Tu Marcellus Eris: Nachtraglichkeit in Aeneid 6

The notoriously complex temporality of the Aeneid reaches perhaps its highest pitch in Book 6, when Aeneas descends to the Underworld and encounters not the dead, but a parade of as-yet-unborn Roman heroes from his future and Vergil's past. The episode ends with Anchises, Aeneas' dead father, lamenting the future recent early death of Marcellus, Augustus' intended heir. This chapter reads this moment of failed inheritance and past futurity in the light of Freud's concept of Nachtraglichkeit or 'deferred effect', which Jacques Derrida has identified as permanently and irreducibly disturbing any linear model of time.