome’s greatest poem.

Anne Rogerson specializes in Latin epic and lyric poetry, as well as the later reception of Virgil’s Aeneid. She is the author of a number of articles, and a book on the Aeneid (Virgil’s Ascanius: imagining the future in the Aeneid), soon to be published by Cambridge University Press.