Hollow Love: Discourses of Desire and Delusion in Turnus’ Pursuit of the Phantom in Aeneid 10

In Aeneid 10.636–88, Juno creates a phantom Aeneas and tricks Turnus into chasing it off the battlefield and onto a departing ship. In this article, I consider a feature of the episode that has not received critical attention: Virgil uses a suite of intertexts (Lucretius 4, Catullus 63 and 64, and Horace’s Carm. 3.27) to cast Turnus as a deluded lover of Aeneas. I argue that by assimilating Turnus’ martial struggles to the sufferings of love, Virgil draws our attention to the erotics of warfare—the frustrated desires and tragic delusions of combat.