The Nightingale’s Song: Weaving Affects in Virgil’s Aeneid from the Trojan Women to Euryalus’s Mother

Abstract

This chapter will draw on my earlier discussion of the relationship between the Stoic prepassions and affects to explore the disruptive work of feminine furor in Virgil’s poem, with a focus on the contagious spread of furor through powerful feminine vocalization (I use the term “vocalization” rather than speech because I am particularly interested in nonsemantic cries, including the ululatus, which is occasionally given the epithet femineus but is in any case almost always feminine; on the derogatory connotations of this adjective, see below in this chapter, TKTK. See Margaret Graver on the evidence that the prepassion theory was already present in early Stoicism, Stoicism and Emotion, chap. 4.).