Policy, civic life and religion: an examination of the Eneias memories in the third book of Virgil's Aeneid
Keywords: Aeneid, memory, hero, politic, religion
In the year 29 a. C. Publius Vergilius Maro began the writing of the epic poem Aeneid. In it Aeneas, a character who had already appeared on some pages of the Iliad and other texts, a Trojan that after the destruction of his homeland is entrusted by the gods to go through seas and lands, along with some compatriots, to search for the ideal place to found a new City. In this research we intended to take the Aeneid as an object of study aiming to demonstrate how its author gave new meanings, in the profile of his hero, some ethical values that permeated the Rome ruled by Gaius Iulius Caesar Octavianus Augustus, between 14 a. C. and 27 d. C. For this, we focus our analysis in Book III of the Virgilian epic in which Aeneas recounts his early years of exile to the Queen of Carthage, Dido. We made a reflection on how mytho and memory were designed in the literature and Greco-Roman history, aiming to understand how these concepts have been designed for this tradition and how the plot of the Aeneid fits in this context. Therefore we seek to trace the Virgilian epic hero profile’s in order to identify how their characteristics can reveal details of religion, civic life and politics that were wanted the citizens of Rome and even its ruler to possessed.