RECENS A VULNERE: DIDO, AJAX, AND THE HIERARCHY OF HEROINES

In the Virgilian underworld, the heroine Dido is described in language that evokes the Homeric encounter of Odysseus with Ajax. By a carefully wrought imitation of his epic predecessor, Virgil crafts a hierarchy of heroines in which the Carthaginian Dido responds to the second greatest of the Greek heroes for valor and excellence, while the new Achilles in his feminine assembly of heroines proves to be the Volscian Camilla. This reading offers commentary on how the relationship of Aeneas and Turnus to their Homeric predecessors reflects the final ethnography of the epic by which Rome will be Italian and not Trojan.