Sacred Time: Grief and Its Limits in the <i>Aeneid</i>

This article interprets key scenes from the Aeneid in light of Roman laws relating to grief. While legislation sought to impose limits on lament—or in some cases to ban it altogether—Virgil’s epic invites its audience to grieve for its characters, in ways that flout the linear directives of mourning regulations. After demonstrating that Virgil shows a heightened attention to the time and duration of mourning in the Aeneid, I analyze a series of scenes in which the poet slows the pace of his narrative, prompting his audience to grieve the loss of characters in his text. At the epic’s end, however, Virgil pointedly forecloses any opportunity to mourn the death of Turnus, creating a poetic simulacrum of a public mourning ban within his own text.