Six Textual Variants in the Fifth Book of the Aeneid

The textual tradition of the Aeneid, while less variable than that of other works, contains many discrepancies among the manuscripts that scholars use to form critical editions and determine Virgil’s original text. Transcribing manuscripts is tedious work, and errors have entered into the textual tradition through this laborious process. The decisions that editors make when choosing among variants for critical editions directly affect the text that scholars use to interpret Virgil, thereby influencing our understanding of the text. In my thesis, I analyze some of these especially problematic textual variants in Book 5 of the Aeneid and argue for which variants seem the most reasonable given the Virgilian textual tradition and the context of each variant within the epic.