Virgil's Aeneid Cosmos and Imperium

The Romans saw an analogy between the ordered workings of the natural universe and the proper functioning of their own expanding empire, between orbis and urbs. Philip Hardie's new work explores Virgil's poetic and mythic transformation of this imperialist ideology with reference to such traditions as the poet/cosmologer, the use of allegory to extract natural-philosophical truths from mythology and poetry, poetic hyperbole, and the "universal expression."