ABSTRACT
Virgil calls the shield's story the Jama and fata of Aeneas' descendants. This chapter demonstrates how these are terms which also embrace the Virgilian narrative and its afterlife. The shield episode is enclosed by references to the Jama and fata which it contains. Fama, storytelling, lives in the present tense yet, as a rule, reacts to events or utterances from the past upon which she is nourished. The shield episode is exceptional in that the Jama there is founded upon a future memory. The shield is an image which both contains and reflects the dynamics governing the whole text, since the fama/fata dichotomy points to the interplay of tenses upon which the Aeneid's structure is founded. Through the shield Aeneas raises aloft the fama and fata of his descendants, the text of the Aeneid and its reception, the 'non enarrabile textum'.
