Vergil’s Achaemenides and the idea of early Latin epic

This article reads Vergil’s Achaemenides as a metapoetic figure. It argues that significant aspects of his characterization in the Aeneid depend upon late Republican and Augustan views of early Latin poetry. Achaemenides is a Greek who was left behind by Odysseus, but he is much more than a link to the Homeric past. He is transformed by his sojourn in the siluae of the Cyclopes, and his new appearance is defined by Roman literary critical terminology applied elsewhere to the Saturnian age and Saturnian poetics.