Abstract 

According to the anthropology of things, gifts are special objects with their own history and memory. They are able to promote, create and maintain social ties between people because of their role of cultural and personal meaning bearers (Gregory 1982b; Kopytoff 1986; von Reden 1995: esp. 60 f.). To some extent, this was also true in ancient Rome, where gift-giving was a widespread practice of reciprocity that allowed to weave a complex net of relationships. Such complexity is reflected in the most representative poem of Roman culture: Virgil’s Aeneid.

My paper aims to investigate the representation of the gift-objects in the Aeneid, having regard to the narrative devices and the cultural and mythical categories involved.

 Abstract 

Due to an organic view of Nature, the Plinian world is perceived as a living organism with its boundaries acting as joints that simultaneously separate and unite the territories. This anatomical perspective aids in conceptualizing the space governed by Rome as a ‘de-fragmented’ entity within which a potentially homogeneous humanity unfolds. For this reason, Pliny’s geography is constructed as a non-ethnographic discourse, wherein curiosities and marvelous details are documented primarily to demarcate the frontiers of the world, beyond which lies either the unknowable or the untamed.