31–53: Sister Act II: Anna’s Reply

Steve Jenkin

November 29, 2012

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 44.       Outline the structure of Anna’s speech. What devices does Virgil use to mark the different segments?

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 45.       Identify the different arguments that Anna musters to convince Dido to give in to her feelings for Aeneas. What rhetorical devices does she use to make them sound compelling? Are they compelling? Does Anna truly understand her sister or the situation?

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 46.       Anna acts as Dido’s trusted confidant, but ends up giving her disastrous advice. At the same time, she faces the task of consoling and advising a sister who is dissolving in tears in front of her. What would your advice to Dido have looked like? Rewrite Anna’s speech accordingly.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 47.       What type of ablative is luce (31)?

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 48.       Parse carpere in line 32. Where in Aeneid 4 have you encountered the verb already? Discuss possible relations between the two occurrences.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 49.       How would you construe the genitive Veneris in line 33?

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 50.       Assess Anna’s suggestion that ‘the dead do not (or cannot) care about what the living do’ within the wider context of Book 4 and the Aeneid more generally. Is she correct? What is the presence of the dead in the world of the living in Virgil’s epic?

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 51.       In what sense is Africa a land rich in triumphs (37–8)?

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 52.       Place the people who threaten Carthage according to Anna (lines 40–3) on a map.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 53.       How are we supposed to interpret Anna’s (blatantly erroneous) belief that the arrival of Aeneas at Carthage owes itself to the intervention of benevolent divinities, in particular Juno (45–6)?

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 54.       Discuss how Anna, on the formal level, relates Dido and Aeneas to Carthage in lines 47–9.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 55.       Where else in Aeneid 4 does a character use winter as an untoward season for setting sail (cf. 52–3) as an argument?

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 56.       What type of ablative is pelago (52)?

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0  

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