Horace c. 3.27 and Virgil, Aeneid 9

Abstract

This essay examines the imaginative connection between c. 3.27 of Horace, one of the poet’s longest and most intense odes, and a salient episode in book 9 of Virgil’s Aeneid. In particular it searches out the multivalent appearances of the concept of pietas in the descriptions of Europe’s behavior toward her father and of Nisus and Euryalus. In their case we attend both to the association between the two innamorati themselves and to that between Euryalus and his mother. I take it for granted that the two Latin masters knew and valued the work of each other.