The Aeneid can also be read as the story about the wrath of Juno.

The Aeneid can also be read as the story about the wrath of Juno.

• A. Ian Du Quesnay
• B. Susanna Morton Braund
• C. Damien Nelis
• D. Philip Hardie

Answer: (B)

Framing the Aeneid around Juno’s wrath shows how a powerful divine adversary shapes the entire journey, making the epic less about a lone hero’s pietas and more about the gods’ ongoing interventions. Juno, hostile to the Trojans because of the Judgement of Paris and the prophecy that Troy’s descendants will found Rome, repeatedly steers events to block Aeneas’s path. Vergil stages storms that cast the fleet off course, creates and sustains the romance with Dido as a tool of delay, and undercuts Aeneas’s progress in Italy through divine meddling. This perspective treats the epic as a drama about the consequences of one queen’s grievance, and it highlights how the unity of the narrative rests on the balance between Juno’s antagonism and the fated destiny of Rome. Susanna Morton Braund is well known for articulating this approach, focusing on Juno’s anger as a central force that organizes the poem’s episodes and moral questions. Her work helps readers see the Aeneid as a meditation on how divine wrath can shape political and personal destinies, a lens that foregrounds gendered power dynamics and the gods’ influence over human history. Other scholars certainly offer valuable insights, but Braund’s emphasis on Juno’s wrath as an organizing principle is what makes this reading particularly distinctive.

Framing the Aeneid around Juno’s wrath shows how a powerful divine adversary shapes the entire journey, making the epic less about a lone hero’s pietas and more about the gods’ ongoing interventions. Juno, hostile to the Trojans because of the Judgement of Paris and the prophecy that Troy’s descendants will found Rome, repeatedly steers events to block Aeneas’s path. Vergil stages storms that cast the fleet off course, creates and sustains the romance with Dido as a tool of delay, and undercuts Aeneas’s progress in Italy through divine meddling. This perspective treats the epic as a drama about the consequences of one queen’s grievance, and it highlights how the unity of the narrative rests on the balance between Juno’s antagonism and the fated destiny of Rome.

Susanna Morton Braund is well known for articulating this approach, focusing on Juno’s anger as a central force that organizes the poem’s episodes and moral questions. Her work helps readers see the Aeneid as a meditation on how divine wrath can shape political and personal destinies, a lens that foregrounds gendered power dynamics and the gods’ influence over human history.

Other scholars certainly offer valuable insights, but Braund’s emphasis on Juno’s wrath as an organizing principle is what makes this reading particularly distinctive.