Studies in Virgil’s Aeneid: Text, Intertexts, Afterlife

This presentation focuses on some overlooked moments in Virgil’s Aeneid and its reception. I briefly discuss the burial of Aeneas’ nurse, Caieta, in Aeneid 7, as well as a short poem by a 17th-century Jesuit missionary in New France, who laments the Aeneaslike suffering of his fellow missionaries (and neatly folds the sufferings of various Indigenous peoples into a pernicious colonial narrative). I then discuss Achates, a shadowy character who seems to always be at Aeneas’ side, and is invariably fidus, “faithful”. Taking up the ancient etymology of “Achates” from the Greek akhos (“pain, grief”), I argue that Aeneas has “pain” as his constant companion: like Homer’s Achilles, whose name was also etymologized via akhos, Aeneas brings pain with him wherever he goes, pain for himself and for others. And this pain is “faithful” because all of the most painful moments in Aeneas’ story—Dido, Pallas, Turnus—involve broken bonds of fides.