Demonstering: a postcolonial reading of Aeneid 3, & the practice of humanising monsters in Ancient literature

Vergil was a witness to colonisation and imperialism. He grew up in Mantua, and experienced, as a young man, the results of the civil wars where Augustus' allies carved up the land for themselves. Perhaps, like many of the other poets of his time - such as Propertius - he was a direct victim of civil wars; perhaps his own family's land was taken, appropriated for the victor's use. He saw what ruthless expansionism and acquisition could do to a landscape and its people, and he would have been exposed to the language of dehumanisation and mythologisation that so often permeates colonial ideology. In short, all of the evidence suggests that he could have directly responded within his work to what he witnessed in a negative sense - and thus, he might have given us an early example of postcolonial literature, or, at least, literature with a postcolonial slant. Book 3 is one of the lesser-studied parts of the Aeneid, so it doesn't get the attention that it truly warrants. However, looked at through a postcolonial lens, it offers us a wealth of material, particularly in the presentation of Polyphemus, the eponymous monster who haunted ancient imaginations. Vergil shows us a Polyphemus that is not quite a monster of the Greek tradition. Instead, Polyphemus is shown as a shepherd herding his sheep, his eye 'stolen' from him, a victim in every sense of the word. Within the context of Homeric literary scholarship of the 1st century AD (such as Metrodorus of Lampsacus' allegorical readings of the Homeric epics), Vergil can respond to the colonialism of Homer's Odyssey 9, and give his responsive work (as the 'Roman Homer') a postcolonial slant.