The Second Italian War of Independence is mentioned in the explanatory notes as the political context of the epigraph to Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Its significance here is not as a narrated military campaign but as the indirect route by which Freud took a line from Virgil: through a political text by Ferdinand Lassalle about the Austro-Italian War of 1859.

Context and Participants

The note identifies the conflict by the alternate name Austro-Italian War of 1859 and connects it to Ferdinand Lassalle’s political writing. It supplies no account of the war’s battles, participants beyond this textual connection, or outcome; its focus is how the conflict entered the book’s framing device.

The Epigraph’s Transmission

The epigraph invokes Virgil’s Aeneid, book seven, line 313, with the sense, “If Heaven I cannot bend, then Hell I will arouse.” The annotation explicitly says Freud did not take the motto directly from Virgil. Instead, he encountered it in Lassalle’s text on the 1859 war, making a political work the immediate source of a classical quotation that stands at the threshold of Freud’s book.

Significance in the Book

The war functions as a point of transmission rather than a developed episode: a nineteenth-century political text carries a Virgilian line into the book’s opening frame. The available evidence establishes this chain of reference but does not describe the conflict itself or claim that the epigraph represents a particular event in its course.