Abstract

Virgil's Aeneid naturalizes Italian unity by projecting it onto the ancient past. By representing the Latin War as a civil war, the Aeneid asserts that the ancient inhabitants of Italy, although temporarily and tragically divided, have always formed a natural unit. The ideology of unified Italy overwrites the historical Roman conquest of the peninsula. Although representations of civil war and poignant descriptions of the deaths of Aeneas' Italian enemies might seem to threaten the idea of tota Italia, the poem uses mourning for Italian deaths, like that of Lausus, to infuse the image of unified Italy with emotional force.