Looking for Achates in the Roman Literary Imagination: An Enslaver’s Fiction in Vergil’s Aeneid

The enigmatic figure of Achates in Vergil’s Aeneid becomes far more intelligible when viewed through the lens of Roman slavery. This paper argues that Achates instantiates the archetype of the “faithful slave” or “faithful freedman” in Vergil’s text. The paper connects Achates’s salient attributes—fidelity, omnipresence, invisibility, surrogacy, and isolation—to hallmarks of the “faithful slave or freedman” trope and to habits of thought endemic to Roman enslaving practices. This study of Achates illustrates how the mentalities of enslavement still inflect Roman literature even when its texts do not mark slavery as their subject.