Iamque Rubescebat: Aurora in the Aeneid

Abstract

The paper investigates the named appearances of Aurora in Virgil’s Aeneid, with some consideration of other Virgilian dawns where the goddess is not explicitly named. Associations of color, mythological tales of the Dawn’s husband Tithonus and her son Memnon, and Homeric parallels are considered as part of detailed analyses of the scenes where Virgil describes the coming of morning, and the specific events of the days he heralds with significant dawns. Study of these dawns and the poet’s depiction of Aurora as part of the divine machinery of his epic reveals Virgil’s concern with his unfolding of the ethnography of the future Rome, a city that will be Italian and not Trojan, and the related problem of the reinvention of the Homeric Iliad in central Italy.