Exempla in Virgil’s Underworld

Abstract

Summary – In Aeneid 6, Hercules and Dionysus point towards the deification of Augustus; the mythological poets amply scattered through Elysium may be there to launch a sense that Virgil too will one day tread those very same meadows as a reward for his service as poet to the state. And the great Romans of the ‘Heldenschau’? There as exempla to help persuade first Aeneas and secondly the Roman reader to shoulder the various burdens of the res publica.