ABSTRACT
Few questions have exercised so many interpreters of Western secular literature in so many times and places as the one which might be put, “How are we to read the Aeneid?” The interpretive tradition to date suggests that it is unlikely that any single or simple answer will soon be forthcoming. The impossibility of arriving at a single meaning for a work has often been raised as an objection against interpreters who assign the function of sense-making to the reader, most notably by E. D. Hirsch in Validity in Interpretation, 1 but even those who, like Hirsch, reserve the authorized meaning for the author admit that in fact this meaning is strictly speaking inaccessible to later interpreters.
