in the previous chapters, we have seen that the nexus of ritual and allusive intertexts is part of a larger tragic intertext operative in the Aeneid, bringing into sharp relief problems surrounding communal unity, national identity, social hierarchy, and gender protocols. In the following pages, I focus on the epic hero and propose that the delineation of his identity relies heavily on Greek tragedy's construction of heroic identity. I argue further that this “tragic” notion of heroism in the Aeneid is intimately connected with the problems facing ideas regarding Roman leadership in Vergil's time. The poet's skillful mobilization of the allusive intertext of Sophocles' Ajax, one of Greek tragedy's most notable explorations of the contours of heroic identity, reveals that the heroic self is constantly questioned and redefined in the Aeneid. As with the problem of ritual, so in the case of the hero the mobilization of the tragic intertext is bound up with the tragedy's political and ideological goals. Similarly, a detailed examination of the deployment of the tragic intertext from this perspective illuminates the role of the Aeneid as a national epic of Rome and its empire, as well as its much-contested relationship to Augustan ideology.

Though overemphasized as a feature of Greek tragedy, the concept of the tragic hero may still serve as a good measure of the poem's tragic intertext, since it may readily be juxtaposed with that of the epic hero.