Katherine Toll Making Roman Ness And The Aeneid Analysis

In this essay I will be discussing the article entitled “Making Roman-Ness and the Aeneid” by Katherine Toll. Toll argues; in her article, that the fundamental background of the Aeneid was the amalgamation of the colossal number of Italians that were enfranchised into Roman citizenship. Toll attempts to prove her argument by emphasizing that Vigil’s motive to write the Aeneid, was to offer a story of unity when it came to the culture and camaraderie of the native Romans and the new Italian citizens, who had until then seen each other as separate communities.
Toll argues that the way in which Virgil wrote the Aeneid, we are able to see that he knew that Romans had held themselves detached from the Italians. After the enfranchisement of the
Toll proposes that Virgil’s poem, with Aeneas as the protagonist, was written for the readers who were in need of help when it came to viewing themselves as Roman Italians. Virgil was able to see that Roman-ness and Italian-ness was not the same thing. He believed that amalgamating the two nations should have been mutually decided and formed not authoritatively. Toll argues that he accomplishes this idea by using Aeneas, a Trojan who was referred to as “Pater” (Means father in Latin) in the Aeneid, as the vehicle of the new forming national identity of Roman Italian for two important reasons. Aeneas was Homeric and this offered Virgil the opportunity to write his generation’s origin and history as ancient as the history and origins that the Greeks were given by Homer. The second reason that Toll argues why Virgil picked Aeneas, is that, Rome already had a founding-father story that excluded the Italians. In the Aeneid, Aeneas is used to represent the ancestor of a greater commodity than Rome, which begins the formation of the amalgamation of Romans and Italians as one unit.
Toll argues that the poem starts the process wherein many people who were once excluded from Rome, are now becoming Roman. In the Aeneid, Virgil portrays Aeneas as at home in Italy as well as an outsider. Because of this Aeneas is hailed by Evander as captain of both the Italians and