juno's anger fuels the action of the aeneid, and sacrifice is at the root of this anger. The performance of sacrifices in her honor validates her deity; it is a tangible form of worship, the basis of exchange between gods and humans, and a locus where the power differential between them is played out. Recent scholarship has amply demonstrated the importance of the role of ritual sacrifice in the Aeneid. The work of Bandera (1981), Hardie (1993), and Dyson (2001) has shown that representations of ritual sacrifice, sacrificial symbolism and metaphor, as well as the depiction of various characters as scapegoats, abound in the epic. One thus may speak of the existence of a ritual intertext (Dyson 2001: 13) operative in the poem.

Building on the insights of these scholars, I offer an analysis of the Aeneid's ritual intertext, which I examine along with the poem's allusive intertext. I argue that the poem's ritual representations, metaphors, and symbols are inextricably linked with the deployment of its rich allusive program. Throughout the Aeneid, Vergil manipulates a pattern of ritual representations, sacrifice being the most salient among them, absent in the Homeric epics and specific to Greek tragedy.