ABSTRACT
Both ecphrastic shields that the people have dealt with so far instruct the imagination to embrace the tiniest details of the metallic surface, but also to jump, at any moment, from these well-crafted minutiae to large stretches of the universe. The ecphrastic focus of Aeneas’ Libyan adventure is of course the picturae in Juno’s temple at Carthage, which look back towards the events at Troy. In short, Aeneas’ malleable mind serves as the material out of which the meaning of the pictures is sculpted. Without diminishing the importance of the often-analyzed sequence of the pictures in Juno’s temple, the author intention was therefore to emphasize first that their description is quite flat and serves as a canvas for Aeneas’ emotions, and second that the episode of Aeneas’ viewing is demarcated by two instances of divine manipulation with human vision – instances that are integral to the sense of the whole ecphrastic piece.
