2025 Theses Doctoral

Vergil’s Sicily: Reflections of Crisis and Reintegration in the Late Republican Civil Wars

Heintges, Elizabeth McLeod

This dissertation reevaluates the significance of the bellum Siculum and Sextus Pompey’s control of the island of Sicily during the second triumvirate and traces its influence in shaping cultural, political, and poetic responses to Rome’s first province in the triumviral and early Augustan periods. At the center of this work is Vergil’s ongoing engagement with Sicily—its landscapes, waterways, and human and mythological populations—which I argue dynamically reflects ongoing discourse about Sextus Pompey, the bellum Siculum, and the status of the island in the 40s–20s BCE.

I argue that Vergil’s Sicily is just one of a larger constellation of cultural responses to the Sicilian War that are naturally very much shaped by the ultimate progression of historical events, and stages of official messaging at Rome, but manifest in different ways. Vergil’s presentation of the island, or of Sextus, is not univocal, nor is it conditioned solely (or even primarily, in some cases) by the crises of the triumviral period; yet the ongoing war, and its aftermath, are constantly lurking in the background. I read and interpret Vergil’s Eclogues and Aeneid against a range of material and archaeological evidence (including a large assemblage of Pompeian coin hoards) to reconstruct a more fluid picture of contemporary attitudes to the war in Sicily. Representations from contemporary art of the triumviral and Augustan periods, numismatic iconography and patterns of coin circulation, epigraphic documents, and archaeological data provide comparanda to the phenomena we see in the Vergilian corpus.

In doing so, I argue that there was an ongoing process of making sense of Sextus Pompey and Sicily over the course of several decades, involving different articulations of how individuals perceived these successive events, rather than just a top-down form of expression. Ultimately, with the Aeneid and Vergil’s death, we find a literary and historical Sicily that is much changed from what it had been only two decades prior: the Sicily of late republican crisis has been successfully reintegrated into its provincial and imperial milieu.