Unnatural Narrative and Temporal Distortion in Vergil's Aeneid

Abstract

The Aeneid is a work steeped in the traditions of classical epic following Homerand has been long interpreted as a successor to his poems. Like the Iliad and Odyssey, it tells a story from the epic past, but with one key difference: Vergil tells a myth of Rome’s own origins. My research explores how the Aeneid combines distinct time periods into a single narrative, transgressing conventional narrative approaches. I draw on the theory of unnatural narratology to explain how impossible or illogical events are understood in the Aeneid. Even though the hero Aeneas is a pre-Roman foundational figure, he encounters Roman influence in multiple impossible episodes throughout the epic. He meets Roman heroes in the underworld, visits the city of Rome, and views a picture of Rome’s history. All of these events should not be contemporaneous with Aeneas, but their coexistence signifies that the rules of narrative have changed. The poem folds the past and future together in unprecedented ways, disrupting the boundaries of what narrative usually does. Given the cultural context and strict genre-based rules of classical epic, these effects produce an “unnatural” narrative deviating from real-world conventions of time, space, and logic. I argue that the unnatural qualities of the narrative influence how the poem should be interpreted, particularly as a normative vision of the Roman past from the first century BCE.