SOURCE: "Juno's Desire" in Rhetorics of Reason and Desire: Vergil, Augustine, and the Troubadours, Cornell, 1988, pp. 22–54.

In the following excerpt, Spence notes that Virgil's delineation of such defeated characters as Juno, Dido, and Turnus suggests a sympathy for the very human traits that the "male" rhetorical model represses—impulsiveness, rebellion, bellion, and passion—and attests to the need for a more tolerant and less hierarchical view of humankind.

In the last twenty years, scholarship of the Aeneid has shifted from viewing the text as a paean to Aeneas, Italy, and Augustus to showing increasingly the darker side of the text, the aspects that suggest the dangerous of the Augustan system. The two most eloquent of the "new" critics, M. C. J. Putnam [in The Poetry of the "Aeneid, " 1965] and W. R. Johnson [in Darkness Visible, 1978], have argued for reading the Aeneid as a political statement warning Augustus of...