Rota Camonis: mapping of the presence of Virgil in Os Lusíadas

Abstract

The specialists in Camões do not speak of Os Lusíadas without referring themselves to this poem's most obvious and objectively declared composition model, the Aeneid of Virgil. The critics, however, lack a systematic study of the influences from the other two poems of Virgil on Camões' epic, the Eclogues and the Georgics. Integrated in the area of reception studies, this research has the objective of listing the cases of Virgilian influence, with the help of Os Lusíadas' commentators, and of mapping the tripartite presence of Virgil in the epic Camões, in order to verify in which way the Roman poet's auctoritas over the Portuguese poet is established not only from his epic poem, but also from the non-epic ones. This mapping's theoretical basis is the Rota Vergilii, since it informs the main qualities of each one of the three Virgilian genres, and, because of this, offers systematic character to the analysis of the reception of this author by Camões. This work will have as goal the conception of a Rota Camonis, a diagram similar to the Rota Vergilii that will specify Os Lusiadas' textual elements through which Virgil's genres, corresponding to each one of his three poems, manifest themselves, in direct of indirect reference to the Virgilian text. Finally, this research discusses the generic mixture in Os Lusíadas and its framing in the epic genre, especially concerning the presence of Virgil's non-epic genres. (AU)