Apollo in the Aeneid

The appearances of the god Apollo in Virgil’s Aeneid have been studied with profit as individual episodes, but rarely with attention to the progress of the poet’s employment of the god in his narrative. This paper endeavors to examine all the references to Apollo in the poem, with a view to demonstrating that the god who presided over Octavian’s victory at Actium is employed by Virgil as a key figure in his account of how Rome will ultimately be Italian and not Trojan in culture and mores.